They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....
DRM is an artificial obstacle put in place to get in the way of something entirely technologically possible.
The elements discussed here are just the natural steps to perform an action outside of the standard workflow, and are actually of reasonable difficulty. Saying “you are free to do it, but I’m not going to help you” is the exact opposite of DRM.
Not a dumb question if you haven’t been keeping up.
The Steam Deck runs Linux and not Windows by default. (It can be loaded by the user if desired.)
Given their desire for a nearly-console-like experience, they put in a bunch of effort into the Proton compatibility layer to get Windows games to work here. It’s not perfect, but it really is a very good experience at this point.
I personally do have a fairly powerful Windows desktop, but the vast majority of my gaming is on Linux on my Steam Deck now.
I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."
They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....