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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

You know more than 1000 great games can run on Linux thanks to the Steam Deck. And the movement of Linux gaming has gotten a lot of traction. Just saying...

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Honestly dual-booting with Linux and Windows on your workstation is perfectly feasible nowadays. Just treat the Windows partition as your "game console" and only use it for games (and avoid the hassle of WINE). Otherwise do everything else on the Linux side. If you want you can use disk encryption and VLANs to segregate the Windows install for security/privacy reasons.

Obviously if you need other Windows applications like Photoshop or Office this mentality doesn't work, but I've convinced people who want Linux and games to go this route. They just treat the Windows partition like an Xbox or Playstation.

There are downsides. First, it's an advanced technique not recommended for novices (too easy to destroy one OS or the other). Second, Windows will want to install updates every time you boot into it. I generally recommend... just having to computers.

Another big downside is that restarting is annoying, you can't easily switch between different things you want to do (like say run a script while you wait for something in a game), and maintaining 2 systems is more hassle. That's why I just use WSL on my PC nowadays (though I have just Linux on my laptop).

That's why part of this is the mentality of treating the Windows partition as a game console - it's a seperate system from your main Linux workspace (generally when you play on your game console you're at your TV and not working at your computer as well). If you really want to do both at once then dual-booting is not the solution for you.

I wonder if there could be a novice friendly "distro" that merely acts as a switch between operating systems. Like a fuller featured prettier GRUB. What can be done to make dual booting as easy for novices as possible?

For years I've been dreaming of a thin hypervisor as an OS that allows me to easily change what resources I give to multiple opened VMs (e.g. a Windows and Linux one) without closing anything.

Or you could stop giving money to companies that make it harder for you to migrate, and give the money to companies that make it easier... It's indeed possible to buy a different game, or even not buy a game at all!

Yeah but it's the prisoner's dilemma, unless everyone else also quits using Windows, you're just causing yourself pain.

Except it doesn't have to be painful, and it is (for me at least) be very rewarding and much better than Windows.

And it's just entertainment.

A modern fork of Wubi with the support of UEFI exists and works perfectly fine https://github.com/hakuna-m/wubiuefi

> Honestly dual-booting with Linux and Windows on your workstation is perfectly feasible nowadays.

I’m confused by the word “nowadays”. I had a friend with a dual-booting setup between Windows and Linux in the 90s.

I don't do anything graphics intensive in windows so a Windows virtual machine works fine for 99.9% of the things I need windows to do. Just throw some more memory in your machine.

I always find it amusing when people on HN say the only reason they keep using Windows is because of the games.

30 years ago, the mantra in the tech world was "Businesses use Microsoft. People only use Apple for games."

Sorry, 30 years ago (1992) the PC already had Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima VII. It was mind-blowing, but all the good games were already on the PC platform with some Amiga die-hards still lamenting the tragedy of their platform’s fading relevance. Macs we’re by no means a gaming platform even then.

No, back then we associated Macs with artists, little children via school funding, and the elderly. People that didn’t want to get their hands dirty, think about careful memory configurations, or bolting in new power supplies. They weren’t associated with technical people much less programmers, and certainly nobody into games cared about them at the time. Myst was the only game I remember on mac, and that was in 1993, and it was lame. Would you rather be running and gunning down 3D hallways shooting nazis or watching still photos thinking about a puzzle? I mean, it had its place but no comparison.

That was before Apple became hostile to game developers by inventing Metal and refusing to support OpenGL past v4.3 or something. Actually they tried in the 2000s with Quicktime 3D also. And Apple always had last-gen GPUs in their machines. And let's not forget that they made it difficult to write games in C++, as ever since OS X the core APIs have required an Objective-C wrapper. Ah well.

It's about hearts and minds. Young people get accustomed to Windows long before they enter the corporate world.

Partly through school these days but it used to be mostly due to gaming when I was growing up.

Making it harder to introduce Linux in a corporate setting. We're in it for the long con ;)

Games aren't fungible, especially when it comes to multiplayer with friends.

Yeah I don't think that there are 1,000 "great" games in the universe.

That's great and all, but irrelevant if the game I want to play doesn't run or run well on Linux. I have friends, I'd like to play with them. They certainly do not care about Linux proselytizing, when at the end of the day after work, all they want to do is play games, but fiddle around with why some update broke a game that previously worked via Proton.

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