The biggest threat to Windows is Steam

[Mnementh]

G2ThaUNiT said:

I can see that eventually being the case. Valve tried that a decade ago with Steam Machines, but there's still major issues that Valve would have to overcome as well since it's not just Steam on PC. Very few games are made natively for Linux (underlying OS for SteamOS) so Steam Deck operating has been reliant on a Windows compatibility layer called Proton to get Windows games to work on Linux. Unfortunately, even to this day, tons of games on Steam do not work with Proton.

So Proton is a short-term solution. It's not the long-term solution. Valve would somehow have to get all developers to make native Linux versions of their games for mass adoption of the OS. Because outside of Steam quite a few publishers have their own PC storefronts that either do not work on Linux or have a lot of/all games that don't work on Linux such as Ubisoft, Epic Games, Blizzard, EA, Rockstar, and Riot Games.

Then there's the other issue of Anti-Cheat as multiplayer games take up a massive amount of PC gamers, nearly all of them do not work at all through Proton. So we're looking at many years before this type of scenario comes to pass.

So for the first part I reluctantly agree. I hope more game devs see in the statistics playing their games on Linux through Proton. But on the other hand it might be very comfortable for the devs to use Proton instead of a real native implementation. But that actually would suffice. For gamers it really doesn't matter that much if it is emulated or native, as long as gameplay is smooth, and for the dev it could be easy to make sure it runs smoothly through Proton.

For anti-cheat - these might be killed by Microsoft. Well, client-side anti-cheat, server-side works even if you play on Linux. The Crowdstrike desaster has MS eager to improve security and anti-cheat uses exactly the thing Crowdstrike is using, it basically hacks your PC and installs a root-kit. That is very dangerous as Crowdstrike has shown. On Linux there is instead an API for implementing such use-cases, so Crowdstrike there isn't actually installing a root.kit but using an API that Linux offers. MS is working to do the same and then banning all 3rd-party software from kernel-access. Which would either kill client-side anti-cheat or relegate them to these API, something which they could also use on Linux or can be easier emulated by Proton.