I've been using Windows 11 without much complaint since its release, but off the top of my head, I can't name a single "feature" that would motivate me to upgrade if I were on Windows 10, besides "continued support."
I have a number of laptops and desktops around home, and I mostly cannot distinguish between the Win 10 vs Win 11 ones - except, Win 11 is more annoying. The inability to move taskbar is one, but they've also removed a lot of keyboard shortcuts for common desktop and file explorer activities for no reason I can discern. So I'll type up a shortcut, nothing or bad things will happen, and that's my clue "oh yeah, this one is on $#&@ Windows 11" :-/.
Also when I need to configure something, like sound or network or power options, it seems like the number of separate windows in different styles to hunt through keeps proliferating.
When unplugging and plugging back in external monitors it moves windows back to the same monitors they were on before unplugging them. This is probably the most significant QoL feature.
The control centre generally feels better than Windows 10, except for switching sound outputs or getting to the volume mixer, which require too many clicks.
The settings app is a little more cohesive and has had some more control panel functionality transitioned into it.
Nothing they couldn’t have fixed in Windows 10, but it is overall better for me due to the above.
My new-ish work laptop runs Windows 11, but my personal desktop for gaming on a 6th gen Intel doesn’t meet official requirements. It has TPM 2 though, so once October arrives I reckon it’s better to run Windows 11 in a “technically” unsupported manner rather than stick with an OS which is no longer getting updates (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).
> (and no, I will not switch to Linux as I’m not looking for another hobby).
Respectable. The state of desktop Linux is pretty good but it's very much a 'your-mileage-may-vary' situation. Every 'exotic' thing you introduce into your setup (having a variable-refresh-rate monitor, having an HDR monitor, two monitors of different refresh rates, running Wayland over X11, having a brand new GPU, having an NVIDIA GPU) is another possible, sometimes likely, source of pain.
Some of the multiplayer games I play with my friends can be played on Linux, but I make a point of using my Windows partition for those because I don't want to waste their time on my troubleshooting.
I know ya crapped on Linux but Pop! OS is pretty great. It's the only distro to play nice with my Nvidia graphics out of the box. Multi monitor support is great. I even use a weird docking station and it works just fine. Steam works great for like 70% of games.
Win11 gave me tons of sound and Bluetooth issues to the point it felt like Linux alsa issues from 2010 or something.
I still have my win11 install on another partition but I rarely use it now. Just for niche stuff.
> When unplugging and plugging back in external monitors it moves windows back to the same monitors they were on before unplugging them. This is probably the most significant QoL feature.
Sometimes. Sometimes it does. It's all very random. My work laptop drives me nuts, when plugging back into the dock my windows return to where they were about 3/4 of the times. A quarter of the times they just all bunch up on the main monitor.
On my laptop, it doesn't nag me, but it does nag my son sometimes when he logs in. My son is not admin, so I don't know why Windows bothers non-admins with this.
At least I hope non-admins can't upgrade, but knowing MS, maybe they can.
That happened to me as well. I get told in the windows update dialog thing to check if I am windows 11 compatible, which I pass but I still don't get Windows 11 offered.
It might've been backported at some point, but for a while if you wanted to get the most out of an AMD Ryzen 7xxx, you needed to be on Win11. Generally about an 11% performance improvement.
The big feature I miss was taken away in Fall Creator's Update --- styluses working as styluses and selecting text, as opposed to being dumbed-down to an 11th touch input.
Basically GPU access in WSL was the only feature I was interested in, but I find the forced onedrive to be super annoying etc, etc. I’m considering paying for the long term version of Office for each of my devices just to not have their stupid cloud features.
I'm looking forward to the better window placement snaps. I plan on buying an ultra-widescreen monitor the day that work upgrades us to Windows 11. Manually positioning windows for a monitor that size is frustrating in Windows 10, you pretty much have to disable all the snaps because they work against you snapping windows into undesired sizes if you come close to the edge of the screen.
I hate all the advertising and spyware, so I'll never run Windows 11 at home, but we have a whole team dedicated to disabling that sort of stuff at work, so I don't have to think about it.
Microsoft solved it on Windows 10 already with their own extension called PowerToys, it adds a really powerful window management extension to windows and it's completely free(plus a tonne of other very useful utilities).
See if your work place will let you install PowerToys, which includes FancyZones. It’s a Microsoft power tool (not third party), so they might allow it, and it has much better window snapping.
The better Window snapping is great. Explorer can open folders in a new tab instead of a new window. The snipping tool shortcut (win+shift+s) automatically saves screenshots you take, instead of showing a notification you have to click. The snipping tool can also record videos, can do OCR and can take delayed screenshots
When I had the choice I still went back to Windows 10.
But auto-stretching windows to the screen's height has somehow turned into a frustrating game of mousing over a 0.001 pixel sweet spot at the top of the window. Maybe there's a hotkey for it though.
I'm predominantly a Ubuntu / Mac user (roughly 60/40).
My Windows machine has seen an uptick in use over the last months for development purposes, but it's still stuck on Windows 10. I don't think I need or want to upgrade it.
Two questions:
- Do I need to upgrade it?
- How do I get comfortable with Windows shell? PowerShell doesn't do Unixisms. There are too many shells. Command Prompt / CMD, PowerShell, there's some utility that installed mingw64 terminal, and WSL is also a thing. Which one(s) should I use?
I'll expand on my shell question: The thing I'm struggling with now is that when I install utilities like git, cargo, etc., they seem to work for some shells but not others. They seem disconnected and not have the same access, visibility, and privileges. What can I read or do to get me over this hill? Which one(s) should I use? (I assume "CMD" is dead?)
I'm doing mostly Rust / TypeScript development on Windows, FWIW.
Windows 10 will go EOL in October, so you should probably try to upgrade sometime before next year.
The first rule of PowerShell is to install the "real" PowerShell [1] instead of using the one bundled with Windows (which is out of date and importantly doesn't interoperate as well with non-PowerShell commands). I still don't like it, it's way too different from UNIX shells, but at least it's usable.
CMD hasn't gotten any improvements since like 1995 but it isn't going anywhere either. If you need something vaguely like a UNIX shell and that's always available, it's not a bad choice.
WSL2 is fine if you work mostly within its environment, which is made easier by things like VSCode's Remote extension. However, accessing Windows files from within WSL2 is surprisingly slow, so you really want to commit to it if you start using it.
I'm doing Rust on Windows too and apart from installing the MSVC tools and a compatible version of libclang, and occasionally figuring out how to write PowerShell, it's not been too much trouble. WinGet is pretty good and the library has quite a large selection of development tools.
> Windows 10 will go EOL in October, so you should probably try to upgrade sometime before next year.
That's the current plan but it wouldn't surprise me if they change their mind given the large Windows 10 install base still out there. They've done that before with Windows XP and 7.
I personally will never migrate to Windows 11, EOL or not. I'll keep using it for games that I can't get to work under Linux even after it is EOL, until Valve stops supporting it for Steam. At that point I'll delete the partition and never look back.
Agree, I use both Mac/Windows a lot and I feels like Apple usually has a couple OS features that make me want to upgrade whereas windows there's nothing
-The absolute crap of a start menu now being all but useless
-Advertisements
-Increasingly forced to online accounts rather than local
Also the UI changes didn't improve anything, and the changes make upgrading more painful and frustrating than needed. One thing OSX has got right it doesn't keep making major surface change every upgrade.
Paying? I believe my Windows 10 got upgraded to Windows 11 for free. IIRC this OS install that I'm using originally started as a Windows 8 and I didn't have to pay to upgrade it even once, but may be misremembering...
I could strip it down and it performed and stayed out of my way. It wasn't ever pretty, I didn't like a lot of it, but I could just get what I needed out of it.
Then it started to change, UI / UX had about 20 different flavors. I couldn't find settings anymore. Updates would change settings / undo my explicit settings. Eventually it felt like I was using an ADWARE OS.
I fled to macOS and haven't looked back. I'm even ok with less local gaming to avoid the windows hassle.
It's a bit of a sad thing for me. I do think fondly of my "old days windows" experiences in the sense that I was excited about updates and "Start Me Up" always reminds me of a special time in computing that I loved:
In the last couple years I've used quite a bit of Windows and macOS (after many years using Linux exclusively), and I've found macOS to be my least favourite of the three. On the surface it looks similar to Linux, but it's all lies. My biggest grip is that very often I'll ask for a setting or solution to an issue and I kid you not, 80% of the time the response I get from mac users is you can't do that, but there's an app (and often it's a subscription based app). mac needs apps for things like mouse scrolling, placing windows, cleaning the keyboard without turning the laptop on, switching between windows, copying things to the clipboard, installing software... and the list goes on longer than I could possibly remember.
For me it's 100% of the linux I need so it's great there.
I do agree the "there's an app for that" is heavily ingrained in the online user suggestions. The mac power users giving suggestions are often VERY much not knowledgeable. Oddly I do find there often is a command line solution that is better than an app ... but it's NEVER the first suggestion and a pain to find out sometimes. That is a pain, I need to turn a thing off, not an app with 20 features surrounding it ;)
For OSX, it either works (or can with an app, covering many things) or doesn't work at all (some things). I rarely find things in the middle.
For Linux, it either works (some things), works with effort and time (many things) or wont work (some things) weighted heavily towards the middle in varying degrees.
For windows, it either works (many things), or works in a weird not fully functional way that you can't fix or change and ends up being as frustrating as not having it at all, or as having to fix it in linux (seemingly more and more things), or doesn't work at all (a few things).
I can't stand using Windows anymore. Yes when it works its OK, except the UI gets worse every update, it gets more bloated with ad-ware, keeps trying to force you to online accounts and subscription models, and when it doesn't work the way you want, its a nightmare that typically can't be fixed (more so than any windows OS before)
Same. Windows used to be pretty good from my perspective. Then, Microsoft started stuffing it to the gills with spy- and bloatware, so I moved on. Windows 10 was ok, but 11 is unacceptable.
After upgrading my W10 laptop to 11, I decided I'm never buying another windows computer again.
I'll be shopping for linux pre-installed and natively supported laptops, or Apple/OSX going forward (and I hate apple and refuse to use most of their services, but their hardware is solid and OS is now far better than windows)
Macos has introduced many breaking changes in the past couple years. I'm getting pretty tired of Apple silently breaking services and adding new permissions.
For me, they've been way more nefarious than the all too frequent annoyance of the Windows update into the Edge upsell screen.
New boss, same as the old boss, I suppose.
I looked up a Windows "Server with Desktop Experience" license the other day and we're talking $1k+ here....I can't help but hover over the buy button.
Shows how much of a bubble I live in, most of my friends who play Steam are doing so on Linux with either a Steam Deck or just installing something like ChimeraOS on a desktop and plugging that into the TV.
I've been so entrenched in the Unixey space for like 13 years that going back to Windows would be a pretty substantial productivity drain in the short term, but I'm not sure I'd want to anyway, simply because gaming on Linux has gotten so good, largely thanks to Valve.
Like, it cannot be overstated how utterly good Proton is now. It's to a point where I almost never check compatibility, because it's more than likely going to work just fine. GameScope in particular is such wonderful thing in its own right, and it has genuinely made Linux the "Gaming OS" of choice for me.
I know it's not perfect, my understanding is that there are some games that break with online play with Proton, but for the games I play I have been very happy with Linux.
Yeah I don't own a Windows computer anymore, all my gaming is on Linux now, and I haven't had any major issues.
Granted, I don't really play new AAA games. Most of the stuff I play is either 10+ years old, or an indie game. Proton seems to be able to rock those just fine.
I am still using Windows 10. A major reason for me to not upgrade is all the media coverage of ads, user tracking, forced subscriptions and unnecessary AI features in Windows 11. Also, Windows 10 is just plain really good. I do have TPM and strong hardware. Windows 11 reputation is the main concern.
It's strange that they are ending Windows 10 support so soon after they stopped selling it. Windows 11 came out October 5, 2021.
Edge came out in 2015 and they kept supporting IE11 until June 15, 2022.
Given that the major Windows 11 features were things like introducing a screen grabber to make your passwords and private data vulnerable to theft, it's no wonder people have resisted adopting it.
- Windows 8.1 had 7 years of support after Windows 10 was released.
- Windows 7 was supported for 7 years after Windows 8 came out.
- Same for Vista after 7 and Windows XP after Vista.
- Windows ME had 5 years of support after the release of Windows XP
- Windows 98 had 6 years after ME.
- Windows 1, 2, 3.0 and 3.1 all had 6 years of support after Windows 95 came out.
Only 4 years of support after the release of the next version of the operating system is highly unusual for Microsoft. They have always supported previous versions long enough that you could skip one version without running out of support, usually even two entire releases.
Instead they follow the schedule introduced in the "Windows 10 is the last Windows" era where two new versions are released each year and each version has three years of support. But this only makes sense if you treat Windows 11 as a rebranded Windows 10 that got a new name for legal reasons. Which Microsoft pretends it isn't, so I don't feel compelled to follow that reasoning when it benefits them. They can't have it both ways
Microsoft is desperate to push people to their always on-line pay-per-boot operating system. They succeeded in pushing me out of Windows altogether. When I bought a new gaming / AI rig, I moved to Linux.
Microsoft never said Win 10 would be the last release. That is an urban myth.
And the x years of support after the next Windows release is irrelevant. Their product support is more or less 10 years and that didn't change. People were skipping versions because they want to use their license as long as possible and they still do that with win 10.
Steam users are more likely to be on win 10 than others because they often spend more money on gaming rigs than people buying web browser machine. With the hardware requirements of win 11 (tpm, others) many gamers will not want to throw out their working machines to satisfy Microsoft's hardware demand.
It's the other way around: PC gamers have more computer knowledge than the average user and actually upgrade their hardware. Windows 11 has been out for 3.5 years now.
Among all internet users, 60% are still on Windows 10. Both worldwide [1] and in NA [2]. And that figure includes all the corporate machines that get replaced on deprecation schedules. Among private computers the share of Windows 10 might be even higher
I'm curious what Microsoft will do in 8 months when over half of PC users will be running a Windows version that doesn't get security patches. As a comparison to your 60% figure for Windows 10, Windows 7 had around 30% market share and Windows XP had around 25% market share 8 months before their respective EOL dates. The only options I can think of are loosening the Windows 11 system requirements (dropping the TPM requirement for example) and doing something similar to the GWX program that forced Windows 7/8 users onto Windows 10, or extending the Windows 10 EOL date.
They could just disable Windows 10 through their updates or put it into some kind of read only mode. Basically a more extreme version of what they did with Windows 7 when it went EoL where they disabled wallpapers and showed a bunch of popups.
Well 2 years ago when I built a new desktop i took great care to order hardware that works on windows 11.
Then I read the stories saying 11 has even more telemetry that you can't disable, ads on the start menu, Edge that you can't get rid of... and when I got around to setting up Windows on it I ordered a Win 10 license. They're still available even now, I think.
Win 10 does try to trick me into upgrading to 11 randomly on boot (full screen ad with a very hidden "fuck off and skip this" button) but so far I've managed to avoid it.
Been running Win11 for a long time; used to be on the Insider track, so the upgrade came early and automatically.
No ads on the start menu. No bs notifications. OneDrive disabled and set to not auto-start.
I did have to disable all of the "interests" on the whatever-widget in the lower left corner, only leaving on the weather, so now it shows the current temperature, but doesn't feel the need to pester me about "breaking news". And I'm really irritable about that shit. Even text or an exclamation point grinds my gears; I feel that same way on mobile phones. No Best Buy, you don't need an indicator on your icon because I've dismissed your 3-times-weekly sale announcements.
Not sure about telemetry, need to look into that. I'm not really against telemetry, per se, provided it has a valid use case. If they're taking pictures of my screen while I'm working to train AI or do god knows what with it, I will deal with that (including moving full time to a distro, which I have done in the past).
Otherwise, my only real complaint is they manage to eff up the mouse in some way every every 4th update or so. Latest one is special pointers failing to return to normal after mousing away from whatever caused the special pointer (i.e. the pointer switches to indicate resizing a window and then doesn't switch back).
Beyond that, mostly smooth sailing. Wish WSL2 would finally officially support 6.x kernels, but they've been blocked on some random issues for 8+ months now.
I'm running Win11 but I had to check, because I forgot. I remember having to turn off a bunch of bullshit when I first installed Win on this machine but there aren't ads or anything. The most annoying thing it does is power cycle when I'm not expecting it, in order to update. Pretty sure there's a setting for that I haven't touched.
The power cycling is especially annoying for me since I dual boot and I (intentionally) have grub boot into Linux by default. The bright side is it encourages me to spend time in Linux by default!
The TPM is on the motherboard as far as i know? I remember the mobos were specifying if they run windows 11 in descriptions when I ordered.
Besides I bought AMD. Needed the thing for parallel builds and I was getting more cores for my money. Plus actually usable integrated graphics. Plus less power consumption.
Many custom build PCs had the fTPM disabled by default in the bios. It was buggy and caused performance issues on AMD systems at the time and since few people buying their own motherboards were using it, it was a pretty obvious fix for the motherboard makers.
It's hard to tell but it seems that no more than 20% of Steam users have pre 8th gen Intel CPU. I'm looking at CPUs with 4 or less cores and Intel was shipping them as late as 10th gen so it's probably considerably more so it's probably considerably less than that.
AFAIK most CPUs with > 4 cores are 8th gen or newer and should be supported (besides old Xeons, Skylake-X and such but I doubt there are that many of those ). Also not sure about AMD but their market share was quite low pre 2020.
If you are a "serious" gamer and have a machine that doesn't support Windows 11, you are probably considering an upgrade anyways.
Such a machine will probably not be able to run the latest AAA titles at a decent framerate, it may run smaller games, but so will a recent "web browser machine". The iGPUs in these machines are starting to get pretty good, probably as good as good as a 10 year old gaming rig but with much better energy efficiency.
Steam users are more likely to be on win 11 than others because they often spend more money on gaming rigs than people buying web browser machine. Many of them will want to throw out their working machines to satisfy Microsoft's demand and upgrade to latest hardware to get 300fps
I doubt I'll be able to use windows 11, even just for gaming. I think when I won't be able to game on 10 I'll just install Linux, or steamos?, and I'll just play whatever I can. And I just won't play any games that require windows for their DRM reasons.
I did that, I'm gaming on linux mint with steam and don't miss anything. Mostly everything works, only a playstation-dedicated wheel doesn't work reliably. PS4 pad works fine in most games. The rest that are native windows games work without hitch. I even tried running some demoscene entries through steam to test my gf card, works too.
That doesn't make sense, Windows 11 was released in 2021. People who spend more money on their hardware are probably not using a 4+ year old machine at this point.
Why should we wait for SteamOS? I’m using Pop_OS! on my gaming machine and can play all new games with the Steam compatibility mode. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II work perfectly fine. I was quite surprised that there are no problems at all and happy that I can go Windows free now
The number of times I've seen people waiting for SteamOS makes me kind of excited that there's so much demand for an alternative to Windows, nervous that a SteamOS general release isn't going to live up to expectations and frustration that that "demand" isn't moving to other distros of its own accord or otherwise being captured by someone savvy.
I think overall it means that "people", even if they have a more positive view of Linux than they did 10 years ago are still lacking the confidence and know-how to be able to make an actual switch.
There are reasons, sure, but there's absolutely a pool of people right now who would be suitable for Linux and appreciate the switch but there just isn't enough activation energy there to get them over the line.
Seriously, the moment there's a linux distro that really "just works", even with games on NVidia cards, I think Windows will lose a very large chunk of market share. So many people are sick of it, but most people still fear that stuff won't work right on Linux.
Anyway, Valve is probably the most likely party to pull that off.
Why, though? If the Windows subsystem for Linux can provide many people an adequate environment for dev work, why can't the equivalent Linux subsystem for Windows provide an adequate gaming platform?
Even Microsoft learnt that with WSL, hence why WSL 2.0 is a plain VM, hardly any different from Virtual Box or VMware Workstation, other than is already on the box and doesn't cost extra.
My gaming laptop is something like 11 years old and still runs the games I'm interested in with really acceptable graphics.
I have installed Pop!OS on it and the combo Steam+Proton is great. I've kept my Windows 10 partition to run Skyrim with mods (last time I checked, it didn't run on Linux) and maybe the occasional Proton-incompatible game.
I tried once to upgrade the W10 partition to W11, and got an error saying that my CPU was not supported.
The day W10 reaches EOL is the day I finally delete that Windows partition. I could just keep it offline, but I don't really play Skyrim anymore (and worst case, I'll wait for Skyrim to run on Proton). As for the occasional game I can't run on Linux, I'll just pass my way. There's way too many games I still want to play, if editors filter themselves out from my reach, it's not my loss.
I tried moving to Windows 11, discovered that pinning folders in Explorer was bugged to hell, and moved back to 10. All of the features I care to use in windows have been in since Windows 7; moving to 11 broke one of the very few moving parts in my workflow. Horrible experience!
Combine that with some of the smartest people I know at microsoft telling me that their current task is to add one iframe to the UI to inject more advertising (and that it had taken six months) and I am an active advocate on not upgrading. I have a test gaming system I'm going to install Arch on to prepare for the win10pocalypse.
> smartest people I know at microsoft telling me that their current task is to add one iframe to the UI to inject more advertising (and that it had taken six months)
This is so sad. A good senior dev can accomplish a lot of good for the customer in 6 months, but instead they're adding ads to an operating system so some Principal Program Manager can get another promo for making his VP's ad revenue go slightly up.
I'm surprised that SteamOS is not listed in the stats. Despite what the article suggests, SteamOS already exists. On the Steam Deck.
Maybe the number of Steam Decks sold is too small to show up in the statistics? Or maybe it reports as Arch, which is the top category of Linux here.
In any case, I'd like to express my gratitude for Steam's excellent Linux support. If anyone is going to usher in the year of the Linux Desktop, it's Steam.
Every time a new Windows version comes out, since Windows XP, that there are forums filled with now the max exodus to Linux Desktop promised land is finally going to happen.
Meanwhile not even Valve was able to convince game studios to port their Android NDK games to SteamDeck, they have to translate Windows/DirectX, and lets see for how long Microsoft will keep tolerating that.
I have the Linux kernel all over the place at home, yet not one of them is a GNU/Linux distribution.
Microsoft made Windows XP free for any OEM that wanted to use it for netbooks, no license at all, and also made some changes to improve its use on limited devices.
That coupled with the usual non-technical resistance to anything that is unfamiliar, meant that in about two years time, all those custom distros for netbooks were for all practical purposes gone from the market.
All netbooks on shopping malls were using Windows XP, netbook edition.
Nowadays it hardly matters, because the netboook market audience nowadays rather use Android and iPadOS.
With Surface devices, which ironically predate iPadOS and Android/iPad window modes, pluggable keyboards, but they messed up delivery, to the point higher ups responsible for Surface product line have left Microsoft for Amazon, unhappy with Microsoft's management decisions.
Microsoft was forced to keep selling XP (Cut down 'Starter' edition was introduced for this IIRC) because Windows Vista was so bloated it was completely unusable on netbooks which is why they started using linux in the first place.
> and lets see for how long Microsoft will keep tolerating that.
Is that something we actually have to worry about? Wine has been around for more than 30 years in one form or another, and AFAIK Microsoft hasn't really taken any legal action against them.
Are you saying that that has been the case because Wine has historically not been great, so Microsoft didn't perceive it as a threat?
That's fair, I guess I thought you meant suing out of existence.
It's tough to say. Annoying Linux people like me tend to have horse-blinders on towards the rest of the world (hence the constant meme of the "Year of the Linux Desktop"), so it's tough for me to speculate with any kind of objectivity.
That said, Steam Decks seem to be selling pretty well, and people don't seem to mind the SteamOS part of it. I think that there's a chance that Linux will be a permanent fixture for Valve now. I don't think they're going to overtake Microsoft, but I think that "Steam Deck" is a viable enough of a target platform for game studios to develop against that it's here to stay.
> Steam Decks seem to be selling pretty well, and people don't seem to mind the SteamOS part of it.
I think part of that is because of its form factor already limiting the device. Like how Android and iOS are fine on a phone or tablet, but I doubt most people would want it on a desktop computer.
Not talking about the Linux part, but the real test with the Deck is whether or not it'll stay a target platform with its low performance and Valve not releasing a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve's Steam Deck verified program already checks performance on games and newer games like Horizon Forbidden West and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are failing.
I think the Deck might occupy a similar spot as the Nintendo Switch, in that it's not the most powerful console out there, but it's portable and nice, and it's a good enough target.
I think especially for indie games, which are typically less demanding than the big new AAA shoot-at-stuff games, the Steam Deck might be an "unofficial standard" for quite awhile.
Though I don't work in the games industry, so I'm talking out of my ass. Again, I'm an annoying Linux person so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I don't disagree about its spot, but I think the "unofficial standard" will still be the Switch because it has sold 150 million units. Valve haven't released sales numbers on the Deck.
Like you say, indie games are less demanding, so even the Deck can be overkill. I remember the Vita being the indie target before the Switch. So many good indie games got ports to the Vita.
I think the Deck has the advantage simply because it’s that much easier to develop on and for a PC than a console. At least I would think so, you would have access to more tools and libraries and debuggers than you would with a dedicated console.
Since the Steam Deck is still fundamentally “just a PC” [1], it has the advantage not really requiring specific “ports” of the games? At least that’s how I think of it, again I don’t work in the games industry.
Of course making stuff “Deck Compatible” might require some specific work to make sure stuff can run on it at a playable framerate, so it’s not completely free, but it does get the advantage of inheriting pretty much every last-gen PC game automatically.
[1] in the sense that it’s running a fairly standard Linux kernel on x64 hardware, with typical desktop Linux features available.
Are you saying that Microsoft might make some change to their API that would be difficult or impossible for Proton to replicate? Otherwise I don't see the issue with targeting Windows and letting Proton handle the compatibility.
I am saying Proton represents Valve's failure to make SteamOS attractive to game developers, many of which are already targeting existing Linux APIs via Android NDK.
Also note that PlayStation makes use of FreeBSD, yet another UNIX based system, even though they use their own proprietary 3D API.
What Microsoft might do, there are legal and technical options they can take, remains to be seen what.
> I am saying Proton represents Valve's failure to make SteamOS attractive to game developers
Sure, but I also think it was a matter of getting a huge library of games available on the Steam Deck immediately. Instead of waiting for every GameCo to port their game over to SteamOS, which may or may not happen no matter what (the console world is full of entropy from what I can tell), they can get like 90% of every single game on Steam available on the Steam Deck right away. I don't know exact numbers, but the Steam Deck might have the largest technically-compatible library of games out of any portable console at this point, although a lot probably aren't well optimized for it.
But of course, this leads to Proton also being a crutch; if you know that Proton is going to do a decent enough job running your game on Linux, there becomes little incentive to spend extra time and money getting a native Linux port on there.
It's tough to say. IANAL, but I feel like if Microsoft were going to do anything about the API emulation scene, they probably would have done something about Wine in the last thirty years. I think they're way more likely to do something funky with DirectX that is difficult or impossible to properly translate into a Vulkan shader, thus breaking compatibility with newer games.
At least as recently as 2014, I was aware of some random Windows 3.1 (yes) machines running in a corporate data center owned by a very recognizable Fortune 500 company. At the time, they were upgrading all their Windows PCs from XP to 7 and this 3.1 box showed up. I confirmed that it was, in fact, real.
True story- when XP was released, all of the people "in the know" (among Windows users) used Win2k.
Nobody wanted to upgrade to XP. It was called the Fisher-Price OS because of the way they made the GUI colorful with oversized icons/shapes and rounded corners everywhere.
The old rule of thumb was that every other version was the good one, so people were naturally skeptical of XP (and after having seen ME, who could blame them). Not sure if that holds anymore, or if there is a good one.
That feature never made sense to me and I always disable it on my GNU+Linux, if I encounter it. Almost always when I want to open 2 different file locations, is because I want to copy files from one folder to another and because I am a lazy lad, i'll just do it by drag and drop. This just works perfectly fine with two windows. Not sure what I would need tabs for. But I also don't care if they exist. Maybe some users like them.
I have a gaming computer on Windows 10 and I only really play Warframe so I plan on making it stay that way (I'm thinking about locking it totally down and not even browsing the web or move to a cloud service). I really don't like moving to Windows 11 especially with the features I don't want or need.
Not surprised. A lot of gamers are still using high-end motherboards and CPUs they bought 10 years ago, only upgrading the GPU and RAM to play newer games. They probably can't upgrade due to the TPM requirement.
I haven't upgraded because my ssd needs to be reformatted to meet install requirements and I no longer enjoy the hours of environment config that will entail
I use Parallels, VMware, UTM and Wine-based solutions for a bunch of applications and games. If you don't mind a bit of tinkering here and there the results can be pretty good.
Unfortunately booting into Windows is not possible on Apple Silicon Macs yet. But there are many other options to run Windows or Windows software - including AAA games.
