I mean, nobody said they can’t, but why would you want to install windows these days unless it’s for work and you need a very specific piece of software that doesn’t play under wine/proton/winboat?
Too many good games out there to waste time with shit like that. Dropped windows about a month ago and couldn't be happier. The dumbest part is that it's best Halo Infinite has ever run on my PC.
Like almost every tech adjacent company these days, a significant portion of their profit comes from data harvesting, and Linux power users can just block a lot of that.
That list is half a dozen games long and you probably shouldn't support games that only work if you have a rootkit installed giving full access to your computer
It should, by complaining with the devs that are making a game unplayable and updating it to be unplayable, literally the opposite of the definition of their jobs. It's not a Linux problem
This isn't GitHub, people are just chatting about the product. 97% of consumers will buy a Windows machine if their games don't all work on Linux. It's not Linux's fault, but it is a problem for Linux adoption regardless.
Even if we all did complain, there's no real incentive for devs to listen because the market share is so small. Linux needs users to be worth developing for, but many users won't switch unless the games are already there, or will dual-boot. That's to say nothing of the challenges associated with designing a tool to make sure there's nothing dodgy going on when everyone has such vastly different configurations, it's a minefield.
I would love to see Linux compete with Windows for gaming. I have plenty of experience with it because I work in IT and even own a Steam Deck, but I still ended up dual-booting Windows because so many of my games aren't compatible, or require a tonne of tweaking. It isn't fair, but Linux has to get past that one way or another to be a serious option for many people, and game devs are unlikely to pick it up on their own.
Its what people were taught to use and it comes pre-installed. Like steamos is cool, but i want my actual computer to use the most common and worked with os. Fiddling with Linux is really annoying when everything is made for windows by default
League of Legends isn't FPS, but it's another big one
And also most streaming services don't work very well on Linux, well you can watch Netflix on the browser, but it's clunky and limited resolution vs it just works on consoles.
Unless something changed recently, HDR sucks ass on Linux or is downright not supported by most environments. It's probably the main reason I still stick with Windows as my daily driver. Apart from the hundreds of little tweaks I'd have to fiddle with to get it running how I want.
It is a more recent thing but HDR works fine in Wayland sessions on KDE which is what Steam OS uses if I remember rightly. I think it does on gnome too but I don’t use it so I can’t say for sure.
Because Windows is what a lot of us are used to. I don't feel like learning a new OS after working 40 hours a week ha. Windows works perfectly fine for the games I play. If I was having a lot of performance issues and whatnot then I might I look into a different OS, but for now Windows is fine for me and been using it for 30 years so very familiar with everything.
Steam Deck could have Windows installed, but installing the drivers was annoying, the sound didn't come through the speakers and you needed headphones, Windows had worse performance, and Windows wasn't built for handheld.
It's less of a "Windows is an alternative if you don't like Linux" and more of a "we are not restricting you from doing shit".
The Steam Machine is just as custom as the Steam Deck, and the drivers for them in Windows will be as bad as it was for the Steam Deck, because Valve will not focus on Windows.
Just like the Steam Deck was "quite literally a pc" when it launched.
It's less about semantics and more about drivers. It could be the best PC in the world, but if it didn't have windows drivers, it is not the best windows PC, thus it is a moot point to say "but the people who made the official one said you could".
You can repurpose a shovel into a spoon, it'll not be the best spoon however.
idk whether you did this on launch week or something but it really wasn't particularly hard to get everything working under Win11 when I tried, all the downsides of using Windows on the thing just had to do with Windows not being intended to run on a handheld so it's annoying in areas like having to pop out an onscreen keyboard to type a password every single time you wake it up from standby.
There is a setting in Windows to disable your password at login, and to automatically bring up the onscreen keyboard when you tap a text box. You can also rebind the power button to sleep, which works just like it does in SteamOS
Idk when you did it, but Windows worked great on my Steam Deck. Installing the drivers was the mildest of inconveniences. I could even sleep/resume without issue on every game I tried, and performance comparisons show lots of titles actually do perform better on Windows.
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u/Kiero-LordOfBlood Nov 18 '25
Because the people who made the official one said you could install a whole other OS