I was questioning that myself.
So far digital goods haven’t been the subject of tariffs on either side.
It would also be hard to tariff successfully as it wouldn’t be difficult for Steam to setup something in another country’s Data center as "Steam International " to bypass any Tariffs.
Although this trade wars has prompted me to start buying games on GoG when that is an option.
Alcohol will be easy to replace but have a long term impact. Canada has had a growing micro-distillery industry for years now, pulling US liquor from shelves and the general increaseing “Buy Canada” intuitive creates a significant business opportunity for them. This will force people to switch from their usual drink, and once someone finds something else they like, it will be hard to court them back even after the trade war is done.
True, thats part of the reason why I didn’t try it. Bazzite seemed much closer to being truely immutable, vice the “read-only” safety rails SteamOS gives you. I like to tinker too much to put it on my own machine, but I’ll probably put Bazzite on my son’s gaming machine next time I upgrade it.
Surprisingly for a choice that I realize doesn’t really matter, it still ends up burning alot of time researching.
Intially looked at Bazzite, which seemed great other than I wasn’t a fan of it immutability, I’ve had to remove the read-only property from my steam deck a few times.
Then I looked at CatchyOS/Arch, decided to avoid that as I know I’m too lazy to read notes every update, and while I don’t mind tinkering and fixing stuff… I want it to be on my schedule lol.
Avoiding Debian, my server currently runs it, but I remember it giving me headaches installing older JREs on it to run modded minecraft servers.
So I’m going to try OpenSuse, not for any real valid reason other than the last time I tried Linux as my daily driver ( 2004/2005) it was the first distro that worked smoothly without any driver headaches.
Choice paralysis is a surprisingly big issue.
I’m waiting for the parts for my new gaming PC build to arrive, and the amount of time I’ve spent choosing a distro has been asinine.
But I did make the choice to leave both the NVIDIA and Windows eco systems on my desktop after seeing most my games run fine on the steam deck ( along with disliking windows 11, and NVIDIA ending gamestream support)
I hear you there, Steams multiplayer infrastructure is top notch, I’ve seen a few games get significantly clunkier when they added cross play and moved away from Steam’s services.
Steams also the leader in getting games to run on Linux, although between the heroic launcher or running the offline installers through Lutris, GoG isn’t that bad anymore.