The whole draw of Steam Deck is that it's a carefully curated experience where everything from the OS upwards is crafted to play nicely together and "Just Work" to bring that console-like experience to PC gaming.
Whatever Microsoft are putting together isn't going to have that end-to-end consideration. It will be nothing more than a skinned launcher on top of Windows 11, and no matter how shiny that launcher looks you won't be able to hide from Windows for long. All the normal Windows bloat will be there, and I wouldn't be surprised if you spend as much time messing around in actual Windows as you do playing games.
"I can't wait for my PC to load the classic Windows UI elements, the Metro elements AND THIS NEW UI all at the same time regardless of what applications I'm running. It's not going to put unnecessary strain on the hardware or introduce annoying bugs and instability at all!"
-Somebody, probably.
They tried doing something that would have fit with Windows 8 and they ROYALLY screwed that up.
I don't know how you don't think about how people that use Windows Server and how they have difficulties reaching the start menu. Seriously, trying to go into the top left or side with your mouse makes no sense. They have so many project managers, QA and process and somehow they screwed up that hard.
You'll get a knock on the door when you are gunning down innocent people in GTA6 because Windows Recall got pictures it sent to the FBI of your violent behaviour.
Meh, I'm fine not playing games that require kernel level access to my system to prevent cheating, or games by devs that are able to set the anticheat to allow Linux users to play but just don't.
Yes and before valve got involved gaming on wine was a hit and miss (mostly a miss). Whereas now basically 100% of the games i play just work with no to minimal tinkering. They put in a lot of effort to get all the kinks out. And steam input is also a huge factor in this. Downplaying their involvement is akin to downplaying wine's achievements because it's built on top of linux.
I just made the jump to Ubuntu. You don't need a Steam Deck or Steam OS. Steam works just as well on any Linux OS. Proton is the real star because it deals with the compatibility issues so well.
That is true. But without the Steam Deck, Proton support would also be lower. And that's the main reason why I hope that they continue their current path, because I also get a lot of enjoyment out of Proton on Ubuntu.
The genie is out of the bottle now. I love SteamOS with its ease of use and steaminput integration, but theres already a ton of open source projects building on what they started that would totally still be able to out perform microsoft even if valve stopped updating steamos today. But every indication seems to be that thats the opposite of their plan, as they're extending steamOS support to other handhelds and devices officially now.
I think Valve does a lot of work on Proton to make it work this good because of SteamOS. And that's the main reason I say this. Because a lot of Linux gaming is possible because of the work they put into it.
I'm not sure, but I think the windows progress bar thingy includes the time spent actually writing to disk, whereas on Linux (or i guess cinnamon) only shows when it gets to disk-cache. If you are full on RAM or tried shutting down immediately afterwards it should take a bit longer since it has to actually write it to disk
It's honestly insane. I zipped up a bunch of files (mainly emulation and modding) to total around a terabyte. I moved it to an external hd and then to Linux, and it only took about an hour to unpack it. I've never had something unpack so fast
For a smaller scale example, I had a ~2GB file that unzipped in about 10 seconds as well
Sure, it took me 15 minutes to scrounge around online trying to figure out why my .rar file wasn't unzipping properly, but after that I saved all that time and then some
Windows still hasn't decided what it's configuration windows should look like, there are still dialogs with the 30 year old W95 design language. I doubt that they were able to put together a seamless gaming UI over that past x months or years.
Microsoft just needs to do what valve is doing to wine and make all the old windows shit work with it, and build a whole new OS that is actually good. Such a steaming pile of band-aided together bullshit and UIs and data collection engines.
I'd argue the kernel itself is significantly better designed vs Linux, at least in critical areas like drivers. You're saying you want a new desktop environment, which doesn't require them to do anything but start over 30 years of development.
Do you, in your brain, genuinely think someone goes through every single dialog box on every release and pressed a button that says "this will use 30 yo design language" and "this one will have really big whitespace and rounded corners"? Because I have some news for you.
Nah, fuck Windows 11. I’m in the beginning stages of a win10 migration to Mint, and as soon as I understand how things actually work beyond the install, MS will be completely out of my life.
I just set up an Ubuntu dual boot last week. Valve has really made Linux gaming easy. Just one checkbox to enable Steamplay. I don't see myself going back to Windows any time soon. Good luck with Mint.
No idea where you are in your trek, but if you can find the time learn how to use virtual machines (or use an old laptop) so you can test stuff without fear of breaking a machine you rely on.
When I want to use a new package or make a change to my setup I will do it in a virtual machine as many times as it takes until I get it right, then use my notes to do it on my daily driver. I went from a Windows only user to daily driving Linux in about a year thanks to keeping good notes.