from Hacker News

Microsoft should be terrified of SteamOS

by dingi on 1/9/25, 12:06 PM with 136 comments

  • by lordfrito on 1/9/25, 1:28 PM

    PC gaming is one of the few places left that Windows has any relevance, without that there very few reasons to continue running Windows.

    Sales volumes for general purpose PCs (used by people other than gaming and developers) have been declining for years.

    If you don't need Windows to game... and you don't need Windows to run office anymore (office 365).. then the only real reason to run windows would be to run VisualStudio and other legacy dev tools?

    Linux is looking more and more attractive to the power user base.

    I'm a power user that games... so Windows it is. For now. The moment I don't need Windows to game, and Wine can run all my legacy apps, then I'm jumping ship to Linux.

    Consumers have moved on and all that's left in terms of volume are businesses that need a stock general purpose desktop -- legacy lives on for a while but not forever.

    This might be the beginning of the end for Windows -- I'm speaking in terms of product lifecycle.

  • by herpdyderp on 1/9/25, 1:26 PM

    > It’s possible… the Steam Deck is now the most popular gaming PC in the world.

    This is completely absurd. If you look at Steam’s own hardware survey Windows still has 96% user share.

    https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

  • by n144q on 1/9/25, 1:26 PM

    No, the premise is wrong.

    > That could threaten Microsoft's hold on PC gaming

    Sure. But so what. PC gaming is a very small market that Microsoft don't actually care much about. Well, they have a Windows store that sells games, a Windows xbox app and PC game pass, and they put a bit of effort here and there, but not really. Microsoft doesn't really care about your Windows license key either. They could have made pirating much harder, but the fact that you can find Windows activator on their own GitHub says that Microsoft thinks it's a waste of time to do anything about it.

    (In fact, Windows license is free on handheld gaming devices. So Microsoft doesn't earn any money anyway. https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-9-remains-free-oems-ann...)

    Most of Windows installations come from OEM and enterprises. Everything else is a marginal error. They also can't sell (much) more licenses just as they want, because pretty much it's tied to PC sales that's more about whether people are buying devices.

    Which is why they are stuffing ads everywhere in Windows. It sucks for users, but is a good (short sighted) business strategy -- you can only earn so much money from license, but you can earn infinite money from ads.

    Seems hard for people to understand this.

  • by sho_hn on 1/9/25, 12:52 PM

    Anecdotally, the number of people I know who bought a Steam Deck and ended up using it as a docked desktop replacement is now in the upper single digits. All of them are in IT or IT-adjacent, but were not desktop Linux users before, either at work or at home.

  • by foolswisdom on 1/9/25, 12:58 PM

    It doesn't seem like this challenges anything but the market for gaming devices (not general purpose PCs). Is that correct? And if so, is the title ("terrified") a little overblown?

  • by eklavya on 1/9/25, 1:31 PM

    I started using Windows fully after like 15 years. I really like Windows 11 after running the debloater. WSL2 seems to work pretty seamlessly. I built this machine for gaming but now I use it as my primary machine and have stopped using my macbook completely.

    I tried to do linux on the box instead of windows, but I ran into: - No fractional scaling support except for KDE. - I can't for the life of me, stop X from using the discrete Nvidia card (I use AMD integrated for display). It wants to sit on the card even when there are no processes running on it through X. - Wayland fractional scaling is unsupported in chrome and electron still. - No HDR. - Font rendering is painful to look at with fractional scaling.

    Wasted a LOT of time trying to get this working before giving up and just using WSL2. Everything works in Windows, which is not unexpected. It's amazing already what a community of volunteers is giving me for free!

  • by r1chardnl on 1/9/25, 12:59 PM

    I tried to switch to Linux a few times over a couple of years but had a hard time switching from Windows to Linux until I found a replacement for Visual Studio (non-VSCode), which I replaced with VSCode on Linux. Aside from a few games that wouldn't work for any reason (Kernel level anticheat, WINE bugs, manually setting export env variables) it's been great. Being a tinkerer/developer I wonder whether this made it harder or easier to switch, you have more knowledge of how to fix things but the same amount of time as everyone else and if you don't depend on specific programs / workflow like using a browser you may be able make the jump to Linux easier.

  • by bpoyner on 1/9/25, 12:54 PM

    I bought my wife a Steam Deck and she loves it, her biggest complaint is that it's a bit too big for women's hands. She isn't highly technical but I haven't had to provide much in the way of assistance, it largely just works.

  • by paxys on 1/9/25, 1:26 PM

    I read all the same articles word for word in 2013 when SteamOS first launched. Yes more games are playable on Linux today because of Proton, but everything else is still a mess. You still can't stream video >720p from any major streaming service, for example. I don't see people rushing to put SteamOS on their PCs or entertainment centers while these basic gaps still exist.

  • by ChrisMarshallNY on 1/9/25, 1:24 PM

    If Valve went for the corporate market, then, maybe, yes, but I think MSFT has always made most of its OS money on corporate stuff (home users often use Windows, because that's what they work with).

    Gaming isn't really a thing, with corporate use.

    I use a Mac. Macs are some of the worst gaming platforms on Earth. If I'm lucky enough to get an AAA game, it's seven years behind its PC version, and a huge bug farm.

    SteamOS might actually get me to consider a console, but gaming hasn't ever really been a priority for me (obv.).

  • by bluetrolliage on 1/9/25, 1:16 PM

    I’m curious how much msft makes in windows from gamers vs actual game sales. They seem to be hedging their bets hard on cloud gaming and actual game sales for Xbox.

  • by samiv on 1/9/25, 1:50 PM

    How come this topic dropped off the main page in a flash? One second it was there and then literally a few seconds later it had disappeared... just wondering..

  • by madeofpalk on 1/9/25, 1:08 PM

    Does Microsoft make money from consumer gaming OS sales? Is there an onroad from that market to others -does there enterprise sales rely on gamers getting jobs and demanding microsoft? I think the author vastly overestimates how much of a market this actually is.

  • by cube2222 on 1/9/25, 1:28 PM

    Very much agreed with SteamOS possibly occupying a lot of gaming PC market share in the not-too-distant future (though not sure if Microsoft cares/should care too much about that).

    However, I expect that this process will still take a while. Proton seems to be working well esp. for single-player games (haven't tried it yet though), but it seems like

    - DLSS-like features still have some way to go,

    - and a lot of multiplayer games require kernel-level anti-cheat which is often developed for windows only.

    Those two are I believe the only remaining blockers for me.

    But that's a chicken-and-egg problem, same as native (non-proton) support for games on Linux. Once SteamOS is big enough, I expect those to quickly follow.

  • by jerojero on 1/9/25, 1:30 PM

    I really want to install steamOS on my gaming laptop, but it has an NVIDIA card.

    So, I'll be waiting for a while until that kind of support happens. It's not a big issue but I'm really sick of windows.

    Even though my laptop is much more powerful I find myself constantly using the steam deck because the thought of booting up windows, closing up all the apps that open, trying to get it to connect to the tv... It's a lot.

    For work and general use I have a MacBook, happy with it for that purpose.

  • by jimnotgym on 1/9/25, 1:27 PM

    Until SteamOS gets MS office and comprehensive Active Directory integration, I think it will have almost zero penetratation into the corporate PC market

  • by poulpy123 on 1/9/25, 1:19 PM

    It's funny because the real danger for Microsoft is of course Apple (and maybe some chinese company but I'm not familiar enough).

  • by foul on 1/9/25, 1:32 PM

    There has to be a ChromeOS good enough for the US military complex (and only available for AWS, GAE, Tencent) to see Microsoft worried. All they're doing is showering MS with cash working with Microsoft sanctioned APIs.

  • by udev4096 on 1/9/25, 1:49 PM

    BazziteOS is far superior and gets faster updates than SteamOS. It even supports secure boot, FDE and other important security enhancements. SteamOS didn't even had a login mechanism on release

  • by figassis on 1/9/25, 1:35 PM

    I love when businesses do this. They keep improving their products in their lane, releasing new ones, etc, without anyone noticing a vision, and then, boom, an entire industry gets uncomfortable.

  • by npteljes on 1/10/25, 11:01 AM

    I think this conflates Microsoft and Windows. SteamOS threatens Windows, maybe, hopefully, but Microsoft is, and has been for a long time much bigger than Windows is.

  • by amai on 1/9/25, 6:59 PM

    "Consumers are ready for a future beyond Windows"

    That might be true, but businesses and governments are not.

  • by pixelpoet on 1/9/25, 12:57 PM

    Microsoft don't give a rat's ass about operating systems since ages, and their policy on no more Windows 10 updates this year will finally push me to Linux (probs ElementaryOS) after a lifetime on DOS/Windows.

    Visual Studio is also full of AI/Copilot junk now, and I've basically just had enough of their "not now" / "ask me again later please, I am a sucker" options when I really want "be ashamed for asking and never ask me again", all the user-hostile shit they pull... enough is enough.

  • by mrayycombi on 1/9/25, 2:08 PM

    When will gta v online be unbanned from SteamOS?

    Dammit.

  • by Havoc on 1/9/25, 12:29 PM

    Absolutely. I need browser, VLC, IDE and some games.

    ...only one of those was a linux showstopper.

  • by pjc50 on 1/9/25, 12:59 PM

    Maybe, but we're not quite there yet - Valve still restricting the OS to their hardware. Come back when people who build their own gamer PCs start choosing SteamOS en masse. That's then the start point of a movement away from Windows.

    I agree that the 10/11 migration has been an infuriating experience for a lot of users. A Microsoft unforced error, seemingly in the name of insisting on forcing TPM on people.