Wait, did anyone actually expect Steam Machines to sell well within the current console cycle? Essentially no one I know of thought they were a marketable format that would have any sort of actual niche, and hey look about half a million sold.

I expect it'll be generation nine that is Valve's to lose. They are essentially making the same kind of deal for consoles as Gates did when he famously got IBM to agree to non-exclusivity for MSDOS. It'll take getting the OS much more up to snuff and getting a lot more of the AAA sector to target the platform but the eighth generation is only two years old and follows the longest console generation in history, so they have plenty of time to get really robust and get the devs and publishers on board.
Hell, a good step I'd personally like to see them doing is helping with getting Wine much better at being able to run all the older Windows exclusive titles in one version to the point they could at the very least convince the big AAA publishers to make the token effort of releasing a few older titles each in Wine bottles the way certain older DOS titles on Steam, mainly Id titles, are released with a preconfigured DOSBOX. So long as it counted as a Linux sale I suspect that'd be enough to get the AAA boys to sit up and take notice of the market potential they're missing on Linux which would help make Linux ports a much bigger priority.

To bring the Windows PC gamers over to Linux though is going to be a much bigger task. There are a lot of little details that all together make Linux unappealing to people used to Mac or Windows without a certain level of iconoclasm. The number of things for which the fix is "open a terminal and run this obtuse and possibly obscure sequence of commands" is a big example.

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Quoting: KimyrielleAnd why would one want to use a commercial code editor when we have tons of awesome open source ones? oO

It is commercial open source actually. Not free in the FOSS nor Free Software sense so far as I know, and certainly not free beer style free but you do get source with the product when you buy it as I understand it. It's main selling point seems to be in terms of it's ability to run identically across all supported platforms without a lot of setup work and directly importing VS projects and the like.

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Been looking forward to this one for ages as I've watched NorthernLion LP it. Between this and Stardew Valley this seems like a good news week for Linux.

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