Comment by kup0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kup0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm about to embark on a journey myself of abandoning Windows(11) completely on my primary/gaming PC. The way I use the PC I'm prepared to deal with the trade-offs (and I'm making a backup, but trying to make it not super "easy" to run back to Windows, that way I commit to Linux for a while). Might document this whole process.

Proton/etc isn't 100% there yet- but it's doing so well at this point, I want to experience the trade-offs and see if I can live with them. Always can go back to Windows as a last resort.

I do know some trade-offs already, from my test-runs (done via dual-booting). Proton + controller vibration issues might be the top issue for me. In Rocket League vibrations happen- but like 2-3 seconds after the feedback should have happened- making vibration useless as a feedback mechanism.

I have tons and tons of games installed- many I've tried work flawlessly on Linux so far (or with easy adjustments from suggestions on ProtonDB).

I'm sure there are games I may completely lose out on- and that's what I want to experience for myself- if those gaps are fine- or maybe if committing will actually help prod me to be part of the feedback/dev/etc communities trying to improve gaming on Linux for everyone.

Either way, this is all personal hardware- work laptops are separate- so this should be a fun experiment with very little downside- I don't do anything critical on my primary home PC that requires Windows

I upgraded to 11 on my laptop and I hate it. I am so glad I still have 10 on my desktop. I'll hold off as long as possible. This is coming from a daily Windows user for almost 30 years now. I use Linux a lot as well but Windows has always been the home desktop PC OS.

I forced 11 to be more like 10 to make it work for me, used various utilities/etc to have a custom taskbar/start menu, bring back normal right-click context menus, etc. So, there are ways to force 11 to work better for you- I agree users shouldn't have to go to those lengths, but the options are there. After those changes, it was close enough to 10 to not bother me.

But after trialing Linux for a while, there is so much I enjoy about it. Things are so snappy. Built in screenshot tools are so much better. So many options for utilities and small little apps that just do one thing well. Theming/customizing is great. Sure it all has its quirks, but compared to Windows it's a breath of fresh air. Respectful OS update systems (no forced restarts).

I feel like even the networking efficiency of the OS itself feels better. For instance, on Windows 11, even with 300mbps internet connection- if I download a large file in browser window A while watching a Twitch video in browser window B- the Twitch video will hiccup and buffer/etc. For some reason this never happened to me on Linux. I don't know if it's just doing better internal QoS-like things at an OS level, or if I got lucky? But it was an awesome, noticeable difference.

Same with opening many tabs at once. If I want to open a folder of 10-20 bookmarks- on Windows, doing that while watching a video causes the video to stutter for a couple of seconds. Again, this is on a 300mbps connection, 10th gen i7, GTX 3070, NVME-drive system. On Linux- I can open like 50 tabs at once with no hiccups at all. Amazing.

That's why I think the time has come for me to make the full switchover. That, and Proton's increasing maturity (and even ability to quickly work for some new titles, like Elden Ring).

How's the 3070 going on Linux? I've been away from desktop Linux since ~2006 or so but find myself extremely tempted to go back lately, just I have a 3070 too (with a mild undervolt so it doesn't sound like a leaf blower) and have always heard negative things about Nvidia drivers and performance over there.

It worked well for me. I've heard the same stories and understand in some cases a the better version of a driver ends up being an older one, instead of the latest, so there are some quirks. But the games I tried all got great performance.

Experience will vary widely by game, however. From the lookups I've done on ProtonDB so far, I do understand in some titles I may lose some fps- but it's yet to have been a big enough hit to bother me

> I don't know if it's just doing better internal QoS-like things at an OS level, or if I got lucky?

Quite a few linux distros do have QoS on network interfaces by default - eg my current linux desktop has fq_codel on physical network interfaces out of the box.

Wow, interesting. I had been considering building a pfsense/opnsense box to get fq_codel on my network to help solve issues like the ones I was seeing, didn't occur to me it would already be enabled within Linux distros- that def might explain my different experience on Linux then

If you run `ip addr show`, you should be able to see. For me, that shows:

2: enp3s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000

fq_codel is the default on linux, osx, and ios now. It "just works" at line rates. It's also part of the linux wifi stack for a half dozen chipsets. It's not visible via qdisc as it's at the wifi layer: https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ but works brilliantly. No configuration needed, all the noise you hear on the internet about cake and fq_codel is the costs of setting up a shaper.

If more ISPs ran at the line rate of the interface, and shipped fq_codel or cake by default (it's the shaper that costs 95% of the cpu, not these algorithms), our intertubes would be a lot better. Sadly most are shipping 7+ year old kernels.

Bit of a late reply, but thank you for your work on bufferbloat & better queuing and shaping.

It makes such a difference to internet usage!

I ended up disabling TPM on my computers (in the BIOS) so that they would not try to automatically upgrade me to Windows 11. I'm fine where I am and if Windows 12 comes out (or patches to Windows 11) which fix the issues I'm concerned about then I might switch.

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