One of the Steam Deck’s primary advantages over more powerful handheld gaming PCs is its operating system, which is designed to mimic a game console interface within a Linux PC environment. Valve has long planned to bring the OS to other devices, but a recent Steam Deck software update includes the first mention of a rival handheld.
It is, but Steam has a habit of iterating, maybe we’ll see an updated Steam Link- like device in the future?
Unfortunately smart TV’s are just a step up from potatoes. Having separate hardware is gereally better than a smart TV app
They didn’t abandon it, they opened it up to anything running at least Andriod 8.0 or newer. So basically every Andriod device made since 2015 can run Steam Link, maybe not at a quality seen as appropriate but it’ll run.
The Steam Link tried and succeeded at this. My guess is only technical people understood its use-case at the time. For hardware to do well on a large scale it needs to be standalone. You turn it on and immediately see the benefit of it. Can’t be dependent on the customer’s other hardware.