Kes

I was going to use Fedora, but there’s no way I can ever look someone in the eye and say “yeah I use an operating system called Fedora” so I went with Debian instead. It’s pretty great

The only thing better than good in the world of business is standard. Windows may be bad, but it’s the industry standard for a ton of commercial applications. A lot of software that companies use are designed for Windows, from antivirus software to Microsoft’s office suite to audio and video editing software and more. Every copy of Windows is also a lot more standard than Linux distros; the customizability of Linux makes it a lot harder to provide support compared to every single Windows user being locked into certain things. As far as the IT team being “lazy” or having “a lack of knowledge” on supporting Linux, they’re working on the company’s dollar, and unless there’s a strong, justifiable reason to increase their workload by supporting another operating system, it’s an unnecessary expense for the company. There certainly are cases where there are strong, justifiable reasons such as with Google, who maintains two Linux based operating systems and needs their staff to know how to work with them, or in situations where Linux substantially outperforms Windows for the tasks employees are doing to the point that supporting Linux is worth it, but “it can do most of what Windows can alongside features that don’t matter to the companies’ operation” isn’t the best selling point

I’m honestly surprised Valve hasn’t made an open source de-Valved SteamOS similar to what Google does with Chromium for these other devices. Valve likely isn’t making much from hardware sales alone, with most of the value for them coming from the Steam store being a mobile gaming storefront as well as moving users away from Windows where Microsoft is looking to compete with them. Getting competitors to run Linux distros with a user interface designed for mobile consoles would boost the amount of Linux gamers which would make Valve less dependent on their competitor Microsoft, make developers more keen to support Linux, and spurn further development for Linux gaming tools. These other manufacturers will without a doubt support Steam as a storefront since Steam is such a dominant force in the PC gaming market so users of these other devices would still be in Valve’s ecosystem

Depends on the game’s anticheat. ProtonDB is a site that tracks Steam Deck (and Linux in general) support for games. You can check what you play to see if it would run on Linux with Proton, the tool Steam uses to run Windows games on Linux. If you want a desktop similar to SteamOS, any distro that supports KDE Plasma will have the same desktop as SteamOS’ desktop mode, with the new Big Picture Mode on Steam being the Steam Deck’s game mode

A pretty important point is that Linux doesn’t come installed on many devices. For most people, they buy a computer with Windows or Mac already installed and they’re satisfied with their experience. They don’t feel the need to find a distro, mount a USB stick, navigate through the BIOS, run an installer that wipes their hard drive, and relearn another operating system when Windows and Mac does everything that they want. When Linux comes pre installed on devices such as the Steam Deck or Chromebooks, Linux usage soars, though these devices have to use Linux because they need a heavily customized OS for their specific purpose. Laptops and desktops intended for casual use that come pre installed with Linux are far less common, so for the overwhelming majority of users, Windows or Mac is what they get and what they end up using. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft switches from charging for Windows to paying manufacturers to put Windows on their computers to get users into the Microsoft eco system if Linux became an actual competitor one day

Make sure the file system is ext4 and make sure the drive is mounted when you go to add the library on the external drive. A lot of games won’t launch on Linux if the file system isn’t ext4

Barely anyone uses Linux, and among those who do, distros vary wildly enough between each other to the point of breaking viruses that it’s just not worth the effort to make viruses for them compared to Windows or Mac

If you buy a brand new computer, virtually all of them come with Windows or Mac pre installed. For the overwhelming majority of users, they are satisfied with either of these options, and can do everything that they want to do with a computer on these operating systems. The overwhelming majority of users aren’t willing to go through the effort of mounting a Linux distro onto a USB, navigating through the BIOS to launch the OS’ installer, partitioning their drive to avoid deleting all of their data accidentally, reinstalling and setting up all of their programs again, and learning how to use an entirely new operating system just because “Linux is free, FOSS, and gives you more freedom”. The only times Linux has seen widespread adoption is when it comes bundled with specific hardware already, such as with the Steam Deck or Chromebooks

You just need 3 largish televisions, a small TV or monitor for the top, and stuff to mount each screen in that configuration. Your PC doesn’t need to be that good unless you are doing something like gaming, just enough to run 4 1080p windows. Once you connect them, it’s fairly easy to adjust the configuration in Windows to extend and rotate the monitors to make the setup work. Depending on how you get the televisions (you can buy them used, flat screen 1080p TVs have been popular for a long time and are relatively affordable) and how you decide to mount them, you can build this setup for only a couple hundred