That's not the important metric. It only tells you the percentage of users, not the percentage of people who play games on Linux (or buy games).

For instance, I have a Steam account. I've got the client installed on my phone and Mac. I don't really play games anymore. I'm sure this counts towards something.

What's meaningful to those who might target a platform is what percentage of those people buy games. It might just be that Linux users are the only ones who play dungeon crawlers, for instance - which could be meaningful information.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

It isn't sociopaths which makes a product good, it's engineering.

France specifically, and Europe more generally, lacks the economic incentives to keep the best and brightest employed at frontier level work. The European "IT industry" is all but dead.

No, that clearly isn't what Jesus meant, and it's made excruciatingly clear that faith without action is dead. Heart condition -> action -> salvation. You can't omit a step.

That's interesting, because I've seen the exact opposite play out twice in our small local schools. There's a "measles outbreak", and they rush to blame the unvaccinated, but it's only vaccinated kids who end up getting sick.

I propose "The Bill Gates Maxim".

Anything Bill Gates proposes or theorized should be strongly opposed societally because he is either wrong, evil, or both, in his prognostications.

"Love" is not a complex emotional state, it's an action - just like belief is an action.

"I believe climate change is a real and dangerous threat" - but you still drive a car and go about modern life?
"I believe in Jesus" - but you sleep around and do evil to others?
"I love my boyfriend" - but cheat on him?

What you describe is infatuation, not love. Love is a decision you act on.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

How many of those people infected and hospitalized were vaccinated?

That's the important information we need to know to make an informed decision. Nobody ever shares that information.

"plenty of good work has been stalled/derailed because of the unreasonable consumption of resources by these companies"

Can you provide some examples?

At surface read, this sounds like trite environmentalist/redistributionist rhetoric to me. You make it sound like they're doing so without compensation or cooperation, which is very far from the truth: the entire world is throwing money at AI, both for use and for investment, because there's significant value in doing so.

As this site is ready testament towards, there are a lot of "open source" types who have their ass firmly planted on their face about AI. "It's a fad", "it's a gimmicky chatbot", "It's not real intelligence".

Yeah, OK. But it is a real tool, and one which is increasingly showing its value for... literally everything. Get onboard or get left behind.

You can pretty easily fix the "annoying the shit out of maintainers" problem by having modern code commit/merge management practices.

You know, something I'd think "open source maintainers" would be pretty readily willing to do. Not only is it best practice (and has been a long time) to gate PR merge on CI completion, but it's trivially easy to have regression and e2e testing in place, as well as require specific artifacts in the commit as evidence that it "works on my machine".

I've got to wonder about the people who are (still, even/particularly on this site) saying AI is not capable or useful when it's able to do things like this.

Those of you who still think AI is a glorified chatbot: what's your rationale?

"with a much more limited use-case than they claimed"

You can't be seriously making that claim, in September 2026. When was the last time you actually tried using these models?

It's arguable that they can't yet, by default, code to the standard or expectation of a highly skilled and capable developer, or do much of anything to the quality of someone at the top of their field.

But they can do 50-80% of it vanilla, and probably hit 95% with the correct instruction/harness in many cases - and they can do it hundreds of times faster than a person could.

I'm curious which use case you think they're limited in.