Effort ? That repo consists of a few Windows Registry tweaks and some bundled 3rd party installers. Not exactly ground breaking engineering that could have been better deployed to improve SteamOS/Linux....
The bloatware is minimal, mostly removable without adverse impacts and the UI has improved markedly. Windows 11's support for TPM root of trust is a great step forward, and the settings screens actually feel very logically laid out now.
Winget, while not anything revolutionary if you're coming from Linux or even Mac/homebrew, is decent - and fills out a big missing piece for technical users that have missed this functionality.
I don't see it as a sinking ship at all, but maybe I'm being really naive (and I mean that sincerely).
Oh fuck no it hasn't. The UI is actually what's stopping me from upgrading to Win11.
Win11 is trying to be macOS with its UI, and that's a bug, not a feature, because I fucking hate everything about macOS's UI.
I hate multiple windows from a program coalescing into a single icon on the task bar. I hate the task bar not including text from windows. I hate that I can't have a task bar on multiple monitors. And I just generally hate how flat everything looks. What I hate most of all, is that Microsoft has decided to go the Apple way and disallow you from choosing what you want it to look like. There are no options to make it look like it used to.
IMO, Windows UI peaked with Win2K. When I used Win7, I used the classic theme. I use Win10 now, and use WindowBlinds to skin it to look like Win2K.
The one thing you’ve called out that I can’t refute is that the option to customise it to the win2k look has been taken away, but I imagine it gets harder to maintain the further they move from those metaphors (e.g. you already needed to use WindowBlinds on 10).
I really like the new UI. The window snapping is far better than it’s been previously. It takes quite a bit from macOS, but I think they’ve left the worst parts of macOS out like the horrific monstrosity of a settings screen and the janky mess of a permissions system.
Certainly.
The problem I have though is that one of the reasons I use Windows is because it's not Mac.
Really, the only reason I'm still on Windows is because I'm a gamer and many multiplayer games don't work in Linux because the anti-cheat software isn't compatible. But the changes in Win11 make me stick with Win10, which is a shame because the current gen of Intel CPUs use two types of cores, and the Thread Director technology isn't going to be ported to Win10, so I'm either stuck with my i9-9900K or I switch to AMD.
On W11 you have TPM/ROT, centralised app signing (that you can enable/disable as you prefer), DirectX 12 (I realise this wouldn't matter if everything was on Vulkan, but it's not).
Proton is great, and Linux has only gotten more user-friendly over time, but there's still some touch points that are either stubbornly still not addressed or just won't be addressed because they're antithetical to FOSS (again, TPM and central signing authorities).
Side note: A central signing authority would be really helpful in the Linux world, maybe run/funded by a consortium of Linux-using orgs (Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Red Hat). I'm surprised this hasn't been attempted already as it would be protective of those organisations massive cloud investments, too.
Seth Arnold wrote about this about ten years ago, touching on the problems back in 2.4.3 that prevented this from gaining traction: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732927/signed-executabl....
It should be noted some of those weaknesses still apply to W11 and macOS even now. I would think WASM (coupled with a minimal runtime like Wasmer) might provide a means to deal with this issue by signing the packaged sandbox and everything in it rather than worry about the internals of the language and what it loads (in that it can't load/touch anything outside the sandbox boundary anyway).
UPDATE: Hadn't realised this has now been started (https://www.sigstore.dev/).
Windows is what most gamers use and need
NVidia and AMD usually design their GPUs together with Microsoft, OpenGL and Vulkan then play catchup with extension spaghetti until some subset of it gets available as standard feature.
https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php
https://opengl.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php
At least with Vulkan they learned why proprietary APIs have profiles.
Didn't know Vulkan had them too. TIL.
https://www.protondb.com/explore
This is a list of games (by default sorted by popularity) and their compatibility with Linux. Some games work great, but there are major games like PUBG and Destiny 2 that don't work at all. Some major games like Apex Legends require tweaking to work.
If you're a hardcore gamer, then you need Windows because the games need Windows.
Though this may slowly change over time since Valve put out the Steam Deck which runs Linux.
Most single player games work well, most multiplayer games don't.
Both are very valid ways to play games, but it can give different gamers very different experiences with what's supported.
You can be a hardcore gamer and not play any of those.
There are very different type of gamers out there, don't forget about us, people who play single players!
For instance: VR on Linux is still a shit show, with only one company kinda supporting it and not doing a very good job of it at that.
> They fully support Linux
No power management for base stations, the Index camera doesn't work, asynchronous reprojection causes issues, no automatic audio switching, and a host of other little issues.
Yup, fully supported.
With the incredible success of the Steam Deck, PC game publishers would be stupid to ignore it.
VR isn’t there yet, but VR isn’t a massive industry anyways. And besides, Valve is the PC VR company. Anyone predicting that VR is never going to work well on Linux is being foolish. As soon as Valve decides to allocate resources to Linux VR, the problem will be solved. And they have every incentive to do so, since they’re clearly all in on Linux gaming.
Sorry man, this is false, most games have anti-cheat that simply won't work with linux out of the box, you may get titles a year later (early depending on sales performance) and the ones you get rarely work perfectly out of the box.
The only place the "vast majority" statement may hold is if you count the endless amounts of simplistic/indie games, and do not consider the highly rated, highest selling titles.
The steam deck surely is helping, can't argue against that, as is SteamOS in general, but we are far far away from parity between the operating systems.
My guess is you are thinking more of multiplayer gaming, where as they are thinking more about the singleplayer games.
Elden Ring, Spider-man, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Stray, etc all work great on Linux.
Single-player games don't typically need any sort of anti-cheat features, so usually work as expected easily.
Multiplayer games are a whole other issue though, and most of those (imo) do NOT work well on Linux at the moment.
And as for the games you listed I would not say they work great on linux, they require tweaking, adjustments, driver updates, switching to experimental builds, etc..
I am not saying gaming isn't possible on linux, I'm saying it isn't as easy, and the results are not on par out of the box with windows. And the things you have to do getting it working are going to typically be provided by game developer support, but by community members figuring it out, and then that having to trickle out to forums and the like.
ProtonDB would typically agree, you can look at the games you listed and see that many of them require specific adjustments to get decent frame rates, avoiding lag spikes, etc...
Now, given the option of having a gaming partition that runs windows and is only used for gaming, or trying to force the games to work on linux. What do you think the majority of gamers would rather even those who are privacy minded.
I'm hoping in the next 5 years are so that this will change, and that windows looses its grip on this market, but currently I don't see many people switching their platforms over what windows is doing.
This is false. Most games do not have anti-cheat systems because most games are not multiplayer games.
The trash that is the multi-player games add ons what has ruined tons of games and no just because of compatibility.
I believe so. I couldn't find statistics but going by the new releases on Steam and seeing the pre-existing releases, most games on Steam are single player games.
Like even now, you can check the games released in 2022 and see how many of them are multiplayer.
It is far easier to limit your ad experience, and have a dedicated windows gaming machine than it is to switch to linux for gaming.
https://www.protondb.com/explore
Of course, you'd know all this if you've ever tried to play on Linux yourself. You know what they say about people who live in glass houses.
And something working and something being supported are vastly different.
And this may come to a shock to you but many people who want to play games don't want to tweak setting to make that work on a unsupported operating system.
This isn't a case for can you do it, this is based around the vast majority of games work fine on Linux, I don't think the average gamer would include making game specific tweaks as fine.
By contrast, XP was very customizable. I used to like BBLean.
I'm sorry to hear that