Truly impressive stuff -- with Windows 11 being kind of terrible, I wonder if we'll soon reach an inflection point where Linux is the OS-of-choice for PC gaming.
Windows isn't without fault but at least for gaming I don't really have any complaints. I'm unconvinced that there's any upside to switching to Linux.
Using the Pro version of Windows seems to have solved most of that. I'm on Win10 Pro, and when people talk about ads, I have no idea what they're talking about.
None of that should have been forced on me, and I don't like it, but it's not incessant like everyone seems to say.
That's the only thing I have encountered though.
sudo sh -c "echo 1000000 > /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count"
echo vm.max_map_count=1000000 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/max_map_count.conf
sysctl -f /etc/sysctl.d/max_map_count.conf
This is an old benchmark, but still shows how good DXVK is for this title: https://youtu.be/voXc1nCD4IA
And yes, it still works with Overwatch 2. Did from Day 1, Blizzard must have had a Steam Deck dev kit or something.
I hope my last comment didn't come off as too hostile, it's a great time to experiment with Linux gaming now that the Deck is moving units! :)
I do quite a lot of my gaming on the Steam Deck these days, but have to keep a windows box around for this reason.
Sort of relatedly: does anyone know how well the Unreal Engine 5 editor works on Linux?
Gonna install Hunt and Day Z on the Deck today so I can stare at them in the launcher and imagine how much fun I would have if I could find the time to play them.
I wish people were a bit more sanguine and a bit less thinking wishfully about the real world performance of Proton. It is absolutely impressive, but "Playable" is not good enough of a rating; it's not even table stakes. There are bugs and manual interventions required on "playable" titles on proton DB that would lead to mass outrage and refunds if they behaved that way on their native platform.
"It can literally be played" is such a low bar.
my daily driver is PopOS and use proton for my games, i love it, but its not better, and the games do not play better on average in my experience. Nor is it fun having to do tinker steps when all i want to do is jump into the game
There's also a native Linux version of Kingpin by the way; the instructions start with "must run as root" so never mind... The 90s were wild.
Curious what you dislike about it - I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally. Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. I use it less and less these days, but it works great for me as a gaming OS.
Microsoft account horribleness eg: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-daughters-school-t...
Win key being unbindable for app specific shortcuts.
Windows update undoing all user preferences https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1504572255665201154?s=46...
Janky crashes: https://twitter.com/litherum/status/1279164544544157696?s=46...
Forced internet accounts: https://twitter.com/rianflo/status/1589346472335937536?s=46&...
I could go on. A lot of these i found just searching “windows update” amongst people i follow on twitter.
The grass isn't always greener. I just treat my PC as a dedicated gaming machine. Though these days the PS5 is becoming the more appealing option.
- fraction scaling: I don't need it
- Wayland: still using X
- hardware accel: I think that's true for chromium but IIRC there's a package with it and widevine (google-chrome-stablevon Arch AUR)
- nvidia: the AMD drivers are great and well supported (I've even been using ROCm to play with stable diffusion on my 6750XT)
- shooters: I mostly play strategy, puzzle, sim and 2D games. Haven't run into multiplayer issues yet but I'm sure there are some in the FPS genre with heavy DRM
Not for everyone but when I got my AMD card I stopped using my qemu virt-io VM w/ GPU passthrough and started using native steam with proton - much better experience all around and haven't booted windows ever since
There's nothing inherently wrong with having an out-of-tree kernel module; a lot of software has, including software that is open source but has an incompatible license.
As far as I remember (I'm not on Nvidia anymore, but I've been for many years), the Nvidia module was one or two minor versions behind the latest release kernel, which is very reasonable support - for example, stable distros like Ubuntu LTS, or OpenZFS, are always a bit behind as well. I've actually changed filesystem because of this, but I certainly don't blame the OpenZFS devs.
Sway/wlroots and KDE support the fractional scaling extension. Seems to be an experimental setting in Gnome for now.
> your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps
How I can't wait for old legacy X stuff to no longer be a question. I feel like it's mostly Zoom & other randos holding me back from never seeing X again. https://arewewaylandyet.com/ is looking generally pretty excellent.
> Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module
Vendors gonna do what a vendors gonna do. Chromium does have fine support. ChromeOS has been slowly ticking along adding their own support, which hopefully rolls-forward. https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/ozone-reviews/c/y...
Nvidia people say things have gotten better but also you bought a card from a company that has forever been adversarial.
I'll take "slightly less green" over "looking to subvert every choice you make".
- You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more
- The start menu is laggy now
- There are more ads and forced tracking integrated into the OS
I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff under the hood that got co-opted by whatever shortsighted idiot is in charge, but whatever it is, I'm not about to drop MacOS and linux to experience it
In one of the MS Office generations, perhaps Office 2000, they introduced "Personalized Menus" as a major innovation in attempt to make the software less overwhelming. The idea was that the menubar menus would only show the most-used menu items by default, and hide the rest behind a "More items" at the bottom. It would then learn usage patterns and adjust the menu contents over time.
The result: Menu options disappearing seemingly randomly. Stuff you used rarely but relied on sometimes would suddenly not be where you found it last time.
The Ribbon later was kind of a "it's not working, back to the drawing board" reaction to that.
It's an interesting lesson in how "pseudo-intelligent" software can come at the cost of predictability. I once had to design tab nickname completion in a chat app, and remembering the MS Office anecdote I made it so that prefix<tab> would complete to the most recently active user matching the prefix, but that subsequent <tab> presses would go through the rest alphabetically instead, which also made a lot more sense to the testers.
Assuming this is what you meant, you can re-align the taskbar icons from center back to left in Settings.
No, Windows 11 is a cargo cult. It imitates the look of an OS X dock (centered icons, no window titles, large icons etc) but not the parts that makes it properly functional. Have you tried to drag and drop an app to make a shortcut there? It doesn't work. For that matter, many modern windows 11 things do not understand the very notion of drag and drop.
By the way, the windows 11 taskbar has no quicklaunch. Without quicklaunch, you can't pin documents or folders to your taskbar.
Mac OS X allows you to drag anything to the dock. App, folders, documents. In the case of folders, clicking them will even show you the last modified files in a quick preview list. The dock can't do everything a windows taskbar can do, but it has its own advantages.
Windows 11's taskbar is, on the other hand, a dock with no advantages. There's nothing it does that makes it an improvement over what Windows 7 could already do (I cite windows 7 because it was the one that added most of the features that can make the taskbar feel more like OS X's dock, but those features, like grouped windows, were purely optional). You can't even have it on the sides of the screen anymore too. It was rewritten.. just for the sake of being rewritten. Developer churn at MS with no improvement on the user's side. Why?
I, as a person who has dealt for many reasons regularly with all the major desktop OSes, hate Windows 11 the most for how arbitrary the loss of features has felt. I hate it almost as much as I hate Gnome 3, but one advantage Gnome 3 has is that... you don't have to use it, Linux has a lot of real desktops. KDE, XFCE, LXDE, customized tilers..
Meanwhile, I feel like every step since 7 has been been a downgrade.
> Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better.
IMO, adopting patterns from OSX is a critical-severity bug, not a feature. Everything about the OSX UI is the worst thing I've ever used.
Microsoft is abandoning a large userbase that chooses to use Windows because it's not MacOS.
I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar. I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text. I hate how flat everything looks.
Screens are bigger and DPIs are higher, giving us more screen real estate than ever before, so why are we filling it with whitespace and hiding functionality?
I'm still on Win10, and I use WindowBlinds to make it look like Win7 Classic. When I eventually am forced to upgrade to Win11 when I upgrade my CPU, I'll be using WindowBlinds11 and Start11 to continue to keep Windows looking sane.
Hyperswitch solves that for good.
> I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text.
Not sure yet if I agree with that, given that HyperSwitch is giving me the best of both worlds - a window preview and window titles.
> I hate how flat everything looks.
Windows is honestly worse. The new Settings "app" is... blargh.
For me, the death of having a vertical taskbar makes an ultrawide display annoying. The centred-by-default icons of the taskbar kill muscle memory because opening applications moves icons along. Just seems an absurd thing. I could go on.
This information is not available in any desktop or system clock configuration. You must either find the old analog clock buried in settings, or procure the information via command line. Maybe I’m wrong and they fixed it, but I haven’t noticed any change.
In quotes because the userland is, of course, heavily modified and proprietry.
Xbox now runs Windows NT, there hasn't been a great interest in hacking them due to low adoption and them allowing homebrew by default.
Until all games start releasing native ports (which could happen given Steam Decks success), Win is going to stick around.
Also Win 11 isn't that bad. I have the pro and you can turn off a lot of intrusive settings. All of my dev stuff lives in WSL2, including anything graphical since WSL2 now includes an X server that can render linux graphical apps), and it works perfectly even with ML.
More realistically, game devs can target Proton as a platform, making sure it works on that.
How so? I'm using Plasma's Wayland session on a 3070ti and have very few complaints. The only issues I've seen are some weird Java GUI apps and that GTK4 text rendering issue that just won't go away. None of the "stuttering that you don't get on windows" that you're citing, I can count the number of dropped frames in most titles on one hand. Did you ever give Wayland a proper try?
> Until all games start releasing native ports
Why? Win32 is covered reasonably well with Wine, I see no reason in my experience why a completely-native runtime is required. It's certainly not needed to get the vast majority of Windows games running on Linux.
Seems like worldly different experiences.
Regardless getting a Linux system up and running is still infinitely more pleasant (assuming hardware compatibility is already taken into account).
Right now I'm deciding on getting a second drive since Windows doesn't like to play nice with duel booting from what I can tell. Also Microsoft fucked up the sound for Oblivion and Morrowind.
A Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is completely reasonable in my opinion for building your own machine and it's well known that Nvidia and Linux don't play nice. Recently built a new system and went with AMD for that reason. Considered Intel but they're a little new to GPUs and were a little too mid range for what I wanted.
Frankly it sounds more like you had issue with the Nvidia card than the rest of your components.
Also have to consider are you trying to use completely free open source software or are you okay with proprietary blobs and drivers.
For example Ubtuntu makes it easy for end user to activate those proprietary software blobs on installation.
Incorrect assumption. The Nvidia card went in last, after the OS was working, and is only used in passthrough.
You're not being very clear here what happened and if you're only using free software sources (the default for Debian I believe).
Also looks like you replied further down. You're not even describing an average home user case but saying it's a massive assumption that average users will have an easy time installing Linux. Lol.
Remember I was comparing the ease of installing a Linux system and having it functional is a hell of a lot smoother than Windows. That's just true in general. No assumption needed.
There's other distros that have rolling releases that tend to have more updated software in exchange for stability and thorough testing.
Anyways, there are some decent oem options these days. Even if you dislike preinstalled distros, hardware compatibility is guaranteed to be there.
It just can't work any other way. Either vendors solve those compatibility problems for you, or you do it. I don't have much time so I went with the easier option of just getting dells or lenovos or simething from the numerous smaller sellers.
Both my wife and my daughter are fine with my older hardware, btw.
If you know that much about Linux, you should expect issues with Nvidia. AMD just works.
> Expecting people to buy based on an HCL is not reasonable
It's totally reasonable for an OS with ~1% market share.
Games on Steam don't run "native" most of the time to begin with; you can more or less always expect some random mix of "steam runtime" + "pressure vessel" + "environment provided" of containerization + i686 shared libraries on your (usual) "native" amd64 system.
I don't see how that is different from running stuff under Proton.