> rarely a day goes by that I don't question how Microsoft manages to get anyone to buy that steaming pile they call an operating system.
"But muh games!"
"But muh games!"
The Windows filesystem has dismal performance. The Windows graphics stack is arguably better than Linux’s. And it’s not just the drivers, so you can’t just blame it on GPU vendors, though poor support from a certain popular GPU vendor definitely doesn’t help.
Some of it is just the little things, like doing mouse movement at very high priority in kernel space [1] [2]. Other parts are bigger and more impressive, like allowing the graphics driver to crash/upgrade/restart without you also losing all of your open windows.
[1]: https://reactos.org/wiki/Techwiki:Win32k/desktops#win32k.21P...
[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061117-03/?p=28...
With Linux, the main difference is whether your desktop is primarily Qt or GTK. Sometimes an app using the other toolkit will look kind of funny, but most of those differences are paved over by any competent distro (eg: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE...).
Couple decades ago for me.
> Yeah, 'cause the incredible fragmentation of Linux GUI toolkits and windowing systems is so fun to deal with.
Sounds like probably "never" for you. You seem hostile toward Linux, so you're probably better off sticking with whatever you use currently.
GUI toolkits are irrelevant to games.