Before you start making plans to evict your current rig, I want to explain how the Steam Hardware Survey actually works. Rather than representing every player that uses the storefront, the monthly census instead uses a small percentage of participants who’ve opted in as a sample. It’s anything but representative of all 154 million active users, meaning the statistic above isn’t an absolute.
Does the author know how *survey sample sizes work?
Do I?
Is it because it’s opt in or opt out?
If they have a high end rig, they should be able to install the Steam Machine OS to it though, thus making it a high end Steam Machine?
The steam machine is also guaranteed to have official driver support for everything on the board which is definitely not the case if you install steamos on any given gaming pc
Yep but the common person doesnt want to install anything they juat want to buy sonething and plug it in. Thats why desktop linux wont happen untill they can go into a store and buy it on hardware and stream machine is the closest we have in this day and age for that to happen.
But the common person also does not have a top of the line rig because they would have had to build that. So for the common person this would be perfect.
So, I don’t know what information this is based on, but I’m questioning it.
High end gaming rigs come in pre built, for people who want that kind of warranty, or, more often in my experience, the people who own them build them. Which means they’re not super fussed about installing a different OS.
It’s more likely that some subset of them play games that require windows (VR, some racing sims, competitive online games that require kernel level anti-cheat etc), and won’t switch because of that.
There may be some subset of the gaming populace who wants that without the fuss, and usually they buy consoles. Computer gaming is what it is because people very often like control.
I’m a tinkerer at heart, and one of my older brothers used to build custom gaming rigs as part of his business back in the early 2000’s. Most of my family and quite a few of my friends have been computer gamers for decades.
I’d be willing to wager that a fair number of computer gamers aren’t bothered about the installation process of steam OS, but might be wary of limiting the games they can play using it.