Linux

You clearly misunderstood my post. Never said it was apples to apples, quite the opposite. I said the change from 7 to 10 was much bigger (and yes, we're ignoring Win 8 completely).

And of course will there be an uptick in Linux usage, he says it would be a "big" one, to which I objected to. Linux desktop has been trending up for a while, and while there might be a slight additional bump, I highly doubt it will be far beyond the margin of error for that general positive trend.

I also said it "barely" moved (it being the market share), which implies it did move, just not a lot.

More to the expected magnitude of the 10 EoL date pushing people to Linux, it won't be anywhere near what valve accomplished with the steam deck. Why? Because people buy a gaming console, they can play games on. Most don't care that it's Linux, it's just a tool/toy. It happens to be Linux underneath. On their PC they actively have to change it themselves. If people bought a PC that had Linux on it, they probably wouldn't overly notice or care either, but they just can't. Overwhelmingly they just come with windows, it you want it or not (usually there is no option to not buy that license).

Edit: what is harder to predict (or guess) is the indirect influence of valves accomplishment. Now that gaming on Linux it's actually viable, this might actually open the door for more people to give it a go. But as per usual with these things, it's probably less people who actually do it than one would intuitively expect or hope.

Edit 2: changed Vista to Win8