I shutter at the idea of using another Windows Operating system.
Imagine booting your computer and having to give an email to login offline.
Then you click on a link and it auto opens through edge, "DO YOU WANT TO IMPORT AND GIVE US YOUR PRIVACY?"
Or imagine you try to uninstall some microsoft app, it doesn't let you, you try to remove it thorugh the registry but the top 10 results on google are outdated with a different windows.
2 hours later, your computer reboots automatically during a windows update. Everything is turned off, you are dealing with autosaves, you re-open your browser and tons of tabs open slowly.
Finally you save some files in your local documents pictures folder, and start getting nagged about not having enough space in OneDrive. No big deal I don't use that. Lets delete OneDrive. Oh my god I lost all of my files.
I can imagine but none of these are happening on my Windows PC :shrug:
I'm not saying you are wrong but I can also wrote about anecdotal experiences about Linux and spending hours in the terminal fixing problems, googling forums for hours and such.
But I get it, it's an easy ragebait on HN and works all the time
Honestly I don't see how you could avoid those on Windows unless you are using a customized ISO with everything striped out or never upgraded from Windows 7. It's not something that may happen, it's the stock experience nowadays.
Nothing is preinstalled and the rest (like the update policy) takes like 10 minutes to set up maximum. I mean I'd spend the same time on other OSes well setting up after a fresh install
I'm too cautious to ever log into my Password Manager on my Windows machine.
It also loves to reboot on its own has no respect for anything I am doing.
dwm.exe and explorer.exe leaking GPU memory for years too. Go to Task Manager > Details > Right click the details column > Add graphics memory. Sort by top users. You'll see that both of these processes are leaking GPU memory like there is no tomorrow.
Nowadays, I always have to kill both and have them respawn before any gaming on Windows.
For all the problems gaming on Linux has, I will never again have to suffer through the buffooneries of windows. I finally made the switch when paint3d improperly updated, causing my PC to go straight to the BSOD whenever I opened the start menu, task manager, or the file explorer. How these things connected I will never know, but using powershell to remove paint3d was what ultimately saved my bacon. This was during finals week while I was in college as well, I had to convince multiple professors to give me extensions on papers since I basically could not operate my computer.
I have windows still for occasional gaming and the random reboots are just infuriating. How is this remotely acceptable for an operating system to do. I feel like it happens even when I explicitly tell the OS to sleep. And then I wake it up and everything has been closed. Some apps attempt to restore state, but never really works.
> Imagine booting your computer and having to give an email to login offline.
As much as I hate what modern Windows has become, this is not actually true. If you know the correct sequence of clicks you can avoid this. Not defending this bullshit, though.
They've made it much more difficult than it was even a couple of years ago when you could just install without the computer connected to the internet. Now you have to start with an internet connection and then disconnect partway through and jump through command line hoops to make the installer let you keep installing
Yes windows is the worst. I can’t wait until AAA devs are forced to support Linux. I’m hoping steam starts to mandate supporting Linux in order to be listed. It’s just not that much more effort
All the smart ones probably already test their games on proton. IMHO they'd be idiots if they didn't. Stuff just works mostly and when it doesn't it's probably relatively easy to address the issues for developers. And of course the Steam Deck is becoming a pretty popular console so there's that as well. Steam on Linux is becoming a pretty nice juicy market with quite a few users. Targeting that is going to be an easy choice. Especially when it is essentially almost no effort to do so.
Most AAA games do not work on proton because the devs refuse to allow the anti cheat to run. Most anti cheat support Linux but the devs have to allow it.
You can't fix all of it. Microsoft is very aggressive about re-enabling certain "features" and new ones arrive regularly. Try watching Performance Monitor during the night, you'll be surprised at which files Microsoft are accessing regularly without your consent.
the author's premise of 'its been working okay for me!' isn't sufficiently convincing. Linux is great for gaming... if you dual boot Windows for when it's not. i was fooled by the contemporary optimism and set my new rig up as Linux only, to discover that some games will just not work, or not work well, or be unable to play multiplayer, or require arcane hacks, or require specifically-versioned, bespoke compatibility layers...
we are getting there, and i look forward to a glorious future where we can kick the pile of dogshit that is Windows to the curb, but that day ain't today.
This is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, as well. It's not even that the developer is hostile to it, they're just tied up trying to hold the rest of the game together with glue and toothpicks and haven't taken the time to figure to figure out how to get their (not terribly effective) Battleye plug-ins to work.
For me, it was Nioh. It would crash when using certain abilities, and cutscenes would just not work. It looks like it's still an issue for some people: https://www.protondb.com/app/485510
Last time I tried to totally banish Windows (it's only on my gaming machine), Linux hated my ~3-year-old AMD card (as in: a known-that-whole-time but unfixed driver bug that reliably made X and Wayland randomly crash a couple times a day, and more often if you tried to game on it). Buy a new card and hope I don't overlook a similar problem in my research, or reinstall Windows. So I reinstalled Windows, having lost about a day of my time, over a week or so of trying to make it work, all for no benefit whatsoever.
I was able to kick Windows, but because I chose a game with multiplayer and anti-cheat, it was still problematic. It's still not perfect because to avoid stuttering in wayland I have to launch gamescope in the TTY. The steam overlay also doesn't work.
Finding this out over the course of a few evenings though wouldn't have been possible without my extensive previous linux experience.
It's very very very quickly getting there and soon these things will be ironed out.
Let's not declare victory too soon and have tons of people angry they deleted their windows and now can't get linux to work for playing their multiplayer games with DRM/anti-cheat though.
I've been running GNU/Linux only, no Windows, since 2012, and while there are one or two games in my library that don't work, I have nothing to complain about. Dragon's Dogma just works, Fallout New Vegas only needed DX9, Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin just works, Neverwinter Nights 2, X3: Albion Prelude, Baldur's Gate EE, BG2EE, Starbound, Devil May Cry 3, Oni, Homeworld,... so many games either just work or require clicking 4 times in Protontricks.
GNU/Linux has come far since I first started, my Radeon HD7770 first needed the proprietary garbage driver to run, which was a pain; but ever since it got supported in AMDGPU it was smooth sailing. I have an R7 card now and it also just works under AMDGPU. Meanwhile my roommate running Windows 11 had a bunch of pictures in her 'My Pictures' directory, got a message from MS saying 'oh, your OneDrive is nearly full', and when I removed the files from her OD, the bastards had the gall to remove them from her PC. Like, she has a 1TB SSD, why would you try to sync files on it to a 5GB cloud storage? And then she naively said 'oh, maybe I should just pay to get more storage', and I flipped my lid.
So yeah, 'a couple of games don't really work' is not a very convincing argument compared to the anti-user hostility MS exhibits in my opinion. But then, I could be wrong.
> So yeah, 'a couple of games don't really work' is not a very convincing argument compared to the anti-user hostility MS exhibits in my opinion. But then, I could be wrong.
All it takes is one game for some people, see console exclusives.
> Linux is great for gaming... if you dual boot Windows for when it's not
Preach. Say it loud so the folks in the back can hear.
Eventually dual boot gets annoying as well. So most people just get two boxes linked via a kvm and run linux on the older box and windows on the new box. Or they give up gaming altogether.
I just gave up on the games that didn't work and ditched Windows. There are enough supported great games to last a lifetime, the few that don't aren't enough of a reason to deal with Windows.
That's okay, I can stop dualbooting once win10 is out of support and the hassle will be gone!
Though I've been refunding games that don't run on proton sometimes as well, because dual booting does indeed get annoying! Perhaps, if missing out on the Deck userbase isn't a motivator enough, we can add some more lost revenue to the motivators convincing devs to use cross-platform or ideally linux-native environments.
Or I'll just stop gaming. Parasite publishers have ruined most of the fun I get from video games the past decade or so, and their product certainly isn't good enough to convince me to go through 5+ ads every time I boot windows for the experience.
Personally I found a couple years ago to be a better time as that was when VRChat worked in my machine and now it's broken likely due to them adding EAC.
I've been on Arch for 2 years now after seeing the cancer that is Windows 11. Ads and "news" on your desktop, garbage free to play games preinstalled or linked to.
OneDrive your user dir(Desktop, Documents) to the cloud, Outlook feeding your mails to the cloud.
All this will be used against people to sell more targeted ads and other BS.
It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
When I install windows on my gaming PC, I spend 15 minutes to disable web search in the start menu, uninstall random games, change what's on my taskbar, etc. It usually lasts multiple years without me seeing any random software I don't want. I can then run literally every single game I have ever wanted to play with no issues.
I would enjoy it if all games had first party linux support and I could switch to it permanently, but at the moment gaming on windows has several pros and negligible cons compared to gaming on linux. Not sure how you're coming to the conclusion that linux is far superior for gaming.
Me experience is that the average windows install has a year long lifespan and then it needs a reinstall. It just feels slower at that point.
Beyond that it’s a matter of principle. Why would I use an OS where the company wants to farm me for ad revenue. I am not livestock. If I pay for it, that’s an even bigger slap in the face.
I'm glad 15 minutes has been your experience. For me, who does not use Windows at all for other purposes, it has taken considerably longer than 15 minutes to figure out where all the settings are to disable and uninstall annoyances. As somebody who stopped using Windows in the XP era, none of the settings are where I remember them being more than a decade ago when I last seriously used that OS for anything.
Since I'd only use Windows for gaming, there's also a non-trivial amount of time spent rebooting into Windows, and the slight annoyance of having to either keep a remote desktop tool open or a laptop nearby if I wanted to do something else on the computer other than launch a game.
And since my gaming computer is custom built, there's also a non-trivial expense of purchasing a Windows license.
The one compromise I have considered is keeping a dedicated Windows gaming PC in a closet and using Steam Link so I can actually play the games on my preferred device, whether it's at my desk or on the TV. It doesn't solve everything I mentioned above but at least it gets closer to the set-it-and-forget-it approach you've taken.
What OS doesn’t have this problem? Linux and Mac have both had major changes and move things around. Mac completely redid System Preferences to Settings and Linux changes frequently and even by distribution.
I never claimed any other OS was any different in that people who are particular will need to configure them, I'm just pointing out that as someone who never uses Windows for anything else except gaming, the cost of fixing the annoyances instead of using Wine for playing games is higher than 15 minutes.
That said, I'm generally more comfortable adapting to whatever random version of a window manager and desktop a Linux distribution ships with than putting up with the "everything is AI now!" "now with more ads!" "find things only via search!" type things that show up in the Windows UX.
macOS changed the visual looks of preferences and rearranged things, but if you had a bash script that just did a bunch of "defaults write", it would still work for the most part.
> I'm glad 15 minutes has been your experience. For me, who does not use Windows at all for other purposes, it has taken considerably longer than 15 minutes to figure out where all the settings are to disable and uninstall annoyances.
Use something like Shutup10 and Chris Titus' utility.
Absent considerations about identities being stored by third parties, what is the downside of targeted ads? I found myself wishing for more targeted ads after listening to yet another random fast food ad the other day.
IMO the problem is not that ads are better targeted, but the fact that they exist at all on the OS (let alone an OS I paid money for). Microsoft is truly cancer.
The fact that the targeting part is the output of a multibillion-dollar industry focused on scientific experimentation on humans without informed consent.
Also the fact that they're ads. That's a problem, too. Basically the whole thing is one big downside for everyone who isn't in adtech or trying to sell you shit you otherwise wouldn't buy.
Do you run this? I’m curious what your experience (and others) are with it.
I have a Pop!OS box and it was a little work to set up. I was mostly pleased with the result, though. Steam experimental Proton had a wide range of my games library compared to regular Proton. I did run into major bugs running some of those games, but it was good for scratching a nostalgia itch.
Linux is not even close to matching Windows in gaming performance.
Maybe for a small sub-set of games, but for the vast majority you're running them on Win32 and DX compatibility layers that each have overhead. Sometimes a lot.
>Maybe for a small sub-set of games, but for the vast majority you're running them on Win32 and DX compatibility layers that each have overhead. Sometimes a lot.
It really doesn't matter. You're talking theoretical benchmarks, when in reality the only thing that matters to someone playing is 60fps@4k. For a compatible game, any Linux machine is equally capable of acheiving that through Proton with a sufficient GPU. Particularly for Nvidia, where the linux drivers are equally as good or better than Windows at this point.
You know, I wouldn't have objected if you had said something like "Linux does not match Windows in gaming perfomance" but you had to go to hyperbole and say "not even close" and that's just not true. Linux is astoundingly close to MS Windows if you consider that most games are not written for the Linux platform, but for MS Windows. That alone should give one pause for thought.
Add "treating its users with respect" to the mix and Linux seems to be the better choice. It sure is good enough for me.
The DX layer is interesting. Dxvk ranges from slightly slower to much, much faster. Older games are an unambiguous win and modern games seem to be a toss up. There’s a large user base for it on windows to get all the performance you can out of older PCs.
SteamDeck has entered the chat. Low power device with low end specs, absolutely crushing games with those pesky compatibility layers.
I play all my games on my PC, they work flawlessly save for 2 exceptions. Diablo 4 Beta took some tinkering, but I got it going after 20mins. Fortnite won't run because their anticheat isn't compatible, because Epic don't want it to be.
> Linux is not even close to matching Windows in gaming performance.
I'm curious if you've actually, you know, tried linux with proton/wine at all in the last three years. Things have really changed since the Deck. You might wanna try updating your opinion to reflect reality; performance is less an issue than one-off compat issues by far in most circumstances in my experience, IE I'm more likely to have to make config changes to deal with a crash than I am to have a huge disparity in FPS/load times/stuttering/frame dropping between linux and windows.
These replies are very curious. Apologies for angering some folks. I didn't intend for that. The assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about was expected. However the doubling-down that running Windows games on linux is, in fact, "far superior" to running them on Windows is... interesting.
First of all, I play games daily on my M1 Mac and have gamed on linux and older Intel Macs since around 2007. I'm very familiar with the compatibility layers that go into running Windows games on non-Windows systems. Wine, ESync, MSync, WineD3D, MoltenVK, DXVK, VKD3D, GPTK, Rosetta 2, winetricks, CrossOver, CXPatcher, Whisky, PlayCover, Parallels Desktop; these are all things I have used to let me play ~8/10 of the games I want to play. That is, ~20% of the games I want to play simply don't work at all outside of Windows mostly due to either anti-cheat, or using DX APIs that aren't implemented in the compatibility layers. Most of them perform noticeably worse than Windows, and that's after googling for an hour and applying the random performance hacks/tweaks.
Windows games are designed and built, from the hardware APIs to the shaders, to run on Windows. It is only with a very curious definition of "far superior" that getting a tiny percentage of games to run a few FPS better is a true statement.
Playing Windows games on linux is not "far superior" than running them on Windows.
Proton is a major improvement over what you listed, but of course it doesn't run on Mac. I also have an M1 and have been using Crossover or Wine with all the tricks since the 2000's. Proton was a significant improvement for ease of use and performance. It's not better than Windows but is practically the same for most games now.
From Steam you browse to a game then click install, and it just works.
The guy you were replying to meant it was far superior in terms of experience, not being forced to view shitty ads and deal with other Windows 11 obnoxious garbage.
Running the Windows build via Proton works fine. That being said, this particular game has a Linux build anyway, so it's kind of a moot point (for now). ;)
Strong disagree and this is from someone that used to use FreeBSD and now dual boots Fedora for my laptop and runs Debian for servers. I mean it took me more than 15 minutes to figure out how to get a fresh nobara 38 install to simply boot last time I tried this. For the sin of having an Nvidia 3070 graphics card I had to look up to where to change some settings in grub to boot to be able install the drivers and boot properly. My fedora running framework laptop can't detect one of the external monitors in my lenovo usb c dock if it is plugged in when it boots or after sleep. No lay person consumer is going to waste their time diagnosing this stuff.
I appreciate that. I did try ubuntu, pop, and fedora beforehand and had the same issue. I didn't want to make my original comment too long or to appear incidinary. It just didn't boot and my research led me to nobara. If you have any thoughts why it wouldn't work with a i7-10700k, rog b560-a, a 3070, 4k monitor via hdmi or dp, and a dual booting m2 ssd would be curious.
Nvidia drivers are a bit iffy sometimes, I will give you that. That said most major distros have builtin support and Arch has great docs for getting things going too.
Good question. I was having those types of issues and I recall issues with booting the usb stick via EFI too. I did install the latest Pop!_OS and it works last night so clearly better this time around!
I have to issue a kudos-where-it-is-due update: I installed the latest Pop!_OS 22.04 last night, and didn't have to play with drivers or installer freezing. I did find the monitor plugged in to HDMI was being discovered sometimes so switched to DP and works. Will see how gaming goes and citrix workspace when I have more time!
> I've been on Arch for 2 years now after seeing the cancer that is Windows 11. Ads and "news" on your desktop, garbage free to play games preinstalled or linked to.
Region dependent. Thanks to GDPR, you don't see any of this if you pick an EU region or "World" when installing Windows.
> It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
Non native games run well in Linux nowaday, but will always run better without Vulkan or any translation layer.
I have a cheap samsung laptop with an intel iris gpu. Not a proper gaming laptop. This was an emergency replacement for a broken macbook a few years ago. It came with windows and I booted it once to download a manjaro image and put it on a usb stick. Long story short, I'm back on a mac for work and the laptop is now used for some light gaming. Steam installation on Manjaro was easy. It's basically arch linux and that's the same OS that the Steam Deck is using under the hood. It works great. I'm actually considering getting something a bit beefier at some point. Possibly with some VR goggles. I'm pretty happy with Linux, and not having to deal with Windows is very nice.
The nice thing with lots of users now doing this is that it is becoming important for game developers to ensure their stuff is supported on Linux as well. That used to be something that few developers cared about but this is actually turning into a large enough chunk of users that most of them will probably want to make sure their stuff works. And the good news is that it is not that hard. It mostly just boils down to testing and fixing bugs. There's no good reason for them to not do that. Even if it's just 1 or 2 percent of users, that represents some serious revenue for some of these games.
Apple apparently is paying attention because they launched their game porting toolkit over the summer. Which, despite the name, is actually quite similar to Proton. Early days but it looks like MS is losing their monopoly on PC gaming. I run X-plane 12 on my M1 macbook occasionally. It's a pretty capable machine. It would be interesting to see if Valve is planning something for Macs now. It's a nice market. Lots of wealthy users that think nothing of spending a few dollars in the app store.
Interesting you mentioned using X-plane 12 on your M1. I had considered doing the same. Currently play MS Flight Simulator sometimes via XBox Cloud Gaming, over a VPN to Nicaragua. It isn't bad, but X-plane seems like it could be better for me.
I remember being pleasantly surprised at how much gaming mileage I could get out of my 2014 MacBook Pro with Intel graphics. A huge proportion of Unity-engine games, for one thing, ran just fine, some even at high graphics (which, they still looked kinda crappy, but still). No contemporary AAA gaming possible, but plenty of big games worked great (Minecraft!)
And the M-series chips are on a whole other level than those were. I wish... any amount of my gaming library could run on them.
One thing I didn't see mentioned here (or the article) that I discovered recently is the "Heroic" game launcher that works in Linux. It lets you start and run GOG and Epic games on Linux. GOG has some Linux stuff, but Epic is allergic to anything but Windows.
It looks like Heroic sets up your wine environment for each game.
I've only installed one game from that, but it seems to work pretty well. Very slick too.
While it is incredible how far these compatibility layers have come, I've been working a lot with getting old games running on modern Windows and I'm continuously impressed at how few barriers there are. The amount of backwards compatibility built into the platform is staggering.
I would like to also shout out other projects like dgVoodoo, dxWnd, IPXWrapper, and the massive amount of work that's gone into sites like WSGF and PCGamingWiki. I've yet to run into a game I can't get working (and I've been going into some pretty obscure stuff) and the amount of work put into preservation is heartwarming to say the least.
The Wine/DXVK stack has been fantastic for older games too. Skifree, Windows Solitaire, Space Cadet Pinball and Desktop Destroyer all work fine on non-native systems, which is probably one of the prerequisites for world peace. Kudos to everyone for keeping our boomer shooters and pointless timewasters working on modern machines!
On the topic of compatibility of old games, it's worth noting that Linux's wine is also very good when it comes to running old Windows software and games. In a retro gaming group I frequent, we sometimes find that our chosen old Windows game-of-the-month offers a better default experience under wine. Not to suggest that one or other platform is superior overall in that respect, but it's sufficiently close that either is capable of nudging a nose in front at least some of the time.
My son played a CD ROM game from like 1998 by my just ripping to an ISO and mounting on Win 10. The print button in the game even printed to our modern printer.
While I understand what you are saying, there really has been a phase shift from "By default, I expect a given game to not work in Linux" to "By default, I expect a given game to work in Linux".
Not being a multiplayer game kind of guy, my Steam Deck currently runs all but one of my Steam games, according to ProtonDB scanning my collection. They don't all play well on the Steam Deck itself due to input expectations mismatch, but they run. This is definitely a non-trivial change in the past few years versus what it was like, say, ten years ago. I no longer even check before installing a game and have to remind myself I really ought to check before purchasing, because it's so rarely a concern anymore.
I love using linux as my daily driver but it's simply not usable for the games I care most about. GSync does not work if you have more than one monitor on X11 (or at all on wayland). I wish someone or some organization would put more pressure on NVidia to fix Gsync for wayland.
That's true. On Jan 12 of 1999 you could have said "there has never been a better time to game on Linux" and you would have been correct.
That said, remember the Ouya? That was probably the first successful console running Linux. I don't count the PS3's Linux mode because that wasn't for gaming.
Stadia died, but the same technology is still being run by Microsoft and Nvidia, so Linux compatibility isn't as much of a problem if you're okay with cloud gaming.
This is the equivalent of an ad claiming that something is the leading brand of pomegranate pickles when all brands of pomegranate pickles have pathetic sales. It can be as good as it's ever been and still be pretty terrible, as long as it's been even worse in the past.
Praising Gaben as the patron saint of PC gaming started out as a meme, and actually became reality. Hard to name a single other individual more responsible for the golden age we're in.
Valve getting involved. Proton. SteamDB. The progress that's been made over the past couple of years is absolutely amazing. For a huge number of games and gamers, Linux is so close to being considered a viable option.
The big problem is that the games that don't work now are for political / financial reasons more than technical reasons--notably incompatible anti-cheat systems or developer refusal to enable the Linux support for their chosen anti-cheat. And these aren't small titles either: PUBG Battlegrounds, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Genshin Impact, just to name a few.
I play a variety of games and I would love to boot back into my Arch system as my main daily driver. But, I'm sadly still forced to keep Windows around because my desire to get off of Windows isn't as strong as my desire to continue to play some of my favorite games.
The one major exception to this is VR Gaming. I have yet to get Oculus Link to work on Linux and that kills off any hope of getting Steam VR games to work on the headset. I game almost exclusively on Linux, but do reboot into Windows when I want to run a VR title.
To be fair, the Oculus Link is also janky on Windows and breaks sometimes when they re-engineer the account system again and require an incredibly complicated and confusing linking/merging/re-synchronizing step that you just kinda keep doing until it finally works.
The only other thing I would add is that several games break due to missing codecs, but you can fix this by installing a Glorious Eggroll Proton profile.
I made the switch from Win 10 to Ubuntu 22.04 for gaming about a year ago. I play mostly 2D games on Steam and have had zero issues. Anecdotal of course, but most titles I've tried recently either have a native Linux build or work perfectly on Proton (e.g. Stardew Valley, Starbound, Terraria, Core Keeper, Aground, Cryofall, Bejeweled 3)
I do a fair bit of desktop Linux gaming with both Steam and Epic (via the heroic launcher) and really, it mostly just works.
I've played death stranding, GTA v, doom eternal, and tons of indies end to end without fuss. I have a dual boot but can very seldom be hassled enough to use it. Cyberpunk runs well enough in proton that I haven't even tried it on windows. Likewise with twitchy 'frame count matters' fighting games like king of fighters and melty-blood.
My silly dream is that the wine-supported subset of win32/dx becomes the target for game devs.
That is, if it doesn't work in wine, what shambolic code atrocity exactly have they committed?
Linux itself is a pretty fun game, right? Like I'm trying right now to figure out why samba won't work for my ntfs partitions (I have it installed side-by-side with Windows). And I have to tell you, this game is not for some average gamer. It sometimes can be quite hardcore :)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadImagine booting your computer and having to give an email to login offline.
Then you click on a link and it auto opens through edge, "DO YOU WANT TO IMPORT AND GIVE US YOUR PRIVACY?"
Or imagine you try to uninstall some microsoft app, it doesn't let you, you try to remove it thorugh the registry but the top 10 results on google are outdated with a different windows.
2 hours later, your computer reboots automatically during a windows update. Everything is turned off, you are dealing with autosaves, you re-open your browser and tons of tabs open slowly.
Finally you save some files in your local documents pictures folder, and start getting nagged about not having enough space in OneDrive. No big deal I don't use that. Lets delete OneDrive. Oh my god I lost all of my files.
I'm not saying you are wrong but I can also wrote about anecdotal experiences about Linux and spending hours in the terminal fixing problems, googling forums for hours and such.
But I get it, it's an easy ragebait on HN and works all the time
Nothing is preinstalled and the rest (like the update policy) takes like 10 minutes to set up maximum. I mean I'd spend the same time on other OSes well setting up after a fresh install
It also loves to reboot on its own has no respect for anything I am doing.
dwm.exe and explorer.exe leaking GPU memory for years too. Go to Task Manager > Details > Right click the details column > Add graphics memory. Sort by top users. You'll see that both of these processes are leaking GPU memory like there is no tomorrow.
Nowadays, I always have to kill both and have them respawn before any gaming on Windows.
https://i.imgur.com/mMyQdH0.png
What GPU and driver you are using?
As much as I hate what modern Windows has become, this is not actually true. If you know the correct sequence of clicks you can avoid this. Not defending this bullshit, though.
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
Destiny, R6, cod, etc refuse to support Linux.
we are getting there, and i look forward to a glorious future where we can kick the pile of dogshit that is Windows to the curb, but that day ain't today.
I use Windows 10 LTSC now for my gaming PC.
Finding this out over the course of a few evenings though wouldn't have been possible without my extensive previous linux experience.
It's very very very quickly getting there and soon these things will be ironed out.
Let's not declare victory too soon and have tons of people angry they deleted their windows and now can't get linux to work for playing their multiplayer games with DRM/anti-cheat though.
GNU/Linux has come far since I first started, my Radeon HD7770 first needed the proprietary garbage driver to run, which was a pain; but ever since it got supported in AMDGPU it was smooth sailing. I have an R7 card now and it also just works under AMDGPU. Meanwhile my roommate running Windows 11 had a bunch of pictures in her 'My Pictures' directory, got a message from MS saying 'oh, your OneDrive is nearly full', and when I removed the files from her OD, the bastards had the gall to remove them from her PC. Like, she has a 1TB SSD, why would you try to sync files on it to a 5GB cloud storage? And then she naively said 'oh, maybe I should just pay to get more storage', and I flipped my lid.
So yeah, 'a couple of games don't really work' is not a very convincing argument compared to the anti-user hostility MS exhibits in my opinion. But then, I could be wrong.
All it takes is one game for some people, see console exclusives.
Preach. Say it loud so the folks in the back can hear.
Eventually dual boot gets annoying as well. So most people just get two boxes linked via a kvm and run linux on the older box and windows on the new box. Or they give up gaming altogether.
Though I've been refunding games that don't run on proton sometimes as well, because dual booting does indeed get annoying! Perhaps, if missing out on the Deck userbase isn't a motivator enough, we can add some more lost revenue to the motivators convincing devs to use cross-platform or ideally linux-native environments.
Or I'll just stop gaming. Parasite publishers have ruined most of the fun I get from video games the past decade or so, and their product certainly isn't good enough to convince me to go through 5+ ads every time I boot windows for the experience.
OneDrive your user dir(Desktop, Documents) to the cloud, Outlook feeding your mails to the cloud.
All this will be used against people to sell more targeted ads and other BS.
It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
I would enjoy it if all games had first party linux support and I could switch to it permanently, but at the moment gaming on windows has several pros and negligible cons compared to gaming on linux. Not sure how you're coming to the conclusion that linux is far superior for gaming.
And I don't have to worry about Windows updates reverting the "15 min changes", or deciding that I need credits to use notepad.
What does this mean?
They're not charging for notepad today, but you never know.
Beyond that it’s a matter of principle. Why would I use an OS where the company wants to farm me for ad revenue. I am not livestock. If I pay for it, that’s an even bigger slap in the face.
I'm glad 15 minutes has been your experience. For me, who does not use Windows at all for other purposes, it has taken considerably longer than 15 minutes to figure out where all the settings are to disable and uninstall annoyances. As somebody who stopped using Windows in the XP era, none of the settings are where I remember them being more than a decade ago when I last seriously used that OS for anything.
Since I'd only use Windows for gaming, there's also a non-trivial amount of time spent rebooting into Windows, and the slight annoyance of having to either keep a remote desktop tool open or a laptop nearby if I wanted to do something else on the computer other than launch a game.
And since my gaming computer is custom built, there's also a non-trivial expense of purchasing a Windows license.
The one compromise I have considered is keeping a dedicated Windows gaming PC in a closet and using Steam Link so I can actually play the games on my preferred device, whether it's at my desk or on the TV. It doesn't solve everything I mentioned above but at least it gets closer to the set-it-and-forget-it approach you've taken.
That said, I'm generally more comfortable adapting to whatever random version of a window manager and desktop a Linux distribution ships with than putting up with the "everything is AI now!" "now with more ads!" "find things only via search!" type things that show up in the Windows UX.
Use something like Shutup10 and Chris Titus' utility.
Also the fact that they're ads. That's a problem, too. Basically the whole thing is one big downside for everyone who isn't in adtech or trying to sell you shit you otherwise wouldn't buy.
https://docs.atlasos.net/faq-and-troubleshooting/removed-fea...
"Performance: By Removing unnecessary components, disabling power-saving features, and optimizing services."
"Privacy: By eliminating Microsoft's notorious tracking, pre-installed apps, and bloatware, you can feel confident when using Atlas."
Github link https://github.com/atlas-os/atlas
I use this on my gaming PC. Works well for me.
I have a Pop!OS box and it was a little work to set up. I was mostly pleased with the result, though. Steam experimental Proton had a wide range of my games library compared to regular Proton. I did run into major bugs running some of those games, but it was good for scratching a nostalgia itch.
Maybe for a small sub-set of games, but for the vast majority you're running them on Win32 and DX compatibility layers that each have overhead. Sometimes a lot.
It really doesn't matter. You're talking theoretical benchmarks, when in reality the only thing that matters to someone playing is 60fps@4k. For a compatible game, any Linux machine is equally capable of acheiving that through Proton with a sufficient GPU. Particularly for Nvidia, where the linux drivers are equally as good or better than Windows at this point.
Add "treating its users with respect" to the mix and Linux seems to be the better choice. It sure is good enough for me.
I play all my games on my PC, they work flawlessly save for 2 exceptions. Diablo 4 Beta took some tinkering, but I got it going after 20mins. Fortnite won't run because their anticheat isn't compatible, because Epic don't want it to be.
Proton/Linux can exceed Windows 11 performance, and is otherwise very close. The difference on my system is negligible.
https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distributio...
I'm curious if you've actually, you know, tried linux with proton/wine at all in the last three years. Things have really changed since the Deck. You might wanna try updating your opinion to reflect reality; performance is less an issue than one-off compat issues by far in most circumstances in my experience, IE I'm more likely to have to make config changes to deal with a crash than I am to have a huge disparity in FPS/load times/stuttering/frame dropping between linux and windows.
First of all, I play games daily on my M1 Mac and have gamed on linux and older Intel Macs since around 2007. I'm very familiar with the compatibility layers that go into running Windows games on non-Windows systems. Wine, ESync, MSync, WineD3D, MoltenVK, DXVK, VKD3D, GPTK, Rosetta 2, winetricks, CrossOver, CXPatcher, Whisky, PlayCover, Parallels Desktop; these are all things I have used to let me play ~8/10 of the games I want to play. That is, ~20% of the games I want to play simply don't work at all outside of Windows mostly due to either anti-cheat, or using DX APIs that aren't implemented in the compatibility layers. Most of them perform noticeably worse than Windows, and that's after googling for an hour and applying the random performance hacks/tweaks.
Windows games are designed and built, from the hardware APIs to the shaders, to run on Windows. It is only with a very curious definition of "far superior" that getting a tiny percentage of games to run a few FPS better is a true statement.
Playing Windows games on linux is not "far superior" than running them on Windows.
From Steam you browse to a game then click install, and it just works.
The guy you were replying to meant it was far superior in terms of experience, not being forced to view shitty ads and deal with other Windows 11 obnoxious garbage.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/221180/Eufloria_HD/
Running the Windows build via Proton works fine. That being said, this particular game has a Linux build anyway, so it's kind of a moot point (for now). ;)
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-scores-dead-last-in...
"Not even close" is inaccurate.
You can't pick an enthusiast distro and then complain when you have to be... well, an _enthusiast_.
The earlier series (4xx through to 525) were pretty solid though, and the latest series (545) is pretty solid too.
Any idea if you might have been unlucky and installed the 535 series drivers last time around?
Region dependent. Thanks to GDPR, you don't see any of this if you pick an EU region or "World" when installing Windows.
> It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
Non native games run well in Linux nowaday, but will always run better without Vulkan or any translation layer.
The nice thing with lots of users now doing this is that it is becoming important for game developers to ensure their stuff is supported on Linux as well. That used to be something that few developers cared about but this is actually turning into a large enough chunk of users that most of them will probably want to make sure their stuff works. And the good news is that it is not that hard. It mostly just boils down to testing and fixing bugs. There's no good reason for them to not do that. Even if it's just 1 or 2 percent of users, that represents some serious revenue for some of these games.
Apple apparently is paying attention because they launched their game porting toolkit over the summer. Which, despite the name, is actually quite similar to Proton. Early days but it looks like MS is losing their monopoly on PC gaming. I run X-plane 12 on my M1 macbook occasionally. It's a pretty capable machine. It would be interesting to see if Valve is planning something for Macs now. It's a nice market. Lots of wealthy users that think nothing of spending a few dollars in the app store.
And the M-series chips are on a whole other level than those were. I wish... any amount of my gaming library could run on them.
It looks like Heroic sets up your wine environment for each game.
I've only installed one game from that, but it seems to work pretty well. Very slick too.
I would like to also shout out other projects like dgVoodoo, dxWnd, IPXWrapper, and the massive amount of work that's gone into sites like WSGF and PCGamingWiki. I've yet to run into a game I can't get working (and I've been going into some pretty obscure stuff) and the amount of work put into preservation is heartwarming to say the least.
Not being a multiplayer game kind of guy, my Steam Deck currently runs all but one of my Steam games, according to ProtonDB scanning my collection. They don't all play well on the Steam Deck itself due to input expectations mismatch, but they run. This is definitely a non-trivial change in the past few years versus what it was like, say, ten years ago. I no longer even check before installing a game and have to remind myself I really ought to check before purchasing, because it's so rarely a concern anymore.
That said, remember the Ouya? That was probably the first successful console running Linux. I don't count the PS3's Linux mode because that wasn't for gaming.
https://www.openra.net/
The big problem is that the games that don't work now are for political / financial reasons more than technical reasons--notably incompatible anti-cheat systems or developer refusal to enable the Linux support for their chosen anti-cheat. And these aren't small titles either: PUBG Battlegrounds, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Genshin Impact, just to name a few.
I play a variety of games and I would love to boot back into my Arch system as my main daily driver. But, I'm sadly still forced to keep Windows around because my desire to get off of Windows isn't as strong as my desire to continue to play some of my favorite games.
To be fair, the Oculus Link is also janky on Windows and breaks sometimes when they re-engineer the account system again and require an incredibly complicated and confusing linking/merging/re-synchronizing step that you just kinda keep doing until it finally works.
The only other thing I would add is that several games break due to missing codecs, but you can fix this by installing a Glorious Eggroll Proton profile.
“There’s never been a better time to be homeless”
I've played death stranding, GTA v, doom eternal, and tons of indies end to end without fuss. I have a dual boot but can very seldom be hassled enough to use it. Cyberpunk runs well enough in proton that I haven't even tried it on windows. Likewise with twitchy 'frame count matters' fighting games like king of fighters and melty-blood.
My silly dream is that the wine-supported subset of win32/dx becomes the target for game devs.
That is, if it doesn't work in wine, what shambolic code atrocity exactly have they committed?