A couple of days ago, Valve revamped the design of the Steam store and removed the direct link to buy Steam Machines , leading people to wonder if it's the end of the project.
Pierre-Loup A, a Valve employee, clarified the situation in a post stating that the disappearance of this section was solely due to traffic issues and has no relation to Steam OS or Linux support.
“While it is true that Steam Machines are not flying off the shelves, our efforts to create an open competitive platform have not changed much. We are working to make Linux a great operating system for games and applications. "
Valve keeps putting a lot of effort into Linux and SteamOS
Small update on the topic of SteamOS, Linux, and Steam Machines: https://t.co/jpLOzs9Cia
— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) April 4, 2018
Valve has confirmed they are investing resources in making the next Vulkan API a vital tool on Linux platforms, as well as being competitive and well-supported. They also mentioned that Steam Machines helped developers understand Linux's status as a gaming system.
The developers of SteamOS recently launched the Steam Shader Pre-Caching feature, which allows users to skip shader builds in games based on the Vulkan API to improve load times, and will continue to invest significant resources in supporting the Vulkan ecosystem on Linux platforms.
The company has said it is investigating new initiatives for Linux, although they are not ready to discuss them at the moment. However, it has been mentioned that SteamOS will be the medium through which these improvements will reach users, resulting in a significant improvement for Linux as a gaming system in the near future.