With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers.

Yes, from what I’ve been told that actually does improve performance in many games.

The compatibility layer is overhead, but the key difference for many games is that DXVK swaps directX for Vulkan, and Vulkan often gets better performance.

The performance gains of using steamOS are twofold, there’s less OS load (this is particularly noticeable in low performance games, windows will consume much more battery on a game like Dead Cells than SteamOS will), and there’s also a vulkan performance increase for some games. My understanding is if you see a big performance increase in a demanding game, that’s usually thanks to vulkan.

Ars Technica is generally excellent in my experience, one of the better tech news websites.

These are both on the Lenovo Legion Go S. The significance here is that there’s both official OEM windows and official OEM steamOS for this device.

Windows uses a lot of power just existing, so you can’t get any of the windows handhelds down to a low power consumption. I remember when the Rig Ally first came out, the verge tested it using 5-8w of power on the steam deck, and using 16-22w of power on the Ally. Some of that is the hardware (the Deck has a really power efficient chip for low power games), but a lot of it is windows.

Yeah you’re right, I had mostly been looking at the difference between the steam deck and legion Go S on that chart and barely even noticed the difference between windows on the legion Go S there.

My understanding is it’s mostly just the advantage of not having windows running hogging resources, so it should be a bigger gain for CPU bound games.

**Edit ** There can be performance gains from using vulkan over DirectX too, so there probably are GPU gains as well. It will depend on the game though

I think this screenshot is pretty telling.

It’s pretty wild that this game is still in development, I remember reading about it back in 2012/13 ish.

Apparently the video was presented after the verdict was already issued. This video had no impact on the actual outcome of the trial, and was more of just a closing statement.

So the judge didn’t approve this a testimony, but just found it emotionally touching.

Distrobox is also a good option for installing stuff without flatpak.

Yeah, I had mostly stayed away from arch based distros after having a really bad time with Manjaro. But hearing the Steam Deck’s version of SteamOS was switching to an Arch base got me to try Endeavour on my desktop, and I’ve been using it ever since.

https://github.com/ryanrudolfoba/SteamOS-Waydroid-Installer

Not disagreeing with your point, but at least for waydroid there’s a specific SteamOS installer available.

Desktop experience is just KDE, only part that I’m worried will trip people up is it being immutable. Usually that’s fine, but occasionally you run into an issue where something doesn’t work because of flatpak sandboxing, and it can be confusing how to overcome it.

It’s working, I know people who don’t even own a steam deck who are considering swapping to SteamOS once it’s available for desktops.

I’ve told them they don’t need to wait and can get a similar or better experience with distros that are already available, but steam’s name is gold for a lot of people and it seems like the only option they’re really interested in.

Japan in general has weird copyright/patent laws. For example the whole palworld patent lawsuits.

Good news is it probably won’t affect people outside of Japan, except that it will stunt games/etc made in Japan.

Probably comparing her acting in the new Snow White movie to Tommy’s acting.

“Sorry I got rid of windows 10 years ago. I can help you install win 7 but nothing newer than that”

I feel like this won’t stop anyone who was already refusing to use a Microsoft account for windows. Anyone who was already bypassing the account requirement will still do so, it just will be more difficult. They’ve accomplished nothing except further pissing off some of their most competent user base.

That’s modern CEOs in a nutshell. Damage the company long term to get those good short term returns for shareholders.