I don’t think they care. With this console generation they have shifted away from treating gaming like a product with certain hardware and software. It’s more of a service thing to them with game pass and cloud gaming
The Xbox literally runs a custom build of Windows, that runs in a Virtual Machine, on top of another custom Windows based hypervisor. Then games are run in a separate VM.
All they’d have to do is port the hypervisor to different hardware, then the rest would run on top just fine.
They don’t “need” to. There are games that companies refuse to let people run on Linux, so there will be a market for Windows, no matter how shit the experience is.
For now. If enough of the market shifts to Linux those companies will support Linux. Particularly since the CrowdStrike fiasco has spurred Microsoft to crack down on kernel level access which means the days of anti-cheat rootkits are numbered. It’s not going to be long before there’s no functional difference between gaming on Windows and gaming on Linux.
The ace in the hole though is that while Steam is effectively cutting down what Windows OSes it decides it'll continue supporting, people will want an alternative to go to instead of feeling cornered with Windows 10 and 11. Because that's all that they have right now for gaming, with Linux being optional, but gamers can be awfully picky about what they want to run.
Microsoft flamed out of the mobile OS space precisely because they insisted that Windows not fork, but be identical software running on all devices.
So now, there is no such thing as a windows phone, but every time I wake up my computer I see a vestigial lock screen that I have to dismiss before I log in.
They designed their phones like a company entitled to 85% of the market share. Something tells me they’re not going to reform just to capture that mobile game space.
True but imagine a gaming tv with all the hardware requirements, and true steam os, you could turn it on and load up a game straight from the tv and not have to stream it
I mean, clearly they don’t. Every other company is still installing Windows. Any of them could install and sell them with Linux, and save a few bucks in the process, but they dont. An official SteamOS release won’t change that.