Although I work in IT, I pay little attention to what is happening in the Windows world. In fact with the amount of information overload nowadays, it is hard enough keeping up to date with things that interest me, e.g. the world of Linux.

However, some of my reading recently has been pretty eye-opening. Valve's fear that Microsoft is going to make Windows governed by a Microsoft App Store seems to be a very real fear. That is, in coming Windows, you wouldn't have a Steam client to buy or play games.

In recent years Google have been making very effective strides into Microsoft territory, with Google Docs Suite and Chrome OS laptops. Apparently in USA, more than half the schools are using Chrome OS laptops for children. Chrome OS is an App Store based operating system, easy to admin, and preventing the kids from abusing the machines as well as being very cost effective.

Windows 10S is a new version of Windows, based on Windows 10, but restricted so the users can only install software from Microsoft's App Store. It's good from a security perspective, but it's bad from the perspective of controlling your own machine, running it the way you want, installing what you want on it. Microsoft has been aiming for this style of operating system for a while now. Even regular Windows 10 has a control panel option to "Only allow software installs from Microsoft App Store."

Anyway, this Windows 10S is a response to Chrome OS, and trying to take back all the losses (from Windows to Chrome OS) in American schools.

This is probably good news for Linux users, because this is putting pressure on Valve to make sure that there is a valid gaming alternative to Windows (other than "locked down consoles" or "locked down Windows" ). Also, this type of news is probably going to help convince more people (e.g. Windows gamers) to switch to Linux in the future too. Hopefully the game industry will open their eyes and release more games cross-platform too. And don't trust Apple either!