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Comment by gortok | Hacker News Reader

I use Windows for one reason only: Steam and best performance and compatibility for high resolution gaming.

If I didn’t want that, I wouldn’t be on windows at all.

The issue I have with Linux is that it’s 2025 and every single time I’ve created a Linux system in the past ten years, I have some sort of issue that I spend too much of my time figuring out. I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”

The downside of open source is you have to have the time to fix it yourself, and that lack of time is what keeps me from pursuing Linux, even though I am absolutely furious at the crap Microsoft is pulling lately, from shutting off ability to create a local account, to forcing OneDrive, to throwing Ads onto the desktop, to the telemetry and marketing spyware that is now standard on Windows 11.

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I find it's the opposite nowadays. I run Kubuntu LTS on an all AMD system and most Steam games just work out of the box. No tinkering with the OS, takes 15 minutes to install and set up.

Compared to the hours and hours of battling Windows to get it to a usable state. Drivers, removing bloat, hunting for exes on the internet, dealing with low quality commercial software, etc. Then you get to do it all over again when a major update drops.

Performance is better on Linux too, I noticed a good 10-20% FPS uplift in some games. Found a random CPU review showing everything is slower under Windows. https://www.phoronix.com/review/windows-linux-amd-9950x-9950...

What DPI scaling and multi-monitor setup do you use on Linux? This is pertinent as parent comment encountered issues with it on their setup.

Just speaking personally, but one thing I wonder about with the issues is putting aside the 'internet knowledge base' how much I've accumulated knowledge of how to gloss over all the little issues in windows that doesn't translate over, and whether that applies to other people in general. There's the common "I migrated grandma and pointed her at firefox and she's loves it" anecdote for users with little assumptions, so for different types of user it'd be an interesting project to catalogue what pain points they come across, major ones are likely well known but I expect it'd be really interesting to gather minor ones. How much is adaptation to the windows/linux "DNA" or ways of doing things that would cause breakage if they were changed and how much could be looked at by various projects.

Other than the “best performance”, Steamdeck fits the bill.

I’d also mention Windows isn’t a panacea. I’ve fiddled with driver upgrades and downgrades for various games over the years on Windows.

True about open source though it's the only place where your computer is and feels like yours. Macs and Windows have you beholden to companies that have increasingly been user hostile and both have been keeping me in a constant state of revulsion.

That said, if you're having to fix your system constantly then something is off, as many distros have become incredibly stable. Of course I don't know your circumstances so can't say anything specific.

On any Linux distro it feels somewhat like my computer belongs to a bunch of opinionated nerds, and none of them are me, and their motivations are peculiar. But also somewhat like it's mine, I must admit.

If your games work with Linux, which you can check on protondb, they typically "just work" and the performance is comparable to (sometimes even slightly better than) Windows. At least using AMD. Nvidia performance is good I've heard but getting everything to work together is still a bit tricky.

> I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”

This comment literally asks him to go check to see if his games work with Linux, and that he needs specific hardware for that compatibility to be meaningfully successful. The alternative is he just uses Windows and plays his games. It's exactly the type of "extra steps" that he wants to avoid.

I use Linux systems daily, and every now and then I'll go FOSS-zealot enough to go rip my Thinkpad back out of the closet and port everything over. Then, I'm no longer interoperable with any part of society that isn't involved in a fringe movement of the Linux laptop, and then go back, somewhat disappointingly, to my MacBook Pro.

It takes like 2 seconds to check if a game is supported. How is that different from checking the recommended system requirements.

And if the game isn’t supported? What then? Not buy it? Buy another PC and use windows for that?

Last time I tried a dual boot UEFI system with windows and Linux on separate drives, I spent three weeks trawling message boards for half answers from DenverCoder9 only to give up.

> Not buy it?

That is a solid option but alas voting with your wallet can be difficult (social reasons etc.) The only thing that needs Windows for me is Valorant. Everything else runs on bazite.

> UEFI system with windows and Linux

That is weird. Were you trying to have some selection with grub?

Just having two drives and selecting a boot device in the Bios/Uefi of the MB has worked stable for at least four years with this configuration. Make your default Linux or Windows and only use the MB for one-time boots of the other one.

Last year I made the dumb decision to buy a Gigabyte Brix without really researching Linux support, after several months of trying to make its UEFI recognising Linux partitions on M2 drives instead of external USB it ended up on the recycling centre, as I eventually damaged the motherboard.

Should have known better.

> Should have known better.

Better than what, modifying your UEFI to forcibly recognize your GPT? Once you reach that point you should know that you're heading towards paperweight territory.

Bother myself with the usual endless hours tracking computers that are supposed to work with Linux, noting serial numbers down to be sure what exact models to buy and the kind of stuff I was doing back in 2000's, when I cared.

Unfortunately that is the standard behaviour every time some of us complain about Linux Desktop.

Just because we complain doesn't mean we are Linux newbies.

Many of us do use Linux at work, have been there since early days, myself kernel 1.0.9, do have multiple UNIX variants experience, what we lack is the willingness to keep doing the same over and over again on our free time.

Yet, a single complaint and there comes the same answer as back in the Usenet days.

It's standard behavior for a reason; gaming on Windows blows. It was user-hostile in the DOS era, user-hostile in the Steam Machine era, and it's user hostile today.

Go look at the reviews of the Xbox handhelds - every single one always mentions how bad the OS is. Windows is no longer a selling point outside the hyper-obsessive purist niche that is waning with the proliferation of hardware-based cheats. Gaming-based hardware is getting docked points for not running Linux as a standard, Windows 11 is a liability.

Complain until the cows come home, really. It just makes you look that much dumber next to the 8-year-olds installing and playing Metroidvanias on their Steam Deck.

Those 8 year olds are enjoying Proton, and will be very sad teenagers when Microsoft decides it has been enough.

You don't really need to check any more. Games just work, unless it's a competitive multiplayer FPS with kernel anticheat. In theory you should check but I've not run into any issues for years now.

Indeed, writing this on a laptop with Linux that cant sleep and gets random crashes with blinking caps lock about once a week. Whether its Realtek ethernet adapter can run at its nominal 5gbps on a 6.14+ or <6.10 kernel without CPU soft lockups is an open question

This assume some default state where Windows is trouble free, which is clearly not the case.

I’m not assuming that at all.

When windows has a problem, I am confident there will be a driver fix and windows/the manufacturer will update the driver and I download an update and I’m fixed, and I’m confident in this for a few reasons:

1. Microsoft spends a lot of time and money on driver compatibility.

2. Manufacturers are incentivized to make sure their stuff works on windows.

3. The time and money has been spent for ease-of-updates and on customer service (having notices and communications that there is a problem and it will be resolved).

When this has happened to me on an Ubuntu or Debian based system, it’s typically been surfaced through a GitHub or random forum post, with consulted instructions to fix, if there is a fix. When the instructions don’t work, I need to spend more of my time figuring out why. And this happens for even mainstream hardware.

I’ve never had trouble free windows, but the time to get the problem resolved is a lot less and generally requires little to no time on my part, which given my state in life, is what I want.

Ok, that has not been my experience with windows at all.

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