It'd be neat to have a comparison like this that has some stats or resources consumption graphs. How many of these wins are CPU, GPU, or other would be interesting to get a pulse on.
Info on the Legion Go S: specs on the Ryzen Z2 Go APU here are overall very similar to the Steam Deck's custom apu; 4 Zen3+ cores, 12CU RDNA2 iGPU (a 680m). A (Windows based) test shows a perhaps double digit % lead for the Z2 Go. I'm a huge fan of there being a second USB port, enabling simultaneously charging and display. Notably has a 32GB ram model. Base: $650 (on sale for $500 recently). https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-Z2-Go-Processor-Benc...https://www.pcmag.com/comparisons/lenovo-legion-go-s-vs-valv...
POM37 · 1h ago
I personally own the older but almost identical version of the Legion Go and while i really think Steam OS is the defacto better operating system for Handleld gaming i still don't switch because what the article missed is the big buzzword Named Frame Generation. Yes windows has worse performance if you count Frame Gen out. Steam OS saddly had no Framegen on launch and now a relatively Old version of it. I think for handheld gaming this really is the killer feature. You get double or even triple the frames in those More demanding 3d titles, added smoothness for the 2d indi games, and the normally occurring downsides like graphic artefacts are a lot less of a problem because of the smaller screen size. Even on windows Lenovo is slow to update their official Drivers but you can either go directly to AMD or get the asus Handheld drivers instead, if you are willing to jump through the hoops that its. This feature which currently has a lot of bad press(rightly so) really is perfect for Handheld gaming and Valve should be staying on top with the updates more.
Night_Thastus · 4h ago
Given Microsoft's recent 'This is an Xbox' and 'Windows 11 will be the platform for gaming' messaging, and the demolishing of the Xbox division, this may be good timing.
Results like this may light a fire under MS to finally fix some deep problems in Windows' performance. At least, one can hope.
lupusreal · 4h ago
I hope Microsoft stays complacent and ultimately loses the gamer market. With gamers out and most other casual consumers going mobile, Microsoft will be ever more relegated to office environments, making them even less cool and hopefully starting a snowball effect that really hurts them.
neuroelectron · 3h ago
They need to actually hire good devs again but then again they are a major part of why software as a career is dying in America.
mlnj · 3h ago
This might not be an engineering problem. It just doesn’t feel like anyone at MS actually cares what their users care for. Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.
thewebguyd · 46m ago
> Doesn’t seem like they use the OS themselves.
Watch any of the MS BUILD or Ignite conference sessions, and take note of how many MS employees are using MacBooks - there's still Windows & Surface there, but I swear it's becoming less and less every year as Microsoft keeps acquihiring, and moved all in on the MS <3 Open Source campaign.
There used to be a huge culture of dogfooding in MS and I don't see it anymore (granted, I'm not an insider - just speaking from public perception). Also see any new open source stuff they put out - very little of it is using their own stack. Good for the community at large, but it speaks volumes to Microsoft's priorities.
Even on the business side - InTune (their MDM) will happily manage macOS, Ubuntu, Android, iOS almost as well as Windows (there' still deficiencies compared to competitors like JamF). Office is on Mac, EntraID doesn't care what OS you use, Defender EDR doesn't care what OS you use, etc.
It's clear that Windows is no longer a priority. Microsoft doesn't care what OS you use as long as you are using Azure, Office, and M365's suite of services. Definitely a better strategy for them to reach more customers, but it does spell the death of Windows long term.
whalesalad · 4h ago
Gonna be tough when they own literally all the gaming studios now
maxsilver · 3h ago
They just fired a lot of the gaming studios they used to own. (Tango, Arkane), and cancelled most of their major upcoming projects (Everwild, Perfect Dark, the new MMO, etc)
And - while there are rare examples otherwise (like iD software), many of their studios haven't made a well received game in over a decade.
It's not necessarily a great thing for the industry, but Microsoft leaving gaming entirely would not be that terribly tough. If anything, it would probably have the least amount of impact now, then it would have at any other time since 2001.
staticman2 · 2h ago
Microsoft bought the Call of Duty studios for a lot of money and likes to say they are succeeding at video games by pointing to Call of Duty revenue in a vacuum without counting the cost to aquire Activision.
They certainly aren't going to stop releasing Call of Duty games.
the_snooze · 3h ago
They own a bunch of AAA gaming studios, which have been producing flop after multimillion-dollar flop. All that while random indie darlings produce high quality cross-platform hits for a fraction of the budget.
lupusreal · 3h ago
Not any of the good ones though. The long-tail of game developers are where most PC gamers are at these days, the AAA slop have large numbers on a per-game basis, but aren't very large compared to the whole gaming market.
msgodel · 4h ago
Most office environments seem to be using OSX for their client OS these days. It's just much more behaved OOTB. The only thing people really need Windows for now is the domain controllers and goofy legacy embedded stuff.
cobalt · 3h ago
That is definitely a silicon valley thing.
thewebguyd · 40m ago
It's expanding beyond the valley, at least I can only speak for the PNW which is admittedly still a minor tech hub but not the level of the Bay Area. My own company I work for included (a change driven by myself) has switched almost everyone to macOS, as have many of our peers and competitors (non tech companies).
I'm also starting to see a lot of Macs pop up in smaller private practices - most dentist offices around here are on Macs, a few dealerships have moved over, etc.
Windows is still the majority by far, but its marketshare is slowly being eroded away. It'll be a while before F500 enterprises move over, if at all, but small-medium businesses are definitely growing their macOS usage.
0cf8612b2e1e · 1h ago
I work at a large F500 company and I would be shocked if Macs were more than 5% of the total computer inventory. Excel alone is very sticky. Excel excerpts will tell you that Mac Excel is weird and does not work correctly.
Said as someone stuck on a windows machine with all of the corporate monitoring spyware which makes performance crawl.
msgodel · 2h ago
I'm definitely seeing it consistently on the East Coast.
lp0_on_fire · 1h ago
Consistently for management or the unwashed masses?
mlnj · 4h ago
At this point, I've given up having hope for Windows to be actually a good experience for anything at all.
Development has been a pain over the last decade. MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.
Normal everyday experience is just a pain with unintuitive settings pages, slow Files Explorer, and a horrendous start panel experience.
Gaming seems to be the last thread my Windows machine is around for anymore. Although I have not tried moving to Linux for this, the gaming community seems to be happy enough for more and more games every week.
BunsanSpace · 4h ago
> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on
Except when Apple deprecates APIs but the replacement doesn't have close to the same functionality (looking at you screen capture kit).
Or when the documentation just doesn't explain anything and you have to reverse engineer the API to figure out what it does.
or how there's a bunch of hidden APIs only certain vendors are told about so you can't even compete on an even playing field.
And don't get me started on the C, C++, ObjectiveC and now Swift monstrosities. Having fun with your legacy project when the new APIs require swift, so you have to use the objectiveC bridge and the weird bugs that comes with it.
pdpi · 1h ago
GP said that macOS is a pleasure to code on, you’re arguing that it is not a pleasure to code for. Both can be true at the same time!
bobbylarrybobby · 2h ago
macOS is great to code on, not to code for
neuroelectron · 3h ago
Also Apple undercutting your business by turning your app in an OS feature.
Or Apple deleting your app and account because of politics but they claim it's a policy violation. They just selectively enforce it.
Or apple allowing foreign governments back doors.
42lux · 3h ago
Because Microsoft never did any of those things...
neuroelectron · 2h ago
Certainly not in the way Apple does. Archive/zip integration into the file explorer is a great example. As apposed to F.lux, where Apple completely removed the API and app and made their own version of it.
vips7L · 1h ago
I genuinely enjoy programming on windows. Perhaps because I don’t try to force windows to be linux, but PowerShell is genuinely good.
The only issues I face are when other developers do non-cross platform things. Like use bash for build scripts.
mtsr · 1h ago
Anything touching disk, such as reading a bunch of source files is just so much slower on windows right now. From what I hear it improves a little if you actually go through the Linux subsystem, but it just can’t touch native Linux performance.
Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.
baq · 4h ago
> MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.
I don’t know what kind of projects are you working on, but it couldn’t be further from truth for me. WSL2 is so much better than docker on macOS it isn’t even funny. (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)
vips7L · 1h ago
Even without WSL, PowerShell is perfectly capable. I find that lots of people just rag about windows because it’s not unix and they’re trying to force it to be.
cosmic_cheese · 3h ago
> (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)
I really wish we could get back to true platform-agnostic development and away from shipping whole Linux-jungles containing the banana you actually want to ship. Effective hard-coupling isn’t a good thing isn’t my opinion, even when the platform being coupled to is FOSS.
thewebguyd · 37m ago
Agreed. Instead of solving "It runs on my machine" we just decided to ship the machine as part of the app and call it a day.
zanecodes · 3h ago
Docker on macOS also runs a Linux VM under the hood, just like WSL2 does, they're no different in that respect. WSL1 used the more exotic approach of translating Linux system calls to and from NT kernel system calls, but for various reasons (compatibility, performance, complexity) Microsoft abandoned that technique and adopted a Linux VM running under the Hyper-V hypervisor for WSL2.
WorldMaker · 34m ago
There is a difference in Hyper-V itself. The Windows hypervisor is underappreciated as one of the better VM hypervisors in some scenarios, and WSL2 uses a few Hyper-V tricks [0] to really shine if your machine's Hyper-V isn't interfered with by other hypervisors. (Sadly not uncommon given how many us have things like old VirtualBox VMs that still need Hyper-V to run in a compatibility mode with Oracle-maintained hypervisors of the past.)
(Also, WSL1 isn't as actively maintained as it was when WSA [Windows Subsystem for Android] was an active Windows 11 feature driving it, but it hasn't been entirely abandoned either and there is some community support ongoing [open source PRs].)
[0] Among other things, Windows likes to run itself at all times as a guest in Hyper-V when Hyper-V is active (and other ancient hypervisors aren't interfering), making Hyper-V VMs like WSL2 "peers" with Windows itself for Hyper-V resources/attention. (It's one of the funnier things about Hyper-V being a "Pro" feature still today because even consumer-focused Windows Home is often still running in Hyper-V [because it's also sometimes a defense-in-depth security/sandboxing in some consumer use cases], it just won't let you configure other VMs in it than your main Windows OS.)
jeberle · 3h ago
My experience w/ WSL2 and Docker Desktop has been roughly equivalent: both a little fussy, but work just fine. What was it about either one that led you to such a strong preference?
tines · 4h ago
This year I switched over to Linux and Mac completely away from my high end Lenovo Windows gaming laptop, using the latter only when absolutely necessary, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m not putting up with ads in my goddamn start menu, opt-out or no.
magicalhippo · 4h ago
Very interesting that the Cyberpunk 2077 results showed 28% performance improvements as well as a 25% increase in battery life.
Often better performance is due to more efficient use of hardware, which comes at an energy cost. Other times it allows the hardware to work more efficiently, like avoiding spinning on locks.
usrusr · 4h ago
When seeing numbers like that I always wonder about the probability of the engines truly running the same feature set: not because I doubt that an alternative implementation can be faster (I don't) and certainly not because I'd want to accuse anyone of trickery, but because those software stacks are just so very, very complex and adaptive and minor (but, perhaps, costly in fps) adaptions of the engine parametrization to the runtime environment can be very difficult to spot by looking at the output. I'd imagine the relationship between the code and what's actually happening must be almost as wild and unpredictable as what we see in epigenetics.
paol · 3h ago
That would be plausible if the effect was only seen in one game, or a small handful. Instead it's happening across the board, with almost all games tested showing at least some gain, and many showing gains comparable to CP2077.
At that point it has to be a platform/stack difference.
Cyph0n · 4h ago
How would the engines be running differently? It’s quite literally the same Windows build of the game running on Wine/Proton.
The simpler explanation is that Windows is poorly optimized, and runs a ton of inefficient crap in the background that’s taking cycles away from the CPU and maybe even GPU.
WorldMaker · 4m ago
I think one of the answers here may be nVidia related. CP2077 is one of those games with a ton of "optimized for/by nVidia" magic with the nVidia driver injecting a lot of its own GPU/CPU code adjustments into the game. Given the Linux nVidia driver is a fraction of the size of the Windows driver I've long assumed there's a lot less "optimized" code being sent to the Linux side than the Windows side. It's interesting to wonder if it is because Linux needs it less or if Windows is still the flagship for "most features"/"best graphics" for nVidia so DirectX gets all the attention.
jeroenhd · 4h ago
I can imagine the feature set the native Windows driver advertises is different from the feature set DXVK reports. If DXVK doesn't support or implement certain features that the engine then doesn't request of it (or if the API call translates to a noop), you could quite easily end up in a scenario where graphic fidelity is lowered, accidentally boosting battery life and performance. There were bugs where certain games wouldn't render certain shadows, for instance, which might not get noticed but still offers an accidental performance uplift.
Cyph0n · 3h ago
I don’t see how something like that would happen consistently across multiple titles.
mitkebes · 1h ago
My understanding is there are two performance differences here, one is vulkan outperforming DirectX, and one is reduced overhead on linux vs windows.
The Vulkan difference can actually be achieved on windows as well, by using DXVK on windows.
The overhead difference is most seen on the lighter games, like Dead Cells and Hades. It's why we see such massive increases in battery life for those games.
joseda-hg · 3h ago
Even on same builds, I could see some calls being performed, and the translation while functionally equivalent, not quite computationally equivalent
It doesn't even have to be worse, just different
Cyph0n · 3h ago
Okay, but it is nonetheless not a good look for Windows.
cassianoleal · 3h ago
> better performance is due to more efficient use of hardware, which comes at an energy cost
It's a matter of balance.
More efficiency means less power for the same computations. If you increase the computations more than your gain in performance, you use more power. If your efficiency gains are not fully utilised by increased computations, you use less power.
kevingadd · 3h ago
The CP2077 framerate is 59, so it's probably effectively running at 60FPS, or is CPU-limited instead of GPU-limited. If the graphics side of things has spare headroom it's going to draw less power.
On the flip side, the CPU may be doing less work due to things like more efficient drivers / less OS nonsense tying up CPU, which would also reduce power draw.
trelane · 4h ago
> So, guys, I don’t want to kill your enthusiasm, but this sounds very much like We are just pretending to release a SteamOS version but in fact we advertise the Windows model everywhere instead. Since I am familiar with large companies, I guess the story was like that.
As a Linux user since the last millennium, this dance is so incredibly familiar.
> In his own column, Gassée has written several times about Microsoft's Windows OEM License and the ways in which it limits the freedoms of PC OEMs. In July 2001, I spoke with Gassée to find out why no dual-boot computers with BeOS or Linux installed alongside Windows can be purchased today
> It's impossible to know precisely how much, but if you do the math and assume that it's $30 per computer from those various sources, that would yield $200 million or more than 25% of Dell's profitability. It could be more or less than this number, but any way that you look at it, Dell is dependent on Microsoft for a massive chunk of their profits.
So, uh, good luck. Sure is an amazing coincidence how many PC vendors suddenly have a competitor to the Steam Deck, that happen to run Windows, and especially push their Windows versions.
pjmlp · 3h ago
I keep telling remember OS/2 and netbooks, but apparently the dream of Desktop Linux built on top of Win32 and DirectX is too good to give up, and accept the issues building castles on foreign kingdoms.
staticman2 · 4h ago
I've had a lot of weird issues with my early model Steam Deck from 2022.
I'd be interested in knowing how these later devices do in basic usability issues like will the device freeze for 30 minutes if booted when your internet is down but your network is up and it can't confirm your Steam credentials on startup.
Will switching inputs on an HDTV result in the dock needing to be disconnected and reconnected before you get a video signal? Etc.
bsimpson · 3h ago
Considering a major selling point of handhelds is portability, it's bizarre that Steam insists on trying to log in when you power it on. Even if there are no known wifi hotspots nearby, it will still spend a minute looking for one.
acd · 1h ago
When gamers get better FPS on Linux they will switch os.
Daishiman · 4h ago
Really amazing how Win32 is now another API that's been essentially virtualized out of Windows with performance improvements on top.
baq · 4h ago
It’s the stable ABI that Linux doesn’t want to have so it got shoved down its throat in userspace, with surprisingly good results and a typical 20 years in the making overnight success.
zanecodes · 3h ago
I'm convinced that the lack of a stable ABI and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer (requiring drivers to be in the kernel source tree) is what's preventing The Year of the Linux Desktop from ever arriving. I understand the principles behind both decisions, but at some point I think pragmatism should win out. I guess I'm just a bit surprised that no distro has taken up the mantle of providing these things; it seems to me it should be possible to build a stable ABI and HAL on top of the existing Linux kernel.
Daishiman · 2h ago
The problem is that as soon as you do that you're stuck with whatever architecture you already have, which incurs precisely the performance and maintenance burdens that Windows already suffers.
Which is a reasonable design choice for many things. But Linux can move fast in part because it can decide to discard bad ABI and HAL conventions.
zanecodes · 2h ago
I understand that, but I think for an operating system it's more valuable to provide stability for applications than to be able to move fast.
Secondarily, do the same issues not apply to the Linux API as to a hypothetical ABI? If the API changes, don't userspace applications still need to be updated and/or recompiled accordingly, or suffer breakage? At some level, whether it's an ABI, a statically linked API, or a dynamically linked API, there always has to be some interface between applications and the operating system, and breaking changes to that interface must be managed with care.
It comes down to where you decide to draw that interface, and I think the ABI is just a better place to draw it from a user's perspective. This way, applications don't need to be recompiled to work on newer operating system versions, and given how challenging and painful it can be to compile applications reproducibly, and how many applications are only provided in binary form to begin with, this seems like a worthy goal.
pjmlp · 3h ago
It is an API frozen in Windows XP days, most new additions are based on COM since Vista.
This will work out as long as Microsoft is willing to tolerate it, like netbooks.
inversetelecine · 4h ago
I guess the OEMs (Lenovo in this case) still don't want support calls about why their game (anti-cheat enabled, fortnite, etc) won't run on their new Legion Go S.
lvass · 2h ago
Although you may very well be correct, Epic and Lenovo aren't owned by the same entities in paper, and putting it this way is uncalled for.
notepad0x90 · 4h ago
I don't get the comparison here. Imagine comparing a Toyota corolla out of the dealer's lot with a highly customized Honda civic optimized for street racing. Guess which will be faster? lol
Windows is a general purpose operating system. Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right? apples and oranges.
Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category? A good comparison would have been consoles like playstation or xbox (Microsoft's gaming optimized OS/platform akin to SteamOS). Then if they used similarly specced PC, it would be reasonable benchmark.
reef_sh · 4h ago
Steam OS is very much just a general purpose OS. It easily allows you to switch to desktop mode and just use it as a regular linux PC. It just boots into steam by default.
notepad0x90 · 4h ago
So I can deploy steam at any random company? or if I'm a graphic designer can I use it to replace my macos? is it a good distro if I'm working on embedded sofware development? Should I use it as a web server? it can after all run nginx or apache on it. If I have a VPS with 1GB ram, is this a good OS for it? or a laptop from 2011? all I'm saying is it can do lots of things, but it isn't built to support all those things. it's built for gaming. if it really is a general purpose OS, the litmus test (in my opinion) is that someone starts shipping it with general purpose computing hardware and people actually start using that.
evilduck · 14m ago
The Steamdeck is a general purpose computing hardware device shipping with SteamOS, it's just an x86 APU with a handheld form factor and SteamOS is just a customized linux distro (but not a proprietary one). Install Windows on it if you'd like, or install SteamOS on any other hardware you'd like (though you'd have to deal with adding your specific hardware support yourself if it's like an NVidia GPU, not all that different than just a generic KDE ISO)
bsimpson · 3h ago
Say you want to play Outer Wilds on an airplane. Your options are Windows or SteamOS. Which do you prefer?
No one in that scenario cares if it's easier to run Office on Windows.
coolgoose · 4h ago
SteamOS has 'desktop mode' which is full fledged Linux + Kde environment.
You can use that accounting software most likely via wine ;)
0cf8612b2e1e · 1h ago
How well does this work? I have been trying to justify this toy to myself. Could it act as a crummy laptop replacement so long as I can dock it with a real monitor and keyboard?
notepad0x90 · 4h ago
I get that, I have VMs for various linux distros as well, all purpose-built. i wouldn't use Kali RockyLinux for office use cases for example. there is a lot to a distro than merely downstreaming ubuntu. it can run libreoffice but can it support (not run,support!) other workloads? I can run netbsd on anything, i can theoretically port any software to it or run a VM in it, that doesn't mean it can support what I'm doing with it well.
ekianjo · 4h ago
> obvious terrible choice for the category?
the same hardware for gaming is being advertised and sold with Windows 11. That's why.
lawn · 3h ago
> Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right?
I bet it can.
> Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category?
They're selling the "obviously terrible" choice, even prioritizing and asking a premium for it.
Furthermore Windows has been the obvious choice for gaming for decades, that SteamOS seems to outclass Windows is indeed noteworthy.
And the open source situation promises only better and better. Work in Mesa 25.2 is improving the next gen geometry, enabling much better culling for example. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Better-NGG-Mesa-25.2
And a recent organizational shift; the Radeon software folks are leaving behind their proprietary stack & will be working purely on the open source stack. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Radeon-Software-Drop-Prop-GL-V...
It'd be neat to have a comparison like this that has some stats or resources consumption graphs. How many of these wins are CPU, GPU, or other would be interesting to get a pulse on.
Info on the Legion Go S: specs on the Ryzen Z2 Go APU here are overall very similar to the Steam Deck's custom apu; 4 Zen3+ cores, 12CU RDNA2 iGPU (a 680m). A (Windows based) test shows a perhaps double digit % lead for the Z2 Go. I'm a huge fan of there being a second USB port, enabling simultaneously charging and display. Notably has a 32GB ram model. Base: $650 (on sale for $500 recently). https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-Z2-Go-Processor-Benc... https://www.pcmag.com/comparisons/lenovo-legion-go-s-vs-valv...
Results like this may light a fire under MS to finally fix some deep problems in Windows' performance. At least, one can hope.
Watch any of the MS BUILD or Ignite conference sessions, and take note of how many MS employees are using MacBooks - there's still Windows & Surface there, but I swear it's becoming less and less every year as Microsoft keeps acquihiring, and moved all in on the MS <3 Open Source campaign.
There used to be a huge culture of dogfooding in MS and I don't see it anymore (granted, I'm not an insider - just speaking from public perception). Also see any new open source stuff they put out - very little of it is using their own stack. Good for the community at large, but it speaks volumes to Microsoft's priorities.
Even on the business side - InTune (their MDM) will happily manage macOS, Ubuntu, Android, iOS almost as well as Windows (there' still deficiencies compared to competitors like JamF). Office is on Mac, EntraID doesn't care what OS you use, Defender EDR doesn't care what OS you use, etc.
It's clear that Windows is no longer a priority. Microsoft doesn't care what OS you use as long as you are using Azure, Office, and M365's suite of services. Definitely a better strategy for them to reach more customers, but it does spell the death of Windows long term.
And - while there are rare examples otherwise (like iD software), many of their studios haven't made a well received game in over a decade.
It's not necessarily a great thing for the industry, but Microsoft leaving gaming entirely would not be that terribly tough. If anything, it would probably have the least amount of impact now, then it would have at any other time since 2001.
They certainly aren't going to stop releasing Call of Duty games.
I'm also starting to see a lot of Macs pop up in smaller private practices - most dentist offices around here are on Macs, a few dealerships have moved over, etc.
Windows is still the majority by far, but its marketshare is slowly being eroded away. It'll be a while before F500 enterprises move over, if at all, but small-medium businesses are definitely growing their macOS usage.
Said as someone stuck on a windows machine with all of the corporate monitoring spyware which makes performance crawl.
Development has been a pain over the last decade. MacOS has it's rough-edges, but it has become a pleasure to code on.
Normal everyday experience is just a pain with unintuitive settings pages, slow Files Explorer, and a horrendous start panel experience.
Gaming seems to be the last thread my Windows machine is around for anymore. Although I have not tried moving to Linux for this, the gaming community seems to be happy enough for more and more games every week.
Except when Apple deprecates APIs but the replacement doesn't have close to the same functionality (looking at you screen capture kit).
Or when the documentation just doesn't explain anything and you have to reverse engineer the API to figure out what it does.
or how there's a bunch of hidden APIs only certain vendors are told about so you can't even compete on an even playing field.
And don't get me started on the C, C++, ObjectiveC and now Swift monstrosities. Having fun with your legacy project when the new APIs require swift, so you have to use the objectiveC bridge and the weird bugs that comes with it.
Or Apple deleting your app and account because of politics but they claim it's a policy violation. They just selectively enforce it.
Or apple allowing foreign governments back doors.
The only issues I face are when other developers do non-cross platform things. Like use bash for build scripts.
Just switching OS will seriously improve your DX because of the faster compiles.
I don’t know what kind of projects are you working on, but it couldn’t be further from truth for me. WSL2 is so much better than docker on macOS it isn’t even funny. (Haven’t tried orbstack, heard good things; though fundamentally the problem of developing for linux on not-Linux can only be solved by actually running Linux.)
I really wish we could get back to true platform-agnostic development and away from shipping whole Linux-jungles containing the banana you actually want to ship. Effective hard-coupling isn’t a good thing isn’t my opinion, even when the platform being coupled to is FOSS.
(Also, WSL1 isn't as actively maintained as it was when WSA [Windows Subsystem for Android] was an active Windows 11 feature driving it, but it hasn't been entirely abandoned either and there is some community support ongoing [open source PRs].)
[0] Among other things, Windows likes to run itself at all times as a guest in Hyper-V when Hyper-V is active (and other ancient hypervisors aren't interfering), making Hyper-V VMs like WSL2 "peers" with Windows itself for Hyper-V resources/attention. (It's one of the funnier things about Hyper-V being a "Pro" feature still today because even consumer-focused Windows Home is often still running in Hyper-V [because it's also sometimes a defense-in-depth security/sandboxing in some consumer use cases], it just won't let you configure other VMs in it than your main Windows OS.)
Often better performance is due to more efficient use of hardware, which comes at an energy cost. Other times it allows the hardware to work more efficiently, like avoiding spinning on locks.
At that point it has to be a platform/stack difference.
The simpler explanation is that Windows is poorly optimized, and runs a ton of inefficient crap in the background that’s taking cycles away from the CPU and maybe even GPU.
The Vulkan difference can actually be achieved on windows as well, by using DXVK on windows.
The overhead difference is most seen on the lighter games, like Dead Cells and Hades. It's why we see such massive increases in battery life for those games.
It doesn't even have to be worse, just different
It's a matter of balance.
More efficiency means less power for the same computations. If you increase the computations more than your gain in performance, you use more power. If your efficiency gains are not fully utilised by increased computations, you use less power.
On the flip side, the CPU may be doing less work due to things like more efficient drivers / less OS nonsense tying up CPU, which would also reduce power draw.
As a Linux user since the last millennium, this dance is so incredibly familiar.
> In his own column, Gassée has written several times about Microsoft's Windows OEM License and the ways in which it limits the freedoms of PC OEMs. In July 2001, I spoke with Gassée to find out why no dual-boot computers with BeOS or Linux installed alongside Windows can be purchased today
https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
> It's impossible to know precisely how much, but if you do the math and assume that it's $30 per computer from those various sources, that would yield $200 million or more than 25% of Dell's profitability. It could be more or less than this number, but any way that you look at it, Dell is dependent on Microsoft for a massive chunk of their profits.
http://www.michaelrobertson.com/archive.php?minute_id=131
So, uh, good luck. Sure is an amazing coincidence how many PC vendors suddenly have a competitor to the Steam Deck, that happen to run Windows, and especially push their Windows versions.
I'd be interested in knowing how these later devices do in basic usability issues like will the device freeze for 30 minutes if booted when your internet is down but your network is up and it can't confirm your Steam credentials on startup.
Will switching inputs on an HDTV result in the dock needing to be disconnected and reconnected before you get a video signal? Etc.
Which is a reasonable design choice for many things. But Linux can move fast in part because it can decide to discard bad ABI and HAL conventions.
Secondarily, do the same issues not apply to the Linux API as to a hypothetical ABI? If the API changes, don't userspace applications still need to be updated and/or recompiled accordingly, or suffer breakage? At some level, whether it's an ABI, a statically linked API, or a dynamically linked API, there always has to be some interface between applications and the operating system, and breaking changes to that interface must be managed with care.
It comes down to where you decide to draw that interface, and I think the ABI is just a better place to draw it from a user's perspective. This way, applications don't need to be recompiled to work on newer operating system versions, and given how challenging and painful it can be to compile applications reproducibly, and how many applications are only provided in binary form to begin with, this seems like a worthy goal.
This will work out as long as Microsoft is willing to tolerate it, like netbooks.
Windows is a general purpose operating system. Can SteamOS run random accounting software from 2002? makes no sense right? apples and oranges.
Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category? A good comparison would have been consoles like playstation or xbox (Microsoft's gaming optimized OS/platform akin to SteamOS). Then if they used similarly specced PC, it would be reasonable benchmark.
No one in that scenario cares if it's easier to run Office on Windows.
the same hardware for gaming is being advertised and sold with Windows 11. That's why.
I bet it can.
> Why pick the obvious terrible choice for the category?
They're selling the "obviously terrible" choice, even prioritizing and asking a premium for it.
Furthermore Windows has been the obvious choice for gaming for decades, that SteamOS seems to outclass Windows is indeed noteworthy.