📚 Prediction: Valve will be the reason Linux will gain a significant market share

You've probably heard of 'Linux will be BIG in the future' yada yada for the last two decades and it obviously hasn't exactly manifested as such. Yet, I think as more and more time passes, Linux will slowly but surely become more and more widespread, moreso than most people think.

Why?

Well, Valve. Valve as a company essentially have heavily depended on Windows as their primary platform to distribute software (ie games on) which is fine, except that they are pretty much dependent on Microsoft. Now, Windows is going nowhere. If Microsoft is a beach full of sand, Valve is only a handful. But the one thing that Valve pretty much dominates is being the distributer for games. For Valve to not be dependent on Microsoft's software essentially means adopting open-source sofware aka Linux.

Valve attempting to adopt Linux isn't anything new - we've had Steam Machines back in the day using Steam OS 2.0 (outdated now) and the early verisons of Proton compatibility layer which lets you play Windows DirectX games on Linux. But now with the Steam Deck being a relatively big success, more average users have actually used Linux and realised it's actually pretty cool.

On the developer side of things, let's go back a decade - remember Mantle API? The API that was a 'miracle' compared to DX11? Well for those who don't know, that's now the Vulkan API which many games use and it works with Linux i.e. more and more games can actually be 'easily' compiled for Linux. This + Proton = very good game compability on Linux.

These two things together might just give Linux the push it needs to be an actual alternatives people consider.

Who knows, maybe in 5 years time, we will walk into an electronics store and see a bunch of Windows laptops, MacBooks, and a wide variety of Linux machines as well.