this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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I wonder how many are Steam Deck users. It's brought Linux to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have tried it.
The stats come from webpages, something a Steam Deck is unlikely to ever see, or at least not very often, so I would say it has almost nothing to do with Steam Deck, other than maybe exposing more people to Linux.
I've seen several people use a Steam Deck + a dock as their desktop PC. It's not much different from using a mini PC.
The people you've seen are likely enthusiasts. A small minority of the millions of users. The vast majority probably never leaves game mode.
Agreed, also wonder how many people it proves that Linux is now perfectly valid for a gaming pc
And all it took was a corporation throwing millions of dollars and thousands of developer hours at it.
Well, on top of the tens of thousands of volunteer developer hours put in to stuff like wine that they built upon.
And one dude that really wanted to play Nier Automata on Linux.
You make it seem like Microsoft didn't do everything they could to kill Linux and Mac.
Like literally investing in $150 million in Apple in 1997 and porting Office to MacOS to get in front of a possible antitrust trial ahead of Jobs' return?
I'm not an MS fanboi, but at least get your facts right if you're going to make such a claim.
Okay look at the history. Look at the Macworld introduction to Microsoft Office. The Apple community wasn't happy about it. Microsoft made a lot of money and kept themselves from being a monopoly. You think they did that out of the kindness of their hearts?
I bet if we talk about Linux, you're going to bring up that Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and completely ignoring their anti competitive practices before that.
I'm merely pointing out that your thesis -- "You make it seem like Microsoft didn’t do everything they could to kill Linux and Mac." -- is categorically false. Of course no sane business decision in the current economic climate is altruistic, but this is scarcely news.
The word "could" can refer to anytime in history.
Just because someone tried to murder someone and did everything they could do to make the murder happen, doesn't mean they didn't just because they got caught trying to do so, changed their mind so they wouldn't get caught, and gave the person, that they tried to murder, money.
Just because Microsoft did everything they could to kill Linux and Mac, doesn't mean they didn't just because an antitrust case was building up, changed their business practices, and invested money in Apple.
Also it's no thesis. In 2001, Microsoft settled with the DOJ and changed their business practices.
Give a Man Code, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man To Code, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime
Yup, there’s enough games supported that one could completely ignore windows.
Also wonder how much impact Windows 11 requirements factored in, since the TPU and processor requirements basically said a measurable fraction of functional systems were trash otherwise.
Do you mean the TPM? Any system made in the last 7-8 years should have a TPM 2.0 chip and I suspect people won't want to run Windows 11 on anything older than that (since newer versions of Windows tend to be pretty slow on old systems)
Well, my first generation Ryzen didn't make the cut, and it was doing just fine
FWIW, TPMs are on the mobo, not on the CPU. Not to encourage you to install Wimdows, but you can get TPM chips that plug into the mobo.
That's definitely been a catalyzing factor for me. I had fiddled around with Linux and had been pretty 'meh' about Windows for years, but I was just coasting along the path of least resistance. Them telling me that I could no longer use my perfectly functional computer for Windows was the 'last straw' that finally what made me begin to take action and get ready to say goodbye to Windows.
If you think about it, Microsoft's timing for this is really perfect. Wait until Linux is very viable for desktop use including gaming then tell vast numbers of your customers that they need to ditch a fully working computer in order to keep using Windows. I expect that this figure will probably double by the end of the year. There's another article by ZDNet now that says that the share is more like 6% and rapidly accelerating. I'll post it on the main Linux community if hasn't already been posted there.