Source is this video:
Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D
We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.
And why would they? They’re printing so much money, this niche probably doesn’t make a dent.
It doesn’t matter if Windows is the best system for gaming. It just matters if people believe it is.
You can always justify using Windows. “How do I get Game Pass to work on my handheld?” is probably something people care about.
Granted this is an expensive way to lock customers into your platform, but they’re already doing it anyways, so no need to pour money into the OS experience when you can just sell services building on customer data.
It’d be great if they truly believed this, but that’s just the image they like to project, the truth is that this has them deathly afraid.
You’ve got mainstream media covering it, folks like digital foundry openly talking about how Windows is the worst part of Windows handhelds. They can’t let this stand, so they’re actively working against it.
Just like the faster zombies blog post in 2012 scared them into boosting d3d development and eventually led to the release of d3d12, this will make them actually invest in gaming for a change.
All the chatter about xbox branded handhelds is an easy tell, but like the blog post we might not discover the true extent until years later.
I am sure that MS is very concerned. If i take my usecase, the things that held me on windows from dos5/Win3.1 up to Windows10 were gaming and that i grew up with it. I sometimes dabbled in linux, but since there was no meaningful way to use my game library, i switched back, because even dualbooting made no sense (what for? just so i can boot back after browsing a few web pages?)
This time after 3 days i deleted my windows partition, even while i was still fighting a bit with the Wayland/NVidia combo - that was shortly after the explicit sync drivers were available.
The young’ins want to play their games, and now they can without ever coming into contact with microsoft at all if not for the anticheat-outliers (who knows, maybe there’s some money flowing that stops them from activating linux support? i know most anticheat in theory does work under linux). And if they start playing on Linux, there’s no reason for them to switch over to Windows at all.
It’s not about the short term, it’s about the long term.
Windows should consider proton and steam an existential threat.
MS (and APR) give away their keystone software windows, office, etc in order to “get them young” and make sure that young kids grow up using their software.
Majority of kids interactions with computers is mobile, gaming, and schoolwork.
MS has nothing in mobile, gaming is getting more crowded and school both Apple and Google are muscling in