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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Why do you even bother running Windows with this crap going on ?

    - Software compatibility.
    - Wanting upgradable hardware that doesn't require new machine + $1000 expense atop it for double the RAM.
    - JACK/ASLA/PulseAudio/GStreamer audio madness shouldn't be forced on mortal man.

Those are perfectly fine reasons, but I just wanted to share my experience as maybe things are better since last time you used the other popular OS that permits upgradable hardware:

- Thanks to infusion from Valve, Wine now works really well. The recent game Helldivers 2 constantly crashes on my friends's Windows PCs, but it has not crashed for me. The Windows users are asking a Linux user to host the game!

- This will almost sound like a joke, but after JACK/ALSA/PulseAudio/GStreamer did not do the job, now there is yet another, the new PipeWire. Anyway, it works great and its bluetooth headset support is better than what I have experienced on android/osx/windows.

> ...now there is yet another...

https://xkcd.com/927/

re: Bluetooh, my experience with it on Pop_OS! with PipeWire has been, not great.

Something in that stack seems to often misunderstand that when I switch from HDMI -> bluetooth headphones, I want the sound going to the headphones..

VLC, Firefox, even Steam seem to run into this so it doesn't appear to be isolated to a particular program.

> JACK/ASLA/PulseAudio/GStreamer audio madness shouldn't be forced on mortal man.

So last decade.. PipeWire is the latest game in the town.

On a more serious note, PipeWire has worked really well for me and it really aims to unify all the previous usecases to one. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...

Because until game devs will even try to support Linux, I’m sort of stuck with it.

Steam has done gods work with proton, and many games run shockingly well under it, but many game devs refuse to support Linux games (as usual, indie’s are the best) and do things as trivial as ticking the “enable EAC button on Linux”, gaming on Linux is a frustrating experience at times.

I game fairly regularly. I have given up on VR on Linux (valve gave up on it), and anti-cheat systems mostly do not work on Linux (valve is making some progress there). Everything else works perfectly for me, frequently with fewer crashes than the Windows systems of my friends.

The most annoying things about the anti-cheat stuff is that:

- most of them don’t even work

- EAC has Linux support, devs literally just need to tick a box in their configs. It’s so straightforward. EAC is junk for a bunch of other reasons, but that’s a side topic.

I’ve gotten many games to work shockingly well - even multiplayer ones, but the performance is like, 10-20 fps below the windows version (different m2, same computer),

The PC gaming market is 99% Windows. Ofc Indies and mid sized studios ignore Linux and Mac. You have to convince customers to use Linux first. Chicken/Egg problem. You can't expect Indies to solve it.

If anything, all the proton/deck work Valve did, gives Indies one more reason to not support Linux natively (game works on Linux anyway).

I believe OP said the opposite with regards to indies. In my experience indie games are the ones that run fine on Linux. Big studio games are not too bad either, but not as consistent.

>Why do you even bother running Windows with this crap going on ?

It runs the programs I use.

Malware kernel mode anti cheats and draconian DRM from hostile developers

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