I have a windows machine connected to my TV for games. Thats it. 1000 Euro machine with 500 Euro GPU. Also use it for govts windows only thingies.

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.

It's not "pushing" as much as a bunch of companies bought a bunch of gaming hardware, in a frenzied AI panic, and now it's sitting around for cheap.

But, I think leased compute has always made the most sense for sporadic users like myself.

I installed Proxmox on my main desktop - with GPU passthrough I can quickly switch to a Windows desktop for the rare games that need it (mostly VR).

Does it handle ring-0 anti-cheat?

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 run windows in the VM. Pcie passthrough is a thing just be careful with the Mobo.

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.

With secure boot, full disk encryption, and robust backups, this risk should be largely mitigated, right?

That’s what I’m personally banking on. I think anyone with the resources to bypass these would first just use a rubber hose.

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.

Many of these attacks target the bios.

BIOS is usually a SPI chip. It'd make sense to perhaps tie the write enable line so that it cannot be written to, unless jumpered.

It used to be a thing motherboards did. A BIOS flash enable jumper.

They kept the CMOS reset one, but for some reason got rid of the flash write enable.

You can use TPM with Heads and a hardware key to ensure Windows can't infect the other partition.

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.

Glad to see Windows is still treated basically the same as DOS, but with slightly better graphics and mouse support.

DOS had mouse support, going at least as far back as 1983.

DOS applications had mouse support. DOS itself neither knows nor cares what a mouse is.

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.

TIL

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.

Steam is a wonderful boot loader.

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.

> Now I just have to wait till prices come down on ssds again

oh man, do I have some really bad news for you:

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/chart/SNDK

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.