I don’t think folks realise how much effort and investment Valve has put into making Linux a viable gaming alternative for modern-ish games.

Most distributors use Windows because it is easy to install and setup for gaming. Is it perfect? No. But any vendor can pay Microsoft and get a viable OS for gaming.

Linux will need a lot of custom graphics card drivers and a lot of tweaking (think power as well as graphical features, memory, CPU etc) to get the optimum performance. Most OSes out of the box have OKish performance for gaming, which is OK for any hobbyist but would be a disaster for a consumer product.

And before Valve came along, Proton wasn’t even a thing. Proton is now a thing, and the way Steam utilises it makes it effortless, but it will need a fair bit of custom args to get it working well.

Each of these things separately can be quite painful in its own right, but altogether it would be a headache for any company not well versed in Linux. Not only that, but having to provide customer support for a Linux OS would put the fear in most companies.

I would imagine most vendors would just slap Windows on their machine and be like “you know what to do with this” and let them go nuts.

That’s actually a really good point. I think, ui wise, skype and slack served a different audience. I think skype was about 1-2-1 messages and calls, whereas Slack was about chatting amongst team members.

Teams as a product feels like a really direct competitor to Slack in a way that Skype could never do (at least in the last iteration I used it in).

As for Teams, same here. In my last job I had slack and it was quite pleasant to use. Now at my new(ish) job and we are all forced to use Teams as part of the license. And I guess that is the reason behind EUs decision right there.

I think you got it the other way round - EU are upset that Microsoft used its massive customer base with Office to ship a video conferencing product like Teams for free in order to dominate that market.

I assure you, very few people would actively seek an individual Teams license. I’m very sure companies force their employees to use Teams as it’s part of the license.

Teams, especially when compared to Slack, is incredibly slow and bloated while being entirely lacklustre. Slack is lean and efficient at what it sets out to do (while being pretty expensive).