I’ve dabbled with Linux over the past 25 years. Last November, I built a high end gaming PC spec’d for Bazzite.
I haven’t touched Windows for gaming in over 4 months.
Yep, my steam rewinds have been 100% Linux for a couple of years now.
I think the only exception in that time was AW2 because it’s an EGL exclusive (and ray tracing/mesh shading support in proton were still a bit lacking in performance).
There are sacrifices. Space Marine 2 doesn’t work despite having a beast of a machine. It seems to be optimized for Windows / Nvidia. I can’t use my racing wheel. It is detected as a device, but I’m unable to configure it due to how Bazzite sandboxes devices and programs from each other.
Eventually these may be resolved. In the meantime, I’m playing Kingdom Come 2 and Arc Raiders along with hopping around a massive backlog playing 5-30 min of games I’ve accumulated over the years, like wandering a massive arcade. Any given evening, I turn on the TV, switch to input 1 and there’s the Steam Deck UI where I left it last. No mysterious reboot showing me a Windows login, no surprise, required Windows update forcing me to wait 15 min before I can start playing.
It’s fucking awesome.
What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:
OS Total % of Players Monthly Change Windows (Total) 92.33% -4.28% Windows 11 64 bit 66.85% +10.57% Windows 10 64 bit 25.36% -14.89% Linux (Total) 5.33% +3.10% Arch Linux 64 bit 0.34% +0.15% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 0.27% +0.13% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 0.14% +0.06% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.07% +0.02% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% Manjaro Linux 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.
In lifetime customer value it’s billions
This is not being ignored my Microsoft
My impression is that Microsoft won’t care all that much. They are primarily a cloud service provider at this point, and while they will try to squeeze Windows users for as much money and information as possible before it goes down for good they have no real interest in keeping on developing Windows. It’s just not where the real money is at.
It doesn’t make sense outside the world of capitalism, but we see again and again that big tech companies are happy to kill even profitable services if they are not their most profitable services. Microsoft’s revenue these days comes from selling cloud office solutions to (seemingly) every company on the planet. Even their own cloud runs on Linux, meaning that Microsoft themselves makes more money off Linux than Windows these days.
Windows is now in the extraction phase of enshittification, and Microsoft will profit as much as they can from it while they still have market power while spending minimal resources developing the product. Windows has effectively been declared dead already, and remains as a sofware zombie just like Facebook. Windows 12 is not going to be an improvement upon 11; it’ll be another fuck you to the customers, and the beatings will continue until customers leave for good and Microsoft are finally relieved of their side gig of making an operative system.
I think we’re both right in a way. They won’t care about Windows specifically, but Windows to them isn’t the product anymore. It’s the entrypoint for users to Microsoft services, which is why they advertise so much in Windows now for OneDrive, Office, Copilot. You’re essentially already in their store just by using Windows. So the real loss isn’t that people aren’t using Windows, it’s that people are cancelling OneDrive and Office subscriptions. That is what is going to be noticed.
Valve is going to be a significant contributor to the death of Windows. Legit one man’s integrity is going to bring an end to a literal monopoly as adjudicated in the late 90’s. Hail gaben.
May he live forever.
The fact that he worked on the early versions of Windows makes it even better.
