Valve has been a big proponent of Linux gaming, and now the company is investing in Android support on Linux. It’s already possible to run Android in a Linux container through Waydroid, but Valve has developed a new fork – and it has officially named it Lepton.
Last month, news broke that Valve would soon support Android games on Steam. This was thanks to a sighting in Steam app changelogs for Walkabout Mini Golf, which added an APK file. The VR title is currently available on the Meta Quest (which runs on a custom version of Android), and may run through the Lepton compatibility layer for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR headset, which runs the company’s Linux-based operating system, SteamOS.
I cannot possibly overstate how amazing this is, given everything else valve is doing to make compatibility layers for practically anything.
This can attack Meta’s near-monopoly on VR incredibly effectively. All those games made for the Quest? Pop 'em on either your higher-power PC, or directly on the Steam Frame, and it just works, very low effort to port, and you can squeeze more performance out of them if you’re playing tethered.
Want to use an Android app on your PC rather than your phone? Done. Linux suddenly becomes much more useful to you on its own.
Being able to run Windows applications on Linux was just the start of making Linux more usable, and giving people more choice as to what software to use, but this expands it to an even larger scale. Simultaneously, this could mean some developers make things for Android that they otherwise would have only made to run on Linux, meaning Android users get more (likely open-source) choices too.
There’s a metric fuck ton of apps that I wish I could use on Linux, but are only easily run on Android directly. (Yes, I know Waydroid is a thing, but it’s been a pain to set up and use for me and many others. Valve has been pretty good so far at making sure things “just work” as best they can.)