There has never been a better time to game on Linux
tildes.net
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OneDrive your user dir(Desktop, Documents) to the cloud, Outlook feeding your mails to the cloud.
All this will be used against people to sell more targeted ads and other BS.
It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
I would enjoy it if all games had first party linux support and I could switch to it permanently, but at the moment gaming on windows has several pros and negligible cons compared to gaming on linux. Not sure how you're coming to the conclusion that linux is far superior for gaming.
And I don't have to worry about Windows updates reverting the "15 min changes", or deciding that I need credits to use notepad.
What does this mean?
They're not charging for notepad today, but you never know.
Beyond that it’s a matter of principle. Why would I use an OS where the company wants to farm me for ad revenue. I am not livestock. If I pay for it, that’s an even bigger slap in the face.
I'm glad 15 minutes has been your experience. For me, who does not use Windows at all for other purposes, it has taken considerably longer than 15 minutes to figure out where all the settings are to disable and uninstall annoyances. As somebody who stopped using Windows in the XP era, none of the settings are where I remember them being more than a decade ago when I last seriously used that OS for anything.
Since I'd only use Windows for gaming, there's also a non-trivial amount of time spent rebooting into Windows, and the slight annoyance of having to either keep a remote desktop tool open or a laptop nearby if I wanted to do something else on the computer other than launch a game.
And since my gaming computer is custom built, there's also a non-trivial expense of purchasing a Windows license.
The one compromise I have considered is keeping a dedicated Windows gaming PC in a closet and using Steam Link so I can actually play the games on my preferred device, whether it's at my desk or on the TV. It doesn't solve everything I mentioned above but at least it gets closer to the set-it-and-forget-it approach you've taken.
That said, I'm generally more comfortable adapting to whatever random version of a window manager and desktop a Linux distribution ships with than putting up with the "everything is AI now!" "now with more ads!" "find things only via search!" type things that show up in the Windows UX.
Use something like Shutup10 and Chris Titus' utility.
Also the fact that they're ads. That's a problem, too. Basically the whole thing is one big downside for everyone who isn't in adtech or trying to sell you shit you otherwise wouldn't buy.
https://docs.atlasos.net/faq-and-troubleshooting/removed-fea...
"Performance: By Removing unnecessary components, disabling power-saving features, and optimizing services."
"Privacy: By eliminating Microsoft's notorious tracking, pre-installed apps, and bloatware, you can feel confident when using Atlas."
Github link https://github.com/atlas-os/atlas
I use this on my gaming PC. Works well for me.
I have a Pop!OS box and it was a little work to set up. I was mostly pleased with the result, though. Steam experimental Proton had a wide range of my games library compared to regular Proton. I did run into major bugs running some of those games, but it was good for scratching a nostalgia itch.
Maybe for a small sub-set of games, but for the vast majority you're running them on Win32 and DX compatibility layers that each have overhead. Sometimes a lot.
It really doesn't matter. You're talking theoretical benchmarks, when in reality the only thing that matters to someone playing is 60fps@4k. For a compatible game, any Linux machine is equally capable of acheiving that through Proton with a sufficient GPU. Particularly for Nvidia, where the linux drivers are equally as good or better than Windows at this point.
Add "treating its users with respect" to the mix and Linux seems to be the better choice. It sure is good enough for me.
I play all my games on my PC, they work flawlessly save for 2 exceptions. Diablo 4 Beta took some tinkering, but I got it going after 20mins. Fortnite won't run because their anticheat isn't compatible, because Epic don't want it to be.
Proton/Linux can exceed Windows 11 performance, and is otherwise very close. The difference on my system is negligible.
https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distributio...
I'm curious if you've actually, you know, tried linux with proton/wine at all in the last three years. Things have really changed since the Deck. You might wanna try updating your opinion to reflect reality; performance is less an issue than one-off compat issues by far in most circumstances in my experience, IE I'm more likely to have to make config changes to deal with a crash than I am to have a huge disparity in FPS/load times/stuttering/frame dropping between linux and windows.
First of all, I play games daily on my M1 Mac and have gamed on linux and older Intel Macs since around 2007. I'm very familiar with the compatibility layers that go into running Windows games on non-Windows systems. Wine, ESync, MSync, WineD3D, MoltenVK, DXVK, VKD3D, GPTK, Rosetta 2, winetricks, CrossOver, CXPatcher, Whisky, PlayCover, Parallels Desktop; these are all things I have used to let me play ~8/10 of the games I want to play. That is, ~20% of the games I want to play simply don't work at all outside of Windows mostly due to either anti-cheat, or using DX APIs that aren't implemented in the compatibility layers. Most of them perform noticeably worse than Windows, and that's after googling for an hour and applying the random performance hacks/tweaks.
Windows games are designed and built, from the hardware APIs to the shaders, to run on Windows. It is only with a very curious definition of "far superior" that getting a tiny percentage of games to run a few FPS better is a true statement.
Playing Windows games on linux is not "far superior" than running them on Windows.
From Steam you browse to a game then click install, and it just works.
The guy you were replying to meant it was far superior in terms of experience, not being forced to view shitty ads and deal with other Windows 11 obnoxious garbage.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/221180/Eufloria_HD/
Running the Windows build via Proton works fine. That being said, this particular game has a Linux build anyway, so it's kind of a moot point (for now). ;)
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-scores-dead-last-in...
"Not even close" is inaccurate.
You can't pick an enthusiast distro and then complain when you have to be... well, an _enthusiast_.
The earlier series (4xx through to 525) were pretty solid though, and the latest series (545) is pretty solid too.
Any idea if you might have been unlucky and installed the 535 series drivers last time around?
Region dependent. Thanks to GDPR, you don't see any of this if you pick an EU region or "World" when installing Windows.
> It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
Non native games run well in Linux nowaday, but will always run better without Vulkan or any translation layer.
we are getting there, and i look forward to a glorious future where we can kick the pile of dogshit that is Windows to the curb, but that day ain't today.
I use Windows 10 LTSC now for my gaming PC.
Finding this out over the course of a few evenings though wouldn't have been possible without my extensive previous linux experience.
It's very very very quickly getting there and soon these things will be ironed out.
Let's not declare victory too soon and have tons of people angry they deleted their windows and now can't get linux to work for playing their multiplayer games with DRM/anti-cheat though.
GNU/Linux has come far since I first started, my Radeon HD7770 first needed the proprietary garbage driver to run, which was a pain; but ever since it got supported in AMDGPU it was smooth sailing. I have an R7 card now and it also just works under AMDGPU. Meanwhile my roommate running Windows 11 had a bunch of pictures in her 'My Pictures' directory, got a message from MS saying 'oh, your OneDrive is nearly full', and when I removed the files from her OD, the bastards had the gall to remove them from her PC. Like, she has a 1TB SSD, why would you try to sync files on it to a 5GB cloud storage? And then she naively said 'oh, maybe I should just pay to get more storage', and I flipped my lid.
So yeah, 'a couple of games don't really work' is not a very convincing argument compared to the anti-user hostility MS exhibits in my opinion. But then, I could be wrong.
All it takes is one game for some people, see console exclusives.
Preach. Say it loud so the folks in the back can hear.
Eventually dual boot gets annoying as well. So most people just get two boxes linked via a kvm and run linux on the older box and windows on the new box. Or they give up gaming altogether.
Though I've been refunding games that don't run on proton sometimes as well, because dual booting does indeed get annoying! Perhaps, if missing out on the Deck userbase isn't a motivator enough, we can add some more lost revenue to the motivators convincing devs to use cross-platform or ideally linux-native environments.
Or I'll just stop gaming. Parasite publishers have ruined most of the fun I get from video games the past decade or so, and their product certainly isn't good enough to convince me to go through 5+ ads every time I boot windows for the experience.
Imagine booting your computer and having to give an email to login offline.
Then you click on a link and it auto opens through edge, "DO YOU WANT TO IMPORT AND GIVE US YOUR PRIVACY?"
Or imagine you try to uninstall some microsoft app, it doesn't let you, you try to remove it thorugh the registry but the top 10 results on google are outdated with a different windows.
2 hours later, your computer reboots automatically during a windows update. Everything is turned off, you are dealing with autosaves, you re-open your browser and tons of tabs open slowly.
Finally you save some files in your local documents pictures folder, and start getting nagged about not having enough space in OneDrive. No big deal I don't use that. Lets delete OneDrive. Oh my god I lost all of my files.
I'm not saying you are wrong but I can also wrote about anecdotal experiences about Linux and spending hours in the terminal fixing problems, googling forums for hours and such.
But I get it, it's an easy ragebait on HN and works all the time
Nothing is preinstalled and the rest (like the update policy) takes like 10 minutes to set up maximum. I mean I'd spend the same time on other OSes well setting up after a fresh install
It also loves to reboot on its own has no respect for anything I am doing.
dwm.exe and explorer.exe leaking GPU memory for years too. Go to Task Manager > Details > Right click the details column > Add graphics memory. Sort by top users. You'll see that both of these processes are leaking GPU memory like there is no tomorrow.
Nowadays, I always have to kill both and have them respawn before any gaming on Windows.
https://i.imgur.com/mMyQdH0.png
What GPU and driver you are using?
As much as I hate what modern Windows has become, this is not actually true. If you know the correct sequence of clicks you can avoid this. Not defending this bullshit, though.
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
Destiny, R6, cod, etc refuse to support Linux.
I would like to also shout out other projects like dgVoodoo, dxWnd, IPXWrapper, and the massive amount of work that's gone into sites like WSGF and PCGamingWiki. I've yet to run into a game I can't get working (and I've been going into some pretty obscure stuff) and the amount of work put into preservation is heartwarming to say the least.
That said, remember the Ouya? That was probably the first successful console running Linux. I don't count the PS3's Linux mode because that wasn't for gaming.
Not being a multiplayer game kind of guy, my Steam Deck currently runs all but one of my Steam games, according to ProtonDB scanning my collection. They don't all play well on the Steam Deck itself due to input expectations mismatch, but they run. This is definitely a non-trivial change in the past few years versus what it was like, say, ten years ago. I no longer even check before installing a game and have to remind myself I really ought to check before purchasing, because it's so rarely a concern anymore.
The nice thing with lots of users now doing this is that it is becoming important for game developers to ensure their stuff is supported on Linux as well. That used to be something that few developers cared about but this is actually turning into a large enough chunk of users that most of them will probably want to make sure their stuff works. And the good news is that it is not that hard. It mostly just boils down to testing and fixing bugs. There's no good reason for them to not do that. Even if it's just 1 or 2 percent of users, that represents some serious revenue for some of these games.
Apple apparently is paying attention because they launched their game porting toolkit over the summer. Which, despite the name, is actually quite similar to Proton. Early days but it looks like MS is losing their monopoly on PC gaming. I run X-plane 12 on my M1 macbook occasionally. It's a pretty capable machine. It would be interesting to see if Valve is planning something for Macs now. It's a nice market. Lots of wealthy users that think nothing of spending a few dollars in the app store.
And the M-series chips are on a whole other level than those were. I wish... any amount of my gaming library could run on them.
To be fair, the Oculus Link is also janky on Windows and breaks sometimes when they re-engineer the account system again and require an incredibly complicated and confusing linking/merging/re-synchronizing step that you just kinda keep doing until it finally works.
The only other thing I would add is that several games break due to missing codecs, but you can fix this by installing a Glorious Eggroll Proton profile.
It looks like Heroic sets up your wine environment for each game.
I've only installed one game from that, but it seems to work pretty well. Very slick too.
“There’s never been a better time to be homeless”
I've played death stranding, GTA v, doom eternal, and tons of indies end to end without fuss. I have a dual boot but can very seldom be hassled enough to use it. Cyberpunk runs well enough in proton that I haven't even tried it on windows. Likewise with twitchy 'frame count matters' fighting games like king of fighters and melty-blood.
My silly dream is that the wine-supported subset of win32/dx becomes the target for game devs.
That is, if it doesn't work in wine, what shambolic code atrocity exactly have they committed?
The big problem is that the games that don't work now are for political / financial reasons more than technical reasons--notably incompatible anti-cheat systems or developer refusal to enable the Linux support for their chosen anti-cheat. And these aren't small titles either: PUBG Battlegrounds, Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Genshin Impact, just to name a few.
I play a variety of games and I would love to boot back into my Arch system as my main daily driver. But, I'm sadly still forced to keep Windows around because my desire to get off of Windows isn't as strong as my desire to continue to play some of my favorite games.