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>I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job. Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company say

>I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job. Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. If it's shoveling annoying ads to users, that's its job, and having annoying ads is a very sensible thing in a proprietary OS since the company is driven by profit, and they can make more profit by including lots of annoying ads. If you don't like the product your vendor has sold you, then you should choose a different vendor. A Free OS that doesn't come from a company with a profit motive won't have this same problem.

alkonaut 4y ago
The whole "just go elsewhere" idea doesn't really work in a total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some use cases. There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not. I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software, and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple OSes. I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others there is a performance penalty of several percent, a slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows release specific for the game.
    - Zurrrrr 4y ago
      That seems to be very much the exception. In many other cases Linux gives significantly better performance and less issues. Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        It's a lot better than it used to be, but it's still far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are basically rootkits). Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart): #1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090 https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090 #2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620 https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620 #3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250 https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250 And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead #1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470 https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470 #2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290 https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290 #3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730 https://www.protondb.com/app/730 Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).
        Zurrrrr 4y ago
        Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles. It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small handful of games. I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all. As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.
  - wil421 4y ago
    Proton was not the experience I wanted on a steam deck. I had to dig way down into comments on proton.db to find the configs that would stop games from crashing or what not. It was getting to the point where I needed notes with links to configs and Reddit comments to get certain games working. I sold my steam deck because I don’t have the time to play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of the switch or desktop. The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I’m just not trying to debug pleasure activities.
    - redeeman 4y ago
      okay, this doesnt sound good. Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. Of course some bought multiple harddrives and had several installations concurrent. Which is worse? :)
      - antiterra 4y ago
        > Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. I am guessing that there have been real issues with incompatible root kits, but there has never been an ‘era’ where it was a common thing for the average gamer to reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible rootkits. The only thing close to that I can think of is places where poorly maintained rootkits were required for banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused havoc. That’s a hellscape for sure but not quite the same thing.
        redeeman 4y ago
        there was
        antiterra 4y ago
        When? What release of Windows, and what games? I’ve been PC gaming and consuming video game media since before Win 3.1 at a level where it wouldn’t be under the radar if it was an ‘era’ where this was the regular thing to do. Are you absolutely sure this is unrelated to banking rootkits in certain countries/regions?
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    The other thing people could do is stop buying software that only works on Windows. Usually, home users do not NEED whatever software only works on Windows. Usually, the example is some AAA game. No one needs a game; it's a luxury. So if some stupid game is "forcing" you to stay on Windows, that's your own fault and I have zero sympathy.
- eloisant 4y ago
  > If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not. The fact that Valve recently released a gaming handheld that runs Linux, and is wildly successful, should be a hint on the status of gaming on Linux
  - falcolas 4y ago
    I love my steam deck, but the subset of games it can play is exactly that - a subset of games that work fine on Windows. About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart, and from some experimentation, they’re largely not wrong.
    - eloisant 4y ago
      > About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart It's unlikely as they haven't checked that many games, I suspect most of your games are still "unknown" (but are very likely to just work in practice). Anyway you're very unlucky with your library, in my case most of the games work out of the box regardless of the rating, and most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks. Did you check ProtonDB for full stats about your library?
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        > most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks. I'd call that "unusable" if you need to tweak it. It's possible for power users like me or you, but if it requires some knowledge of computers, or being able to google an error message or visit a forum to look for solutions, it's way beyond usable for most people. I'd say using any tweaking at all would for most people fall under "nope". It's only enthusiasts that can do that. My point remains: only enthusiasts who are ready (and able) to tweak even small settings - particularly e.g. visit a forum or google the occasional error would this work for. Let's measure it this way: how frustrating would an average non-power user find the desktop Linux gaming experience today? I'd argue that while it's a lot less frustrating to them than it was a few years ago, but it's still not so frustrating when put next to the windows start menu ads frustration.
- falcor84 4y ago
  >If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not. Could you please elaborate? It was impression that SteamOS (based on Arch with KDE Plasma) does cover all bases - what's missing?
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    By "usable" I mean "is equivalent to" in terms of performance, availability. I should have used a better term than "usable" I suppose. It's usable with some caveats if you are willing to miss some titles, miss some performance and so on. It's not usable as a complete replacement for windows if you don't accept missing any titles, any performance.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      Windows itself has issues with titles that don't work, or leave performance on the table. Granted these are older titles long out of the spotlight but by your metric Windows 11 can't be a complete replacement for Windows 98 or XP.
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        Yes, the interesting segment imo is "online multiplayer AAA, released in the last 5 years". Because when people buy gaming rigs with $1-$2k graphics cards, those are the titles they are likely to want to play. Anything simpler, older, indie, you can basically work around by other means (virtualization, emulation. Or the community or company, or driver vendor has caught up and "fixed" the problem, see e.g. Apex Legends).
- worble 4y ago
  Welp someone better call up Gabe and tell him to stop selling the Steam Deck, apparently Linux can't be used to play games. Poor guy must've missed the memo.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I never said linux can't be used to play games.
- teekert 4y ago
  MS365 from Linux is at times painful but not undoable, for example sharing ppts from teams is nice. In the browser it's anyway easier to have multiple teams windows open. For everything development related, Windows is just that layer that runs WSL2, and dropping the WS makes it better.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    That describes my work experience right now... Mostly just slack, browser, vs code, and code/docker/etc is in WSL. Though if I had to deal with the consumer windows garbage from win11 again at work, I'd start advocating for a full switch (I know at least 1/3 of devs would be with this, and it's a .Net/Azure shop mostly).
- wellanyway 4y ago
  > for some use cases let me guess, Photoshop and Autodesk?
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    For pro use. Then AAA multiplayer online gaming for home use.
    - Zurrrrr 4y ago
      Nah. Plenty of gamers and linux users disagree.
      - willcipriano 4y ago
        Anticheat makes a lot of multi-player games not work on Linux. Can't play Rust on a steam deck.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't. Most games work, granted if you love some multiplayer game with kernel level anti-cheat it won't work. But at this point it feels like 90-95% compatible. I've run into I think one game I've tried out of probably 50-100 that I couldn't get to work just by launching or either bumping the Proton/Wine version.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    > It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't. I remember when Loki was porting a small handful of games to Linux and clueless Linux Desktop evangelists back then claimed the same thing: "look, it is a perfectly useable gaming platform!". Look, Linux has made a ton of progress as a viable gaming platform lately, largely due to the Wine and Proton projects[0], but there are still large holes in what it has reasonable support for. For me personally, VR is a shitshow on Linux, even with Valve's own offerings. [0] Because the actual Linux Desktop community could never get their shit together enough to actually be a platform, we ended up just porting Windows's own platform.
    - account42 4y ago
      Its a matter of perspective and what kinds of games you are interested in. Even with the relatively few games from Loki / Id / etc. you still had more than enough games to fill your time. So in that sense it was a perfectly viable gaming platform. Of course if you want to play whatever is popular then the story is different - but even there, Proton does improve things quite a bit.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
        Everything is a matter of perspective though so this is a pretty meaningless statement. And telling someone who stays with Windows because of gaming that 5 games is "more than enough games to fill your time" is one of the big problems with the Linux Desktop community: You seek to change the user's use case rather than make the OS better at the one they actually have.
- redeeman 4y ago
  so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox? no, linux is not "perfectly usable" for every single task imaginable, but you know what? neither is windows, or osx, or ios, or android. People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    > so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox? There are games made for xbox. On Linux, the story is sadly that you are basically trying to mostly bend games made for windows to work on Linux. It's not the same to the xbox vs playstation situation.
  - soylentcola 4y ago
    No, but if they want to play God of War or Uncharted, they get a Playstation, even if they may really dislike some aspects of the Playstation and would prefer an Xbox. Some people (myself included among them) have hardware or use software that is either Windows-only or works much better on Windows - even if we really dislike some aspects of Windows. Doesn't mean we won't complain about the things we dislike and call out for them to be changed/improved.
  - pxc 4y ago
    > People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life. This × 1,000. Everyone has a tendency to do this, but I think it's especially prevalent for choices that we make essentially 'by default'. They no longer register as tradeoffs, and are naturalized and universalized as 'facts of life'.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  > Most notably: a gaming rig You know that feeling when you move from Windows to Mac, and suddenly realize that there is a paradigm of personal computing that doesn't involve multi-gigabyte updates to the operating system every other week? Maybe you don't, but it exists. There is a similar experience when moving to Playstation (or Xbox) for gaming, and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date, and fiddling with all the settings that ultimately make little difference in how games actually play. I know, I know. "Mouse and keyboard." "Framerate." "Mods." I don't care. Moving to a console has been liberating. Since the advent of getting everything running at 60 FPS on the current-gen models, there's really nothing holding it back. Also, as an outstanding bonus: no cheaters in online games!
  - green-eclipse 4y ago
    I really, really wish I wasn't so terrible at using a console controller for FPS games. I would love to play COD and all the others on PS or Xbox, but I'm awful. It would be so much better.
    - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      I'm not going to lie; it took a long time to readjust, but I have, and I don't even think about it any more. The key is that everyone else is using the same thing, so it works out. I've worked my way up to maxing out the sensitivity in Battlefield 1, and I can usually place in the top 25%. To be fair, it takes a long time to really dial in your snap 180's with a mouse too. The no cheating thing helped me get over the hump. I was pretty tired of ALWAYS having at least one hacker in PC Battlefield.
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        If you play on a reasonable server then hackers should be a non-issue. Any reasonable server is one you can return to every day and where you know there is a sane admin on, 100% of the time. That obviously all went out the window when they trashed community servers in BF (and some multiplayer games don't have stable servers to this day - which means I'll probably never play them).
- trinsic2 4y ago
  I hear this a lot with this generation and I think its misguided. If you really want to support, or not support something, you will find a way to make it happen. Complaining or justifying why you have to do something that doesn't give you choice is a victim's way of thinking. If you want the world to continue to become less free, keep blaming the world for your choices. Your choices, good or bad, determine the world that we all live in together. It's up to each individual to make right choices for this world to change.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    Not sure which generation you refer to, I'm pushing 50... I really don't want to use what games I play to make a statement about where I want computing or computers to go. I'd happily use Linux if it solved my problem better than a proprietary system. But I'm sure not going to use Linux because the other system is proprietary.
    - trinsic2 4y ago
      I don't know if that justifies using software that restrict peoples freedom.
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        I mean I make proprietary software for a living (as do, I assume, a huge fraction of people commenting on HN). For a lot of use cases I prefer proprietary to open. I have zero moral questions about using my iPhone or Windows desktop and I consider anyone who tries to use open software as a moral imperative do be fooling themselves and wasting their time. With that out of the way I think it's completely irrelevant for the original discussion. Game developers are going to make games for the biggest platforms. So if you want to play the most titles, you choose the bigger platform. Yes, so long as people keep using windows, the games will keep coming to windows . But I'm not going to waste my time crusading against that in order to maybe see Linux be a more viable gaming platform in two decades. Life is just to short. I'm not enjoying Linux on the desktop much to begin with, so in my case the game issue isn't really the deciding factor. For a lot of gamers it probably is, though.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
> Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. That's just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that can do that.
avsteele 4y ago
We are the customers. Of COURSE its appropriate to give feedback on what parts of the product we like/don't like. The assertion that, because they put ads in, that it is the business-optimal thing to do is weird.

alkonaut 4y ago

The whole "just go elsewhere" idea doesn't really work in a total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some use cases. There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not. I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.

Zurrrrr 4y ago
Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software, and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple OSes. I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others there is a performance penalty of several percent, a slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows release specific for the game.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    That seems to be very much the exception. In many other cases Linux gives significantly better performance and less issues. Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      It's a lot better than it used to be, but it's still far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are basically rootkits). Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart): #1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090 https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090 #2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620 https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620 #3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250 https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250 And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead #1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470 https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470 #2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290 https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290 #3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730 https://www.protondb.com/app/730 Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).
      - Zurrrrr 4y ago
        Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles. It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small handful of games. I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all. As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.
- wil421 4y ago
  Proton was not the experience I wanted on a steam deck. I had to dig way down into comments on proton.db to find the configs that would stop games from crashing or what not. It was getting to the point where I needed notes with links to configs and Reddit comments to get certain games working. I sold my steam deck because I don’t have the time to play switch, desktop, and steam deck. Proton configs were one of the reasons I chose to sell the deck instead of the switch or desktop. The proton configs worked and I was surprised they made a big difference. They made unplayable games playable. I’m just not trying to debug pleasure activities.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    okay, this doesnt sound good. Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. Of course some bought multiple harddrives and had several installations concurrent. Which is worse? :)
    - antiterra 4y ago
      > Now lets remember back to the era of incompatible rootkits where windows gamers were reinstalling windows weekly because they wanted to play different incompatible games. I am guessing that there have been real issues with incompatible root kits, but there has never been an ‘era’ where it was a common thing for the average gamer to reinstall windows weekly because of incompatible rootkits. The only thing close to that I can think of is places where poorly maintained rootkits were required for banking, could not be easily uninstalled and caused havoc. That’s a hellscape for sure but not quite the same thing.
      - redeeman 4y ago
        there was
        antiterra 4y ago
        When? What release of Windows, and what games? I’ve been PC gaming and consuming video game media since before Win 3.1 at a level where it wouldn’t be under the radar if it was an ‘era’ where this was the regular thing to do. Are you absolutely sure this is unrelated to banking rootkits in certain countries/regions?
- midoridensha 4y ago
  The other thing people could do is stop buying software that only works on Windows. Usually, home users do not NEED whatever software only works on Windows. Usually, the example is some AAA game. No one needs a game; it's a luxury. So if some stupid game is "forcing" you to stay on Windows, that's your own fault and I have zero sympathy.
eloisant 4y ago
> If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not. The fact that Valve recently released a gaming handheld that runs Linux, and is wildly successful, should be a hint on the status of gaming on Linux
- falcolas 4y ago
  I love my steam deck, but the subset of games it can play is exactly that - a subset of games that work fine on Windows. About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart, and from some experimentation, they’re largely not wrong.
  - eloisant 4y ago
    > About 3/4 of my library is marked with “no” on their compatibility chart It's unlikely as they haven't checked that many games, I suspect most of your games are still "unknown" (but are very likely to just work in practice). Anyway you're very unlucky with your library, in my case most of the games work out of the box regardless of the rating, and most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks. Did you check ProtonDB for full stats about your library?
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      > most of the games marked "unsupported" can be played by changing the proton version or using protontricks. I'd call that "unusable" if you need to tweak it. It's possible for power users like me or you, but if it requires some knowledge of computers, or being able to google an error message or visit a forum to look for solutions, it's way beyond usable for most people. I'd say using any tweaking at all would for most people fall under "nope". It's only enthusiasts that can do that. My point remains: only enthusiasts who are ready (and able) to tweak even small settings - particularly e.g. visit a forum or google the occasional error would this work for. Let's measure it this way: how frustrating would an average non-power user find the desktop Linux gaming experience today? I'd argue that while it's a lot less frustrating to them than it was a few years ago, but it's still not so frustrating when put next to the windows start menu ads frustration.
falcor84 4y ago
>If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not. Could you please elaborate? It was impression that SteamOS (based on Arch with KDE Plasma) does cover all bases - what's missing?
- alkonaut 4y ago
  By "usable" I mean "is equivalent to" in terms of performance, availability. I should have used a better term than "usable" I suppose. It's usable with some caveats if you are willing to miss some titles, miss some performance and so on. It's not usable as a complete replacement for windows if you don't accept missing any titles, any performance.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    Windows itself has issues with titles that don't work, or leave performance on the table. Granted these are older titles long out of the spotlight but by your metric Windows 11 can't be a complete replacement for Windows 98 or XP.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      Yes, the interesting segment imo is "online multiplayer AAA, released in the last 5 years". Because when people buy gaming rigs with $1-$2k graphics cards, those are the titles they are likely to want to play. Anything simpler, older, indie, you can basically work around by other means (virtualization, emulation. Or the community or company, or driver vendor has caught up and "fixed" the problem, see e.g. Apex Legends).
worble 4y ago
Welp someone better call up Gabe and tell him to stop selling the Steam Deck, apparently Linux can't be used to play games. Poor guy must've missed the memo.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  I never said linux can't be used to play games.
teekert 4y ago
MS365 from Linux is at times painful but not undoable, for example sharing ppts from teams is nice. In the browser it's anyway easier to have multiple teams windows open. For everything development related, Windows is just that layer that runs WSL2, and dropping the WS makes it better.
- tracker1 4y ago
  That describes my work experience right now... Mostly just slack, browser, vs code, and code/docker/etc is in WSL. Though if I had to deal with the consumer windows garbage from win11 again at work, I'd start advocating for a full switch (I know at least 1/3 of devs would be with this, and it's a .Net/Azure shop mostly).
wellanyway 4y ago
> for some use cases let me guess, Photoshop and Autodesk?
- alkonaut 4y ago
  For pro use. Then AAA multiplayer online gaming for home use.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    Nah. Plenty of gamers and linux users disagree.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      Anticheat makes a lot of multi-player games not work on Linux. Can't play Rust on a steam deck.
goosedragons 4y ago
It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't. Most games work, granted if you love some multiplayer game with kernel level anti-cheat it won't work. But at this point it feels like 90-95% compatible. I've run into I think one game I've tried out of probably 50-100 that I couldn't get to work just by launching or either bumping the Proton/Wine version.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  > It IS a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig. Try a Steam Deck if you haven't. I remember when Loki was porting a small handful of games to Linux and clueless Linux Desktop evangelists back then claimed the same thing: "look, it is a perfectly useable gaming platform!". Look, Linux has made a ton of progress as a viable gaming platform lately, largely due to the Wine and Proton projects[0], but there are still large holes in what it has reasonable support for. For me personally, VR is a shitshow on Linux, even with Valve's own offerings. [0] Because the actual Linux Desktop community could never get their shit together enough to actually be a platform, we ended up just porting Windows's own platform.
  - account42 4y ago
    Its a matter of perspective and what kinds of games you are interested in. Even with the relatively few games from Loki / Id / etc. you still had more than enough games to fill your time. So in that sense it was a perfectly viable gaming platform. Of course if you want to play whatever is popular then the story is different - but even there, Proton does improve things quite a bit.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Everything is a matter of perspective though so this is a pretty meaningless statement. And telling someone who stays with Windows because of gaming that 5 games is "more than enough games to fill your time" is one of the big problems with the Linux Desktop community: You seek to change the user's use case rather than make the OS better at the one they actually have.
redeeman 4y ago
so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox? no, linux is not "perfectly usable" for every single task imaginable, but you know what? neither is windows, or osx, or ios, or android. People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  > so playstation isnt a perfectly good gaming console because it doesnt run all games including those that only come for xbox? There are games made for xbox. On Linux, the story is sadly that you are basically trying to mostly bend games made for windows to work on Linux. It's not the same to the xbox vs playstation situation.
- soylentcola 4y ago
  No, but if they want to play God of War or Uncharted, they get a Playstation, even if they may really dislike some aspects of the Playstation and would prefer an Xbox. Some people (myself included among them) have hardware or use software that is either Windows-only or works much better on Windows - even if we really dislike some aspects of Windows. Doesn't mean we won't complain about the things we dislike and call out for them to be changed/improved.
- pxc 4y ago
  > People are used to all the bullshit windows forces them to do, and since they consider that the default, thats just how life is for them, and nothing they can do can change that. Ask them to use linux? they will have all sorts of things they need before "its ready", but all the shit they put up with on windows does not get to go in same category, because they already accepted that thats just life. This × 1,000. Everyone has a tendency to do this, but I think it's especially prevalent for choices that we make essentially 'by default'. They no longer register as tradeoffs, and are naturalized and universalized as 'facts of life'.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
> Most notably: a gaming rig You know that feeling when you move from Windows to Mac, and suddenly realize that there is a paradigm of personal computing that doesn't involve multi-gigabyte updates to the operating system every other week? Maybe you don't, but it exists. There is a similar experience when moving to Playstation (or Xbox) for gaming, and suddenly noticing how much time you were spending in keeping video, mouse, and keyboard drivers up to date, and fiddling with all the settings that ultimately make little difference in how games actually play. I know, I know. "Mouse and keyboard." "Framerate." "Mods." I don't care. Moving to a console has been liberating. Since the advent of getting everything running at 60 FPS on the current-gen models, there's really nothing holding it back. Also, as an outstanding bonus: no cheaters in online games!
- green-eclipse 4y ago
  I really, really wish I wasn't so terrible at using a console controller for FPS games. I would love to play COD and all the others on PS or Xbox, but I'm awful. It would be so much better.
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    I'm not going to lie; it took a long time to readjust, but I have, and I don't even think about it any more. The key is that everyone else is using the same thing, so it works out. I've worked my way up to maxing out the sensitivity in Battlefield 1, and I can usually place in the top 25%. To be fair, it takes a long time to really dial in your snap 180's with a mouse too. The no cheating thing helped me get over the hump. I was pretty tired of ALWAYS having at least one hacker in PC Battlefield.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      If you play on a reasonable server then hackers should be a non-issue. Any reasonable server is one you can return to every day and where you know there is a sane admin on, 100% of the time. That obviously all went out the window when they trashed community servers in BF (and some multiplayer games don't have stable servers to this day - which means I'll probably never play them).
trinsic2 4y ago
I hear this a lot with this generation and I think its misguided. If you really want to support, or not support something, you will find a way to make it happen. Complaining or justifying why you have to do something that doesn't give you choice is a victim's way of thinking. If you want the world to continue to become less free, keep blaming the world for your choices. Your choices, good or bad, determine the world that we all live in together. It's up to each individual to make right choices for this world to change.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Not sure which generation you refer to, I'm pushing 50... I really don't want to use what games I play to make a statement about where I want computing or computers to go. I'd happily use Linux if it solved my problem better than a proprietary system. But I'm sure not going to use Linux because the other system is proprietary.
  - trinsic2 4y ago
    I don't know if that justifies using software that restrict peoples freedom.
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      I mean I make proprietary software for a living (as do, I assume, a huge fraction of people commenting on HN). For a lot of use cases I prefer proprietary to open. I have zero moral questions about using my iPhone or Windows desktop and I consider anyone who tries to use open software as a moral imperative do be fooling themselves and wasting their time. With that out of the way I think it's completely irrelevant for the original discussion. Game developers are going to make games for the biggest platforms. So if you want to play the most titles, you choose the bigger platform. Yes, so long as people keep using windows, the games will keep coming to windows . But I'm not going to waste my time crusading against that in order to maybe see Linux be a more viable gaming platform in two decades. Life is just to short. I'm not enjoying Linux on the desktop much to begin with, so in my case the game issue isn't really the deciding factor. For a lot of gamers it probably is, though.

Zurrrrr 4y ago

> Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. That's just semantics. The job of an OS is to be an OS, not to be an advertisement delivery mechanism. At least primarily. Just like a car is primarily for driving, not sampling random smells, even if a carmaker makes a car that can do that.

avsteele 4y ago

We are the customers. Of COURSE its appropriate to give feedback on what parts of the product we like/don't like. The assertion that, because they put ads in, that it is the business-optimal thing to do is weird.