Yeah but you’re assuming the programmers who worked on this don’t make dumb mistakes like the rest of us. Especially not since they’re working for one of the only major tech companies where all the devs use Windows and might make bad assumptions based on their environment.

> Yeah but you’re assuming the programmers who worked on this don’t make dumb mistakes like the rest of us.

Yeah but this isn't just a "dumb mistake".

It's been widely discussed in the web design world how terrible of an idea it is to use the user agent for basically anything at all for literally decades now. There are web designers working now who were not born when this problem was first discussed. It's not a "oops I didn't know about this recent change" thing, it's a "doing this has been known to be a bad idea for so long there are obsolete books that talk about it".

The reason browser user agents are the disaster area they are today is entirely because bad web programmers have been abusing the user agent in ways they shouldn't be for so long.

Microsoft is far from the only company that sniffs, they all sniff. If you give people information they’re bound to use it. This is all commonplace in web dev.

If it was truly a dumb mistake, of which I am doubtful, then let's see it fixed now that it's in the wild. User Agent detection has never been a great method of client identification, and is just a means to an end in the absence of a better option.

I don’t know that it was a mistake but it doesn’t seem implausible to me.

I wonder if many people will even be aware that Android _is_ Linux.

Could also be the fact that a lot of video drivers/coders works slower on linux?

No, because that is untrue.

Have you done much gaming, or video intense stuff on linux?

On all my various devices, linux gpu performance was worse, than with stock windows. But I never shopped for specific linux supported devices, which is the only known way to me, to get comparable results.

Benchmarks going back a couple years show near parity on both.[1] Even recent NVidia cards show comparable results.[2] It's perhaps a 5-10% hit for running via Wine, sometimes less, and rarely it's faster on Linux. There's certainly very few actual compatibility issues with most games, and generally those I've encountered affect both Windows and Linux equally (see: GTA:V shadows on AMD cards).

As someone who only has Linux systems and games often, my big barriers are not performance related; they're Anti-Cheat related.

So to suggest that this is the source of Microsoft's decision making is laughable.

[1]: https://youtu.be/aE5WyObAFtk

[2]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=rtx3090-...

Yes, I have. My gaming desktop is running Manjaro Linux with a 1660 super and game performance is great. I haven't yet run into a game that this PC struggled with. My home media center is running LibreElec on a Raspberry Pi 4 and video playback is perfect. It can play 4k h265 video with no problems.

And have you compared the same device with windows?

I'd imagine Windows would run like absolute shit on a Raspberry Pi.