[GuestFAUniverse]

And who in 2026 is still anal-fixated on a "Windows" PC?

It's just a personal computer. It normally runs multiple operating systems just fine.

Windows PC sounds like people talking about tech who are either payed by M$, or embed pictures into Word documents to send them.

Nobody has to kill the fun those OS agnostic machine allow, by artificially bind them to a shitty OS.

[zdragnar]

Enterprise, of course. They probably buy more PCs than the rest of the market combined.

Even for personal use, I'd imagine the amount of people dual booting Windows and something else are a very tiny minority.

Saying "Windows PC" is a pretty reasonable way to distinguish between "made by Apple" and "made by someone else" because the market of PCs that aren't made by Apple and don't come with Windows is really, really tiny.

To be honest, this seems like a strange hill to take such an aggressive stance upon.

[jeroenhd]

Hopefully anyone who wants to run anything other than Windows on an Nvidia-produced device has learned their lessons at this point. Although, a cursed Nvidia Hackintosh would be extremely funny.

For normal people, there are three computer operating systems: Windows, Apple, and ChromeOS. Nvidia isn't going with ChromeOS and Apple hates their guts, so Windows is the only normal operating system they can market.

Their marketing makes clear that these devices aren't the piddly Chromebooks that ruined the desktop experience for so many people (expensive Chromebooks were nice, but rare in practice).

Qualcomm promised Linux support, failed to deliver, and now anybody burnt by their promise won't want to buy their hardware again. If they promise a Windows PC, people won't have reason to complain when Linux or FreeBSD or SerenityOS won't boot on there. Given Qualcomm's failures here, Nvidia is probably doing the right thing.

[dylan604]

> Although, a cursed Nvidia Hackintosh would be extremely funny.

I did this for years. We ran Resolve color correction suites with external chassis to place multiple Nvidia GPUs in it at a fraction of the cost of the shitty TrashCanMac that was available. Lots of people continued to use the 2012 Cheese Grater MacPro with its older CPUs. The only way to get modern (at the time) compute in a Mac was to use a Hackintosh. Since it wasn't for personal use, not having things like AppStore, Messages, Music, etc wasn't a big deal, so building a Hackintosh was easier.

I built one for personal prosumer use around the time of the 1080s that allowed me more machine for the dollar than Apple offered. Once the M-series chips came out and they were capable of what the Hackintosh was doing for me put me off of building anything newer.

[kmac_]

Windows is dying a death by a thousand small, user-unfriendly decisions. This is genuinely sad because the technology underlying Windows is actually very robust and flexible.

So, the partnership is maybe natural, but not prospective. Also, note how Linux is getting popular among gamers. Of course, it's way behind Windows, but the direction of the change is clear.

I'm convinced that Nvidia is not primarily targeting the consumer market and that the ultimate goal for its CPUs is the server space. The company invests effort where the money is, and consumer products account for only a fraction of its total revenue. Maintaining a presence in the consumer market seems more like a way to avoid a complete pivot than a strategic priority.

[pjmlp]

Apparently Valve still needs Proton, regardless.

Linux won't be popular for much longer among gamers if the Proton fountain dries out.

[crazygringo]

> And who in 2026 is still anal-fixated on a "Windows" PC?

I'm assuming it's just clarifying this isn't about Macs.

The term "PC" is ambiguous, since it can either refer to all personal computers in its original meaning, or to the IBM PC lineage that is mainly contrasted with Macs. Remember the famous "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads.

When you just say "PC", people today genuinely don't know which meaning you are referring to. And "IBM PC" is antiquated, and "IBM PC clone" is even worse. So "Windows PC" is a pretty decent name.

Do you have a better suggestion? Because "Non-Mac PC" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. If you say "Windows PC", everyone knows what you mean.

And it's not an "anal fixation", there's no need to be gratuitously insulting.

[Aperocky]

Well, there's the other problem, windows sucks.

I prefer Windows XP, or even Windows Vista, to Windows 11 with its copilot. And it's been a downhill race, even macs are more of your own personal machine than Windows today, which is saying a lot.

PC should be a PC, Windows is as they advertised, a Copilot PC.

[alkonaut]

And this isn't a "Windows PC" in the traditional sense. The reason people run Windows in the enterprise (and for some desktop home uses like games) is still hardware and software compat.

I run it for work because we make windows programs. We use drivers that don't exist on Win-for-ARM yet. So to most people a "Windows PC" is an x64 Windows PC still. The risk for MS if compat isn't good enough for Windows-Arm64 is that people might as well shift from windows entirely if they need new software and harware anyway.

[bigyabai]

> It's just a personal computer

Your x86 machines were, but these are ARM SOCs. Many of them don't even support UEFI, let alone the upstream Linux kernel.

[rvba]

Getting rid of UEFI is bad?

[speed_spread]

However bad UEFI is, it's still better than the fragmented ARM boot wasteland.

[bigyabai]

Can you quote where I said that?

[dylan604]

Sir! I'm not an LLM.

[pjmlp]

The 80% of desktop market, and Valve porting Windows PC games into SteamDeck.

[jayd16]

A big push specifically for Windows ARM from Nvidia seems like relevant information.