[merlijn_s]

Valve's announcement that games ran faster on SteamOS had an almost immediate response:

> “A few weeks after this post went out, some very senior developers from Microsoft came by for a discrete visit. They loved our post, because it lit a fire underneath Microsoft's executives to get their act together and keep supporting Direct3D development. (Remember, at this point it was years since the last DirectX SDK release. The DirectX team was on life support.) Linux is obviously extremely influential." [1]

And again, market relevance was not required for SteamOS to succeed. Gabe Newell has been very open about the fact that SteamOS' goal was to keep Microsoft in check and have a plan B for when things go south..

[1] http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/steam-s-linux-and-opengl-...

[pjmlp]

The Steam hardware/OS survey is a good indication how successful plan B would be.

[WillPostForFood]

I thought and posted something similar in another Steam/Linux thread. I was corrected by a passionate Linux user, so I'll return the favor. The Steam hardware survey will not appear for Big Picture users, which is what SteamOS will launch into by default, so it gets undercounted.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3045249/linux/linux-gaming-i...

[hood_syntax]

Are you implying people wouldn't jump to SteamOS if it met the needs of gamers? If 95% of Steam games ran on it that would be a huge thing. Lots of people don't want to run Windows 10 because of privacy issues (maybe not a huge number, but it's likely a larger portion of gaming enthusiasts fit into that group than the population at large). And is there a better value proposition than free? If it meets your needs and costs nothing, why would you pay for an equivalent product?

[Feniks]

Sure everyone would jump to an alternative of Windows.

Sadly every piece of software and hardware since win95 has been made with windows in mind and no alternative has been able to come even close to that.

[pjmlp]

You mean the same people that didn't want to use Vista and Windows 7, and would move from Windows XP into GNU/Linux?

[moepstar]

Well, i guess you do have a point there - one iteration was worse in terms of privacy than the other, yet the adoption of alternative OSs was very weak.

But they've gone a little too far with Windows 10 - for me at least, of course everyone will have their own "measure" where too much will be too much.