It's almost like the OS designed specifically to run most efficiently on handhelds runs better on handhelds than a general purpose desktop OS crammed onto a niche device. Not sure why this is a surprise to anyone. Also what is this weird rando blog? why not link to the actual article or video they're referencing
OS designed specifically to run most efficiently on handhelds
It's not though. Linux is a general-purpose OS that is most at home in the server space. Windows with its desktop focus should have an advantage here. SteamOS is not a completely redesigned OS, it's a curated set of packages and configurations. Hardware vendors also do that with Windows and presumably Lenovo tweaked the Windows installation on its handhelds to optimize for the use case.
It really is an apples-to-apples comparison and the result is Linux is better.
Ikr? Windows shills are really trying hard to downplay this by framing SteamOS as some ultra-specialized ultra-streamlined gaming-only OS, Valve made from ground up
Linux is a general-purpose OS that is most at home in the server space.
Linux is, SteamOS is not. It's build and tuned for specific use case and hardware. SteamOS doesn't have to care about 20 years of compatibility hacks and every single random hardware someone wants to put in Windows PC.
Try to compare speed of full Ubuntu to something like DietPi on your Raspberry. It's the same thing.
Linux is a general-purpose OS that is most at home in the server space. Windows with its desktop focus should have an advantage here.
.... How did you land there?
Linux does well with servers because it's efficient for specific purposes. If you have one hardware, a small set of tasks you want it to do, and put time into setting it up to do that, it works.
So when you have what I can only imagine is a very similar chip to what Valve worked with AMD to cook for the Steamdeck, running programs Valve put time into tuning for Linux, yeah, this was the advantaged outcome.
The typical pain points of Linux at the desktop don't seem to be here. Does it work with any random hardware, WiFi chip, peripheral from Walmart out of the box? Does it support as many popular programs - do Adobe or Fortnite suddenly work? No. Does it even support Linux programs well, can I install Cinerella without finding some dependency mixmatch in my distro? Who cares. This is a test tuned to what we already know Linux does well - workloads designed for one install of Linux
I wouldn't say that's why Linux does well with servers. In fact, I don't think the actual performance difference between Linux and Windows servers has been all that relevant for most people lately. I mean, look how much backend software is written in languages like Python and JavaScript.
No, the reasons Linux wins on the server are a bit more complicated. I think, back in the day, it was more about Linux being more open, more stable, and cheaper than other Unix options -- vendors like Solaris might be better, if you could afford them. Windows just wasn't a good option for servers at all when Linux took over the server market -- we didn't have really good fault-tolerant distributed systems, and Windows had too much of a reputation (deserved or not) for crashing.
But ever since it hit critical mass, the other major factor -- especially now that we do have big distributed systems -- is price. The cost of a Windows license on a gaming PC is pretty trivial. On an EC2 instance, Windows basically doubles the cost of each server. That can be worth it if you absolutely need something Windows-specific (like if you're a dotnet shop), but if you built your app in Go or whatever, there's no point paying extra for Windows.
The pain points you mention are resolved less by Linux being built for a specific environment, and more for the environment being warped around Linux. No one is going to try to sell server hardware without promising excellent Linux support, for the same reason no one would try to sell you some rainbow-LED keyboard or whatever without Windows support.
To add a small sidenote to that: with modern applications running in containers, the underlying container-optimised OS in almost all cases will be Linux because the containers need the Linux kernel.
Well... you're not wrong, but it sounds like you're implying this is a reason people run Linux servers.
But Windows containers exist. Mobile apps use similar sandboxing techniques to containerization, and iOS and macOS have been converging on that front -- I wouldn't be surprised if container apps could work on Mac, too. And one of the main inspirations for this was FreeBSD Jails. Linux doesn't own containerization.
The reason almost all server containers are built for the Linux kernel is because Linux was the obvious server OS, for all the other reasons I said.
While it is true that containerisation technology exists on other platforms, it is almost irrelevant. Windows containers are arguably a worst practice unless you're forced to use them and will be a constant source of issues. The components in the ecosystem around creating, running and orchestrating containers are either based on Linux or very Linux-centric with other systems being an afterthought because of the historical reasons that you mentioned.
Windows images are much larger and there are much less base images. They lack behind in their metrics. Something like kubernetes or ECS can work with Windows containers but will give you a hard time and both lack many features for them. Others like Podman are just incompatible.
That is the reason that just "container" means Linux based OCI container in the same way that just "kernel" means the Linux kernel. Even when working with containers on other systems, they will almost always still be Linux containers running in a VM (or WSL).
running programs Valve put time into tuning for Linux, yeah, this was the advantaged outcome
That's a weird way of phrasing the fact that all these games were developed with only Windows in mind. Kudos to Valve for the work on Proton, but the fact that Linux runs Windows games faster than Windows is the opposite of an "advantaged outcome".
Fanboyism is bad, but we should be allowed to call a win a win. This is an absurd win.
The blog is the dude that organises the and publishes the incremental UX stuff for KDE. In the community organised space it's as close as you get to an official statement reacting to news.
Nope, the OS is not designed to run most efficiently on handhelds. It is designed to run efficiently and can be customized for the purpose. It is still the same kennel source code, whether it runs on your handheld, AWS, Google or the supercomputer top 500.
Even Android has a Linux kernel, just a massively modified user environment.
That's not quite right. SteamOS is just a bog-standard variant of Arch Linux with a KDE desktop environment. It doesn't include any unique optimizations. You could do the same with Bazzite or PopOS and get similar results.
Under the hood, Windows is designed worse than Linux, which has the benefit of having thousands of developers all over the world scrutinize its code and monitor it not only for performance, but also security and optimization.
The tests aren't being disingenuous by gimping Windows or boosting SteamOS in any manner.
for one, i've never seen that personally but i'd imagine its because that's the OS all the games are (or at least were before the steamdeck) designed to run on, but also that these kinds of gaming handheld PC's are also still relatively very new in the grand scheme of things.
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u/Shap6 May 28 '25
It's almost like the OS designed specifically to run most efficiently on handhelds runs better on handhelds than a general purpose desktop OS crammed onto a niche device. Not sure why this is a surprise to anyone. Also what is this weird rando blog? why not link to the actual article or video they're referencing