Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won't run on SteamOS. It's only that one that is outright ridiculous.

> entirely It's not just overhead.

I recently switched from windows (with a debloat scrpit ran on it) to linux mint and I was shocked at how much faster it booted. When I turn my pc on I usually get up and do something else for a bit (not because windows is THAT slow but because I could spend the minute it takes to turn on to make lunch or something) and linux booted before I was out of my chair.

The closest thing they had to internet explorer dominance is saying that it was manditory to be installed in every OS. The OS had market dominance, and you couldn't uninstall internet explorer. But actual usage? Everybody used Netscape.

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.

Linux will never be mainstream while it's controlled by nerds. I mean there is no uniform interface (there's so many guitar options) and when people want to learn it, the support is from people who think "it just works".

I like to see this. This is not my experience out of the box (in debian so not truly a comparison) on legacy hardware. (Which shouldn't be running win 11 anyways). We are definitely most of the way there with proton but game devs/publishers have a lot of room of improvement.

They’ve promised that exact same thing for like at least three major windows versions.

People who knew what they were doing with computers used Netscape until it died, those people went to Mozilla suite and then Firefox (well, Phoenix then Firebird then Firefox). But that was a shrinking minority of people on the internet at the turn of the millennium. Practically everyone else used IE (90%+ of web traffic at its peak) and continued to do so until Google released Chrome and shone a light on how little Microsoft had been doing for nearly a decade. Dominance was dominance however they got it, and they pissed it away through complacency, somewhat similarly to what they're doing now.

In the same way that talking to a presidential translator is faster for a diplomat than talking to Trump. The translation layer can communicate more concisely and effectively.

This is your rose tinted hindsight fantasy.

Vulkan isn't magic, its power comes from the flexibility it gives developers in its API. If developers are using DirectX, especially older versions, then they're not utilizing that flexibility. If DirectX code performs better through a Vulkan translation layer than on Windows, it means the driver implementations or OS bloat are what's causing it. 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.

That's still without NTSYNC patches, right?

Windows was for nerds in its early days

Yeah, three is the limit on control panel flavors within an OS https://pureinfotech.com/windows-11-ui-inconsistencies/

> Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation. Why should the author rule it out? Honest question. If shader compilation leads so worse real world experience for gamers on Windows than SteamOS, it is a valid point to include.

And Windows 10 was clearly faster. Than Windows 11, that is.

I think this time actually does have the potential to be different. They're co-launching an Xbox-branded handheld PC designed to go head-to-head with the Steam Deck while downplaying the future of dedicated consoles. Microsoft's gaming division is going all-in on PC, so it matters more than ever.

They said all those exact corporate blowhard promises when the introduced the gamebar and the Xbox windows store and a “gaming mode” lol.

Yeah, but they were also still making new standalone gaming boxes with a dedicated OS, and they didn't have the Xbox division take the lead on game mode. Linux and Mac gaming also weren't a threat, and the solution to a bloated Windows installation was more horsepower, which was relatively cheap. Now the market is completely changed. The Xbox Series S and X have had their lunch eaten by Playstion and Switch. Linux gaming is exploding because of the Steam Deck, while more-powerful Windows handhelds are performing worse with worse batteries than the Deck because of Windows bloat. Mid-range GPUs cost more than an entire high-end gaming rig from 5 years ago, so high-end gaming PCs are rarer than ever. Microsoft *has* to do something. And what they've chosen, for now, is to partner with Asus to launch a true Xbox-branded competitor to the Deck. To do that, they have to actually be competitive. There's 2 keys to that. One is Gamepass, and the other is moving Windows out of the way of the game experience.