Look… Regardless of metrics saying one is faster, Linux is where everyone should be. I say that knowing full well the anger it’ll cause.
These corporations do not respect the user. They shovel ads, AI, spyware and half baked software down our throats. They restrict what you can do with your own hardware with artificial barriers. They force reliance on “industry standard” bs when they’re the industry benefiting. The only power we have is our money and our choices, and choosing to take the abuse because of fucking Fortnite or Photoshop is as pathetic as it comes.
Preach. Studios that make games with anti cheats and what not should reconsider how they handle Linux as they’ll only get even more players, who’ll probably be even more loyal due to their Linux compatibility. I know cheating is a big issue in online games, but adding invasive kernel level code to detect that is just adding system level vulnerabilities just to prevent cheaters from cheating seems like an overkill. It’s not like cheating mouse and keyboards don’t exist and cheaters have evaporated entirely due to anti cheat.
The XBox Ally could still be worthwhile if it ran XBox One and backwards compatible XBox 360 and XBox games. I don’t know why Microsoft didn’t do that.
I found the same thing on CachyOS (another Arch fork). The increase for me was staggering. Lies of P went from an unstable 144fps on windows 11 with an overclock (OC) on my GPU to 200fps in Cachy. Settings were all maxed out at 1440p. I noticed a similar jump from other games. Modded and vanilla NBA 2K25 went a stuttery mess at 172fps (frequent dips down to 72fps) to a steady 180fps with NO dips (that’s my monitor’s limit). I like to test things on The First Descendent, and it went from an unstable 79fps with maxed settings to 119fps. And while I don’t have numbers for it, The Witcher 3 Next Gen (vanilla and heavily modded) run a lot smoother. But after ten years, that game has been optimized out the ass.
I did notice, however, that the increase in performance diminished greatly as I turned down settings. On Windows 11, I would notice a way “higher” increase in frames. For Example, I could tweak settings in the First Descendent like Global illumination and increase frames in Windows 11 to 109fps, but still unstable. In Cachy, if I did these things, I didn’t really notice a meaningful impact.
RT also performs slightly worse on Linux. But I figure anyone using Linux might be the same type of person to not care about RT.
My hypothesis is that without the CPU resources being eaten up by things like Windows Defender, the CPU is able to process more data quicker, reducing GPU wait time. I don’t have data on that, I would need something as in depth as presentmon from Intel for testing. Arch has forks of that, but nothing nearly as in depth, and PresentMon has declined any Linux support in the foreseeable future.
I should mention, the OVERALL jump is ~40% going to CachyOS. And we know that the jump from Windows 10 to 11 saw a ~27% hit due to the new Windows Defender.
My system is 64GB of SK Hynix DDR5, 9070xt (on my Windows Partition it’s OC’d, but on CachyOS I leave it stock), and a 9800x3D that has been manually OC’d in the bios and a 240mm AIO. I leave the panels off my O11 D Mini. The motherboard is a Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite (2x8 pins for the CPU delivery).
For all the FPS data, I pulled it from Steam on Cachy which uses presented frames instead of actual frames. Basically, the frames the GPU is presenting to the monitor, not necessarily what your eyes are seeing.
On my Ally, I also noticed a difference swapping to SteamOS. Something to keep in mind with anyone planning to do that, you can allocate up to 6GB of RAM to the iGPU before Arch/SteamOS gets affected. I just don’t see anyone telling you you can do this.
Edit one day later- I played Enshrouded on CachyOS. I will report that my 9070xt underperforms at max settings. Unstable 80fps with dips down to 50fps, but the Frame Time Pacing makes it feel worse. It stutters like it’s running at 50. Turning down settings again only increased frames by 5fps, which is not marginal at these rates, but did not help with the stuttering issues. I think it’s rendering things similar to Minecraft. The comparison I have is my 7800xt, which at max settings a year ago was able to run in Windows 11 at 70fps, but equally unstable. Therefore, I’d hypothesize that if I ran present on I’d just see high GPU wait times.
Yeah I really don’t think they would do that. At least right now, in the middle of the year 2025, valve still seems to be making very consumer-friendly choices.
Except they wouldn’t be? SteamOS is just fancy Linux, so they wouldn’t be directly gaining market share & I don’t see how them releasing a game only on one (free and open source) platform is suddenly wrong? In a world where virtually every PC game already does that, just for Windows
Have you forgotten about Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony (actual monopolies: controls hardware, software, marketplace, etc)
Android is, at its core, an open source mobile operating system. What Google has done with it is monopolize all of the software for the platform. There are competitors (read: GrapheneOS, F-Droid) which are also based on the Android Operating System but outcompeted by Googles market position
iOS shouldn’t even be in this conversation, not open source & completely walled garden
“Whataboutism seems to be an admission of truth these days” HUH? At what point did I engage in whataboutism, i simply pointed to other companies that have set standards for gaming accessibility in the market.
Valve:
Has Steam, the largest videogame platform on PC. You claim it’s a monopoly but it’s not because it has direct competitors in Epic Games (Fortnite is not a small game), Riot Games (League and Valorant are not small games), Battle.net (WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch are not small games), etc
Developed the proton translation layer (which you yourself made this post for), and released it open source so anyone can use it. I myself leverage Proton for Linux gaming on a daily basis (I do NOT run SteamOS)
Released SteamOS, which is a fork of Arch Linux, as a means of helping gamers break away from the real monopoly of Microsoft/Windows
Is not creating a walled garden the likes of which we have seen in every xbox, playstation, and nintendo console. If Epic, Riot, Blizzard, etc wanted to release a launcher for Linux (and subsequently SteamOS) they could. They just choose not to, because they feel it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do that.
Developed the proton translation layer (which you yourself made this post for), and released it open source so anyone can use it. I myself leverage Proton for Linux gaming on a daily basis (I do NOT run SteamOS)
Proton stands on the shoulders of giants like Wine and DXVK. What Valve did is still impressive but they didn’t start from scratch.
Definitely, and I’ll never try and make the argument against that. However what they did was definitely a significant improvement on these pre-existing translation layers.
Linux gaming can be clearly defined as pre-proton and post-proton because it was such a huge improvement to the experience (one-click installs, large number of support in games, gaming via proton counting as a Linux sale in publisher metrics, etc)
And I’m speaking from personal experience, before proton I had a hard time getting pretty much every game I tried to play working on Linux (and tbf a large part of this is probably me fumbling the installation but I’m not an untechnical person either, so I’m sure this was the experience for many)
I’ve had this discussion enough times here that I’m bored of it and will get dogpiled as always. I’m mostly bored of explaining what a monopoly is because the rest of your argument is that Valve is a benevolent company. I’ll just say they sell gambling games to children which should be enough measure of their benevolence and it extends to their other self-serving activities.
Valve fans are the only video game tribe on Lemmy that actively applauds monopolistic practices. I’m blocking you now because you guys are so boring. Goodbye.
I was using Teams on Firefox and I’ve been thinking that FF is the problem that Teams’s working horribly, but man, it works horrible on chromium as well
Linux desktop compositors are still behind windows. Until my weird setup works just as well I can’t switch without being annoyed. HDR 4k120hz and 1080p360hz both gysnc. Always seem to have issues with vrr in Linux and multi monitor. And HDR support is strange
I can notice things like mouse movement being smoother at high refresh rates, but it’s totally not a deal breaker. 60hz is more than good enough for everyday use.
There are 2 games where windows is neck to neck or better, 3 where SteamOS is far ahead
Some doubts:
Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation. 99%ile would be helpful.
I wonder if it makes sense to test DirectX10, 11 and 12 games separately to better understand where Proton has an edge.
I wonder what all settings can be tweaked in Windows to find potential fixes (core isolation, cpu boost, power profiles).
Point is Microsoft and OEMs need to do better, however not every game or subscription services work on Linux, so in the interim time users should know what they can do to close the gap better.
Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won’t run on SteamOS. It’s only that one that is outright ridiculous.
Biased to what? Point of comparison is to figure out why things are the way they are and use that information to get the best of both worlds? It’s not very helpful if the conclusion stops at “x is better than y”.
Going deeper into “why” Proton is doing better in 3/5 games but not in 2/5 will only help users of both operating systems to make better informed decisions and get everyone closer to root cause other than “bloated windows” or “just use linux”, potentially even leading to improvements to both sides.
Did the author run the benchmarks few times to rule out shader compilation.
Why should the author rule it out? Honest question. If shader compilation leads so worse real world experience for gamers on Windows than SteamOS, it is a valid point to include.
Because I’m more curious about why things are the way they are just like the author, and would like to understand this with more data points, only making the comparison more helpful. I’m not saying author “should” consider impact of shader compilation, but I’m saying had they done, we’d understand the difference better.
They added asus vs Lenovo drivers data points, which alone tells us that driver optimization is responsible to a great extent. All I’m saying here is more data is more helpful.
Maybe even after taking care of that, the difference is huge, which will tell us its not enough to have precompilation of shaders. Maybe it does reduce the gap, telling us that potentially dx11 games might tend to do similarly.
Saying “RTX 5060 is better than 9060 XT” with 5 games tested is one level of comparison, but if they are grouped into RT and non RT games, games with 8gb and 16gb VRAM requirements, games with and without nVidia partnership, isn’t that just more detailed and an even better comparison point?
This is really not surprising to anyone who has used modern windows and Linux recently. Windows is so incredibly bloated, whereas Linux is a true real-time OS basically out of the box.
While the bloat exists, even debloated windows wouldn’t match proton because that’s not the only reason. Despite bloat there are two games in this test the actually do similar or better than SteamOS. This means there’s a confounding reason for the difference, not the bloat.
True, I just wanted to clarify that by default Linux doesn’t run on an RT kernel.
And tbh, an RT kernel is really not desirable for most applications, which is why it’s not default. All these RT guarantees cost a lot of performance, and in most cases a guaranteed latency is not worth losing performance over.
In fact, using an RT kernel would be just the opposite of what you’d want on a gaming system.
I recently switched from windows (with a debloat scrpit ran on it) to linux mint and I was shocked at how much faster it booted. When I turn my pc on I usually get up and do something else for a bit (not because windows is THAT slow but because I could spend the minute it takes to turn on to make lunch or something) and linux booted before I was out of my chair.
I last checked in December. At that time Linux had an all time high usage rate of 5.6%. For a platform that’s existed since the early 90s, 5.6% is the highest they’d ever achieved.
So I wouldn’t exactly say microsoft EVER pissed it away. They still have, and always have had, dominant market share of users. And they do so by charging hundreds of dollars as opposed to a free alternative.
The closest thing they had to internet explorer dominance is saying that it was manditory to be installed in every OS. The OS had market dominance, and you couldn’t uninstall internet explorer.
People who knew what they were doing with computers used Netscape until it died, those people went to Mozilla suite and then Firefox (well, Phoenix then Firebird then Firefox). But that was a shrinking minority of people on the internet at the turn of the millennium.
Practically everyone else used IE (90%+ of web traffic at its peak) and continued to do so until Google released Chrome and shone a light on how little Microsoft had been doing for nearly a decade.
Dominance was dominance however they got it, and they pissed it away through complacency, somewhat similarly to what they’re doing now.
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Look… Regardless of metrics saying one is faster, Linux is where everyone should be. I say that knowing full well the anger it’ll cause.
These corporations do not respect the user. They shovel ads, AI, spyware and half baked software down our throats. They restrict what you can do with your own hardware with artificial barriers. They force reliance on “industry standard” bs when they’re the industry benefiting. The only power we have is our money and our choices, and choosing to take the abuse because of fucking Fortnite or Photoshop is as pathetic as it comes.
Preach. Studios that make games with anti cheats and what not should reconsider how they handle Linux as they’ll only get even more players, who’ll probably be even more loyal due to their Linux compatibility. I know cheating is a big issue in online games, but adding invasive kernel level code to detect that is just adding system level vulnerabilities just to prevent cheaters from cheating seems like an overkill. It’s not like cheating mouse and keyboards don’t exist and cheaters have evaporated entirely due to anti cheat.
deleted by creator
It is more impressive when you realize that those games were meant for Windows and require a translation layer (Wine and DXVK).
Games run faster with LMDE6 than they did with Windows 10 on my 5800X3D/7900XTX PC.
We’ll have to see if that’s the same with the Xbox Ally.
I’ll be laughing if its still outperformed
The XBox Ally could still be worthwhile if it ran XBox One and backwards compatible XBox 360 and XBox games. I don’t know why Microsoft didn’t do that.
We don’t know that yet. Allegedly some old Xbox console only games like prototype and the darkness are showing up on the PC Xbox app so who knows
I found the same thing on CachyOS (another Arch fork). The increase for me was staggering. Lies of P went from an unstable 144fps on windows 11 with an overclock (OC) on my GPU to 200fps in Cachy. Settings were all maxed out at 1440p. I noticed a similar jump from other games. Modded and vanilla NBA 2K25 went a stuttery mess at 172fps (frequent dips down to 72fps) to a steady 180fps with NO dips (that’s my monitor’s limit). I like to test things on The First Descendent, and it went from an unstable 79fps with maxed settings to 119fps. And while I don’t have numbers for it, The Witcher 3 Next Gen (vanilla and heavily modded) run a lot smoother. But after ten years, that game has been optimized out the ass.
I did notice, however, that the increase in performance diminished greatly as I turned down settings. On Windows 11, I would notice a way “higher” increase in frames. For Example, I could tweak settings in the First Descendent like Global illumination and increase frames in Windows 11 to 109fps, but still unstable. In Cachy, if I did these things, I didn’t really notice a meaningful impact.
RT also performs slightly worse on Linux. But I figure anyone using Linux might be the same type of person to not care about RT.
My hypothesis is that without the CPU resources being eaten up by things like Windows Defender, the CPU is able to process more data quicker, reducing GPU wait time. I don’t have data on that, I would need something as in depth as presentmon from Intel for testing. Arch has forks of that, but nothing nearly as in depth, and PresentMon has declined any Linux support in the foreseeable future.
I should mention, the OVERALL jump is ~40% going to CachyOS. And we know that the jump from Windows 10 to 11 saw a ~27% hit due to the new Windows Defender.
My system is 64GB of SK Hynix DDR5, 9070xt (on my Windows Partition it’s OC’d, but on CachyOS I leave it stock), and a 9800x3D that has been manually OC’d in the bios and a 240mm AIO. I leave the panels off my O11 D Mini. The motherboard is a Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite (2x8 pins for the CPU delivery).
For all the FPS data, I pulled it from Steam on Cachy which uses presented frames instead of actual frames. Basically, the frames the GPU is presenting to the monitor, not necessarily what your eyes are seeing.
On my Ally, I also noticed a difference swapping to SteamOS. Something to keep in mind with anyone planning to do that, you can allocate up to 6GB of RAM to the iGPU before Arch/SteamOS gets affected. I just don’t see anyone telling you you can do this.
Edit one day later- I played Enshrouded on CachyOS. I will report that my 9070xt underperforms at max settings. Unstable 80fps with dips down to 50fps, but the Frame Time Pacing makes it feel worse. It stutters like it’s running at 50. Turning down settings again only increased frames by 5fps, which is not marginal at these rates, but did not help with the stuttering issues. I think it’s rendering things similar to Minecraft. The comparison I have is my 7800xt, which at max settings a year ago was able to run in Windows 11 at 70fps, but equally unstable. Therefore, I’d hypothesize that if I ran present on I’d just see high GPU wait times.
Dope, detailed writeup, thank you!
RT = Rollercoaster Tycoon?
“Hello everyone, and welcome to another video”
“Drowning 50000 guests in 20 seconds”
Yes /s
Ray tracing is my guess
You could use Nsight, it has a Linux version and is very in depth (shows every draw call, also has one that shows very detailed CPU tasks)
Of course harder to use than presentmon
I will report back
That’s still without NTSYNC patches, right?
I heard they are irrelevant for Proton as it has its own fsync.
Imagine if Valve decided to ship HL3 only on SteamOS :)
They’re already going to only ship it through Steam. As long as you’re using Steam, they don’t care.
Imagine leveraging your monopoly in attempt to gain market share in another market.
Yeah I really don’t think they would do that. At least right now, in the middle of the year 2025, valve still seems to be making very consumer-friendly choices.
Except they wouldn’t be? SteamOS is just fancy Linux, so they wouldn’t be directly gaining market share & I don’t see how them releasing a game only on one (free and open source) platform is suddenly wrong? In a world where virtually every PC game already does that, just for Windows
Have you forgotten about Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony (actual monopolies: controls hardware, software, marketplace, etc)
Android is just fancy Linux. iOS is just fancy BSD. I guess neither can be a monopoly.
Whataboutism seems to be admission of truth these days.
Android is, at its core, an open source mobile operating system. What Google has done with it is monopolize all of the software for the platform. There are competitors (read: GrapheneOS, F-Droid) which are also based on the Android Operating System but outcompeted by Googles market position
iOS shouldn’t even be in this conversation, not open source & completely walled garden
“Whataboutism seems to be an admission of truth these days” HUH? At what point did I engage in whataboutism, i simply pointed to other companies that have set standards for gaming accessibility in the market.
Valve:
Has Steam, the largest videogame platform on PC. You claim it’s a monopoly but it’s not because it has direct competitors in Epic Games (Fortnite is not a small game), Riot Games (League and Valorant are not small games), Battle.net (WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch are not small games), etc
Developed the proton translation layer (which you yourself made this post for), and released it open source so anyone can use it. I myself leverage Proton for Linux gaming on a daily basis (I do NOT run SteamOS)
Released SteamOS, which is a fork of Arch Linux, as a means of helping gamers break away from the real monopoly of Microsoft/Windows
Is not creating a walled garden the likes of which we have seen in every xbox, playstation, and nintendo console. If Epic, Riot, Blizzard, etc wanted to release a launcher for Linux (and subsequently SteamOS) they could. They just choose not to, because they feel it doesn’t make financial sense for them to do that.
Proton stands on the shoulders of giants like Wine and DXVK. What Valve did is still impressive but they didn’t start from scratch.
Definitely, and I’ll never try and make the argument against that. However what they did was definitely a significant improvement on these pre-existing translation layers.
Linux gaming can be clearly defined as pre-proton and post-proton because it was such a huge improvement to the experience (one-click installs, large number of support in games, gaming via proton counting as a Linux sale in publisher metrics, etc)
And I’m speaking from personal experience, before proton I had a hard time getting pretty much every game I tried to play working on Linux (and tbf a large part of this is probably me fumbling the installation but I’m not an untechnical person either, so I’m sure this was the experience for many)
I’ve had this discussion enough times here that I’m bored of it and will get dogpiled as always. I’m mostly bored of explaining what a monopoly is because the rest of your argument is that Valve is a benevolent company. I’ll just say they sell gambling games to children which should be enough measure of their benevolence and it extends to their other self-serving activities.
Valve fans are the only video game tribe on Lemmy that actively applauds monopolistic practices. I’m blocking you now because you guys are so boring. Goodbye.
Go ahead and block me 💀 your post history shows you having this same argument and taking the same action every time.
You defend this point endlessly and the minute the conversation starts to pile up, you block the other person.
✌️ Enjoy the echo chamber you’re creating for yourself
Windows games used to run better on wine 15 years ago and Windows bloat/telemetry has only gotten worse since then.
Yes but Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit on my Linux laptop. Checkmate atheists.
😭😭😭 Sadly, Microsoft Teams runs like dogshit everywhere
I was using Teams on Firefox and I’ve been thinking that FF is the problem that Teams’s working horribly, but man, it works horrible on chromium as well
Linux desktop compositors are still behind windows. Until my weird setup works just as well I can’t switch without being annoyed. HDR 4k120hz and 1080p360hz both gysnc. Always seem to have issues with vrr in Linux and multi monitor. And HDR support is strange
I’m glad I’m one of those people who can’t seem to percieve any difference above 60Hz
Having low standards is pretty convenient
I can notice things like mouse movement being smoother at high refresh rates, but it’s totally not a deal breaker. 60hz is more than good enough for everyday use.
I believe everyone can, it just takes practice and is only relevant for 120hz games. Or VR.
I like to see this.
This is not my experience out of the box (in debian so not truly a comparison) on legacy hardware. (Which shouldn’t be running win 11 anyways).
We are definitely most of the way there with proton but game devs/publishers have a lot of room of improvement.
Windows runs better on Linux than on Windows…
Linux runs better on Windows than Windows.
Are you saying we should run Linux Subsystem inside Windows inside a VM on Linux for maximum performance? 🤔
Take aways:
Some doubts:
Point is Microsoft and OEMs need to do better, however not every game or subscription services work on Linux, so in the interim time users should know what they can do to close the gap better.
Really grasping at straws there, eh? I’m no big fan of Ars but I hope we can assume they’re not quite that incompetent.
It’s not a slight, as I said it’s a doubt, not criticism. I’m not saying “did the author EVEN …”
Your other doubts and concerns seem slightly biased, e.g. wondering what settings could be tweaked on only one of the systems being tested and then reminding us all that there do still exist some things that won’t run on SteamOS. It’s only that one that is outright ridiculous.
Biased to what? Point of comparison is to figure out why things are the way they are and use that information to get the best of both worlds? It’s not very helpful if the conclusion stops at “x is better than y”.
Going deeper into “why” Proton is doing better in 3/5 games but not in 2/5 will only help users of both operating systems to make better informed decisions and get everyone closer to root cause other than “bloated windows” or “just use linux”, potentially even leading to improvements to both sides.
Methodology is important to a robust result. It’s weird that you take issue with their considerations there.
Why should the author rule it out? Honest question. If shader compilation leads so worse real world experience for gamers on Windows than SteamOS, it is a valid point to include.
Because I’m more curious about why things are the way they are just like the author, and would like to understand this with more data points, only making the comparison more helpful. I’m not saying author “should” consider impact of shader compilation, but I’m saying had they done, we’d understand the difference better.
They added asus vs Lenovo drivers data points, which alone tells us that driver optimization is responsible to a great extent. All I’m saying here is more data is more helpful.
Maybe even after taking care of that, the difference is huge, which will tell us its not enough to have precompilation of shaders. Maybe it does reduce the gap, telling us that potentially dx11 games might tend to do similarly.
Saying “RTX 5060 is better than 9060 XT” with 5 games tested is one level of comparison, but if they are grouped into RT and non RT games, games with 8gb and 16gb VRAM requirements, games with and without nVidia partnership, isn’t that just more detailed and an even better comparison point?
This is really not surprising to anyone who has used modern windows and Linux recently. Windows is so incredibly bloated, whereas Linux is a true real-time OS basically out of the box.
While the bloat exists, even debloated windows wouldn’t match proton because that’s not the only reason. Despite bloat there are two games in this test the actually do similar or better than SteamOS. This means there’s a confounding reason for the difference, not the bloat.
Unless you use an RT kernel, Linux is not a realtime OS and certainly not a true one.
Because, you know, terms have a meaning.
Right but switching to an RT kernel is trivial for basically any mainstream distro. You can do it from the package manager.
True, I just wanted to clarify that by default Linux doesn’t run on an RT kernel.
And tbh, an RT kernel is really not desirable for most applications, which is why it’s not default. All these RT guarantees cost a lot of performance, and in most cases a guaranteed latency is not worth losing performance over.
In fact, using an RT kernel would be just the opposite of what you’d want on a gaming system.
I recently switched from windows (with a debloat scrpit ran on it) to linux mint and I was shocked at how much faster it booted. When I turn my pc on I usually get up and do something else for a bit (not because windows is THAT slow but because I could spend the minute it takes to turn on to make lunch or something) and linux booted before I was out of my chair.
Oh dear Microsoft, you had everything and you pissed it away again
I last checked in December. At that time Linux had an all time high usage rate of 5.6%. For a platform that’s existed since the early 90s, 5.6% is the highest they’d ever achieved.
So I wouldn’t exactly say microsoft EVER pissed it away. They still have, and always have had, dominant market share of users. And they do so by charging hundreds of dollars as opposed to a free alternative.
They had internet explorer dominance, they pissed that away
They had PC gaming OS dominance, they’re now pissing that away
The closest thing they had to internet explorer dominance is saying that it was manditory to be installed in every OS. The OS had market dominance, and you couldn’t uninstall internet explorer.
But actual usage? Everybody used Netscape.
People who knew what they were doing with computers used Netscape until it died, those people went to Mozilla suite and then Firefox (well, Phoenix then Firebird then Firefox). But that was a shrinking minority of people on the internet at the turn of the millennium.
Practically everyone else used IE (90%+ of web traffic at its peak) and continued to do so until Google released Chrome and shone a light on how little Microsoft had been doing for nearly a decade.
Dominance was dominance however they got it, and they pissed it away through complacency, somewhat similarly to what they’re doing now.
This is your rose tinted hindsight fantasy.