Despite Microsoft’s push to get customers onto Windows 11, growth in the market share of the software giant’s latest operating system has stalled, while Windows 10 has made modest gains, according to fresh figures from Statcounter.
This is not the news Microsoft wanted to hear. After half a year of growth, the line for Windows 11 global desktop market share has taken a slight downturn, according to the website usage monitor, going from 35.6 percent in October to 34.9 percent in November. Windows 10, on the other hand, managed to grow its share of that market by just under a percentage point to 61.8 percent.
The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade. The stats also revealed a small drop in the market share of its Edge browser, despite relentlessly plugging the application in the operating system.
Yes, you can technically get some games working. If you use the right VR headset (meaning Valve Index or Vive), use the right distro, with the right compositor and right GPU, spend a lot of time troubleshooting, then you can maybe get a few games to start. Camera passthrough won’t work, power management won’t work (no control for base stations), Bluetooth won’t work, tracking won’t be as good, you will experience weird bugs and crashes of both the games and SteamVR, and you will get less FPS than on Windows. And even with that inferior experience, most games still won’t run.
I spent a lot of time trying despite this being the experience for most people online, and I only confirmed that it’s the case. Windows is absolutely needed if you want a good experience. Hopefully Valve changes that in the future, but that’s the case today.
Not entirely. SteamVR on Linux is almost that bad, yes. With ALVR you can try to use standalones on SteamVR, but it’s not very stable. Most games will “run” under SteamVR and modern proton, I’ve only encountered a few situations where they don’t, once again caused by kernel level anticheat. SteamVR does have major issues with stability and reprojection, which makes the VR experience much worse overall.
However, Monado and WiVRN (+ OpenComposite) are great when using Envision. Not all games run, and some have input issues, but it’s significantly better than SteamVR. With a couple overlays, you can get most functions working as expected, like desktop view, camera passthrough, etc.
As for “power management” and “bluetooth”, the only thing the Valve Index uses bluetooth for is power management. That doesn’t work in the drivers on Linux, but there are scripts you can use if you have a separate bluetooth dongle. It’s not a full fix, but not as painful as using an Android app or unplugging the basestations.
As we both noted, it requires setup and troubleshooting, and as someone who uses Linux for VR gaming too, I can’t recommend it to the average person. That does not make Windows a “requirement”, just much easier and the better plug and play experience.
Sure, as I said “Windows is absolutely needed if you want a good experience”. Yes, it’s not required to get something working if you try hard enough, but it is required if you want everything to work well.
I keep a Windows virtual machine with GPU passthrough for VR and don’t see myself ditching it any time soon. At least I don’t need to boot into Windows.