Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

> But before you declare this a triumphant moment for desktop Linux, it's important to note that some of these Linux users are not, in fact, using Steam on a desktop. The Linux version "SteamOS Holo" 64-bit is the most popular reported, at just over 42 percent of the Linux slice of pie. That indicates that a huge portion of these Linux users are actually playing on Valve's Steam Deck portable, which runs Linux.

There's such a deep seeded, systemic bias against linux that it actually can never win, to any degree or magnitude, because the moment it starts winning we just move the goal-posts for the flimsiest of reasons to ensure it can't quite claim that victory.

Linux is obviously and clearly the most popular operating system kernel on the planet. Oh, no, that's no good a measure, servers are messy, let's refine it to most popular consumer operating system kernel? Oh... it, could also reasonably claim that title? No no, no Android, that doesn't count. Nope, No Chrome OS either, you can't have that, that's, well, that is linux, but its not. Just nice, pure, desktop linux, yes, perfect, arch linux, kde desktop, that'll never trend up and thus is the perfect new-new definition of desktop linu--wait hold up, I'm getting word this is, not possible, its actually SteamOS? Nope, kill it, that's not desktop linux either, kill it.

I guess it really depends on what you expect out of a "user". I think servers and Android count but I think SteamOS is a bit tricky, because it's relying on a compatibility layers running Windows to run most games. This may not matter to the end user, but it isn't quite the developer revelation many imagine where suddenly tons of games and apps have a proper linux port.

Is that any different developer tools not supporting Windows and Windows users using WSL? We would still classify these as Windows users despite the compatibility layer. Ultimately compatibility layers are good because they reduce developer workload so that developers can focus on what really matters.

>Is that any different developer tools not supporting Windows and Windows users using WSL?

excuse my ignorance, but are there any major developer tools that don't support Windows? I can only imagine some internal enterprise tooling doing this.

>Ultimately compatibility layers are good because they reduce developer workload so that developers can focus on what really matters

I don't mind them as a concept, but I personally want as few points of failure between me and my software as possible. Some software is already either overly bloated or buggy (or both) as is without wondering if there's now compatibility layer issues on top of it.

> excuse my ignorance, but are there any major developer tools that don't support Windows?

Semgrep is one that I use at work. Nix is another. Docker¹ is a third. Many terminal emulators support multiple operating systems, but not Windows.

Windows support also often lags for new programming languages. Golang didn't run on Windows at first. Crystal is only now starting to have full-fledged Windows support. Plus there are many tools that do run on Windows but work poorly or are extremely slow or require tons of compatibility shims, like Git and Emacs.

A lot of dev tools are Unix-first. You just probably use only a few of them if you work at a Microsoft shop.

--

Not Docker itself at this point but 99.9% of all Docker containers that anyone actually uses.