I've been on Arch for 2 years now after seeing the cancer that is Windows 11. Ads and "news" on your desktop, garbage free to play games preinstalled or linked to.
OneDrive your user dir(Desktop, Documents) to the cloud, Outlook feeding your mails to the cloud.
All this will be used against people to sell more targeted ads and other BS.
It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
When I install windows on my gaming PC, I spend 15 minutes to disable web search in the start menu, uninstall random games, change what's on my taskbar, etc. It usually lasts multiple years without me seeing any random software I don't want. I can then run literally every single game I have ever wanted to play with no issues.
I would enjoy it if all games had first party linux support and I could switch to it permanently, but at the moment gaming on windows has several pros and negligible cons compared to gaming on linux. Not sure how you're coming to the conclusion that linux is far superior for gaming.
I'm glad 15 minutes has been your experience. For me, who does not use Windows at all for other purposes, it has taken considerably longer than 15 minutes to figure out where all the settings are to disable and uninstall annoyances. As somebody who stopped using Windows in the XP era, none of the settings are where I remember them being more than a decade ago when I last seriously used that OS for anything.
Since I'd only use Windows for gaming, there's also a non-trivial amount of time spent rebooting into Windows, and the slight annoyance of having to either keep a remote desktop tool open or a laptop nearby if I wanted to do something else on the computer other than launch a game.
And since my gaming computer is custom built, there's also a non-trivial expense of purchasing a Windows license.
The one compromise I have considered is keeping a dedicated Windows gaming PC in a closet and using Steam Link so I can actually play the games on my preferred device, whether it's at my desk or on the TV. It doesn't solve everything I mentioned above but at least it gets closer to the set-it-and-forget-it approach you've taken.
What OS doesn’t have this problem? Linux and Mac have both had major changes and move things around. Mac completely redid System Preferences to Settings and Linux changes frequently and even by distribution.
I never claimed any other OS was any different in that people who are particular will need to configure them, I'm just pointing out that as someone who never uses Windows for anything else except gaming, the cost of fixing the annoyances instead of using Wine for playing games is higher than 15 minutes.
That said, I'm generally more comfortable adapting to whatever random version of a window manager and desktop a Linux distribution ships with than putting up with the "everything is AI now!" "now with more ads!" "find things only via search!" type things that show up in the Windows UX.
macOS changed the visual looks of preferences and rearranged things, but if you had a bash script that just did a bunch of "defaults write", it would still work for the most part.
> I'm glad 15 minutes has been your experience. For me, who does not use Windows at all for other purposes, it has taken considerably longer than 15 minutes to figure out where all the settings are to disable and uninstall annoyances.
Use something like Shutup10 and Chris Titus' utility.
Me experience is that the average windows install has a year long lifespan and then it needs a reinstall. It just feels slower at that point.
Beyond that it’s a matter of principle. Why would I use an OS where the company wants to farm me for ad revenue. I am not livestock. If I pay for it, that’s an even bigger slap in the face.
Linux is not even close to matching Windows in gaming performance.
Maybe for a small sub-set of games, but for the vast majority you're running them on Win32 and DX compatibility layers that each have overhead. Sometimes a lot.
You know, I wouldn't have objected if you had said something like "Linux does not match Windows in gaming perfomance" but you had to go to hyperbole and say "not even close" and that's just not true. Linux is astoundingly close to MS Windows if you consider that most games are not written for the Linux platform, but for MS Windows. That alone should give one pause for thought.
Add "treating its users with respect" to the mix and Linux seems to be the better choice. It sure is good enough for me.
These replies are very curious. Apologies for angering some folks. I didn't intend for that. The assumption that I don't know what I'm talking about was expected. However the doubling-down that running Windows games on linux is, in fact, "far superior" to running them on Windows is... interesting.
First of all, I play games daily on my M1 Mac and have gamed on linux and older Intel Macs since around 2007. I'm very familiar with the compatibility layers that go into running Windows games on non-Windows systems. Wine, ESync, MSync, WineD3D, MoltenVK, DXVK, VKD3D, GPTK, Rosetta 2, winetricks, CrossOver, CXPatcher, Whisky, PlayCover, Parallels Desktop; these are all things I have used to let me play ~8/10 of the games I want to play. That is, ~20% of the games I want to play simply don't work at all outside of Windows mostly due to either anti-cheat, or using DX APIs that aren't implemented in the compatibility layers. Most of them perform noticeably worse than Windows, and that's after googling for an hour and applying the random performance hacks/tweaks.
Windows games are designed and built, from the hardware APIs to the shaders, to run on Windows. It is only with a very curious definition of "far superior" that getting a tiny percentage of games to run a few FPS better is a true statement.
Playing Windows games on linux is not "far superior" than running them on Windows.
Running the Windows build via Proton works fine. That being said, this particular game has a Linux build anyway, so it's kind of a moot point (for now). ;)
Proton is a major improvement over what you listed, but of course it doesn't run on Mac. I also have an M1 and have been using Crossover or Wine with all the tricks since the 2000's. Proton was a significant improvement for ease of use and performance. It's not better than Windows but is practically the same for most games now.
From Steam you browse to a game then click install, and it just works.
The guy you were replying to meant it was far superior in terms of experience, not being forced to view shitty ads and deal with other Windows 11 obnoxious garbage.
>Maybe for a small sub-set of games, but for the vast majority you're running them on Win32 and DX compatibility layers that each have overhead. Sometimes a lot.
It really doesn't matter. You're talking theoretical benchmarks, when in reality the only thing that matters to someone playing is 60fps@4k. For a compatible game, any Linux machine is equally capable of acheiving that through Proton with a sufficient GPU. Particularly for Nvidia, where the linux drivers are equally as good or better than Windows at this point.
The DX layer is interesting. Dxvk ranges from slightly slower to much, much faster. Older games are an unambiguous win and modern games seem to be a toss up. There’s a large user base for it on windows to get all the performance you can out of older PCs.
SteamDeck has entered the chat. Low power device with low end specs, absolutely crushing games with those pesky compatibility layers.
I play all my games on my PC, they work flawlessly save for 2 exceptions. Diablo 4 Beta took some tinkering, but I got it going after 20mins. Fortnite won't run because their anticheat isn't compatible, because Epic don't want it to be.
> Linux is not even close to matching Windows in gaming performance.
I'm curious if you've actually, you know, tried linux with proton/wine at all in the last three years. Things have really changed since the Deck. You might wanna try updating your opinion to reflect reality; performance is less an issue than one-off compat issues by far in most circumstances in my experience, IE I'm more likely to have to make config changes to deal with a crash than I am to have a huge disparity in FPS/load times/stuttering/frame dropping between linux and windows.
Strong disagree and this is from someone that used to use FreeBSD and now dual boots Fedora for my laptop and runs Debian for servers. I mean it took me more than 15 minutes to figure out how to get a fresh nobara 38 install to simply boot last time I tried this. For the sin of having an Nvidia 3070 graphics card I had to look up to where to change some settings in grub to boot to be able install the drivers and boot properly. My fedora running framework laptop can't detect one of the external monitors in my lenovo usb c dock if it is plugged in when it boots or after sleep. No lay person consumer is going to waste their time diagnosing this stuff.
I appreciate that. I did try ubuntu, pop, and fedora beforehand and had the same issue. I didn't want to make my original comment too long or to appear incidinary. It just didn't boot and my research led me to nobara. If you have any thoughts why it wouldn't work with a i7-10700k, rog b560-a, a 3070, 4k monitor via hdmi or dp, and a dual booting m2 ssd would be curious.
I have to issue a kudos-where-it-is-due update: I installed the latest Pop!_OS 22.04 last night, and didn't have to play with drivers or installer freezing. I did find the monitor plugged in to HDMI was being discovered sometimes so switched to DP and works. Will see how gaming goes and citrix workspace when I have more time!
Nvidia drivers are a bit iffy sometimes, I will give you that. That said most major distros have builtin support and Arch has great docs for getting things going too.
Good question. I was having those types of issues and I recall issues with booting the usb stick via EFI too. I did install the latest Pop!_OS and it works last night so clearly better this time around!
Do you run this? I’m curious what your experience (and others) are with it.
I have a Pop!OS box and it was a little work to set up. I was mostly pleased with the result, though. Steam experimental Proton had a wide range of my games library compared to regular Proton. I did run into major bugs running some of those games, but it was good for scratching a nostalgia itch.
> I've been on Arch for 2 years now after seeing the cancer that is Windows 11. Ads and "news" on your desktop, garbage free to play games preinstalled or linked to.
Region dependent. Thanks to GDPR, you don't see any of this if you pick an EU region or "World" when installing Windows.
> It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.
Non native games run well in Linux nowaday, but will always run better without Vulkan or any translation layer.
Absent considerations about identities being stored by third parties, what is the downside of targeted ads? I found myself wishing for more targeted ads after listening to yet another random fast food ad the other day.
IMO the problem is not that ads are better targeted, but the fact that they exist at all on the OS (let alone an OS I paid money for). Microsoft is truly cancer.
The fact that the targeting part is the output of a multibillion-dollar industry focused on scientific experimentation on humans without informed consent.
Also the fact that they're ads. That's a problem, too. Basically the whole thing is one big downside for everyone who isn't in adtech or trying to sell you shit you otherwise wouldn't buy.
OneDrive your user dir(Desktop, Documents) to the cloud, Outlook feeding your mails to the cloud.
All this will be used against people to sell more targeted ads and other BS.
It used to be that Windows was reasonably solid with good performance for dev and gaming. Now Linux is far superior in both aspects.