Yeah well, this is of course just a singular anecdote, but my experience with any touch-based de on Linux hasn’t been great.

No Linux phone I have ever seen has had a particularly competitive pricing. Or specs.

But perhaps there has been some major advancements I’m not aware of in the past week.

In any case, your latter point is true.

At this point I would not be surprised if steam built on top of the deck idea and the support it already provides for fairly responsive and configurable inputs, touch screen included, to launch a steam phone or something.

I mean deck isn’t all that far from having such a device. For the actual phone network stack they would likely just partner up with someone already in the space.

They’ve already had to tackle powering a lightweight portable device with a touch screen and adapting the UX for a small screen and non-kbd input. They’ve already established they can source parts and mass produce a competively priced device.

But realistically I can’t see it being that much better than the recent Linux phone offerings.