Windows 10 is the IPV4 of operating systems.
Every time a new Windows version comes out, since Windows XP, that there are forums filled with now the max exodus to Linux Desktop promised land is finally going to happen.
Meanwhile not even Valve was able to convince game studios to port their Android NDK games to SteamDeck, they have to translate Windows/DirectX, and lets see for how long Microsoft will keep tolerating that.
I have the Linux kernel all over the place at home, yet not one of them is a GNU/Linux distribution.
Is that something we actually have to worry about? Wine has been around for more than 30 years in one form or another, and AFAIK Microsoft hasn't really taken any legal action against them.
Are you saying that that has been the case because Wine has historically not been great, so Microsoft didn't perceive it as a threat?
Think of how Microsoft quickly killed the Linux based netbooks, when they really started paying attention, then the new tablets market did the rest.
It's tough to say. Annoying Linux people like me tend to have horse-blinders on towards the rest of the world (hence the constant meme of the "Year of the Linux Desktop"), so it's tough for me to speculate with any kind of objectivity.
That said, Steam Decks seem to be selling pretty well, and people don't seem to mind the SteamOS part of it. I think that there's a chance that Linux will be a permanent fixture for Valve now. I don't think they're going to overtake Microsoft, but I think that "Steam Deck" is a viable enough of a target platform for game studios to develop against that it's here to stay.
Also note that PlayStation makes use of FreeBSD, yet another UNIX based system, even though they use their own proprietary 3D API.
What Microsoft might do, there are legal and technical options they can take, remains to be seen what.
Sure, but I also think it was a matter of getting a huge library of games available on the Steam Deck immediately. Instead of waiting for every GameCo to port their game over to SteamOS, which may or may not happen no matter what (the console world is full of entropy from what I can tell), they can get like 90% of every single game on Steam available on the Steam Deck right away. I don't know exact numbers, but the Steam Deck might have the largest technically-compatible library of games out of any portable console at this point, although a lot probably aren't well optimized for it.
But of course, this leads to Proton also being a crutch; if you know that Proton is going to do a decent enough job running your game on Linux, there becomes little incentive to spend extra time and money getting a native Linux port on there.
It's tough to say. IANAL, but I feel like if Microsoft were going to do anything about the API emulation scene, they probably would have done something about Wine in the last thirty years. I think they're way more likely to do something funky with DirectX that is difficult or impossible to properly translate into a Vulkan shader, thus breaking compatibility with newer games.
I think part of that is because of its form factor already limiting the device. Like how Android and iOS are fine on a phone or tablet, but I doubt most people would want it on a desktop computer.
Not talking about the Linux part, but the real test with the Deck is whether or not it'll stay a target platform with its low performance and Valve not releasing a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve's Steam Deck verified program already checks performance on games and newer games like Horizon Forbidden West and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are failing.
I think especially for indie games, which are typically less demanding than the big new AAA shoot-at-stuff games, the Steam Deck might be an "unofficial standard" for quite awhile.
Though I don't work in the games industry, so I'm talking out of my ass. Again, I'm an annoying Linux person so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Like you say, indie games are less demanding, so even the Deck can be overkill. I remember the Vita being the indie target before the Switch. So many good indie games got ports to the Vita.
Since the Steam Deck is still fundamentally “just a PC” [1], it has the advantage not really requiring specific “ports” of the games? At least that’s how I think of it, again I don’t work in the games industry.
Of course making stuff “Deck Compatible” might require some specific work to make sure stuff can run on it at a playable framerate, so it’s not completely free, but it does get the advantage of inheriting pretty much every last-gen PC game automatically.
[1] in the sense that it’s running a fairly standard Linux kernel on x64 hardware, with typical desktop Linux features available.
That coupled with the usual non-technical resistance to anything that is unfamiliar, meant that in about two years time, all those custom distros for netbooks were for all practical purposes gone from the market.
All netbooks on shopping malls were using Windows XP, netbook edition.
Nowadays it hardly matters, because the netboook market audience nowadays rather use Android and iPadOS.
How did Microsoft deal with that?
Maybe from Windows 3 to 95/98, but I remember (perhaps incorrectly) that moving to 95/98 and/or 7 was pretty stock experience.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/ms-dos-and-win...
Although for me personally I would add Windows 2000.
Nobody wanted to upgrade to XP. It was called the Fisher-Price OS because of the way they made the GUI colorful with oversized icons/shapes and rounded corners everywhere.
The old rule of thumb was that every other version was the good one, so people were naturally skeptical of XP (and after having seen ME, who could blame them). Not sure if that holds anymore, or if there is a good one.