My opinion on that may be colored by the fact that I had a Surface Pro 3, the one place where Windows 8.1 was actually great to use, and taking away some of the focus on tablet use was a regression. Overall you're right though, outside of tablets W10 was an improvement, because 8 tried to stick the tablet UI into desktops.

I was recently connecting to some server with the Windows 8 derived version of Windows Server and gosh that full screen start menu is stupid with a mouse.

Ironically I built a Linux box for mainly local models with some RGBs because I wanted tasteful accent lights to match the room, but my motherboard isn't supported by OpenRGB so they're stuck on either nothing or 'unicorn vomit' mode until some indefinite point in the future. This is the first time I've run into a stereotypically Linux issue in nearly a decade (on sane hardware) I think!

Not a fan of those aquarium PC cases though, they sacrifice airflow for aesthetics which isn't a great shout. I have a 5090 and a 9950X in a more traditional case and my temperatures are fine with air cooling alone. Not sure you'd get away with that in an aquarium case with poorer airflow, at least without it sounding like a hairdryer all day.

I feel like that makes sense. Linux users are messing with all the control given to them in software by a free OS, while windows user get only what they're allowed in software and Microsoft has not figured out how to keep them from modifying their hardware... yet. So the flashy LED folks are making their modifications where still allowed.

Maybe the people who go hardcore like that, with the obnoxious PC cases, but there are lots of casual-to-less-casual gamers out there who will be happy enough with Bazzite.

There’s a whole spectrum of PC gamers, and I think Linux+Proton can appeal to most of them. Let the people spending $10,000 on a glowing case make their own bad decisions.

> From a consumer perspective, it’s “open”.

As open as windows that tracks everything that you do

> is there something that is more open and better than Discord, for this group of people?

Matrix, xmpp, and probably more. The options are not lacking

I actually did selfhost my own matrix server to communicate with my friends while gaming. Works great on my steamdeck and I’ve got bazzite on my laptop. Most games I’m interested in work great on Linux and anything that doesn’t I just don’t play. There are so many games that do work great, but I can see people skipping Linux because of fomo.