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Comment by mtndew4brkfst | Hacker News Reader

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mtndew4brkfst

For a gaming desktop are there any realistic options I'm overlooking besides:

- acquiesce to everything Win11 entails

- be a weirdo and run a server SKU

- run insecure EOL OS on hardware

- run insecure EOL OS on some less-begrudged hypervisor

- fully migrate to preferred Linux distro and sacrifice some amount of game compatibility, though less than I'm conditioned to believe per https://www.protondb.com/

I have no Windows-specific software other than games.

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I gave up a few years ago and decided that I was willing to deal with any drawbacks of buying and playing games on consoles rather than dealing with Windows. I only have so much time to sit down and enjoy myself and I would rather not fiddle if I just want to play a game. It turns out that you can buy a PS5 and a Switch for less than the price of a decent midrange gaming rig.

I just put Windows 11 on its own little VLAN/WiFi island called "RebootRift." It lives alone, endlessly restarting, hoping one day it will be trustworthy enough to join the others—but deep down, it knows it never will.

If you go weird, note that GamePass (xbox) and MS store installs tend not to work or can break. For steam and other launchers it works fine.

See https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Same issue with most mini/slim scripts that mod your win 11 iso. Be sure to keep gaming services and Xbox from install.

Once it does its first update it will try and put back what you remove. And when you make a non-admin local account it will try again. Best to use a post-install script you can run often to keep settings off.

You could also get 0patch to keep it secure. They're adopting Windows 10 for security updated from the EOL date. Pretty reasonable price as well, around 30 euros per year.

https://blog.0patch.com/2024/06/long-live-windows-10-with-0p...

I'll probably just move to Win11 because I don't have to worry too much about it. It's in virtual machine. And I can keep snapshots of the virtual disk in case I come back to an update I don't like.

Kinda sucks that the only fully correct way to play games is on an OS that continues to suck more and more, and that I have to wear a virtual condom to do so.

Run win11 with debloat patches, behind a firewall that blocks everything, then use a socks proxy for Steam and everything else that you want to connect to the internet.

Edit: okay, the firewall might become annoying to maintain if multiplayer gaming is your thing

Just dual-boot. Run whatever hellscape of windows is current when you want to game, and run Ubuntu (or whatever) the rest of the time.

Been doing that for 10 years.

Build your own windows ISO to install and run in a boot partition or VM.

There are decent WinMod ISO communities out there that have open readable tools, changes, suggestions, and forums that keep things clean of cryptofarming process and all that BS.

See, for example:

Revision: (as used by Qubes folk for Win Qubes) https://revi.cc/docs/playbook/general

or WinUtil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41843917

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