I don’t know if you were joking or not… But in case you weren’t: the Intel guys typically have information about upcoming / unreleased products before the details are out in the open. Yes, the drivers can be maintained by the community when the information is available… But, day one driver support won’t be there (since they are generally developed in-house by Intel, and then pushed up to the kernel for release), and community development would (likely) take significantly longer…
And on the Enterprise customer side, there might be some hesitation about adopting newer Intel products that don’t have drivers officially supported by the company…at least in environments where Linux would be the (logical) choice… That might lead Enterprises to look at Windows instead of Linux.
This is definitely something that has been coming for some time. Yes, I am a little surprised it has taken this long for a major channel know for hardware reviews for gamers to take this step… I would have thought that the popularity of the Steam Deck, and all of the handhelds that are now running Linux would have been a motivator.
But it seems that Steve is really seeing that there is more of a progression of people not wanting to go to Windows 11, and the issues surrounding Microsoft’s insistence on adding creepy features that no one asked for (like Recall) as the push they needed.
And I agree, Bazzite is probably one of the best choices that they could make. The immutability of the system will allow them to have consistent images that won’t change on them randomly. That is a definite requirement when dealing with this type of benchmarking.