[STEAM] The RAMpocalypse has bought Microsoft valuable time in the fight against SteamOS

[Steam 0]

Valve and its SteamOS operating system have already done what a bunch of companies (including Apple) have been trying to do for decades: make a dent in Windows’ dominance in PC gaming.

I mean, sure, according to Valve’s own statistics,

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remains dominant. Over 92 percent of PCs in the Steam Hardware Survey run some version of Windows. But five years ago, this number was

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. Ten years ago, it was

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. Fifteen years ago?

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. Go back any further than that and Steam only runs on Windows in the first place, itself a testament to

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's ubiquity.

Between April 2021 and now, Linux’s share has climbed from under 1 percent to over 5 percent. This is a small number, and it's not all SteamOS (Valve's OS isn't broken out, but Arch, the base distribution for SteamOS, accounts for about 0.33 of that just-over-5-percent). But it’s also more than these numbers have ever moved. By

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, rather than trying to push game developers to make Linux-native ports, Valve has done via organic word-of-mouth success what the company

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when it

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.

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