this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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If only there was something to be done to slash the price while not losing anything important like using an OS that is FREE... But alas, there's no such thing, I guess we'll have to stick with windows, adding the license price to a hardware that is already expensive...
Technically the OS isn't free: Valve pays a team of developers to maintain the SteamOS and also donates money to Arch and Ubuntu foundations as well as to the Proton and Wine dev teams as well as contributes code to the linux kernel. All costing them money, that they eat but could easily find a way to charge the end user
I mean... bazzite? ChimeraOS? You don't need to go to steamOS to find a free linux distro that works well with games. Hell, you could even customize one based on any of those so you don't have to pay for a windows license for your products.
Both of those heavily rely on Wine and especially Proton, which is funded by significant donations from Valve software, so you are arguing a trivial cost versus a subsidized cost.
So, instead of paying to license widows in your device, pay to support a system that ditches windows so you can stop relying on it and reduce costs of your products?
Every other company is free to sponsor FOSS development too. You're saying that like Microsoft and Windows aren't already a defacto monopoly. Charge a FOSS contribution fee instead of the Windows license, done, Linux development sponsored by the manufacturers is solved and they too get to not get steamrolled by Microsoft.