7 ms·

Truly impressive stuff -- with Windows 11 being kind of terrible, I wonder if we'll soon reach an inflection point where Linux is the OS-of-choice for PC gaming

Truly impressive stuff -- with Windows 11 being kind of terrible, I wonder if we'll soon reach an inflection point where Linux is the OS-of-choice for PC gaming.

gs17 3y ago
Game Pass is honestly the only thing keeping Windows installed on my gaming computer. If there was a way to use it on Linux, even if it was a bit hacky (or, say, didn't allow multiplayer), I would switch immediately.
jjcm 3y ago
"with Windows 11 being kind of terrible" Curious what you dislike about it - I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally. Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. I use it less and less these days, but it works great for me as a gaming OS.
- warning26 3y ago
  The built-in ads that are intentionally made difficult to disable is the major problem. That alone disqualifies it from being good, in my view.
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  Advertising in start bar, Hidden lock-ins, difficulty with creating local accounts, features requiring internet 24/7. Dark UI patterns, forced applications just to name a few.
- Firmwarrior 3y ago
  The only UX things they changed from Windows 10 to Windows 11 were downgrades, so far as I can tell - You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more - The start menu is laggy now - There are more ads and forced tracking integrated into the OS I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff under the hood that got co-opted by whatever shortsighted idiot is in charge, but whatever it is, I'm not about to drop MacOS and linux to experience it
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
    The windows ten start menu is also laggy. I’ve also disabled and uninstalled as much crap as possible.
  - skeaker 3y ago
    Not to mention what is possibly the most asinine change I've ever seen in any UI revision of any software: Making the right click menu show you half the available options and requiring another click to view them all. Why?! It completely defeats the purpose of the right click menu as a convenient quick options menu. Nobody has ever said, "Man, right clicking is nice and all, but I wish I had to right click then left click on a More Options button then left click again." Just completely ridiculous.
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      This is not the first time Microsoft has done it, either. In one of the MS Office generations, perhaps Office 2000, they introduced "Personalized Menus" as a major innovation in attempt to make the software less overwhelming. The idea was that the menubar menus would only show the most-used menu items by default, and hide the rest behind a "More items" at the bottom. It would then learn usage patterns and adjust the menu contents over time. The result: Menu options disappearing seemingly randomly. Stuff you used rarely but relied on sometimes would suddenly not be where you found it last time. The Ribbon later was kind of a "it's not working, back to the drawing board" reaction to that. It's an interesting lesson in how "pseudo-intelligent" software can come at the cost of predictability. I once had to design tab nickname completion in a chat app, and remembering the MS Office anecdote I made it so that prefix<tab> would complete to the most recently active user matching the prefix, but that subsequent <tab> presses would go through the rest alphabetically instead, which also made a lot more sense to the testers.
  - darknavi 3y ago
    > - You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more Assuming this is what you meant, you can re-align the taskbar icons from center back to left in Settings. https://i.imgur.com/zmulgwG.png https://i.imgur.com/zmulgwG.png
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- darzu 3y ago
  Tabloids being forced upon you: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabloid-news https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl... Microsoft account horribleness eg: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-daughters-school-took-over-my-personal-microsoft-account https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-daughters-school-t... Win key being unbindable for app specific shortcuts. Windows update undoing all user preferences https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1504572255665201154?s=46&t=o5CM8PutFnPe1JVwCeKsSw https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1504572255665201154?s=46... Janky crashes: https://twitter.com/litherum/status/1279164544544157696?s=46&t=o5CM8PutFnPe1JVwCeKsSw https://twitter.com/litherum/status/1279164544544157696?s=46... Forced internet accounts: https://twitter.com/rianflo/status/1589346472335937536?s=46&t=o5CM8PutFnPe1JVwCeKsSw https://twitter.com/rianflo/status/1589346472335937536?s=46&... I could go on. A lot of these i found just searching “windows update” amongst people i follow on twitter.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    And then you go into the Linux world where fractional scaling doesn't work properly yet, your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps, Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module and hope for the best. Oh, and you can't play most shooters since anti-cheats won't trust Linux. The grass isn't always greener. I just treat my PC as a dedicated gaming machine. Though these days the PS5 is becoming the more appealing option.
    - the_gipsy 3y ago
      Yea but it's not a company shoving hostile features down paying user's throats.
    - bavell 3y ago
      Good points but YMMV: - fraction scaling: I don't need it - Wayland: still using X - hardware accel: I think that's true for chromium but IIRC there's a package with it and widevine (google-chrome-stablevon Arch AUR) - nvidia: the AMD drivers are great and well supported (I've even been using ROCm to play with stable diffusion on my 6750XT) - shooters: I mostly play strategy, puzzle, sim and 2D games. Haven't run into multiplayer issues yet but I'm sure there are some in the FPS genre with heavy DRM Not for everyone but when I got my AMD card I stopped using my qemu virt-io VM w/ GPU passthrough and started using native steam with proton - much better experience all around and haven't booted windows ever since
- boston_clone 3y ago
  Have to add my ick as a question: what time is it, to the second? This information is not available in any desktop or system clock configuration. You must either find the old analog clock buried in settings, or procure the information via command line. Maybe I’m wrong and they fixed it, but I haven’t noticed any change.
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  > I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally Meanwhile, I feel like every step since 7 has been been a downgrade. > Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. IMO, adopting patterns from OSX is a critical-severity bug, not a feature. Everything about the OSX UI is the worst thing I've ever used. Microsoft is abandoning a large userbase that chooses to use Windows because it's not MacOS. I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar. I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text. I hate how flat everything looks. Screens are bigger and DPIs are higher, giving us more screen real estate than ever before, so why are we filling it with whitespace and hiding functionality? I'm still on Win10, and I use WindowBlinds to make it look like Win7 Classic. When I eventually am forced to upgrade to Win11 when I upgrade my CPU, I'll be using WindowBlinds11 and Start11 to continue to keep Windows looking sane.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar. Hyperswitch solves that for good. > I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text. Not sure yet if I agree with that, given that HyperSwitch is giving me the best of both worlds - a window preview and window titles. > I hate how flat everything looks. Windows is honestly worse. The new Settings "app" is... blargh.
- ztnktl 3y ago
  > Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. No, Windows 11 is a cargo cult. It imitates the look of an OS X dock (centered icons, no window titles, large icons etc) but not the parts that makes it properly functional. Have you tried to drag and drop an app to make a shortcut there? It doesn't work. For that matter, many modern windows 11 things do not understand the very notion of drag and drop. By the way, the windows 11 taskbar has no quicklaunch. Without quicklaunch, you can't pin documents or folders to your taskbar. Mac OS X allows you to drag anything to the dock. App, folders, documents. In the case of folders, clicking them will even show you the last modified files in a quick preview list. The dock can't do everything a windows taskbar can do, but it has its own advantages. Windows 11's taskbar is, on the other hand, a dock with no advantages. There's nothing it does that makes it an improvement over what Windows 7 could already do (I cite windows 7 because it was the one that added most of the features that can make the taskbar feel more like OS X's dock, but those features, like grouped windows, were purely optional). You can't even have it on the sides of the screen anymore too. It was rewritten.. just for the sake of being rewritten. Developer churn at MS with no improvement on the user's side. Why? I, as a person who has dealt for many reasons regularly with all the major desktop OSes, hate Windows 11 the most for how arbitrary the loss of features has felt. I hate it almost as much as I hate Gnome 3, but one advantage Gnome 3 has is that... you don't have to use it, Linux has a lot of real desktops. KDE, XFCE, LXDE, customized tilers..
  - henriquez 3y ago
    Hate is such a strong word… I personally prefer Windows 11 to the jumbled mess that MacOS has recently become. Windows Subsystem for Linux is a major improvement over the BSD junk running on Macs. The tabloid headlines and Edge are annoying but it’s easy enough to turn that stuff off.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Can you quantify how the UX is an improvement? For me, the death of having a vertical taskbar makes an ultrawide display annoying. The centred-by-default icons of the taskbar kill muscle memory because opening applications moves icons along. Just seems an absurd thing. I could go on.
ed25519FUUU 3y ago
Been asking this question out loud for 20 years.
- warning26 3y ago
  Hah! Could this truly be the Year of the Linux Desktop™?
tadfisher 3y ago
Probably not while Ring-0 anticheat remains a thing. But we did get EAC ported, at least.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  The main issue for me is performance. Dota 2, which is "CPU-heavy" and has historically been very forgiving of low-spec hardware, ran poorly under Linux but runs flawlessly at max settings under Windows on the same machine.
- vintermann 3y ago
  I find that I can do just fine without all those rootkit-"anti cheat" games. I just don't see what they have that's worth that sort of corporate condescension and abuse.
pjmlp 3y ago
Nope, as proven by OS/2 better Windows support.
ActorNightly 3y ago
Graphics drivers are still somewhat of a mess in Linux, especially with Nvidia. Also, compatibility of games is all over the place. Some games have platinum rating, and they run fine, but every one in a while you get a stuttering that you don't get on windows. Until all games start releasing native ports (which could happen given Steam Decks success), Win is going to stick around. Also Win 11 isn't that bad. I have the pro and you can turn off a lot of intrusive settings. All of my dev stuff lives in WSL2, including anything graphical since WSL2 now includes an X server that can render linux graphical apps), and it works perfectly even with ML.
- Mike_12345 3y ago
  > Until all games start releasing native ports More realistically, game devs can target Proton as a platform, making sure it works on that.
- iamerroragent 3y ago
  This raises a question I have about Win 11. Are the problems people are attributing to 11 because they use the Home edition or are these problems also found in the Pro edition? Seems like worldly different experiences. Regardless getting a Linux system up and running is still infinitely more pleasant (assuming hardware compatibility is already taken into account). Right now I'm deciding on getting a second drive since Windows doesn't like to play nice with duel booting from what I can tell. Also Microsoft fucked up the sound for Oblivion and Morrowind.
  - theodric 3y ago
    That's a HUGE assumption. I'm not some idiot neophyte who just migrated from a dumb phone yesterday; I've been running Linux since 1995. Debian 12 does not function on my Ryzen 7 5700G + Biostar B550M + RTX A2000 system-- it's nothing exotic! Neither does the stock Arch kernel, nor linux-rt, but linux-amd and my custom kernels do. I got it going, and I got VFIO passthrough working as well, but it took effort as well as knowledge normal users can't reasonably be expected to possess. Expecting people to buy based on an HCL is not reasonable, and that's half of why it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. (The other half is the desktop being a dying breed, sadly.)
bentcorner 3y ago
Personally, Linux would need to be many times better than Windows for me to use it to replace Windows for gaming. Currently W11 does the job with minimal fuss. I don't need to worry about anticheat, compatibility issues or driver problems. Windows isn't without fault but at least for gaming I don't really have any complaints. I'm unconvinced that there's any upside to switching to Linux.
- unixhero 3y ago
  It already is. You don't seem to have done actual testing.
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    Proton DB makes that case handily, no personal testing required. I wish people were a bit more sanguine and a bit less thinking wishfully about the real world performance of Proton. It is absolutely impressive, but "Playable" is not good enough of a rating; it's not even table stakes. There are bugs and manual interventions required on "playable" titles on proton DB that would lead to mass outrage and refunds if they behaved that way on their native platform. "It can literally be played" is such a low bar.
  - bentcorner 3y ago
    Let's get some concrete facts out then - how is it better? A (selfish) practical example for myself - I play a lot of Overwatch. It works just fine in windows. I get low load times and usually maintain 177fps at full resolution. I have no complaints but I am open to switching. Am I guaranteed of seeing no issues in Linux?
    - Mike_12345 3y ago
      No. Overwatch is not on Steam. So you would need to mess around with Wine or Proton separately. Maybe it works, but it's not a single click installation.
      - 3y ago
nine_k 3y ago
AFAICT so far "FreeBSD" is the Unix of choice for gaming, since it powers Playstation 4 and (apparently) 5. too. In quotes because the userland is, of course, heavily modified and proprietry.
- meibo 3y ago
  That effectively doesn't matter, they could have also gone for Linux or written their own microkernel and it probably would be transparent to the user. They did choose FreeBSD because it's very safe, which the PS4's security track record has shown to be effective. Xbox now runs Windows NT, there hasn't been a great interest in hacking them due to low adoption and them allowing homebrew by default.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    They also chose BSD, I suppose, because it does not requite to upstream any special changes to it, which they likely made.
k4ch0w 3y ago
I can't wait for this day. The day I can run any new release on Linux, I will be off windows forever.
yellowapple 3y ago
It's already my OS of choice for PC gaming. There are exactly two games which require me to ever boot Windows: Fortnite and Modern Warfare 2. Everything else I play runs good enough for me on Proton.

Truly impressive stuff -- with Windows 11 being kind of terrible, I wonder if we'll soon reach an inflection point where Linux is the OS-of-choice for PC gaming.

gs17 3y ago

Game Pass is honestly the only thing keeping Windows installed on my gaming computer. If there was a way to use it on Linux, even if it was a bit hacky (or, say, didn't allow multiplayer), I would switch immediately.

jjcm 3y ago

"with Windows 11 being kind of terrible" Curious what you dislike about it - I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally. Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. I use it less and less these days, but it works great for me as a gaming OS.

warning26 3y ago
The built-in ads that are intentionally made difficult to disable is the major problem. That alone disqualifies it from being good, in my view.
doublerabbit 3y ago
Advertising in start bar, Hidden lock-ins, difficulty with creating local accounts, features requiring internet 24/7. Dark UI patterns, forced applications just to name a few.
Firmwarrior 3y ago
The only UX things they changed from Windows 10 to Windows 11 were downgrades, so far as I can tell - You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more - The start menu is laggy now - There are more ads and forced tracking integrated into the OS I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff under the hood that got co-opted by whatever shortsighted idiot is in charge, but whatever it is, I'm not about to drop MacOS and linux to experience it
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
  The windows ten start menu is also laggy. I’ve also disabled and uninstalled as much crap as possible.
- skeaker 3y ago
  Not to mention what is possibly the most asinine change I've ever seen in any UI revision of any software: Making the right click menu show you half the available options and requiring another click to view them all. Why?! It completely defeats the purpose of the right click menu as a convenient quick options menu. Nobody has ever said, "Man, right clicking is nice and all, but I wish I had to right click then left click on a More Options button then left click again." Just completely ridiculous.
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    This is not the first time Microsoft has done it, either. In one of the MS Office generations, perhaps Office 2000, they introduced "Personalized Menus" as a major innovation in attempt to make the software less overwhelming. The idea was that the menubar menus would only show the most-used menu items by default, and hide the rest behind a "More items" at the bottom. It would then learn usage patterns and adjust the menu contents over time. The result: Menu options disappearing seemingly randomly. Stuff you used rarely but relied on sometimes would suddenly not be where you found it last time. The Ribbon later was kind of a "it's not working, back to the drawing board" reaction to that. It's an interesting lesson in how "pseudo-intelligent" software can come at the cost of predictability. I once had to design tab nickname completion in a chat app, and remembering the MS Office anecdote I made it so that prefix<tab> would complete to the most recently active user matching the prefix, but that subsequent <tab> presses would go through the rest alphabetically instead, which also made a lot more sense to the testers.
- darknavi 3y ago
  > - You can't move the taskbar to the sides of the screen any more Assuming this is what you meant, you can re-align the taskbar icons from center back to left in Settings. https://i.imgur.com/zmulgwG.png https://i.imgur.com/zmulgwG.png
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
darzu 3y ago
Tabloids being forced upon you: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabloid-news https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-keeps-feeding-tabl... Microsoft account horribleness eg: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-daughters-school-took-over-my-personal-microsoft-account https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/my-daughters-school-t... Win key being unbindable for app specific shortcuts. Windows update undoing all user preferences https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1504572255665201154?s=46&t=o5CM8PutFnPe1JVwCeKsSw https://twitter.com/rygorous/status/1504572255665201154?s=46... Janky crashes: https://twitter.com/litherum/status/1279164544544157696?s=46&t=o5CM8PutFnPe1JVwCeKsSw https://twitter.com/litherum/status/1279164544544157696?s=46... Forced internet accounts: https://twitter.com/rianflo/status/1589346472335937536?s=46&t=o5CM8PutFnPe1JVwCeKsSw https://twitter.com/rianflo/status/1589346472335937536?s=46&... I could go on. A lot of these i found just searching “windows update” amongst people i follow on twitter.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  And then you go into the Linux world where fractional scaling doesn't work properly yet, your XWayland apps interact differently than your Wayland apps, Chrome doesn't support hardware accelerated video decoding, and using Nvidia still requires you compile a kernel module and hope for the best. Oh, and you can't play most shooters since anti-cheats won't trust Linux. The grass isn't always greener. I just treat my PC as a dedicated gaming machine. Though these days the PS5 is becoming the more appealing option.
  - the_gipsy 3y ago
    Yea but it's not a company shoving hostile features down paying user's throats.
  - bavell 3y ago
    Good points but YMMV: - fraction scaling: I don't need it - Wayland: still using X - hardware accel: I think that's true for chromium but IIRC there's a package with it and widevine (google-chrome-stablevon Arch AUR) - nvidia: the AMD drivers are great and well supported (I've even been using ROCm to play with stable diffusion on my 6750XT) - shooters: I mostly play strategy, puzzle, sim and 2D games. Haven't run into multiplayer issues yet but I'm sure there are some in the FPS genre with heavy DRM Not for everyone but when I got my AMD card I stopped using my qemu virt-io VM w/ GPU passthrough and started using native steam with proton - much better experience all around and haven't booted windows ever since
boston_clone 3y ago
Have to add my ick as a question: what time is it, to the second? This information is not available in any desktop or system clock configuration. You must either find the old analog clock buried in settings, or procure the information via command line. Maybe I’m wrong and they fixed it, but I haven’t noticed any change.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> I've felt the UX is a big improvement over 10 personally Meanwhile, I feel like every step since 7 has been been a downgrade. > Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. IMO, adopting patterns from OSX is a critical-severity bug, not a feature. Everything about the OSX UI is the worst thing I've ever used. Microsoft is abandoning a large userbase that chooses to use Windows because it's not MacOS. I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar. I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text. I hate how flat everything looks. Screens are bigger and DPIs are higher, giving us more screen real estate than ever before, so why are we filling it with whitespace and hiding functionality? I'm still on Win10, and I use WindowBlinds to make it look like Win7 Classic. When I eventually am forced to upgrade to Win11 when I upgrade my CPU, I'll be using WindowBlinds11 and Start11 to continue to keep Windows looking sane.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > I hate having multiple windows from one program being collapsed into a single entry on the taskbar. Hyperswitch solves that for good. > I hate programs on the taskbar only showing their icon and not the window titlebar text. Not sure yet if I agree with that, given that HyperSwitch is giving me the best of both worlds - a window preview and window titles. > I hate how flat everything looks. Windows is honestly worse. The new Settings "app" is... blargh.
ztnktl 3y ago
> Feels like they've adopted some patterns from OSX for the better. No, Windows 11 is a cargo cult. It imitates the look of an OS X dock (centered icons, no window titles, large icons etc) but not the parts that makes it properly functional. Have you tried to drag and drop an app to make a shortcut there? It doesn't work. For that matter, many modern windows 11 things do not understand the very notion of drag and drop. By the way, the windows 11 taskbar has no quicklaunch. Without quicklaunch, you can't pin documents or folders to your taskbar. Mac OS X allows you to drag anything to the dock. App, folders, documents. In the case of folders, clicking them will even show you the last modified files in a quick preview list. The dock can't do everything a windows taskbar can do, but it has its own advantages. Windows 11's taskbar is, on the other hand, a dock with no advantages. There's nothing it does that makes it an improvement over what Windows 7 could already do (I cite windows 7 because it was the one that added most of the features that can make the taskbar feel more like OS X's dock, but those features, like grouped windows, were purely optional). You can't even have it on the sides of the screen anymore too. It was rewritten.. just for the sake of being rewritten. Developer churn at MS with no improvement on the user's side. Why? I, as a person who has dealt for many reasons regularly with all the major desktop OSes, hate Windows 11 the most for how arbitrary the loss of features has felt. I hate it almost as much as I hate Gnome 3, but one advantage Gnome 3 has is that... you don't have to use it, Linux has a lot of real desktops. KDE, XFCE, LXDE, customized tilers..
- henriquez 3y ago
  Hate is such a strong word… I personally prefer Windows 11 to the jumbled mess that MacOS has recently become. Windows Subsystem for Linux is a major improvement over the BSD junk running on Macs. The tabloid headlines and Edge are annoying but it’s easy enough to turn that stuff off.
hammyhavoc 3y ago
Can you quantify how the UX is an improvement? For me, the death of having a vertical taskbar makes an ultrawide display annoying. The centred-by-default icons of the taskbar kill muscle memory because opening applications moves icons along. Just seems an absurd thing. I could go on.

ed25519FUUU 3y ago

Been asking this question out loud for 20 years.

warning26 3y ago
Hah! Could this truly be the Year of the Linux Desktop™?

tadfisher 3y ago

Probably not while Ring-0 anticheat remains a thing. But we did get EAC ported, at least.

nerdponx 3y ago
The main issue for me is performance. Dota 2, which is "CPU-heavy" and has historically been very forgiving of low-spec hardware, ran poorly under Linux but runs flawlessly at max settings under Windows on the same machine.
vintermann 3y ago
I find that I can do just fine without all those rootkit-"anti cheat" games. I just don't see what they have that's worth that sort of corporate condescension and abuse.

pjmlp 3y ago

Nope, as proven by OS/2 better Windows support.

ActorNightly 3y ago

Graphics drivers are still somewhat of a mess in Linux, especially with Nvidia. Also, compatibility of games is all over the place. Some games have platinum rating, and they run fine, but every one in a while you get a stuttering that you don't get on windows. Until all games start releasing native ports (which could happen given Steam Decks success), Win is going to stick around. Also Win 11 isn't that bad. I have the pro and you can turn off a lot of intrusive settings. All of my dev stuff lives in WSL2, including anything graphical since WSL2 now includes an X server that can render linux graphical apps), and it works perfectly even with ML.

Mike_12345 3y ago
> Until all games start releasing native ports More realistically, game devs can target Proton as a platform, making sure it works on that.
iamerroragent 3y ago
This raises a question I have about Win 11. Are the problems people are attributing to 11 because they use the Home edition or are these problems also found in the Pro edition? Seems like worldly different experiences. Regardless getting a Linux system up and running is still infinitely more pleasant (assuming hardware compatibility is already taken into account). Right now I'm deciding on getting a second drive since Windows doesn't like to play nice with duel booting from what I can tell. Also Microsoft fucked up the sound for Oblivion and Morrowind.
- theodric 3y ago
  That's a HUGE assumption. I'm not some idiot neophyte who just migrated from a dumb phone yesterday; I've been running Linux since 1995. Debian 12 does not function on my Ryzen 7 5700G + Biostar B550M + RTX A2000 system-- it's nothing exotic! Neither does the stock Arch kernel, nor linux-rt, but linux-amd and my custom kernels do. I got it going, and I got VFIO passthrough working as well, but it took effort as well as knowledge normal users can't reasonably be expected to possess. Expecting people to buy based on an HCL is not reasonable, and that's half of why it will never be the year of Linux on the desktop. (The other half is the desktop being a dying breed, sadly.)

bentcorner 3y ago

Personally, Linux would need to be many times better than Windows for me to use it to replace Windows for gaming. Currently W11 does the job with minimal fuss. I don't need to worry about anticheat, compatibility issues or driver problems. Windows isn't without fault but at least for gaming I don't really have any complaints. I'm unconvinced that there's any upside to switching to Linux.

unixhero 3y ago
It already is. You don't seem to have done actual testing.
- Karunamon 3y ago
  Proton DB makes that case handily, no personal testing required. I wish people were a bit more sanguine and a bit less thinking wishfully about the real world performance of Proton. It is absolutely impressive, but "Playable" is not good enough of a rating; it's not even table stakes. There are bugs and manual interventions required on "playable" titles on proton DB that would lead to mass outrage and refunds if they behaved that way on their native platform. "It can literally be played" is such a low bar.
- bentcorner 3y ago
  Let's get some concrete facts out then - how is it better? A (selfish) practical example for myself - I play a lot of Overwatch. It works just fine in windows. I get low load times and usually maintain 177fps at full resolution. I have no complaints but I am open to switching. Am I guaranteed of seeing no issues in Linux?
  - Mike_12345 3y ago
    No. Overwatch is not on Steam. So you would need to mess around with Wine or Proton separately. Maybe it works, but it's not a single click installation.
    - 3y ago

nine_k 3y ago

AFAICT so far "FreeBSD" is the Unix of choice for gaming, since it powers Playstation 4 and (apparently) 5. too. In quotes because the userland is, of course, heavily modified and proprietry.

meibo 3y ago
That effectively doesn't matter, they could have also gone for Linux or written their own microkernel and it probably would be transparent to the user. They did choose FreeBSD because it's very safe, which the PS4's security track record has shown to be effective. Xbox now runs Windows NT, there hasn't been a great interest in hacking them due to low adoption and them allowing homebrew by default.
- nine_k 3y ago
  They also chose BSD, I suppose, because it does not requite to upstream any special changes to it, which they likely made.

k4ch0w 3y ago

I can't wait for this day. The day I can run any new release on Linux, I will be off windows forever.

yellowapple 3y ago

It's already my OS of choice for PC gaming. There are exactly two games which require me to ever boot Windows: Fortnite and Modern Warfare 2. Everything else I play runs good enough for me on Proton.