Does steam deck not run Steam OS..? What the Deck was meant to do is irrelevant, the OS it comes with and the OS mentioned in the OP in no way shut Windows down
I feel like we're having two different conversations.
The OP is acting like as soon as people "have the option" to switch to something else, they will, and Windows will be dead. SteamOS, however, has been a thing for a couple years now, and easily configurable Linux distributions for even longer, so saying that Windows is dead 30 minutes after release isn't really wishful thinking, it just... Didn't happen.
Your argument is that SteamOS has potential to upset the gaming OS market, which I'm not at all disagreeing with.
My comments had nothing to do with "what corpos use", I'm talking about Steam's user statistics. Over 90% of steam users are on Windows, and that's with the incredibly popular Steam Deck taken into consideration.
Let it be clear that I'm not at all a Windows fanboy, I fucking hate the OS. I use it because I'm too lazy to set up Linux, and a few games I play are known to not work. Something SteamOS can change, but not something it already has.
We are talking sideways a little bit. OP's joke won't come true. But SteamOS has the potential to begin shipping on prebuilds if this traction keeps up. Why pay for a Windows license when we wanna game, y'know? In company time, thats a blink of an eye. Microsoft should be doing something, they are, but its not really going to matter. If this game focused OS jumps to desktop and is good. It has the potential to take over the PC gaming market. Especially if it makes everything Just Work. We're probably on the same page in reality. Its not exactly there yet. But if there is gonna be a year of the Linux desktop. I'd put my money on Valve igniting it.
Proton is a much bigger deal than SteamOS itself. It's what allows you to play Windows games on Linux -- often with better performance than on Windows due to reduced overhead.
That's all been available for a while. The cat is out of the bag