Comment by extraisland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extraisland | Hacker News Reader

> Unless games use some funky video codecs or kernel-level anti-cheat, a lot of the time they do just work with the click of a button.

He glosses over this but I suspect that is almost all the newer multiplayer games that are popular.

I was gaming on Linux from about 2020 to this year. I went back to Windows for gaming. It was either constant faffing or there was always at least one game that doesn't work that well. I don't want to spend an hour or messing with various launch options in Steam.

Performance is often claimed to be better on Linux than Windows. However it is highly dependant on the distro, kernel, GPU, game and whether you have particular magic settings configured. I am sure it is faster if you are running bazzite or one of the other gaming focused distros, but I run Debian on pretty much everything. So I just decided to use Linux for serious stuff and Windows for gaming.

Don't get me wrong it is loads better than it was, which was pretty much non-existent. But it will be fairly niche for quite a while yet.

My experience is that it's really just the upper end of AAA games. Things like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Apex Legends. You might run into problems if it's a game that requires an external launcher. These days, Windows doesn't seem to be in a much better state. I've been watching friends and coworkers complain about getting the Battlefield 6 beta to work. One of them had to do a fresh install of his computer, because he was using MBR partitions (which is now a no-no, apparently) and bricked it while trying to convert to a GPT scheme.

I use a pretty quirky setup on Linux and I find something that doesn't work properly out of the box maybe once every 2 years. I play a lot of popular multiplayer games with friends, but none of the billion dollar AAA blockbusters.

> These days, Windows doesn't seem to be in a much better state. I've been watching friends and coworkers complain about getting the Battlefield 6 beta to work. One of them had to do a fresh install of his computer, because he was using MBR partitions (which is now a no-no, apparently) and bricked it while trying to convert to a GPT scheme.

Well you are talking about a beta. The entire point is to get it out to some of the public to get feedback before final release. Secure boot is probably a requirement for the anti-cheat. IIRC it is a requirement for Windows 11 and Windows 10 is EOL soon.

Changing how the partitions work is just dangerous and you should backup before you try converting it.

That doesn't seem to be an indictment of Windows IMO.

> I use a pretty quirky setup on Linux and I find something that doesn't work properly out of the box maybe once every 2 years. I play a lot of popular multiplayer games with friends, but none of the billion dollar AAA blockbusters.

That hasn't been my experience at all. The point that I was making that it is super variable depending on the distro, GPU, game, launcher.

I am not distro-hopping to solve problems (I'd learned that didn't work almost two decades ago).

I just don't want to deal with it tbh. Rebooting into Windows takes less time that faffing with launch options.

Keeping windows around in any capacity takes more time. It only takes it deciding to overwrite your bootloader a single time to become an annoying time sink.

> Keeping windows around in any capacity takes more time.

No it doesn't. I honestly not sure what people are doing when they claim this. I have to do a reinstall every 5 years.

I do use chocolatey as package manager. I do run the debloat script that removes most of the annoyances.

I typically install the follow WSL, MSYS2, Steam, GoG, Podman or Docker, Brave, Thunderbird, Emulators, Python, Go and .NET. With choco this is a oneliner, do some chores in the house and then sign in to everything.

It maybe few hours max, every few years. It isn't as onerous as you are suggesting.

> It only takes it deciding to overwrite your bootloader a single time to become an annoying time sink.

It won't do this randomly like you are suggesting. It does it when doing a full reinstall. It won't do it when you are doing a PC refresh.

I've had fix this recently. It isn't super difficult if you've done before. Windows will just overwrite the EFI partition. The process to fix is to boot live-cd, then chroot into the Linux install, use blkid / lsblk to confirm the GPT partitions label that would changed, update fstab, rerun update-grub2 and you are done.

It can be a time sink. But Linux itself is generally a massive time sink.

An hour? It is a very rare occasion that I spend more than a minute with launch options. Dealing with launch options was the case on windows, too.

I've rarely touched launch options on Windows ever.

Yes it can take upto an hour. If you look on protondb for a particular game you can find there are several different suggestions for launch options.

Some of the times these work, sometimes they don't. Once You've faffed around with these options and relaunching a game a few times 30 minute to an hour is quickly gone.

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