[beezischillin]

I don't necessarily know how you could write a smoothly-integrated shell for Windows the same way you can for your own Linux distro and not be constantly occupied with catching up and fixing your stuff from the potential changes from Microsoft just to make all the settings and toggles work properly to change things in the underlying Windows OS and then still potentially get issues from the Windows Update process that's out of your control. Going with Linux, in my opinion, solves having to rely on a platform that is potentially a competitor and therefore could turn hostile if they choose to. Microsoft has the advantage that it controls the whole software stack for the Xbox. It's also a giant uphill battle, but one that potentially benefits everyone due to the open source software behind it.

I'm personally also really happy that this gives incentive for AMD to improve their hardware support on Linux.

[mimixco]

For sure! Being tied to MS is probably why they didn't do it. I seem to remember that's why Newell made Steam in the first place, so he wasn't tied to MS.