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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Buy a gaming pc if you want freedom

Good point. I forgot Microsoft doesn't have any stake in that market and would never do anything to infringe PC user freedom.

You can play games on Linux.

Some games. Sometimes. Depending on the game, Linux distro, library versions, hardware driver support, etc.

I can also bake my own bread. But I'm tired of all the tweaking and debugging at the end of the day.

Most games. Most of the time. You make it sound like there's only a small subsection of games that can be played on Linux when that hasn't been true for some time now.

There definitely still exist games that have issues running on Linux, but they are few and far between now.

Quality versus quantity problem. The most popular games not made by Valve tend to not work at all, and a quick look at Proton DB shows of the top 100, only about 20% are in the "no issues" (platinum) category. Gold is "playable", and from experience, there is a lot of variability there. It includes problems that would lead to refunds and bad reviews on the original platform.

Gold is generally only minor issues. I can play most of the games in my library.

In my experience these days, across several dozen games in my Steam library (admittedly largely omitting competitive multiplayer games other than CS), it has been most games, most of the time, on a basic Ubuntu install on hardware I chose mostly without checking for Linux compatibility. If you want to play video games without paying Microsoft for user-hostile systems, Linux has definitely become a genuine option in recent years.

I have a Windows 10 install on my machine that I have been thrilled to discover I’ve only needed a handful of times in three years (mostly to disable the rainbow vomit RGB that Linux doesn’t recognize).

Unfortunately, anti-cheat systems usually don't work well with proton so "competitive multiplayer games" are exactly the sort of games that you would be more likely to have problems with on Linux.

Microsoft is hard at work trying to control the software you put on it through code signing in the form of Secure Boot and signatures on user software. We haven't quite got Authorized peripherals excepting HDCP in the bluray-to-display path. You have kernel level anti cheat mechanisms there at the expense of private servers.

Microsoft is hard at work trying to control the software you put on it

Someone should probably tell the Visual Studio teams.

What's the difference? An Xbox is essentially one already.

You don’t see the difference between an Xbox and a gaming pc running windows?

Sure there's a difference, an XBox sucks.

Besides that? Not particularly. The input devices are worse, the underlying hardware and software is worse, the fact it only supports a measly 60hz at 4K^1 blows. I used to love XBoxes and have many great memories of my original and 360, but ever since the XBox One it's just been a bloated, slow PC with a bad interface front for Windows.

I own one because occasionally I like to play Halo 5. That's literally it.

[1]: What Microsoft calls 4K which is like 2560x1440 upscaled slightly on the vast majority of games.*

I'm not gonna disagree with your reasons for liking or disliking a gaming console. Gaming consoles are for fun, your preferences don't have to make logical sense. But...

     but ever since the XBox One it's just been a 
     bloated, slow PC with a bad interface front for Windows.

Huh? The original XBox and 360 were also slow (relative to higher-end PCs of their day) systems running Windows variants.

Yes but they didn't feel slow. The One does and so do it's iterations. They all run slow, download slow, and just feel sluggish to use. Even the Switch which is INCREDIBLY limited on the hardware front feels snappy and responsive.

Every console has always had worse hardware compared to a PC, that's a given, but almost all of them don't feel that way because the developers know the platform and can squeeze every last cycle out of the hardware. The One has NEVER felt nice to use. Ever.

That makes more sense, I guess. I've never used an XBOne so I don't have an opinion as to how responsive it feels.

It is truly awful. Menus take an atrocious amount of time to load, everything is buried several screens deep into massive UI elements that usually amount to huge boxes of solid color, the home screen itself seems to lag quite badly which is just embarrassing for a device that can also run Halo 5 at 2K/60hz without issue, is choking to death on a bunch of fucking boxes.

Yikes! And also, I really appreciate the clarification.

Yeah for sure man. I know a lotta PC guys give consoles shit (rightfully so :D) but I enjoy them too, my PS5 is the slickest thing I've ever used, and the switch is a remarkable little piece of kit, with some stumblings here and there, but yeah, between the severe dip in quality in the XBox One and subsequent iterations, and Microsoft's move to really amp up the experience for PC gaming on the XBox network, I just feel an XBox is a bad proposition these days. It's just a shitty PC that's locked down and you can't fix it.

Not really? I bought an Xbox when I couldn't afford a gaming PC, but beyond that, they are very similar.

Especially these days. Microsoft even sells a Xbox ultimate pass that works on PC and lets you play or stream many cross platform games. You can also play them on geforce now.

Xbox to me is just a cheap gaming PC with a kiosk OS.

you are on hacker news

I often make the mistake of thinking HN is populated mostly by ... well, hackers. While there's plenty of us here, most users are from the startup crowd, where "hacker" is more of a buzzword than anything.

Of course this makes sense, it's just something that slips my mind every once in a while.

The dissonance is really something at times. I get facepalms, giggles, sighs. I haven't made it to the acceptance stage yet and I have no plans to advance to it soon.

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