Linux

Valve made games "just work" on the Steam Deck. No tweaks, CLI, hacks, or major performance issues. They took away the friction. I hope that in time all games will just work on Linux. When that happens and I can use my gaming peripherals like wheels and pedals I'll be giving up Windows on my gaming PC.

Man this is so wrong, I don't even know where to start.

If everyone loved windows so much they would install it on the deck

1. Valve has dedicated millions of dollars to making shit work on Linux so that MS cannot control them.

2. Specifically on handhelds, Windows is ass. Because it's not designed for them. That's why Valve developed a version of Linux specifically intended for this single device.

3. Windows is still installed on like 95% of gaming PCs because "everyone loves it so much".

Microsoft pays the PC makers in the states a lot of money to keep Windows Pre-Installed.

What? No. MS charges the PC makers to install Windows, not the other way around... Why would they pay them?

I feel the same way. I've been riding the Linux daily driver train for over a decade now. Back when I first made the switch, Proton wasn't a thing. I could dual boot to play the games that wouldn't run on Wine but I instead made the decision to only buy new games that were Linux native and if existing games didn't run on Wine then it was tough bikkies.

But the issue is that most people sadly don't give a shit. They don't give any thought at all about sending money to Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. despite the fact that those companies are playing a part in actively degrading the user experience (amongst other things). They don't think about how they're screwing over themselves in the long run as well as the younger generations. Most people don't think much beyond what the advertising tells them to buy, convenience and ease of use.

I wish people made more ethical consumer choices but they just don't. And that habit won't change while big business has collectively billion dollar advertising budgets, gets away with monopolising and centralising and has government and regulators in their back pockets.

That's ok if you look at it that way. But at the end of the day, it's just a tool like any other. Personally I find it really silly to put any moral questions into it because I don't believe it's worth my time to think about it, lose time on silly things and/or sacrifice the quality of my work. I'm not trying to imply anything about Linux, btw, it's the same for the other ways around. It just feels stupid because it ends up like a political discussion, when it really shouldn't be. You have the option to use basically anything and choosing to limit yourself over that is just plain stupid imo. You could make the arguments for how they process data, which is a whole other discussion, but then again, there are plenty of workarounds to all of those problems (which is exactly what some people are doing with virtualization, different machines entirely, OS tweaks, etc., which is fine, because they're benefiting from it). Nothing against FOSS or otherwise, btw, I do agree about the need to support, but there are so many other ways to do it. Just using it isn't enough, sadly. As the point of this OP is - it's also market adoption, marketing itself, etc. None of this changes the fact that using certain tool(s) (e.g. gdb) is best done on a certain OS (e.g. a Linux distro) at a given time.

Exactly. That's what matters. That's why SteamOS is on Steam Deck, or Linux distros on POS machines, or Windows on ATMs (which is kinda depressing ngl), etc.

It's a tool, nothing more, nothing less. An OS is just a gateway to other apps at the end of the day.

Flip a coin and pick one of them. If you face some strange problems and later find out it’s because of the distro, it’s time to do some distrihopping. Before that, it’s important to get started with something.