The performance gains are from all the tweaks people have done to proton to fix the games. Running regular programs through wine will only be slower.

Yes but that's it right, they are not developing for Linux, Steam is doing it for the developer. There is nothing stopping Windows of saying sell exclusively through my Store, though I believe they have tried.

But I do understand were you are coming from Windows is definitely not the most ethical company and definitely they are not up for fair fight, what I'm trying to say is that I hope the game developers focus more in the mobile market and optimize the games more.

The Steam Deck was the way of bringing SteamOS to the masses, now the HW developers will sell their devices in Walmart just by the Switch and the other consoles, it will be cheaper due to the 0 license cost (or, you know, pocketing the difference) with a big, ever expanding, catalog.

About the Switch 2, the hype is there definitely and it is a known brand, mainly sold to families and casual gamers. But even PlayStation and Xbox are not competing with Nintendo.

I agree with everything you said, but I still don’t think that will change the decision of someone on the fence. The Deck is the odd one out.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Deck and SteamOS and want it to succeed, and expect them to to a certain degree, but I just know the average consumer and they’ll just look at the SteamOS handhelds as a weird knockoff gaming computer.

We all know how special it is because we were the target market. But when all is said and done, it comes down to what people know.

If Valve was advertising like the big guys do, maybe, but with no ad support, not a chance.

I think the issue here is DirectX, so unless there's meaningful changes to how DX works internally, DXVK at this point can always be a step ahead with all the changes it can make without tech debt to worry about. I wouldn't be surprised if that's why Series X despite being stronger than PS5 on paper, struggles to match performance in non zero count of games.

As an ally owner, this is rather unfortunate

Unfortunate why? It just means Asus sold you a pretty well optimized product.

I suppose there's no reason to take the time and remove windows from it

Bullshit

If they make a Linux app for Game Pass & just let Proton do its thing, they could still make money off people that don’t use Windows.

Probably, but I know that at least in the past, their philosophy was to uphold Windows as the one gold standard at all costs, and I doubt that has changed.

It might be one of those non-authentic quotes, but I heard that Steve Ballmer supposedly once said, that they'd rather have people pirate Windows instead of using another OS. No matter if that is an authentic statement - there is a real synergetic effect: If everyone is used to how Windows works at home (even if pirated there), then any potential employer will want to have Windows licenses for their IT and office stuff, which is where the main money lies. That's one of the reasons Microsoft has been so furiously anti-competition, because their main advantage is being the de-facto standard, and being the only proper gaming system became a part of that strategy, with attempts to further lock-in any gamers into their ecosystem if at all possible (some of which thankfully failed).

So I think making an app for Game Pass for Linux won't be in their interest any time soon, unfortunately.

That's all because Wine is not an emulator

I reached the same conclusion. But at the end of the day it’s your system, if losing Gamepass doesn’t bother you go ahead and install SteamOS. I did see a few people say that it is somewhat buggy and that Bazzite is still better for the Ally.

I'd like to see someone else reproduce the original test results. Seen the same set of data posted multiple times and honestly the numbers look like major outlier and either different settings or something wrong on wibdows.

No, you see. Corporations have no rights. People have rights. Corporations can have legal protections, but not rights.

THIS IS THE KINDA NEWS I WANNA HEAR

Tempted to get Steam OS on my laptop, gotten really used to it on my Steam Deck

150 million Switch 2 sales

Nope, that's Switch 1 sales, over its entire lifetime.

I fixed it. It was 15 million projected in the first year, 2.2 million preorders. But I think that point still stands. The Deck has been out for a few years now.

Unless there are major changes from the Deck version, I would STRONGLY advise not running SteamOS on any machine with sensitive data. You want a real login screen and, preferably, FDE for any laptop.

If you like the Desktop Mode? That is just KDE Plasma. Basically every major distro has a build that uses it (and you can install it yourself otherwise). And Steam mode is literally just Steam Big Picture (with some minor tweaks).

For a laptop? I am an old so I use Fedora. But I think everyone loves atomic distros these days so consider Bazzite.