Given Valve have been the ones keeping older AMD GPUs working and up to date on Linux, pushing upstream etc, I’d argue we kind of do rely on a company to provide support.

I’d rather spend my money on something I have stronger confidence will have developers maintaining and committing patches etc for all the components in the box than a box of components I can’t be sure will all have the same level of support across all its components into the years to come.

Take x86-64-v1/v2 (and even v3 in some cases) CPUs for example. They’re “supported” on Linux but many distros’ packages don’t support it, meaning you’re often compiling from source to get a package functioning. Sure the kernel isn’t the issue but the rest of userspace is.

With Valve seemingly having no intention of ending maintenance support for their hardware even after end of sale, and their huge contributions to Arch and other parts of the Linux ecosystem, it’s nice to have an option to buy a complete system that will be maintained, and remain a target/reference platform for their distro (which means binaries will be around should I want to distro hop).

Have you even looked at the linked patchnotes? I don't think that "Added support for GameCube controller rumble when the adapter is in PC mode" is something linus torvalds fixed personally in the linux kernel lmao.

And, for the sake of the argument, let's say all of those improvements are upstream linux kernel improvements. Then valve still has to pull them, build a new build and push it, something that no major company can be assed to do. And that effort is still commendable.

For $1,000 I do

So if I buy Valve, I’ll gain the benefit of support and the hardware. Nice!