2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7 right now, so I’ll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
2024 is the Year of Linux on the Desktop, at least for my boyfriend. He’s running Windows 7 right now, so I’ll be switching him to Ubuntu in a few days. Ubuntu was chosen because Proton is officially supported in Ubuntu.
To be fair they’ve got enough market share to start a distro they got enough market share to be platform agnostic
They already have their SteamOS, which has 43% of the Linux market share on Steam (I guess almost all Steam Deck)
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=linux
SteamOS isn’t included in the combined numbers, but comparing it to Arch which is only 0.15% of steam, the deck is <1% of the total.
I actually quite like the read only incremental update model of SteamOS combined with flatpak. It makes the OS a lot simpler and I rarely ever change the OS much outside of apps that I can install in home or with flatpak. And if you have special hardware, you are probably already looking at other distros anyway. There is enough choice.
Linus himself has been long advocating for something flatpak-like in general: One of his projects, subsurface, is not exactly of interest to most people for the simple reason that most people don’t dive, why should half a gazillion distros maintain their own packages? Distros should focus on the actual OS part and a full-featured DE, from document viewer to browser – stuff everyone needs, also the little stuff practically noone wants to choose, like, say, a desktop calculator.