Source is this video:
Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D
We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.
A performance uplift plus double or tripled battery life compared to running on Windows…hot damn that’s impressive.
Get rekt Windows.
What’s nice is that Microsoft today doesn’t have capability to improve in the short or even medium term. They could drop a billion dollars into it and it would still take them years to improve their offering, if they can at all.
And why would they? They’re printing so much money, this niche probably doesn’t make a dent.
It doesn’t matter if Windows is the best system for gaming. It just matters if people believe it is.
You can always justify using Windows. “How do I get Game Pass to work on my handheld?” is probably something people care about.
Granted this is an expensive way to lock customers into your platform, but they’re already doing it anyways, so no need to pour money into the OS experience when you can just sell services building on customer data.
Because they aren’t just optimizing for gaming.
Any change they make would influence their other markets as well, like general and office use.
Realistically the design goals of a gaming OS vs a general desktop OS aren’t that different. You want to balance performance, batterlife/power consumption, and making sure it withstands insane abuse by users and software doing anything you could never imagine that nobody should have ever tried to do. About the only design goal that separates SteamOS from Windows is fleet manageability features
I’d wager they could cut a lot of cruft from a handheld gaming device specific version of Windows.
I bet Antimalware Service Executable is still randomly springing it’s way to the top of task manager in this build. All sorts of crap that just doesn’t need to be running. On my PC right now I can see Service Host: DNS Client at 1-4% all the fucking time. Random driver update checks that run in fucking Electron for some godforsaken reason. That kind of shit.