Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I wanted to add a new user account on my new Windows 11 system. It came with Windows Home right. So when I went to add one, it told me that feature is disabled because I have poor man's Windows, go to this other program. So I go to program B. Guess what program B told me? It told me I was using poor man's Windows to go back to program A to add a new user. I had to do it via command line. After I was about to remove my Hotmail user (I just wanted offline only users) I said screw this, and installed POP_OS! instead, installed Steam, and move on with life. I even played the good 'ole Cyberpunk 2077 on Linux thanks to Proton.

I think at this point I have nothing keeping me using Windows other than the rare game that Proton doesn't support, but my old gaming rig still works and plays most games, so I can easily swap. It pisses me off though, because my Windows 10 box for some reason, at some point, any new program I install does not show up in the start menu whatsoever. I've not even been able to find anything on Google that remotely answers why its broken. At least with Steam I dont have to worry about it, but if I hit Windows Key and type anything, I dont see any programs I installed like three years ago. Freaking weird.

Anyway, I think moving forward I'll be buying Mac or Linux Systems. I'll let employers buy me Windows boxes.

Edit: Typo'd Proton as Photon ;)

Unfortunately Linux is still far from ready. It's awesome that it can run Steam games quite seamlessly, and it can even run non-Steam games if you fiddle around a bit and find the magic incantations. But - I tried using it for things like GoG, and quickly found out that there is actually no way of running GOG on Linux, even with Proton/Wine, unless maybe if I go and install a bunch of other 3rd parties. Not to mention, installing the Nvidia drivers without first running an apt upgrade on my newly installed system quickly broke the whole thing to where it wouldn't even boot.

So back to Windows it is, and hoping that they respect the GDPR enough to protect me from the worse of their snooping.

Have you tried Lutris? It seems to have GOG support, and is designed to help you do all the incantations for you. I havent tried it yet, but have heard a lot of good things about it.

There's a limit to how many third parties I was willing to install to get the programs I wanted working. I also didn't read anywhere that Lutris would have helped with GOG - every reddit thread I trawled ended up saying that we need to wait for a Linux version of GOG. I tried Steam, I tried playing with a few of its options, I tried a few ways of running GOG as a steam game - decided to switch back to Windows. I do enough debugging at work, I don't want to spend too much of my free time debugging there either.

All I know is Lutris is meant to handle every windows game client: GOG, Steam, Origin, and so on.

Researching a bit more, it seems that Lutris can download and perhaps run these games, but it doesn't offer other integrations. It's not clear to me whether it downloads updates automatically for them, but it certainly doesn't handle things like cloud saves (I game from multiple systems) or achievements.

"GoG" what is that?

> Unfortunately Linux is still far from ready.

Depends on person. I use it for over decade, exclusively for few years since my Windows install bricked itself and recovery partition few years ago (and I discovered that I have no idea how I should reinstall Windows)

Good Old Games. It's a game store, like Steam. Used to be for old games hence the name.

> quickly found out that there is actually no way of running GOG on Linux

But GoG is a website, not an application. The games they've ported/adapted to Linux work great, at least for me. I've never had the slightest trouble.

Clarified in another reply, I was referring to GOG Galaxy, the launcher that you would use to keep those games up to date, sync saves across systems etc.

Ah, OK. I've actually never heard of GoG Galaxy before, and so haven't ever used it.

It's obviously not required, but I do find it nice, especially for newer games that still receive regular patches. And of course, achievements are sometimes fun to have as well.

I'm referring to GOG Galaxy, the Good Old Games game launcher. It's an app similar to Steam, which allows you to install and update your GOG games, get achievements, sync saves etc.

Heroic Launcher does a great job of getting GoG products working on Linux with minimal effort.

It's called heroicgameslauncher, runs on Linux and works with GoG.

https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher

I hadn't heard about this one when I was researching options. I'll give it a go next time I feel inclined to play with Linux, it sounds like it supports most of the features I'd like.

To be fair/transparent, I hadn't heard about it either until my 16 year old pointed it out a couple of months ago, LOL.

Can also be used on the Steam Deck to run games from GoG (since the Steam Deck uses Linux).

Saying Linux is far from ready [for desktop usage] is like saying bicycle is far from ready for off road. What do you mean by “bicycle”?? Who made it? What features were priorities?

People run third party software all day every day. Third party software runs your browser, inside and out. Many commercial products leverage open source projects. Bottom line is you start Windows and you’re running third party programs. If you want Windows apps to run on Linux you need wine/proton/bottles etc. If you want it to be easy, you run Lutris or Steam or Heroic. Sure you can do it yourself too, but that’s harder.

I switched off windows easily, and play 90% of the games I want and have very few problems with productivity software. I use PopOS but I could have gone with half a dozen other distros just as simply.

I admit that I am not daunted by computer problems, but the worst case scenario is you choose a different distro with different priorities. Get yourself a couple memory sticks.

If your heart is set on a cheese sandwich, there is likely no non-dairy alternative that is going be good enough for you. But if you can stand Gimp instead of Photoshop and Libre office instead of MS Office, you’ll do fine.

I'm a big fan of PopOS after using it for over a year now. I hadn't used desktop Linux for over a decade and expected the usual hassle and obscure fiddling, but in all honesty I've found it easier to use than not just Windows (obviously, it's a shitshow these days) but even Mac too (which wouldn't let me configure my suspend settings without running obscure shell commands copied off the internet, and required me to set up homebrew to get any decent software store, and broke git on every single system update, and...)

I might switch to Fedora since I want something kind of "rolling" but not quite bleeding edge. But I've used Debian/Ubuntu based OS' for a while, and POP is definitely one of my favorites currently. I will nag about one thing though, their package manager UI has some severe bug where it halts the whole UI (probably a threading issue).

I fled to pop os after the arch devs decided that shipping a broken build of grub master branch (nightly) was totally acceptable, and if I didn't like it I should 'use an easier distro'. They left millions of users in an unbootable state and weren't the least bit apologetic about it. Easiest decision I ever made.

Thats a wild response. I left arch in 2012 and have been with debian since then because its stable. I would have lost all faith.

I use linux as a daily driver since probably around 2006, but to say it’s a replacement for windows, it’s just not the case, your example for “readiness” is video games, a lot don’t care about that but rather other productivity software, Adobe suite and Adobe acrobat, MS suite, some CAD/3D software, a lot of engineering software like simulators and what not, and you either have crappy alternatives (like anything to replace adobe) or none in the case of other software. That’s why I still have Win10 on a non-upgradable CPU, and as long as I can run these software there, will not update.

I can run Discord, I can run Firefox, Chrome, the only thing I can't run is Visual Studio natively, but I can run VS Code. I can run Rider and .NET natively though, so there is that, and a lot of things I like work better on Linux (specifically Postgres and a few Linux first type of projects, gnu utils arguably because it is OOTB on Linux).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com