Comment by somenameforme
3 months ago
It being the year of Linux is definitely a meme at this point, but Microsoft's trying their hardest to make it a thing.
Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I’ve had multiple friends who are not tech savvy ask me about steam os. Because they basically only use their gaming PC for gaming, and they are frustrated with windows.
None have actually switched yet, but also 10 is still supported, and steam os isnt quite ready from what i understand; (nvidia driver issues?) although I assume that’s changing quite quickly. I haven’t looked super recently.
Personally I run bazzite on a machine I’ve got hooked to a tv. It’s basically steamOS and works great for gaming. I can’t speak to the desktop mode, but as long as it’s passable, windows sets the bar pretty low. Main issue is that some multiplayer games intentionally don’t support Linux for anti-cheat reasons. :(
I don't run Windows at home. My gaming PC is running Ubuntu. Very rarely do games not work perfectly. It's also usually underfunded indie games.
10 is no longer supported in 7 days, unless you activate ESU. Officially this requires a Microsoft account, but there's always the Massgrave way.
PC ownership is NOT a zero-sum game. You assume that lost marketshare must be replaced by something else. I'm confident this is not people replacing their PC for a Mac, this is people who stopped using a PC completely.
Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
I think you can approach this 3 different ways:
Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey.
Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%.
Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset.
[1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
I don't worry much about that. I has been often said that PCs would be dying. Seems it was mostly marketing. It survived consoles and Xbox is probably dead. I have no illusions that Microsoft has the same mismanagement in store for Windows, it didn't have sensible patronage for years.
I don't think it's dying, what I think has been happening and will continue to happen is that unless you're an enthusiast the PC presence is gradually being shrunk and tidied away in a corner and forgotten by many. For many having a 'home PC' would be a relic, similar to how they don't have anything like a dedicated stereo system for playing audio which might have taken up a significant amount of space (possibly more than a PC) years ago.
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I’d wait until they dip below 90% market share before I’d say it was “dying”