Sometimes an excellent idea is late, or it does not arrive as early as it should, or its timing is not the most appropriate, and thus an incredible opportunity to prosper and become an established and lasting product is lost. Some of that may have happened with Valve y SteamOS, which arrived in December 2013 and is a kind of Debian-based distroAlthough the initial enthusiasm was logical and deserved, we have seen that over time it has faded a bit. And the causes for this are very varied, although it is interesting Frank Azor's point of view from Alienware.
What Azor believes is that Microsoft has been in serious trouble in the days of Windows 8 but that from having been close to hitting bottom they have been able to begin to listen to users. It's that Windows 8.1 fixed some issues from a user interface and performance point of view, and Windows 10 is -always according to Frank Azor- an excellent platform, quite well focused on the 'gamer' aspect. And although it is still far from perfect, it has improved enough to continue to place the operating system of the Redmond company as the main one for everything related to video games.
Regarding Valve, the words of Frank Azor have not been anything positive since the believe that the 'moment' of the Steam Machines has passed, or at least that it has lost strength and it may be difficult to regain it. And to assert this opinion, it confirms that although they continue to sell hundreds of units of Steam Machines, there is no longer the demand that there was two years ago, and this seems not to be a problem for them since for Azor, Alienware is fine with Windows 10.
Of course, this is an opinion that, although it has its weight, is also somewhat affected by subjectivity (and we know well that Valve continues to project a future for Linux), but it is still important to analyze the reasons for some issues, and here in Linux Adictos We have already been commenting that SteamOS is not taking off as much as we fans of the great free operating system would have liked.
I have not read the article you mention, and although I am going to browse to read it, I dare to say that at least in the approach they are right. Windows 10 I do not know why it has managed to fill the gap left by windows xp although for this you logically need a more powerful computer than the one you had in the past. The marketing campaign has apparently been a total success and we would almost have to, like football teams, hire the creators of that campaign on Linux. I'm not a programmer or anything like that, just a simple user, but seeing what I've seen about Steam OS doesn't quite convince me because unfortunately it seems like a point but I don't shoot. And seen what has also been seen lately, the same thing they tell us about we abandoned Linux as so many others have done in recent years. Hopefully I am a bird of ill omen, a pessimist without a solution and everything is the opposite. In addition, I have already said that I am a simple user and of the malillos so it would not be surprising my mistake. Sorry for the rant and greetings to everyone from Debian.
Linux and SteamOs are going to make the leap with vulkan if directx 12 wins the fight, most of the people migrated from previous versions for that simple fact even though there is nothing very concrete there and for me that even inside a few years we will not see much in directx 12. If there were more games in vulkan there would be more people interested in systems such as steam machines for looking like a console or for not having the knowledge to build a pc would be much easier to buy it armed. This is what it looks like to me, Greetings.
Specifically, the Steam Machines were late, their moment was when W9 failed. Linux on the other hand will continue to grow little by little.
It seems to me that taking out steamachine with windows is a setback, and also stupid, who wants a console that looks like a PC? which has less features than a clone PC on sale or built by you. From there they already screwed up, that they make an effort to get more games for Linux and eat Windows ground.
The market for specialized gaming machines has many competitors and I think Valve knew it and still went for a Linux-based system. Perhaps he is not having the push that many of us would like but his effort has helped many companies and video game developers pay attention to Linux as a platform and fortunately we see how in the Steam store the catalog grows every year incorporating interesting titles. I think the important thing is that Linux is strengthened as a platform for video games regardless of the distro and over time specialized products such as Steam Machines will continue to appear.