They should've sticked to the black color of the previous Pangolin, and should have used the newer AMD APUs.

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Quoting: Highball

Quoting: sarmad

Quoting: Highball

Quoting: sarmadLenovo has a good history of supporting Linux with their Thinkpad laptops, so there is a good chance this is true. Fingers crossed.

This is actually what makes me think they wont be shipping SteamOS on their new handheld. When you buy one of the few Thinkpads with Ubuntu installed instead of Windows. Lenovo eats the cost on the MSFT Tax. MSFT still gets paid and still publishes it as a Windows sale. That money still gets reinvested into the Windows eco-system. In most cases, companies who buy the Linux supported Thinkpads are already paying for a Windows volume licensing deal and so it's not a big deal to Lenovo. It's the consumers that will ultimately cost Lenovo. Lenovo will need to pay the MSFT Tax for every handheld in order to keep their licensing deal with MSFT. They can charge the consumer or they can eat the cost themselves. Lenovo is huge and they can afford to eat the MSFT Tax on consumer Thinkpads because they aren't selling millions of them to consumers. They probably sell 1000 or 10000. Anytime I've been in the market for a new machine, when I check Lenovo, they are always sold out. Which leads me to believe they only sell a limited number of them to consumers. It's been several years since I have been in the market, so things could have changed significantly since then.

Really, if the new Legion Go is on par with the Steam Deck feature for feature, with more battery and better performance, why recommend a Steam Deck?! So Lenovo would be looking at 1 or 2 million in sales and that would also mean eating the MSFT Tax for 1 or 2 million devices. And of course MSFT is going straight to their share holders and say, "We sold 1 million Windows licenses for handhelds in FY 2025." I just don't see Lenovo eating the cost on 1 million Windows licenses. Maybe Lenovo is able to justify their new handheld unbound by the MSFT licensing agreement they have. That would be cool.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Hmmm.. this doesn't make a lot of sense. If Lenovo is selling their own hardware and aren't putting Windows on it, why would they have to pay Microsoft? Is Microsoft imposing some terms on OEMs that if you sell your hardware with Windows then you cannot sell the same hardware without it? I don't see how such a term can be legal in the first place. Do you have any sources for this?

This is their volume licensing agreement for an OEM. They do not have to install Windows on the machine, but they must sell a license for Windows with the machine. This is why it's commonly referred to as the MSFT Tax. I'd love to link you a MSFT OEM's contract with MSFT, but I doubt they post those for the public to read. I suppose it's fallen out of common knowledge, but almost thirty years ago there was more than just Windows and DOS. And in many cases you already owned a Windows license and didn't want to re-buy a second or third Windows license. If you told your sales rep to remove Windows from the purchase of your new machine they would tell you it wasn't possible. I heard in some cases for some OEM's, FreeDos was allowed. Now a days, the Windows price is just bundled as part of the machine itself's price unless you are buying from a boutique vendor. It's legal because the companies agree in order to get massive volume discounts on Windows. The machines from the big companies are sold on very thin margins. If an OEM doesn't take the volume licensing deal that means their machines will be more expensive than their competitors. If a buyer is buying a 2000 dollar workstation, an extra 100 dollars is probably not a big deal to the buyer. If buyer is buying a 400 or 500 dollar machine, even an 800 dollar machine, 100 dollars is very very noticeable. If you are a competing on price for government contracts (especially in 90's and early 2000's), especially you have to be competitive on price, at least here in America. Now big businesses and governments have volume licensing deals and are just prepaying for licenses. So these big PC companies really don't have the choice but to agree to the deal if they want to be competitive. If you have two laptops next to each other at a brick and motar store, same or similar specs, but one laptop is 100 dollars cheaper, guess which machine sells out first. Also, that means a company that's competing on price isn't going to put any engineering efforts towards a second or even third operating system. No drivers, no software, and no testings for anything but the Windows operating system. Holy crap, I just saw, custom building a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon will save you 140 dollars if you go with Linux instead of Windows Home. You can't even select Linux for a gaming laptop.

Try it, call a major PC manufacturer and tell the sales person that you don't need Windows and they can remove that fee from the price of the machine. Maybe it's changed, I doubt it. But I learned to not to pay the MSFT Tax 25+ years ago.

I still don't see how this can be legal. If you are buying a machine from retail then yes, they can't remove the license because the license is tied to the machine. But, if you are the manufacturer, not the retailer, then you should be able to manufacture a new machine and not assign a Windows license to it. I don't see how any legal contract can prevent you from doing whatever you want with your own product. Volume licensing is about buying volumes of licenses, but how you use those licenses shouldn't be Microsoft's business. If I buy 1000 licenses and I manufacture 1500 laptops, then the extra 500 laptops is mine and I don't have to pay Microsoft for an extra 500 licenses. I don't see how Microsoft can add a contract term that says "if you build more machines than the number of licenses you've bought, then you have to buy more licenses". I guess the only way for Microsoft to impose such a term is to be a joint owner of the hardware brand itself.

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Quoting: Highball

Quoting: sarmadLenovo has a good history of supporting Linux with their Thinkpad laptops, so there is a good chance this is true. Fingers crossed.

This is actually what makes me think they wont be shipping SteamOS on their new handheld. When you buy one of the few Thinkpads with Ubuntu installed instead of Windows. Lenovo eats the cost on the MSFT Tax. MSFT still gets paid and still publishes it as a Windows sale. That money still gets reinvested into the Windows eco-system. In most cases, companies who buy the Linux supported Thinkpads are already paying for a Windows volume licensing deal and so it's not a big deal to Lenovo. It's the consumers that will ultimately cost Lenovo. Lenovo will need to pay the MSFT Tax for every handheld in order to keep their licensing deal with MSFT. They can charge the consumer or they can eat the cost themselves. Lenovo is huge and they can afford to eat the MSFT Tax on consumer Thinkpads because they aren't selling millions of them to consumers. They probably sell 1000 or 10000. Anytime I've been in the market for a new machine, when I check Lenovo, they are always sold out. Which leads me to believe they only sell a limited number of them to consumers. It's been several years since I have been in the market, so things could have changed significantly since then.

Really, if the new Legion Go is on par with the Steam Deck feature for feature, with more battery and better performance, why recommend a Steam Deck?! So Lenovo would be looking at 1 or 2 million in sales and that would also mean eating the MSFT Tax for 1 or 2 million devices. And of course MSFT is going straight to their share holders and say, "We sold 1 million Windows licenses for handhelds in FY 2025." I just don't see Lenovo eating the cost on 1 million Windows licenses. Maybe Lenovo is able to justify their new handheld unbound by the MSFT licensing agreement they have. That would be cool.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Hmmm.. this doesn't make a lot of sense. If Lenovo is selling their own hardware and aren't putting Windows on it, why would they have to pay Microsoft? Is Microsoft imposing some terms on OEMs that if you sell your hardware with Windows then you cannot sell the same hardware without it? I don't see how such a term can be legal in the first place. Do you have any sources for this?

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Lenovo has a good history of supporting Linux with their Thinkpad laptops, so there is a good chance this is true. Fingers crossed.

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I'm surprised to read this. For a while I thought you've been using Arch, or an Arch based distro.

I'm just using plain Ubuntu. Not the most shiny distro out there, but it's the one with the least amount of compatibility/driver issues. I may switch to something else in the future when I buy an nVidia-free laptop, and as more and more devs move to Snap or Flatpak instead of deb packages.

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I will definitely buy one.

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Let's be honest, game of the year should've been Astro Bot.

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Quoting: _wojtekI wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?

No, because of regulations. You can't just collect a bunch of info about a user's machine and send it over without consent. The survey is not just about knowing which OS people game on. The survey is targetted at game developers, and devs want to know more than just what OS the user is running; they need to know OS, CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, controller, keyboard, language, screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, etc.

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Why is it rated Unsupported on Steam then, is it just too heavy to run on the Deck?

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The x86-to-ARM part is likely in preparation for the expected widespread adoption of ARM in laptops, but the Android translation is interesting. We may finally get the likes of Fortnite working on Linux with a click of a button!

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