Funnily I also run GoG games through steam proton.. But looking forward to the GoG client working!

And now it doesn't even split games in "Linux" vs "Windows"; it simply assumes all games run on Linux. And they mostly do! Though to be fair I had to tweak a couple to make them run, and Space Marine II absolutely refuses to play past the cutscene, but most other games "just work".

Valve has good, stable funding to pay a team full time to build and support Steam OS which, over a long period of time and with enough user uptake, I think will have better chances of getting publishers on board with ensuring their games work on something that isn't Windows. Hell, they could probably make deals with publishers to say "hey, here's a pile of money to make sure your game works on Steam OS day 1, and put it in all the ads" and get the ball rolling that way.

Gaming is a tough space to crack. I think Valve's money and their history of supporting the most popular gaming platform on PC inspires more trust needed to make their platform a standard target.

Maybe I'm downplaying what the Bazzite team is actually doing, but from afar it is Fedora Silverblue with gaming related tweaks out of the box, probably targeting handhelds and common gaming hardware in testing.

The actual issue of adopting a new operating system is already rearing its head on this thread. "What's Bazzite? What's Silverblue? SteamOS, is that linux? Is that different from this other linux?".

There's too many options for someone that wants to sit down and play a game. Unless a major OEM decides to push Linux on their systems, SteamOS is generally the only real competitor in this space due to reputation and control of the PC gaming market. Time in the market, versus timing the market is what comes to mind here.

Users are mostly afraid of wasting time trying Linux (any Linux) and having to go back to Windows for reason X, Y, or Z that they didn't even know about. For my partner who doesn't game, reason Z is one particular feature of Microsoft Word (the shrinkwrap application, not 365 Copilot App or whatever) that isn't emulated by LibreOffice or Google Docs. For competitive PC gamers, it's kernel anti-cheat. The Linux desktop story in general has been to slowly whittle down these reasons until there really is no good excuse for users not to switch and for vendors not to support the OS, even through compatibility layers.

My biggest hobby project right now has several dependency services that are configured via docker compose and some script files for development.. then the couple services/application I'm working on are literally setup to run in dev containers watching/running against mounted volumes to the source director(ies). It's very portable to any nix-like environment with docker installed in terms of dev. Including Windows with git/msys bash or wsl.

You can use pretty much whatever Linux you want or suits your needs... relatively easily. I'm probably going to get to a point for first release over the weekend... a lot of it AI assisted (Claude Code) and pretty happy with it.

Because someday Valve may no longer be privately owned, and we're potentially back where we started. If we support having strong OSS ecosystems around computers we don't have to fight this battle over and over again.

Valve slow-rolling SteamOS and being coy about it ever being released as a "standalone, supported" OS is only because they're a private company and can build for open source ecosystems.

So if your game runs under Wine/Proton today, there's a pretty good chance that game will continue to run years from now. I've had better experience with really old games under Wine than actual Windows for that matter.

From your perspective you aren't waiting around for "completion" ... in terms of scope, most of it is built on efforts from Fedora/Redhat with enough customization to make it friendlier to gamers. Linux distros aren't like Windows, they share a lot and are largely interoperable or compatible with a few major camps.

But very little of this affects what will happen with games. Your experience with Steam on pretty much any Linux distro is likely to be as good or better than Steam on SteamOS.

Edit: to clarify, there are differences between Linux distros... but the fact is, that Steam on pretty much any modern/updated distro will be a very similar experience wether it's "SteamOS" or something else that you aren't having to wait around for. For that matter, you can put together a current AMD system with up to a 9070XT and run SteamOS today, the hardware is supported and you don't actually have to wait for it if you don't want to. You may find the experience better with a desktop distro, if you plan on using it more or as much of a desktop as game platform. And more so if you want to run a non-amd GPU.

There isn't a downside to these other distros like Bazzite.

It wasn’t that long ago that Wine was only really useful for games that were at least 5-10 years old. Proton is amazing.

Like even in 2014 WINE worked well enough for most games for me. Proton just made it utterly effortless, and lets me run AAA games like RDR2 and CP2077.

First is Wine itself, with its implementation of Win32 APIs. I ran some games through Wine even twenty years ago but it was certainly not always possible, and usually not even easy.

Second is DXVK, which fills the main gap of Wine, namely Direct3D compatibility. Wine has long had its own implementation of D3D libraries, but it was not as performant, and more importantly it was never quite complete. You'd run into all sorts of problems because the Wine implementation differed from the Windows native D3D, and that was enough to break many gams. DXVK is a translation layer that translates D3D calls to Vulkan with excellent performance, and basically solves the problem of D3D on Linux.

Then there's the parts original to Proton itself. It applies targeted, high quality patches to Wine and DXVK to improve game compatibility, brings in a few other modules, and most importantly Proton glues it all together so it works seamlessly and with excellent UX. From the first release of Proton until recently, running Windows games through Steam took just a couple extra clicks to enable Proton for that game. And now even that isn't necessary, Proton is enabled by default so you run a game just by downloading it and launching, same exact process as on Windows.

Is the only reason for needing Proton is to do direct x api translations?

Something like wine is needed to do that translation too.

There’s also the issue of forward compatibility. Sometimes you just can’t run an old Linux game on a newer distro, while it works fine in Wine. Or it might partially work: for example, I’ve managed to run a Linux build of Heroes of Might and Magic III, but didn’t get any sound, because it relied on some ancient sound API (pre-ALSA; perhaps OSS?). Windows version works great in Wine to this day.

For some game engines though, porting is really easy. There are some piracy groups releasing Linux ports of Unity games (that don’t have an official Linux version) by just replacing the game executable with a compatible one from another game.

The computing power is there, we just need the ability to run Windows-only games on Macs with a single click.

I don't think this is a given. I think most gamers so far haven't cared about openness because pragmatically, it didn't matter for them.

Now they're seeing the long-term effect of not caring about that though, which is why we're suddenly seeing a movement of gamers moving to Linux, and trying to get others to move with them, because they realize the importance now, as their desktops are slowly collapsing over Microsoft's decision to let AI do all the programming, and having zero QA before releasing stuff to the public.

This is a given. They love Discord and shit like that.

Discord is obviously proprietary but it’s actually a very modular platform that gives a lot of nice controls. It’s easy to make your own “server”, it’s easy to add whatever bots you want, it’s easy to moderate. From a consumer perspective, it’s “open”.

Also, I know that this wasn’t your point, but I do feel compelled to point out that Discord works fine on Linux.

As open as windows that tracks everything that you do

Matrix, xmpp, and probably more. The options are not lacking

I'm not saying there have been zero useful improvements in later Windows releases, but 7 looked good and did what you told it to. "Openness" is a very abstract idea but "Only does what you tell it to" is a selling point for Linux.

You know it's not going to upload all your documents to OneDrive and then erase them from the computer.

Not a fan of those aquarium PC cases though, they sacrifice airflow for aesthetics which isn't a great shout. I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.

Great reviews back you could get cases with multi-layered sound deadening side panels instead of windows.

If you have negative pressure you'll be sucking in air through the gaps and that air won't go through a filter, hence more dust.

Is this really part of the ATX spec though? Or just something people have learned to do for modern cases with air filters?

There’s a whole spectrum of PC gamers, and I think Linux+Proton can appeal to most of them. Let the people spending $10,000 on a glowing case make their own bad decisions.

I also have a glowing case PC. Out of the box, it's possible to change the fan light color patterns from Linux.

I had one problem putting Devuan on it:

If you plug the gaming keyboard 2.4GHz dongle into the monitor, the bios doesn't enumerate far enough down the USB tree to find it. So, you can't enter the bios and tell it to boot from USB. Then, the windows setup screen pops up.

After a few force reboots (M$ removed the "shut down cleanly" button from the language chooser), Windows goes into deep diagnostics mode on each boot trying to figure out why it keeps crashing out during the install flow. So, each debug step of "why can't I get into the bios?" takes a few minutes.

The solution was to plug the keyboard dongle directly into the box. The only time the fan has come on after boot (I think it likes to knock the dust off itself when it turns on) was when I told it to download my steam library all at once.

Not sure what language chooser you're talking about here, but if you're trying to shutdown Windows without hybrid shutdown to access the uefi, there's two switches you can use with shutdown.exe: `shutdown /s /t 0` will perform a full shutdown without hibernating the system session (not hybrid shutdown, that can be done with another parameter). If you want to reboot into your UEFI menu, use `shutdown /r /fw /t 0`

I may be confusing the time parameter, it might be `/t now` and not `/t 0`; I usually use a dedicated command to reboot to UEFI via slickrun.

I was recently connecting to some server with the Windows 8 derived version of Windows Server and gosh that full screen start menu is stupid with a mouse.

Cory Doctorow is doing a very good job of that, but there is only one Cory Doctorow.

The PC is an “open” platform in that you can buy and choose your own hardware. Intel vs AMD vs Nvidia, Seagate vs Western Digital, etc….

Using open software isn’t really more than a few steps from that. Being able to pick how your system works and customizing it to your liking is basically the software version of picking your PC parts. Gamers also like to run all sorts of software to rice there Windows desktops and will install all sorts of abominations tha mess with the Windows desktop shell. Much easier and fun to rice a Linux desktop.

Linux enthusiasts need to just learn how to appeal to their sensibilities. Valve knows, and they are very effective at getting people excited for a Linux based gaming platform. They’ve also proven they can walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Sure, they won’t give a crap about the source code but there is more to libre software than just being able to change the source code if you want.

We’re also at an inflection point where people are getting really really really annoyed with companies like Microsoft treating them like lab rats and shoving Copilot down their throat when they don’t want it. There is a chink in the armor; people are opening up to the idea of alternative platforms where you don’t have to worry about any of that garbage.

> making Linux unusable by using EEE or any other tactic

This will never happen because projects will just be forked.

You're making a huge assumption here. I think that's a really small percentage. Most people game on PC because certain games they like to play are only on PC, or are much better suited to PC, or because their friends are on PC, or because they want to play on the go (Steam Deck is very recent and still not widely used), or because they need to have a PC anyway. Or because they grew up with it at home/in the neighborhood because there was no money for a console. Or because "Because they like building their system", I'm going to peg at <10%.

One aspect I think will be interesting is to compare what happens to attitudes with prices changes in more affluent markets like North America or Western Europe compare to how PC has been approached in other markets like Asia or South America.

The initial cost upfront was higher than a console but if you want a lot of games it ends up being worth it.

It’s plugged into my TV, with a wireless controller, and I have direct access to around 800 games immediately.

There are consoles that don’t even have 800 games in their entire library and I have 800 I can play whenever I want, some of which I purchased almost two decades ago.

I am speaking as an old gamer. I no longer play.

1, because multiplayer is free. Still baffling to me that you actually have to pay to play with others on consoles

2, piracy is much much easier

I hate building it and messing w hardware. Its a a necessity pain for me

There's a chasm of difference between a technical fork and a meaningful fork. The entire point of EEE is relying on usefulness and convenience combined with network effects to make the entire system restricted and control it. Sure, you can go and fork anything you want - nobody stops you, technically. But you're getting the rug pulled from under your feet in any case.

You can witness the early stage of subversion with very useful software (without any hint of irony) made by people who "left" Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

I haven't built a PC in over 2 decades and I can't stand trying to game on a console or on a phone. I buy a stock machine like AlienWare, overwrite Windows with Kubuntu and go to town gaming.

With the Windows 11 debacle, many are learning first hand about what closed ecosystems force on you. It seems every feed I have that has gaming as an interest has an article about Linux as the future. Clearly someone is reading these articles.

a lot of FOSS is an abstraction but even the rubes can realize that they're being spied on, that Big Tech wants to be Big Brother, and is enshittifying their experience to that end.

Linux needs a positive reason for Linux rather than relying on anti-Windows reasons (and there are, but I see those reasons outside of the gaming space).

There are 1B Windows 11 devices. Granted not all are for games, but it is not an unpopular OS by the numbers alone.

Most gamers are idiots. They are okay paying exorbitant sums for broken games and most have no problem with forced rootkits.

I don't think gaming is or should be driving people to Linux.

Microslop turning their OS into a data mining and ad platform should and is pushing normal, rational people to Linux. But, most gamers don't care about such things as long as they are getting their sweet, sweet dopamine hit.

Ironically, lower framerates(even though they are higher than the human eye and nervous system can perceive) on Windows 11 might push gamers onto Linux.They still want their rootkits, though.

It is always the dumbest reasons that get gamers upset.

They are but AI has fried the markets for RAM, SSDs and GPUs. Everything has gotten ridiculously expensive ever since the wash trading and the 100s of billions of $ worth of deals really took off.

Personally, I think at least one or two of the major GPU OEMs will go bust thanks to all of this, and I would be surprised if Framework, Pine64 and Steam's hardware line survive it. Hell, at the point we're at, I even have serious doubts the Xbox line survives.

One of the major x86 manufacturers makes CPUs with integrated graphics that is good enough for gaming. It's in "Steam's hardware line" btw.

Oh yes, AAAs maybe won't run on that. But they're boring af anyway. And predatory. So not much loss.

...so you do need a GPU.

Well, for modern AAAs you also need to afford to pay for the IAPs. The GPU is the least of your problems.

You would struggle to play any graphically intensive game, old or new, without at least a modest GPU. It's not only AAA.

I play storylines and interesting mechanics.

But I still feel like we're still in the eye of the storm, and things will improve. Remember late 2020 when every useless GPU would command a fortune? I remember buying a used RX 5600 XT with a warranty somewhere around October for 300 €. A month later, it would cost at least twice as much, if you could even find one in stock. Last December I looked a bit at prices, and the current equivalent model (9060xt 16 GB) was roughly around 300 again, and I don't think it has gone up since. I understand there may be a shortage of equivalent Nvidia GPUs from a thread the other day, so this may change soon, again. I have no use for top-of-the-line models, so I'm not familiar with their prices and availability.

Truly I have seen not even a hint of reason to believe prices would come back down in the near term. Fab allocation is booked years out, and building out new manufacturing capabilities is difficult and slow. Everything I'm seeing points in the same direction: this is only going to keep getting worse for consumers month after month for a long time.

Exactly that is the problem with the "pork cycle" we are seeing [1] - there aren't that many manufacturers and ODMs around nowadays for RAM, storage, CPUs and GPUs. The ecosystem was so much more vibrant even 10 years ago. When the AI bubble collapses, it will take the entire world's economy down the drain, and I think that quite a few of the brands we have now will be extinct after this iteration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle

The goal has to be to make native Linux attractive, so that they actually bother to create native executables, using Vulkan and co.

Until then it is no different from playing arcade games with MAME on Linux.

There are many older games I can't install on Linux anymore, because they used an older SDL1 or some particular X11 version or some GPU driver that's no longer available for the current kernel.

The exact same game, Windows version, can be installed and runs flawlessly on both Linux and Windows.

So, native Vulkan executables? Sure, if they can continue to run in 20 years.

That’s one of the most successful computer projects I’ve heard of.

I don’t even know what you’re arguing now.

Your point?

And they run fine.

You are not reinventing the wheel. Just maintain the damn thing and keep it running as is. As Linus once said "If there's a bug that people rely on, it's not a bug, it's a feature.".

This is a similar idea to flatpak/snap etc.

For them DirectX and Win32 is what matters, if folks go out of their way to run on Proton, that is Valve's problem.

There's outliers, it'd be fair to say EA don't give a damn. But a lot do and you can't handwave away Microsoft and Sony as small fish either.

Literally half the gaming/hardware focused channels I watch have run at least one, if not several Linux Gaming videos and tests this past year... mostly in the past 4 months and mostly praising the state of Linux gaming. It's not going away.

I don't think I'd be willing to place bets on Linux dying any time soon.

I don't think so. I rather do believe that many game developers would actually love to give a more native approach for writing GNU/Linux games a try (to make this point more plausible: game developers are very used to game-console-native SDKs).

But what these game developers really demand is a very stable user-space API for everything that is necessary for writing games, which will work reliably on basically every GNU/Linux distribution, and will be supported for at least 20 years.

And studios definitely check out their games running on Steam Decks via Proton now, so that's good.

Sure, the platform is enshittified spyware, but that only impacts the game devs on their work machines (which are probably locked down to protect secret IP anyway). Microsoft has basically lost control over their own platform at this point. The game studios have been refusing to migrate to new APIs until after they're working well in Wine.

If the rest of us can run something decent at home, that's a > 99% solution to the problem.

Put another way, for a long time, you needed to buy an SGI workstation or whatever to make assets for PC games. That didn't hold the DOS ecosystem back.

As for the ABI:

The Linux kernel has started adding syscalls to enable native-like execution of Windows binaries, and game devs are testing with Linux at launch. In the worst case, these are only used by Wine. In the best case, some good ideas from the Windows kernel will be exposed to regular Linux user-land.

I don't see how it really matters if the binaries are targeting libc, musl, or an opensource win32 / win64 layer. It's free software regardless. End-users are getting better backward compatibility under Linux than Microsoft is supporting under Windows. That one victory goes a long way towards winning the entire war.

On top of that, Linux is starting to show better framerates than Windows in the same hardware. It's not 100% of the time, but it's enough that you should run the game in both places if you really care to get that extra few percent out of the hardware.

They still aren't Linux games.

They are more likely to move to PlayStation and Switch than SteamDeck, the amount of sales already show that.

I would say it's a lot different, since it's an API implementation, not hardware emulation.

That said, as long as windows is the bigger more profitable market I wouldnt expect a switch, unless the dev tooling situation becomes dramatically better on linux

On the other hand, they didn't go up as much as our grocery bill and other bills. So, they're not keeping up with inflation, at least around here.

This has nothing to do with the base distribution

You can have free commercial software, and proprietary shareware, the opposites are oxymorons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

https://mako.cc/talks/20031106-nten/foil06.html

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

I know it's unfair but it is what it is.

I wish there was some independent vote quality assessment process (a bot working on the HN backend) gently adjusting account standing factor based on their votes on the obviously true/false comments. After a while troll would simply see zero impact of their votes and comments assigned 0 karma at the outset. For not bringing the positive impact to the community.

Free/libre commercial software is indeed possible, and I’d love to see more products utilizing this model. We do need to keep in mind that “cracking” such software becomes legal (which is probably not a big deal because people would do that anyway).

I think you're alone in this.

Why would a bunch of volunteers put a ton of effort to create infrastructure so people (corporations, really) can make money?

Flathub is making inroads into having paid apps but they’re explicitly not a distribution really

There are distributions like elementary OS which are happy to sell you things with this model, though, but I just don't think it's surprising many distributions would actively prefer to not be in this position even if it leaves money on the table. This sort of principled approach is exactly why a lot of us really like Linux.

> I am still surprised most Linux Distros haven't changed their package managers to allow for selling of proprietary solutions directly

- It creates perverse incentives for the promotion of free software.

If development of the operating system is now funded by purchases of proprietary commercial software in the app store, it naturally incentivizes them to sell more software via the app store. This naturally gives an incentive to promote commercial software over free software, contrary to the very mission of free software. They can still try to avoid this, but I think the incentive gets worse due to the next part (because running a proper software store is much more expensive.)

Free software can be sold, too, but in most cases it just doesn't make very much sense. If you try to coerce people into paying for free software that can be obtained free of charge, it basically puts it on the same level as any commercial proprietary software. If said commercial software is "freemium", it basically incentivizes you to just go with the freemium proprietary option instead that is not just free software, but also often arguably outright manipulative to the user. I don't really think free software OS vendors want to encourage this kind of thing.

- It might break the balance that makes free software package repositories work.

Software that is free as in beer will naturally compete favorably against software that costs money, as the difference between $0 and $1 is the biggest leap. Instead of selling software you can own, many (most?) commercial software vendors have shifted to "freemium" models where users pay for subscriptions or "upsells" inside of apps.

In commercial app stores, strict rules and even unfair/likely to be outlawed practices are used to force vendors to go through a standardized IAP system. This has many downsides for competition, but it does act as a (weak) balance against abusive vendors who would institute even worse practices if left to their own devices. Worse, though, is that proprietary software is hard to vet; the most scalable way to analyze it is via blackbox analysis, which is easily defeated by a vendor who desires to do so. Android and iOS rely on a combination of OS-level sandboxing and authorization as well as many automated and ostensibly human tests too.

I am not trying to say that what commercial app stores do is actually effective or works well, but actually that only serves to help my point here. Free software app stores are not guaranteed to be free of malware more than anything else is, but they have a pretty decent track record, and part of the reason why is because the packaging is done by people who are essentially volunteers to work on the OS, and very often are third parties to the software itself. The packages themselves are often reviewed by multiple people to uphold standards, and many OSes take the opportunity to limit or disable unwanted anti-features like telemetry. Because the software is free, it is possible to look at the actual changes that go into each release if you so please, and in fact, I often do look at the commit logs and diffs from release to release when reviewing package updates in Nixpkgs, especially since it's a good way to catch new things that might need to be updated in the package that aren't immediately apparent (e.g.: in NixOS, a new dlopen dependency in a new feature wouldn't show up anywhere obvious.)

Proprietary software is a totally different ball game. Maintainers can't see what's going on, and more often than not, it is simply illegal for them to attempt to do so in any comprehensive way, depending on where they live.

If the distributions suddenly become app store vendors, they will wind up needing to employ more people full time to work on security and auditing. Volunteers doing stuff for free won't scale well to a proper, real software store. Which further means that they need to make sure they're actually getting enough revenue for it to be self-sustaining, which again pushes perverse incentives to sell software.

What they wanted to do is build a community-driven OS built on free software by volunteers and possibly non-profit employees, and what they got was a startup business. Does that not make the problem apparent yet?

- It makes the OS no longer neutral to software stores.

Today, Flatpak and Steam are totally neutral and have roughly equal footing to any other software store; they may be installed by default in some cases, but they are strictly vendor neutral (except for obviously in SteamOS). If the OS itself ships one, it lives in a privileged position that other software store doesn't. This winds up with the exact same sorts of problems that occur with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. You can, of course, try to behave in a benevolent manner, but what's even better than trying to behave in a benevolent manner is trying to put yourself in as few situations as possible to where you need to in order to maintain the health of an ecosystem. :)

--

I think you could probably find some retorts to this if you wanted. It's not impossible to make this model work, and some distributions do make this model work, at least insofar as they have gotten now. But with that having been said, I will state again my strongly held belief that it isn't that projects like Debian or Arch Linux couldn't figure out how to sell software or don't know that they can.

It's just that they do not want to.

They could simply fund developing app store extensions in the same way redhead enabled systemd to happen. Both Sievers and Poettering were working at Redhat at the time.

One of the advantages of open source software is the ability to distribute said software with relatively few restrictions. It simplifies life for the maintainers of Linux distributions, those who manage Linux systems, the end user, and software developers. Making a package manager a retail product store would complicate things for everyone.

That said, the only thing preventing the distribution of proprietary software by most Linux distributions is policy. If a distribution wanted to do so, and the vendor's license allowed for permissive software distribution, they could do so. The vendor could implement their own mechanism for selling and distributing license keys. The advantage to them would be using a common software distribution method without having a middleman taking a cut. (Think shareware, or even physical software that included a license key.)

It's not "zero cost" but plenty of proprietary software with native linux clients will do things like set up Ubuntu package repos. You're pasting a handful of lines in the command line (or for the fancier stuff downloading the isntaller that does that for you) and you're off to the races

There might be a boutique business that could help with installer/package repo mgmt for people wanting to ship linux clients and take advantage of the auto-updaters and the like. Maybe.

What software are you looking for?

About the only thing seriously lacking is a proper competitor for Photoshop and Illustrator, really.

That's essentially being done with Flatpak.

Linux is largely still built on the old (and indeed, outdated) Unix trust model. The system itself is assumed to be trusted, and the primary security boundaries on the system are drawn between users. Since Linux package managers actually install and manage the base system as well as end-user software, anything the package manager installs is treated as part of "the distribution", and thus trusted. It's not a good idea to use such a thing to install proprietary, third-party software. The curation and vetting of the distro maintainers is actually vital here, and when you add a third party repo, you're giving it a lot of trust. At the same time, why would distro maintainers give free labor to integrate proprietary software? Most are not super interested in that, and even if they are, they don't generally have the rights necessary to redistribute, let alone modify, proprietary software. On the other hand, those third-party developers and publishers don't want to master and manage a half-dozen different packaging formats, and various other packaging ecosystem differences that vary across distros.

Flatpak is positioned to solve all of these problems, and it's no secret that enabling (relatively) responsible use of proprietary software is one of the goals. It enabled distributing a small number of large, common runtimes of which different versions can safely coexist on the same system, addressing fragmentation. To reduce the amount of trust given to installed apps, it separates what it installs from the base system, and offers sandboxing to help limit the permissions granted to an app that still runs under the OS user of the person using it. And it supports third-party repos that publishers can run themselves.

I'm not currently a daily Flatpak user, so idk how much the current reality lines up with that goal, but that's where the movement towards this is on the Linux desktop today.

A drop in the bucket really, nvidia used to make the majority of their revenues from gaming, now it's under 10%

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!4U09!,f_auto,q_auto:...