gurupanguji
The desktop pc and laptop market is in turmoil. As a sign of the times, Microsoft is leveraging the AI moment to determine how it wants to play in the consumer space. However, their plan is currently being rejected by their ardent users.
Let's take a step back. Microsoft's major AI play is Azure. A couple years ago, Microsoft was riding high. They invested early in OpenAI after seeing the potential. They leveraged their strengths to become the enterprise play for AI as a result of Azure and Office 365 and their major consumer play was - Bing.
However, OpenAI was the better product company and now holds a significant lead in both consumer usage and mindshare. This has changed the calculus.
It's almost banal. OpenAI is no longer an open-source-sharing-research-startup. It's a consumer juggernaut with the greatest momentum. Consumers would develop an entirely new habit than use bing. Google also finally seems to have gotten its act together (for now), to finally leverage the strengths it had to make wonderful, delightful utilities backed by the most well functioning infra the world's seen.
At the same time, Microsoft's been picking up AI executives by the dozen to develop a consumer play. However, the only consumer surfaces it has are: Xbox and Windows. So, it's not a surprise that Microsoft would attempt to start with Windows - which is where its other enterprise lead might also be leveraged.
Except. The world's changed a lot for consumer pcs and desktops. Windows has felt downside pressure from 2 sides - on the premium front, the profit's been in the mac segment and in the non premium segment, Chrome OS provides a much simpler and accessible experience. As a result, an entire new generation grew up primarily thinking of Window as a gaming operating system.
This is not to take away the major strides Windows's made to make itself into a better OS - WSL, VSCode etc have all made Windows a strong platform for development. Except, that's not been where Microsoft's focus and interest's been and the product sense compounds over time. It's kinda like Safari for Apple. After years of neglect (by way of less resources), Windows has some core features to catch up on in the form of stability, security etc.
Enter Steam Machine
There's one name that's been on the rise for gaming, even on Windows machines - and that's Steam (and Valve). Valve's continued to be a better product to buy PC games and it's now leveraging the open vector - fueled by Microsoft's own contribution to better linux / open source support - into a tremendous advantage. Valve is champing at the bit given the entry vector that Microsoft leaves behind with gaming.
Steam's the primary source of games. Steam Deck has proven that Valve can make a good console like gaming OS. And Windows consumer users are increasingly gaming users.
Aside: I also believe that nvidia is currently leaving an open vector of attack for consumer level GPUs. There are currently not enough takers for this market and that surprises me. Apple seems to be making some inroads, but it is also trying to keep its lead as the premium consumer pc.
Valve opened its salvo with the Steam Deck. It is a well designed compact PC capable of playing games and proved the value of Steam OS. After honing that OS in a highly constrained environment, and with the continued rise of AMD as the only real option in x86 based heterogenous computing, Steam Machine is taking it to the obvious next form factor - the console like SFF PC segment.
The genius - it's all Linux based, specifically Arch based.
So, it's finally happening folks. Amongst the dev community, Linux always had a pull. Arch linux also dramatically rose in popularity over the last couple years. The purists will hate omarchy, but combined with the framework set of devices, Linux is on the up and up.
As someone who's followed this since 2000, I want to say - it's only been 26 years in the making. However, the age old trope might finally become a reality.
2026 - might just be the year of the linux desktop.