Dear Gabe,

I hear that you are building Steam for Linux - especially because Windows 8 on ARM is blocked for any app-store kind of models. Sounds absolutely fine to me - except that you are underestimating two, very serious, aspects:

• Religious fervor around different Linux distros - giving rise to “why not ”
• poor support for peripheral devices inside desktop linux - yes, my graphics cards still overheats. No, my multi-monitor setup doesnt work perfectly.

So what do you do ? You pick the flavor of linux that has half a millions apps running on it, has very good peripheral support and has multiple, demonstrable, viable appstore models (Play and Amazon).

And you make it desktop compatible.

Android uses Skia and Surfaceflinger instead of X.org. But guess what - Firefox is already ported to Android (along with its extension framework). Chrome already works very well and is officially supported by Google. There are already a billion twitter, facebook, etc. apps that work much better than any equivalent desktop linux counterparts. Ubuntu for Android is already being built, which will be a familiar UX for all users. There are already ports of ViM for Android. There will be minimal disruption of user experience in going from desktop linux to desktop Android.

All you need to do is build a desktop version of Android, with developer essentials built in - most importantly commandline package managers, integration of init (systemd, sysVinit or upstart ) into Android. Then take care of hardware compatibility - especially peripherals, sound and graphics drivers.

That would be a killer proposition - you not only use a tried and tested (both technically and financially) platform, but also are also positioned to be able to do interesting things - for example, similar to how Dust and Eve Online games interact in the same universe on different hardware platforms. You can enable me to single sign on to Dust from my mobile device or to Eve from my desktop.

That looks to me as more interesting than a still-born Linux client with limited graphics drivers.