A couple of days ago, Valve did redesign the Steam store and removed the direct link to buy Steam Machines, which made people wonder if this is the end of the project.
Pierre-Loup A, a Valve employee, has clarified the situation through a post in which he mentions that the disappearance of this section was only due to traffic issues, but it is not related 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 that they are investing resources in making the following Vulkan API an important tool on Linux platforms, as well as being competitive and with excellent support. They also mention that the Steam Machines helped the developers understand the Linux status as a gaming system.
SteamOS developers recently released the feature of Steam Shader Pre-Caching which allows users to bypass 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 that is investigating to launch new initiatives with Linux, although at the moment they are not ready to talk about them, Although if it has been mentioned that SteamOS will be the means by which these improvements will reach users, this will result in a great improvement for Linux as a gaming system in the near future.
It looks good!