I don't want a "PC future" where you can't just install software without OS vendor blessing.
Same, but my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.
I feel like at some point normies may end up just using iPadOS or Android as a "convergent" device: a tablet/phone that they can plug into a docking station and use as a computer.
I am sort of hoping that it will work with something like GrapheneOS, so that I will be able to benefit from it on my phone.
This is why Valve invested so much in Linux. They saw the writing on the wall of Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier). Now they have an alternative. If Microsoft charges a 30% tax on all Steam transactions and won't let Steam run unless they do that, Valve can heavily push Linux and Steam Machine sales.
> Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier)
At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons, having disappearing controls depending on window size (scrollbars), or having corners so rounded that the click to drag mostly being outside the actual window.
The Windows 11 UI is annoying, but at least it doesn't look like a kid's toy.
And yet they failed to get game devs to natively target SteamOS.
As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
I'm not sure how they could have failed that if that was never their goal in the first place. The entire point of Proton is that the Win32 API is infinitely more stable and worthwhile to target than anything Linux distros offer, and that the financial incentives aren't there for developers to 5x their platform distribution effort to reach 1% more users. An approach that relies on developers doing that would never work, and fortunately for Valve that isn't their approach.
You're thinking of now. Proton didn't exist yet the first time they tried Steam OS.
To be fair to Valve though, back then, there was a lot of movement in direct ports for Linux games. Humble Bundle (before they were bought) was spending real money on it and companies like Feral sprang up to help with titles like Mordor. It looked like there was going to be some real change.
But for various reasons the momentum waned. One of those reasons might be the existence of Proton itself. Some people were very against it because they thought it might lead to less native ports.
Oh, right. I completely forgot SteamOS 1 existed, haha.
> As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
Maybe not, but they fully solved my problem with games, which was that I could not play on Linux. I started playing again just because of the SteamDeck, I think it's a pretty big achievement :-).
Hardly any different than running MAME.
Tbh, why bother?
kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)
Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those fixes would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 etc...
TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
> run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows
Already happening, to an extent. Specifically, modern Intel GPUs do not support DirectX 9 in hardware, yet legacy apps run fine. The readme.txt they ship with the drivers contains a paragraph which starts with the following text: “SOFTWARE: dxvk The zlib/libpng License” DXVK is a library which implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan, and an important component of SteamOS.
With game studios using Windows + Visual Studio, what a win!
Try running a directx 5 game and let me know how it goes.
29 years is a lot more than the 5..10 years time window I'm talking about. 3 decades is basically "I will need an emulator for that" ;)
But I think even a lot of D3D9 games should still work, and that's 2002 stuff. Also try running a 1997 Linux game binary on a modern Linux distro without recompiling, I doubt that's works all that well...
Neither do I. But with Windows slipping badly, Google could start encroaching on their core tech.
Linux seems to be gaining a lot of traction, both with the fall of windows and gaming being more than feasible.
It makes sense for the tech savvy option to succeed, now that personal computing is disappearing. Average folks won’t use a windows/macbook, they’ll use phones and tablets.
My only concern is ending in a macOS+asahi situation where supporting a single device requires mountains of effort.
The cycling speech since Window XP Toy's R US L&F days, unfortunely.
Less fragmentation, more focus, OEM support on devices selling on regular stores is needed, otherwise we won't get away from the yearly meme.
> otherwise we won't get away from the yearly meme
What's different in the last decade is that Windows is on an undeniable quality downward spiral, it's simply not important anymore for Microsoft.
E.g. desktop Linux doesn't even need to improve, it just needs to wait for Windows to become worse ;)
Unless it becomes available for normies to buy laptops with it pre-installed at Saturn, Media Market, FNAC, Cool Blue, and co, it won't matter.
They aren't going to buy them from Tuxedo.
The fall of windows and Linux gaining traction.
I've seen that written on here, Reddit, /., digg, hell even on usenet back in the day. . . .
And yet it's undeniable that 2025 had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11
- DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux
- Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting
- Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month
- Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months
- I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was
- And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
Is it going to be the same future as Fuchsia OS? There were some good ideas in that one, but then one day it sort of disappeared. Not that that was surprising - Google is good that that.
I believe the Google Nest devices ship with Fuchsia
I'm sure they will be discontinued in a few days.
I have absolutely no interest in expanding the use of Android in my life. I am, in fact, far more interested in going the other way and trying to reduce my reliance on any locked down platforms.
Google’s entire business is predicated on collecting as much data on users as possible. This OS will be the worst spyware imaginable.
No, only the 85% or so of it that's accreted since about 2008. Prior to that it actually made money by offering useful search results without infringing on user privacy. That core business model could still work to power a company about 1/8th the size of current Google. Current Google cannot survive on that model. Something went really wrong when it put growthism above all else.
Chrome and Android look like yin and yang: one never knows which one is planned to run inside the other.
That UI is available to test on any Pixel 10 (maybe even any Android 16 device?)
I do have it in Pixel 8 after enabling in developer options. It's a bit buggy and low resolution, but does the job when e.g. I want to connect some video I'm already watching on mobile to the external display via USB-C. (You can connect a mouse via Bluetooth to the phone, or via a USB dongle plugged into your monitor, to control it.)
An interesting thing is that you can run apps X and Y on desktop screen while also run app X on mobile screen independently.
Does it still require wiping your drive and enabling developer mode to install software outside the Play Store like ChromeOS does? DOA if so.
I believe you can run Linux in a container and use apt-get.
Many years ago I used to play around with CyanogenMod and Linux.
Life with work and a family became too busy to fuss with that stuff, but I'm rapidly approaching the point where abuse from android and Microsoft make using a less polished OS worth the bother.
You'll be happy to hear then that the experience has improved significantly over the past decade.
No thanks.
If this allows one to still have (linux terminals?), then its (fine?) but Klaster_1 suggests that installing software would become hard without OS vendor blessing.
I mean, is this OS literally just android with a more desktop like UI?
Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
What I would prefer is a linux device phone being more widespread than Android PC. Linux in PC is mostly pretty good.
We probably need some good linux phones. One of the biggest issues I find is that they are really price-y so even though I don't want much specs, I find it troubling to justify a 2x price increase in such sense.
> Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
Samsung Dex still exists and still sucks. It's probably the best desktop experience available on Android but it's nowhere near usable as a daily driver. It feels a like a lightweight window manager from the 2008 era.
It is good enough that a Samsung tablet has replaced my now dead netbook.
I don't want a "PC future" where you can't just install software without OS vendor blessing.
Same, but my PC runs on Linux so I don't feel threatened.
I feel like at some point normies may end up just using iPadOS or Android as a "convergent" device: a tablet/phone that they can plug into a docking station and use as a computer.
I am sort of hoping that it will work with something like GrapheneOS, so that I will be able to benefit from it on my phone.
This is why Valve invested so much in Linux. They saw the writing on the wall of Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier). Now they have an alternative. If Microsoft charges a 30% tax on all Steam transactions and won't let Steam run unless they do that, Valve can heavily push Linux and Steam Machine sales.
> Microsoft becoming Apple (but shittier)
At least Microsoft haven't fallen so low as to fail basic design principles like having transparent on top of transparent buttons, having disappearing controls depending on window size (scrollbars), or having corners so rounded that the click to drag mostly being outside the actual window.
The Windows 11 UI is annoying, but at least it doesn't look like a kid's toy.
And yet they failed to get game devs to natively target SteamOS.
As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
I'm not sure how they could have failed that if that was never their goal in the first place. The entire point of Proton is that the Win32 API is infinitely more stable and worthwhile to target than anything Linux distros offer, and that the financial incentives aren't there for developers to 5x their platform distribution effort to reach 1% more users. An approach that relies on developers doing that would never work, and fortunately for Valve that isn't their approach.
You're thinking of now. Proton didn't exist yet the first time they tried Steam OS.
To be fair to Valve though, back then, there was a lot of movement in direct ports for Linux games. Humble Bundle (before they were bought) was spending real money on it and companies like Feral sprang up to help with titles like Mordor. It looked like there was going to be some real change.
But for various reasons the momentum waned. One of those reasons might be the existence of Proton itself. Some people were very against it because they thought it might lead to less native ports.
Oh, right. I completely forgot SteamOS 1 existed, haha.
> As long as they depend on Proton, they haven't fully solved their problem.
Maybe not, but they fully solved my problem with games, which was that I could not play on Linux. I started playing again just because of the SteamDeck, I think it's a pretty big achievement :-).
Hardly any different than running MAME.
Tbh, why bother?
kernel32+user32+gdi32+d3d[11|12]+dxgi is a pretty great API abstraction for game development. And unlike Linux desktop APIs the Win32 APIs are actually stable, so those games will also work in 5 years, and most importantly, performance is the same or better than on Windows. It's unlikely that game devs directly targeting Vulkan would do any better, and when using a high level engine, any layering overhead in Proton is negligible anyway. And don't even get me started about the state of audio APIs on Linux ;)
Also don't underestimate the amount of workarounds and tweaks that (most likely) go into Proton for games that make poor system API use. Without Proton those fixes would need to go into MESA, Wayland, X11 etc...
TL;DR: just think of Proton as an extremely low level and slim cross-platform API for games (not all that different than SDL), and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. And I bet that in 5..10 years Windows will have regressed so much that it might actually be better to run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows (assuming Windows hasn't become 'yet another Linux distro' by then anyway) ;)
> run games through a Proton-like shim even on Windows
Already happening, to an extent. Specifically, modern Intel GPUs do not support DirectX 9 in hardware, yet legacy apps run fine. The readme.txt they ship with the drivers contains a paragraph which starts with the following text: “SOFTWARE: dxvk The zlib/libpng License” DXVK is a library which implements Direct3D on top of Vulkan, and an important component of SteamOS.
With game studios using Windows + Visual Studio, what a win!
Try running a directx 5 game and let me know how it goes.
29 years is a lot more than the 5..10 years time window I'm talking about. 3 decades is basically "I will need an emulator for that" ;)
But I think even a lot of D3D9 games should still work, and that's 2002 stuff. Also try running a 1997 Linux game binary on a modern Linux distro without recompiling, I doubt that's works all that well...
Neither do I. But with Windows slipping badly, Google could start encroaching on their core tech.
Linux seems to be gaining a lot of traction, both with the fall of windows and gaming being more than feasible.
It makes sense for the tech savvy option to succeed, now that personal computing is disappearing. Average folks won’t use a windows/macbook, they’ll use phones and tablets.
My only concern is ending in a macOS+asahi situation where supporting a single device requires mountains of effort.
The cycling speech since Window XP Toy's R US L&F days, unfortunely.
Less fragmentation, more focus, OEM support on devices selling on regular stores is needed, otherwise we won't get away from the yearly meme.
> otherwise we won't get away from the yearly meme
What's different in the last decade is that Windows is on an undeniable quality downward spiral, it's simply not important anymore for Microsoft.
E.g. desktop Linux doesn't even need to improve, it just needs to wait for Windows to become worse ;)
Unless it becomes available for normies to buy laptops with it pre-installed at Saturn, Media Market, FNAC, Cool Blue, and co, it won't matter.
They aren't going to buy them from Tuxedo.
The fall of windows and Linux gaining traction.
I've seen that written on here, Reddit, /., digg, hell even on usenet back in the day. . . .
And yet it's undeniable that 2025 had some of the biggest Linux hype in recent times:
- Windows 10 went EOL and triggered a wave of people moving to Linux to escape Windows 11 - DHH's adventures in Linux inspired a lot of people (including some popular coding streamers/YouTubers) to try Linux - Pewdiepie made multiple videos about switching to Linux and selfhosting - Bazzite reported serving 1 PB of downloads in one month - Zorin reported 1M downloads of ZorinOS 18 in one month and crossed the 2M threshold in under 3 months - I personally recall seeing a number of articles from various media outlets of writers trying Linux and being pretty impressed with how good it was - And don't forget Valve announced the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, which will both run Linux and have a ton of hype around them
In fact, I think that we will look back in 5 or 10 years and point at 2025 as the turning point for Linux on the desktop.
Is it going to be the same future as Fuchsia OS? There were some good ideas in that one, but then one day it sort of disappeared. Not that that was surprising - Google is good that that.
I believe the Google Nest devices ship with Fuchsia
I'm sure they will be discontinued in a few days.
I have absolutely no interest in expanding the use of Android in my life. I am, in fact, far more interested in going the other way and trying to reduce my reliance on any locked down platforms.
Google’s entire business is predicated on collecting as much data on users as possible. This OS will be the worst spyware imaginable.
No, only the 85% or so of it that's accreted since about 2008. Prior to that it actually made money by offering useful search results without infringing on user privacy. That core business model could still work to power a company about 1/8th the size of current Google. Current Google cannot survive on that model. Something went really wrong when it put growthism above all else.
Chrome and Android look like yin and yang: one never knows which one is planned to run inside the other.
Some "first look"
It's just a slightly different showcase of the same UI shown in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzDO-GS-Bm8
That UI is available to test on any Pixel 10 (maybe even any Android 16 device?)
I do have it in Pixel 8 after enabling in developer options. It's a bit buggy and low resolution, but does the job when e.g. I want to connect some video I'm already watching on mobile to the external display via USB-C. (You can connect a mouse via Bluetooth to the phone, or via a USB dongle plugged into your monitor, to control it.)
An interesting thing is that you can run apps X and Y on desktop screen while also run app X on mobile screen independently.
Does it still require wiping your drive and enabling developer mode to install software outside the Play Store like ChromeOS does? DOA if so.
I believe you can run Linux in a container and use apt-get.
https://chromeos.dev/en/linux/setup
Many years ago I used to play around with CyanogenMod and Linux.
Life with work and a family became too busy to fuss with that stuff, but I'm rapidly approaching the point where abuse from android and Microsoft make using a less polished OS worth the bother.
You'll be happy to hear then that the experience has improved significantly over the past decade.
No thanks.
If this allows one to still have (linux terminals?), then its (fine?) but Klaster_1 suggests that installing software would become hard without OS vendor blessing.
I mean, is this OS literally just android with a more desktop like UI?
Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Samsung+DeX&t=ffab&ia=images&iax=i...
What I would prefer is a linux device phone being more widespread than Android PC. Linux in PC is mostly pretty good.
We probably need some good linux phones. One of the biggest issues I find is that they are really price-y so even though I don't want much specs, I find it troubling to justify a 2x price increase in such sense.
> Didn't Samsung have something like this called (just searched) Samsung Dex?
Samsung Dex still exists and still sucks. It's probably the best desktop experience available on Android but it's nowhere near usable as a daily driver. It feels a like a lightweight window manager from the 2008 era.
It is good enough that a Samsung tablet has replaced my now dead netbook.