Obviously their dark patterns are not sufficient to drive away enough users and this has been the case for decades. Nothing new to see here, it's the same old Microsoft of yore.
> Interestingly SteamOS is quite nice, but will it be something outside of gaming on a Steam Deck?
Considering their website[1] still says it's Debian derived but they switched to Arch some time ago, I doubt it's in their plans to do more than enable their own hardware.
Maybe not enough, but certainly some. I'm not a software person, and yet my personal machine now runs linux, exactly _because_ of Microsoft's wankery with no local accounts, uninstallable Edge, Cortana, news on the fucking taskbar, and the shitty Windows 11 with its shitty taskbar. Fuck all that noise. Life is calm and great in linux land.
That's because they have backroom deals with the manufacturers.
Its impossible to compete when the manufacturers are actively hostile and don't provide the firmware/code/specs in a way that the hardware can be supported independently. Some even use this to spy under an umbrella of plausible deniability, there was an article just recently about Qualcomm chips that did this (checked in) at the firmware level.
