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Comment by coolnow | Hacker News Reader

Okay, tell me how i can play all my Steam games then (no, not just the Source Engine ones).

personally I took it as an opportunity to finally try out VT-d gaming... so Linux on the bare metal, and Windows tightly locked down in a VM (on a separate vlan).

MS are free to spy on me playing X-COM, but they won't be getting anything else...

How goes vt-d gaming? I was investigating if it was possible to pass through the igpu using VMware but never could get a straight answer.

I've had two problems: crackling audio and NVIDIA's driver coming up with strange errors.

the former was fixed by buying a cheap PCI-E soundcard and passing it through (line-in'ed to the primary soundcard), and the latter by twiddling some QEMU flags, as NVIDIA want you to buy the $4000 quadro... my next card will be AMD, who don't do this sort of BS.

now it's all sorted it works like a dream, you wouldn't know it's in a VM.

Cool. Do you have a writeup of your setup somewhere? Maybe I'll investigate this more over Christmas break.

1) wine is quite good these days. It has played far more than Source Engine games for like 5+ years. Ever since steam went to Linux and the Unity engine became popular, compatibility problems became much less common even on new games.

2) If you are always going to rank playing games as more important than spyware, then you're an easy mark. If you aren't willing to make a few sacrifices to invest in your future, then you're made your decision. Why do you care about spyware if games are more important?

The costs of leaving are only going to get worse with time. I recommend paying these costs now instead of waiting for the problem to get worse.

The problem with wine in this case is that it currently can't work with anything using DX11/12, many (if not most) of the big name titles coming out on PC these days are unusable on wine because of that.

2 is actually a decent reason to try to change, given that Valve is trying to get more venders to SteamOS it might just be start to make a difference.

Linux gaming is getting better and better. Yes, we have a few sacrifices to make in the form of not getting to play every mainstream title, but many of the ones worth your time have great Linux versions, and if not, they might run well in Wine.

I wiped Windows nine months ago and installed Arch. The only things I missed were Dark Souls and Insurgency.

I found out a week ago that Dark Souls runs like butter in Wine, and Insurgency just got native Linux support the other day. I am a happy Linux gamer.

As for the titles that choose to avoid supporting my operating system, well I guess I won't be supporting them with my dollars.

Do you have any issues with drivers for things like mice, keyboards, joysticks?

I have a RAT5 mouse and am X-55 Rhino HOTAS for Elite: Dangerous and as far as I am aware, there are no drivers for these under Linux.

>Why do you care about spyware if games are more important?

I use my Windows machine for gaming only, whereas the rest of my computing is split between my MacBook and iPad.

Same here, except Debian/Arch for all my non-gaming computing activities.

Did you know Steam spy's on you? It saves your keystrokes (In steam instant messages) and tells people what game you are playing!

But you are opting in for that service.

Steam records your gameplay statistics, and it is something you have agreed to.

It's not even remotely comparable to what MS is doing with Windows.

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