Comment by JadoJodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JadoJodo | Hacker News Reader

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I am in this category, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the market for OS's:

I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).

Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).

I think it comes down to the following wishes:

A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.

B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.

C. I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.

I am still using Windows 10. I use Flow Launcher ( https://www.flowlauncher.com/ ) and have it bound to ctrl-alt-shift-g, but then use an AutoHotkey binding to rebind it to Caps lock. Point being I almost never use the Start Menu, I just use Flow Launcher. And Flow Launcher has half the latency to display with no ads. When I'm forced to update to Windows 11 I may be forced to investigate alternate taskbars.

Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.

A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.

I have a script that puts my laptop from suspend to hibernate automatically within some sane amount of time (hours), and so either I pickup my laptop within hours, or it’s hibernated and reliably not wasting my battery away while sleeping.

> I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.

The ever increasing number of GPUs of the world are making the cloud PC gaming services ridiculously cheap. I only pay $12 USD/month (boosteroid, gaming only).

If I bought a gaming PC with similar specs, it would take over 7 years to pay it off (no use for a PC besides gaming). That would be 7 years of fixed hardware, where the cloud hardware specs keep improving with time, and I can pause the subscription whenever I want.

You definitely pay with some extra input latency, but not enough to impact my casual play. Definitely worth trying, if you have nice internet.

You can easily buy a gaming PC for less than $1000 that provides a better experience than cloud gaming. You also need to remember that these companies are trying to create a market for their product and right now they're happy to sell their services really cheap. Once its adopted it will be raised.

> You can easily buy a gaming PC for less than $1000

I've priced it in the recent past, and was not able to, but I'll believe you. Maybe I'm off by a year or two.

Note that boosteroid supports 4k@120Hz, up to 80Mbps streams. It's not the 1080p of the old cloud services.

> Once it's adopted it will be raised.

Since it's monthly, and switching services takes just a few minutes more than the time it takes to authenticate with steam and download the game, this is only an issue if competition ceases to exist, which would require that these datacenters become saturated. If it does happen, I always have the option of buying a gaming PC.

Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.

It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.

For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.

I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.

What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.

Interesting - using WSL on Thinkpads (T460 and some Carbon from ~ 2018 till 2020, 2020-2024 on T480 and T16 G2 now) with WSL (WSL2 mostly) and cannot say it was/is resource hog or blasting the fan out of the blue. Working with balanced power mode mostly

Can you elaborate about the friction you experienced.

Just in the first week of switching back, I turned off ipv6 DHCP on my router. I left ipv4 unchanged. ( The reason is that I want to switch to ipv6 someday and I want to run my own v6 DHCP and dns). 24 hours later, my fedora Linux host name changed from "fedora" to a uuid!

This somehow wiped my Google chromium profile, lost its sync and dropped all my saved passwords! I know that chromium hasn't had sync since '21 but I swear it worked for a few days and then disappeared. It's like a Mandela effect moment because I don't know how I lost it. I know I didn't import bookmarks, but I did import a passwords csv.

The other thing that made it hard was I tried to simultaneously switch to Wayland and sway. But also wanted to use Nvidia drivers and have cuda ready (for a project I haven't even started). I got sway up and running but it's a PITA and all the fonts and stuff look weird.

I've actually been using Linux almost full time since 2005, but turning 40 and slowing down a bit has made the switch back to Linux way harder than I expected!

>New things pop up here and there with each update every few years

In my experience this is every few weeks.

Then you haven't disabled advertisements or product recommendations. You can do that in the Pro version.

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