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PS4 is basically a modified Free BSD. So, "fixing" Linux desktop is probably doable, but extremely difficult to profitably do. Valve seemed interested when Windows introduced the App store and seemed to be going App store / Play store way, but now that Microsoft is losing interest in Windows, they don't have as much incentive to pursue Linux.

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PS4 is not really comparable. (Nor is macOS, for that matter.) It's one thing to get some *nix flavor to work on standardized hardware. It's another to make it work on the wide variety of computing devices where you could install Windows.

True, but hardware compatibility isn't the only thing wrong with Linux desktop. There's a lot of broken stuff on the software side too (ex: X windows as the article points out). In fact, hardware compatibility hasn't been that much of an issue on desktops in recent times. We have a couple hundred Linux desktops (not laptops) at my university, and what I find is that if you're using last-gen Intel CPU with iGPU on a desktop with Ethernet, hardware compat isn't much of an issue at all.

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