Perhaps the headline should clarify that it's talking about GNU/Linux

It's always useful to differentiate between embedded, mobile and desktop/server-grade operating systems.

> Linux is the dominant gaming platform.

Given that the article is obviously talking about Desktop Linux, since you can run Proton exclusively on Linux distros (and not Android) the statistics says 96% on Windows and 1% on Linux.

So how is Linux itself a 'dominant gaming platform' here when it is obviously Windows again? It's always cute to see lots of denial of the results here.

Android isn't Linux. Linux is just an implementation detail, which could be swapped for something else and the apps wouldn't notice.

This is and has always been kind of the point of Unix-like OSs. Blackberry had a workable Android 2 runtime on top of QNX.

You can (at least could) run a Debian on top of a FreeBSD kernel. I run a lot of Linux code on MacOS too.

Android is not exactly open, and Google Play Services is not FOSS. Its games are also mostly addictive micro-transaction-ridden trash.

The parts that aren't open source are the google-specific pieces. Amazon has a thriving ecosystem (of mostly addictive micro-transaction-ridden trash) on top of their FireOS, which is mostly Android with the Google parts replaced with Amazon parts.

Still, Blackberry managed to make it easy to repackage Android (2.x) software to run on their QNX-based OS and there have been multiple demonstrations of Android software running on Linux with a relatively thin API layer. There's at least one commercial, IIRC, tool that does that for Windows.

Any system with a low barrier to entry will be flooded by games that are cheap to develop and quickly recover the investment. There are good games, but the platform is generally much less capable than either a desktop PC with a beefy GPU or a console.

Eh, don't blame the platform's power for IAPs.