They did sponsor/donate to someone who got the Epic Games Launcher working through wine. Don’t remember the exact details and can’t find a link though.

Even if Valve pushed their own Steam machine back then, it would have failed miserably. It simply had terrible game support because Proton didn’t exist (or integration with wine). Only the few native linux games out there would work.

But now Valve has Proton. I doubt the Steam Deck would have taken off if it wasn’t for that.

Integrals. I can have an area function, integrate it, and then have a volume.

And if you look at it from the Rieman sum angle, you are pretty much adding up an infinite amount of tiny volumes (the area * width of slice) to get the full volume.