Microsoft clearly does not 'love' Valve's choice of operating system
"How many people will be inspired by this handheld console and decide to install something similar on laptops/desktops?"For those who lived under a tree/rock this past week (or maybe were on holiday), Valve chose KDE on top of GNU/Linux for its successor to efforts like Proton, SteamOS (Debian), and Steam Machines that never quite materialised. The choice of KDE is particularly interesting because it brings with it a suite of Free software, apparently not just a Web browser. So that's potentially millions more KDE users, Free software users, who play proprietary games 'on the side'...
Not only might this improve KDE (patches from Valve); it'll increase exposure of the platform. People will start asking, "what is this thing?" (Much of the media at the moment does not mention the choice of platform and instead focuses on the hardware)
Given the alternate reality or the possibility of Windows, which was rejected, it's probably something to be celebrated. How many people will be inspired by this handheld console and decide to install something similar on laptops/desktops? Time will tell...
Last year we wrote why it's better to get gamers on GNU/Linux than to let them stay on Windows. Not everyone agreed; figosdev, for example, objected to this. He saw that as tolerating DRM.
We'd love to hear readers' thoughts (and stance) on this in IRC. Was this product even worth mentioning in a blog about software freedom? Might KDE be compromised somehow? We're all ears... ⬆