[Steam Deck][Linux][Partnership] Official support for Valve's Steam Deck

[randomuser3938]

Hello

Since the production and shipping for Valve's Steam Deck is currently on the uptick it seems prudent that Spotify should jump right in  and produce an official version for the Deck and form a partnership with Valve. For those who might not have made acquaintance with the device the Steam Deck is a Valve designed handheld gaming PC sporting an AMD custom chip and by default running on Arch Linux based distribution called SteamOS.

The current experience with Spotify on the Deck is lackluster at best since the default boot mode is the gaming mode from which you can't install Spotify. You have to boot into the desktop mode and from there you can install the application via The Discover Software center as a flatpak application. Now if one wants to launch spotify in the gaming mode it needs to be added as a non-Steam game to your library so you don't have to boot into desktop mode first every time you need to use it. When you finally get it set up and start using it you discover that the software is not up to par with the other desktop versions since it's " a labor of love" type a situation according to the Spotify's website (see attachment). This really puts a damper on the whole experience since the UI might be different, bugs may or may not be fixed in a timely manner and so on.

https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/ 

So they should undoubtedly make the Spotify experience on the Deck a bit more convenient. I realistically can't come up with a reason for Spotify to not want to tap into the vast userbase of Steam so positively directly and to finally acknowledge that Linux (SteamOS) is indeed a perfectly fine OS to support.