I have windows on my desktop pc because it's easier to get executable mods (downgraders, engine fixes, etc) working on windows than linux. There's also the matter of 'kernel level anti-cheat' games not working.
But if I just judge windows vs linux, on even ground, W11 is painful. I've main'd linux on my laptop for ~ 25 years. There was a time when it was a jank experience that I put up with for better devex, but that ended in the late 00's. From that point forward, unless you were trying to get bleeding edge hardware to work, linux has been hands down better.
It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience.
I just run two drives - one with windows and one with Linux.
I treat the windows one as a console essentially, not even logged into my password manager or email or anything. It is only for games. Basically an Xbox, with all sorts of normal annoying UX, but it doesn’t matter for all of the ~2 minutes until I can launch a game
Similar for me but I mostly play single player small studio games/no mods, and on Steam/Linux there are enough "out of the box working" games to fill all the time I still have left for gaming.
It's not perfect, but I anyway had the computer for other reasons and may need it for the other reasons again after which I would need to re-setup anything. Bazite default/w. SteamOS UI install + a minor number of setting changes (1) and a login to steam and it's ready to go again. Can't complain. Just which the SteamOS UI version would also do the same background download+apply of updates the main versions or distros like Fedora Silverblue do.
While not quite yet console experience, for many games it really is not "that" far away. (For some other games very much very far away, don't expect any competitive PvP games or games with real world money related online economy working. To some degree it's not even about anti-cheat not working on Linux. It's about many such games struggling making it work on Windows and having no room to bother with another platform, and dishonest managers potentially using "all Linux fault" as an excuse when the anti-cheating strategy failed on Windows where most of their players where... (happened before))
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(1): Mainly SteamOS UI is made for Handhelds and as such has some bad defaults for more powerful desktops (which likely will change soon). I'm only couch gaming on it, hence close to everything else just stays with default settings. Sure it's not fancy customized Linux or most maximal privacy preserving Linux. But it's in the "good enough" area of settings, privacy and similar, which Windows in many aspects isn't anymore. No fighting windows forcing things down your throat, weather it's Copilot, the nasty way it tries to deceive you into using it's online drive, etc.
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Oh and as minor tip: You can majorly micro optimize kernels, schedulers, drivers etc. If you don't need to, then don't bother. That is where unexpected perf. regressions, issues after updates etc. come in. Like you still find reports about Bazzite being slower then windows due to them having don that in the past and having run into an unexpected perf. regression on some hardware without realizing. I mean it is fun to tinker. But I'm in the "please mostly just work" age by now.
I was going to go this route, but with all the GPU's sitting around in data centers now, you can get Steam cloud gaming for stupid cheap. I pay $10/month for 4k@120Hz (up to 80mbps video bitrate, they're experimenting with HDR), with my MacBook connected to my TV. It would take 12 years of subscriptions to equal the price of a PC, which is realistically more like 20 since I pause the subscription for months that I don't play. And, if I want to play some multiplayer game with a family member, I just add another subscription for $10, we play the game until they're done, then cancel.
I'll probably pick up a PC at some point, but this has been completely fine.
I think this is the direction they are pushing people to move towards. Cloud gaming on thin clients with out any ownership model. You are uniquely primed for the world. Owning hardware or experiences will be a thing from the past.
Hopefully I'll be gone by this point. This is not a world I want to live in. Feels like Bladerunner 2049.
Some games anti-cheat will detect you running in a virtual machine and kick you. I particularly ran into the with Rust's anti cheat, after a friend convinced me to join them.
I've considered this for consolidating core hardware, but dual-boot doesn't do trust boundaries well. The Windows kernel still has full block access to the other device, so if it gets admin-level malware, it has free rein to infect the other system. At one point several years ago I got partway through a plan involving having most disks be externally pluggable (and assuming that firmware-level malware persistence is unlikely, which I'm not as sure about these days) but gave up for unclear reasons. I think if I were to try that again (and if I had the hardware for it) I'd try some kind of NAS approach to separate storage credentials from the OS.
You could indeed run Windows in a VM with PCI passthrough, and for a while long ago my desktop was Xen and I ran a Windows 7 domU which was attached to a second graphics card. Sharing a GPU at least used to be much harder; I think there's better options nowadays than before (paravirtualization-style GPU-command-level passthrough devices, and I assume some graphics hardware supports being split up for partial IOMMU passthrough in the way some high-end network cards do), but I don't know how they stack up for gaming performance.
However, the use case under discussion touches on things like handling kernel-level anti-cheat requirements, which is exactly the kind of place where I'd expect you to get in trouble trying to jigger around with virtual machines. Even before that point, I get the general feeling games and game platforms can get tetchy when you're not on Real Recognizable Hardware.
Normal/classical FDE doesn't truly protect integrity, only confidentiality. Supposedly LUKS2 allows you to run with --integrity, but it's an extra layer of I/O amplification, and if you're willing to take that hit then there's less incentive not to just use an external drive. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/87367/does-luks...
As for Secure Boot, maybe? I haven't thought through how that would help in this context, but my instinct is to ask how you'd do the binding between “I intend to boot Y instead of X” and “only accept the boot signature for Y instead of X”, so that malware can't try to unexpectedly substitute X. It feels like there's probably places for attackers to mess around here unless you're very careful.
Not really. Regular exploits that allow attackers to gain SYSTEM level access frequently crop up in Windows (like the recent regpwn exploit). Someone who games on PC is likely into modding as well, and this is a frequent attack vector - so an innocent-looking mod executable could gain admin rights and make use of secure boot exploits like CVE-2023-24932 (assuming the system is using an unpatched BIOS). Even if the BIOS is patched, there's no guarantee that a similar exploit won't crop up in the future. You could update your system regularly to stay on top of things, but zero days exploits are also a thing - like, do you install updates the minute they come out? Probably not. And even if you do, it takes time to download and apply those updates, a window which could be used to execute zero days, by a hidden RAT.
You don't need any major resources to exploit systems these days in this manner, especially with AI in the mix.
This is basically how I use linux. PC plugged in to the TV running bazzite. No keyboard or mouse, just an xbox controller. The experience is so seamless now.
That's an ambiguous statement, depending on what exactly you're referring to by "DOS".
If by "DOS" you're specifically referring to shell (COMMAND.COM), then yes, it didn't know or care about the mouse. But MS introduced DOSSHELL (in '88), which had mouse support (along with other later core applications such as EDIT.COM), and of course, there were other thirdparty shells too (like Norton Commander) which also had mouse support.
But if by "DOS" you're specifically referring to the kernel (MSDOS.SYS), then you may be surprised to know that even the Windows kernel (NTOSKRNL.EXE) doesn't know or care about the mouse - this is handled by other bits like mouclass.sys and win32k.sys.
Y'all just need to game on Linux when and where possible, to the extent that it is possible.
Be the change the market needs to see to adjust development practices.
Valve is doing their part. I get playing on Windows when there are mods, but if you can play a new game vanilla at launch on Linux - do it. It shows demand.
That's ...not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Now I just have to wait till prices come down on ssds again. While I can of course afford it, it wounds my soul to pay the AI / tariff tax on components.
I typically install both systems on the same disk, different partitions. Then work with additional SSDs strictly for game storage. Only annoying bit is that some games _need_ to be on C, but very few in my experience. If you have enough space to shrink your Windows partition, that could work without waiting for an SSD. Though I guess the one OS per disk setup is ultimately cleaner.
Been dual booting for >20 years now. It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days, and of course I had fun messing with Wine manually to get some stuff to work decades ago. But it really doesn't bother me too much to reboot when switching between gaming and literally anything else.
The issue that has occurred a few times is that some windows updates will decide that they 'own' the disk it's installed on or knows better than whoever is running the system, and overwrite any other boot manager with window's own and you may need to break out a live boot to recover it. Using a single isolated disc at OS install time (if you can have multiple physical drives) and using a motherboard boot selection hotkey means that risk likely goes away.
I use BIOS boot selection to dual-boot. MS has broken it twice. I turned off SecureBoot now and just don't run games that require it.
Apparently you can get a mobo with switchable BIOS config (or was it just a switchable SSD?) so the OS didn't even know that there's a second OS around. If there's no connection of the other OS then MS can't break it [as easily]!
IMO it must be malicious, because otherwise it would be caught with remedial testing. I can't believe MS don't include dual boot setups in their testing.
Microsoft got rid of QA years ago. If it was targeted sabotage they could break dual boot setups every single Patch Tuesday. It's just disrespect for users. Like how Copilot and other shovelware such as Candy Crush keep getting reinstalled every few updates, and privacy settings reset every once in a while. Dual booting is likely not even on their radar.
Many newer computers now have a rudimentary bootloader integrated in the EFI. Some are actually quite nice, allowing you to browse partitions to choose which image to boot. HPs have this. You just hit a key during uefi “post” and voilà.
The functionality is present on my new Lenovo laptop, various generations of HP elite/pro books/desks, old asus mobo and newer cheap gigabyte mobo, 7th gen intel nuc.
> It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days
This description doesn't really do it justice. ~75% of top 100 games work well out of the box/with minimal tinkering according to https://www.protondb.com/dashboard (it varies a bit based on the rating scale)
Many work perfectly and many work even better than they do on Windows. Valve's work really changed the game over the past few years.
i have an old windows 10 pc for things that absolutely must run on non-vm windows, like guardian browser for example with online proctoring. but ive recently moved over to linux for my main comp for a few reasons. 1. steam has made gaming doable on linux and if i cant get it to run through proton or wine then i dont want to play that game. 2 microsoft pushed updates on me. 3. then microsoft pushed ads on me, 4. then microsoft removed any privacy i may have had with recall (they havent given up on it, just likely rebranded and hidden from view). 5. then microsoft forced slop one me. 6 then microsoft recently forced broken updates on me that made logging on a hit and miss affair. with all of these things going youd be forgiven for thinking im suffering from stockholm syndrome, and perhaps i was. but now ive got it in my head that im using linux no matter what, and if that means i cant play games or w/e, then so be it.
For me last year was the tipping point, with Windows 10 hitting EOL I refused to move to the buggy mess of 11. All the games I regularly play are now nearly flawless in proton and games that refuse to run on Linux just don't exist for me anymore. Admittedly I already didn't play the kinds of highly competitive online games that like to use KLAC, so might be a tougher sell if that's your jam. Most of my game time goes to FF14 and GW2.
I switched from Windows to Linux because I got a Steam Deck, which caused me to realize that the only games in my library that don't also run flawlessly on Linux are the ones that have invasive anticheat that I'm really not comfortable installing.
Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.
I could tolerate Windows more if it stopped being a rental OS that thinks MS own your laptop more than you do. Like it was in Windows 7.
All I ask is that things I uninstall stay uninstalled -- I got rid of OneDrive and Teams for a reason, stop adding that shit back! -- and that it doesn't shove Edge and Bing down my throat and decide that MS knows better than I do about what I want.
I assume this isn't the case with every machine, but every hardware I've ever owned (including the Framework 13, which has pretty good Linux support) has had worse battery life under Linux (mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu).
To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get.
That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.
Have you tried a ThinkPad? They have official support for Linux and generally have excellent battery life. At least that's been the case for me on my ThinkPad Z13 running CachyOS. I did install TLP for better battery life, but TLP is a must-have for all Linux ThinkPad users anyways.
I'm a little gun-shy of getting another Dell after two bad machines in a row (two separate models with swollen batteries < 3 years old), but I'll admit the 14 looks nice now that they've brought back the physical function keys!
I'm waiting to see some other reviews of the Omarchy and Dell XPS combo on battery life. DHH has overhyped some things in the past - he posted a screenshot on X last week showing ~40 hours battery life remaining on the Dell.
But it's so good to see the Windows side catching up to Macs now. So tempted to try out Omarchy on the XPS.
I repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.
I did that for my mom. At some point she learned to click through the Ubuntu updater and she kept her machine updated by herself. I only kept tabs on her computer via the server monitoring tooling I had on my network.
This sounds like the move, vs. having mum on Win+Chrome.
If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members.
Unforgivable btw
Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell
That can't be literally true, no release of Ubuntu is still getting updates after 18 years. At some point you have to upgrade to the next release, and that's not quite as simple.
The 'upgrade to next version of ubuntu' has gotten pretty good these days.
The only thing I would make sure to do is to have a separate home partition / volume so if you had to blow the underlying OS away after a botched upgrade, it's easily doable.
For the life of me I don't understand why having a separate area for your personal files isn't the default on every OS. Just pick a reasonable size for the OS part (20-30G?) and give the rest to /home
The laptop started with Windows 7 (the best one btw). Switch to Ubuntu was done years later when I handed it over to my parents.
You are right about the Ubuntu upgrades though. Over these years I'd just randomly press update to get out of EoL'd versions when I was around. I think I just went over 4 major versions in a few hours. It just downloaded, installed and restarted without any problems. One outlier was an issue with nvidia driver packages after update, for which I had to consult google.
Anecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script.
But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.
The multiplayer stuff with kernel level anti-cheat - it’s mostly the kind of thing that’s also on console. I bought a PS5 for that and called it a day.
Desktop rig runs Bazzite and I’ve a Steam Deck. They play most everything in my Steam library with Proton (ymmv, of course). One of the last ones that didn’t work was Assetto Corsa - some kind soul here on hn helped me get it working recently.
I used to dual-boot Win 10 with Bazzite (separate drives), but finally ditched Windows 6 months ago. It can be done; a lot’s changed in the past couple of years.
> It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience.
Why don't you play games that actually work online, instead of giving it up altogether?
Diablo 2/3/4/D2R/PD2, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys, Age of Empires, Forza, MS Flight Simulator, Quake 3/4/Champions, The Finals, CS2, TF2, Halo Infinite... there's a bunch more I'm missing, but you can certainly game online on Linux.
I tend to run pretty close to the edge on hardware (9950x, 9070xt, gen5 nvme)... I've had a few issues with that in Linux... that said, I've been using Linux as the main OS on my desktop for a while now, and when I upgraded about a year ago, I ditched the Windows drive entirely.
I do have a Windows Server 2025 and Win11 VM running for a couple testing issues, but that's about it. That said, there seems to be a few integration issues on Wayland where the RDP client or the VM UI both will not intercept hotkeys like alt-tab, which makes it kind of painful to use the VM effectively.
Even with the rough edges in Cosmic, I'll still take it over the jank they keep addding to Windows.
Yeah, I mostly stopped checking hardware compatibility for Linux ~10 years ago. Every now and again there's an issue, but it's usually easy to work around, or I wait a little bit and it's resolved. When it got to the point that I felt I didn't need to check any more, it was a big deal.
I had an RX 5700XT at launch, that was about the most painful... but 6mo later it worked fine... But by then I did switch back to Windows because I couldn't deal with the day to day issues... A year later, I went back to Linux and haven't looked back though.
Linux is missing good vm defaults (dirty_bytes etc.) - out of the box settings on the distros I tried are abysmal; both windows and macos are much saner.
Other than that, yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. It's treating the user primarily as an upsell funnel.
I usually don't care enough about the games that only run on Windows. Most of the games I play are 100% playable on Linux, even the online competitive ones. Never liked League, PUBG or GTA Online anyway
Its always been a momentum thing for me, grew up on Windows, esp in my LAN party days. The guys running linux couldn't play 90% of the games the rest of us were. When dev became more important to me I would typically reach for something else because the windows dev experience always kind of sucked IMO (unless you were a .NET person, which for the most part I was not).
I have a spare laptop with Pop OS on it now and I'm really enjoying it. Kind of forget I'm on it sometimes. I'm considering putting it as my OS for my main powerful laptop that I play most of my games on.
I haven't had Windows in the home for maybe 10ish years. It is funny how quickly you forget about it once you are entirely over to your new normal.
I am only reminded when very occasionally someone is around and they see my system running, they ask "What is that?", but most of the time nobody notices or cares.
Using Proton tricks hasn't been too difficult a task for me on Bazzite and my steam deck. But my modding experience hasn't been that extensive. Mostly tinkering with Deus ex and Starwars x-wing alliance
For the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.
Google and Facebook showed the way. Consumers see FREE service and it sets the market equilibrium. Retail Windows licenses were already a slim minority. Those who would buy Windows 11 LTSC for Home would be an even smaller group.
Last time I checked, Linux didn't have hardware acceleration for videos in most browsers. I think it was 2 or 3 years ago, certainly way after "the late 00's".
In my opinion, an operating system that sucks the battery out of your laptop is not good enough.
Just one exemple but I think it's pretty straightforward.
Worse: while, as a technical user with decades of *nix experience (SunOS since 4.1.x, FreeBSD since 2.x, Linux since Red Hat [not Enterprise] 6, NEXTSTEP and its successors since 3.3, etc.), I've never had trouble getting hardware decoding working in Linux browsers with a little elbow grease, the overall support picture is not straightforward at all.
Whether hardware decoding works in browsers on Linux depends on the Linux distro, the browser, the hardware, and how the browser is packaged and configured.
It may be disabled by default. X11 backends may in some cases have broader decode support than Wayland backends or vice versa. And at least one popular distro, Fedora, packages video decoding libraries with patent-encumbered codecs disabled, which need to be replaced with libraries from a third-party repo for hardware decoding to work except in the case of applications installed via packaging mechanisms that vendor dependencies like Flatpak.
Do you use executable mods? Downgraders, engine fixes, etc? I'm also curious what mod manager you use, because getting MO2 to work under linux is a bit janky as well.
I use MO2 on Linux through Steam's Proton runtime, to play TTW (Fallout NV mod). Works fine. The TTW installer did require an older Proton version though.
Probably not often I'd say, but at least there were some games I played with wine where some executables to apply mods also ran in wine and worked, I vaguely remember some fix to make something be able to use more than a few GB of ram to allow farther or better remdering, sometimes just a strange combination of things is needed to get something to work. But that's actually long ago, these days everything just works in Steam instead
Yeah. I recently tried to run an auxiliary program (Mass Effect save editor because the character creator sucks) on Linux which was only written for Windows. Getting it running in the same Proton "space" (bottle?) was not an enormous challenge, but it was very far from "just works".
The only reason I haven't fully swithed to Linux at this point (because I'm very comfortable in it) is that my work pretty much requires it. Having the enterprise world in a strong hold to the point where important industry tools simply have zero/very weak Linux support feels like half the reason the fabled "Year of Linux Desktop" hasn't come to fruition. Many engineers and artists literally cannot afford to switch. Many other industries have too much data in servers or spreadsheets to efficiently move over.
I don't trust windows with access to sensitive data, much less games. I do all banking, etc on my linux laptop. My desktop is for messing around with AI / ML / games
I run Windows 11 as my main desktop (and use Mac at work and have a bunch of servers / NAS where I run debian), and W11 is not painful at all.
I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then.
Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.
Some people don't mind ads on the radio, when they're watching a show, some people don't mind pop-ups, etc.
Now, if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet? Users had had browsers for over two decades, who has asked Microsoft to mix local search, application startup and web search?
As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career. I guess different personalities here, as well.
> if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet?
This is how I launch most of my programs and it has literally never been an issue for me, it always does exactly what I expect, which is to launch the program I have installed locally.
I don't give a fuck if it makes an HTTP call or performs an incantation to the god of search in the background, as long as it just gives me my locally installed software instantly, which it does.
> As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career.
Sometimes its not instant though.. sometime web search completes faster then locally installed software and because of muscle memory I accidentally opened a bing page about scrcpy (where the first result is an unaffiliated web page instead of official github page!) instead of my locally installed scrcpy
But if I just judge windows vs linux, on even ground, W11 is painful. I've main'd linux on my laptop for ~ 25 years. There was a time when it was a jank experience that I put up with for better devex, but that ended in the late 00's. From that point forward, unless you were trying to get bleeding edge hardware to work, linux has been hands down better.
It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience.