13 ms·

When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/d

by jjcm 1y ago

When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution. Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process. With Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work. Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.

nickserv 1y ago
Just curious, which games gave you problems?
- jjcm 1y ago
  Overwatch is the big one - lots of random issues with it. But basically any game with Denuvo DRM is extremely high risk, resulting in either a ban or the game not running at all.
  - zamalek 1y ago
    Denuvo counts each proton version as a unique activation, might help you avoid this issue going forward
  - foresto 1y ago
    Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful. One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781 https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781
  - rossy 1y ago
    There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.
  - ozgrakkurt 1y ago
    Really hope valve’s server side anti-cheat will be a success and more competitive games will move over to that.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      I'm not familiar with what new changes Valve has been working on in the anti-cheat space but historically most major anti-cheat systems, such as Easy Anti-Cheat, already have long included a server-side anti-cheat component. The catch rate (and overall accuracy) with both is just always going to be higher than only going with one approach.
  - dncornholio 1y ago
    Nowhere it says they don't want to.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      I think you're hitting on ideal vs. constrained wants (or, at least, that's how I've always referred to them). That is: what they want to be able to allow in itself vs. what they want to allow given the trade-offs with other wants. E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.
- mococa 1y ago
  For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.
  - la_oveja 1y ago
    i play rdr1 via proton on opensuse + amd and i get better frames than windows
  - margorczynski 1y ago
    In general you want to avoid Nvidia if you want to play games on Linux, but maybe things will get better.
    - arzig 1y ago
      Isn’t pop_os shipping ancient components at this point due to their hate brained idea to try and create their own de and pinning their next release to it?
      - mococa 1y ago
        RDR is now working fine on Pop_OS with Proton 10.x.
- npteljes 1y ago
  For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming: https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/ Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
    - npteljes 1y ago
      Yeah there's a lot of random issues with the different games. In case user experience is the main goal, I always recommend going with the main supported ways, which in this case would be Windows 11. I personally try things first on my Linux, but I always keep a backup Windows just in case.
    - alexjplant 1y ago
      Did this change recently? I haven't played in a month or so but it's been working great for around a year now for me.
      - frollogaston 1y ago
        It's been waffling back and forth but always had a "gold" rating even when I verified it was broken. I haven't tried recently (haven't really played video games in years), but there's a comment from 5 days ago saying it's broken again. At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust. Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Escape from Tarkov and GTA V (online).
- falcojr 1y ago
  https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.
- neogodless 1y ago
  When I ran a two month experiment, Hogwart's Legacy and Anno 1800. The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues. The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out. (Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )
1oooqooq 1y ago
i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again. then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again. then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again. now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
- kmacdough 1y ago
  For consumers. A load of professional software still exists only for Windows, particularly as you do more niche.
- 7bit 1y ago
  For me it's Adobe Phuckushop. But yeah, always that one thing holding one back from swapping
- mulmen 1y ago
  > gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
- sertraline 1y ago
  It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features. No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
ozgrakkurt 1y ago
I had the same experience. Even installing linux is easier for me now. And with new spyware features of windows, there is really no incentive to use it
- jasonm23 1y ago
  Honestly accurate for a dev work machine. For a gamer... still not quite, but very close. For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.
- herbst 1y ago
  Could have written the exact same sentence when Vista came out. I still wonder when it's finally enough for the poor souls still stuck in windows
  - BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
    It’s finally enough for me at least. I’m skipping windows 11 and going to Linux instead.
  - xeromal 1y ago
    When we die off I guess lol. I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess? My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing. Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.
    - graynk 1y ago
      I have a video of me typing things into Microsoft Word at ~3-4 years old. I still hate Windows with a passion now (Mac too, tbh).
    - herbst 1y ago
      Definitely not for me. Was in Windows between 95 and XP, never looked back. Same for my first programming languages, glad I am not stuck still doing PHP and Java. Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.
throwaway148773 1y ago
Except if you're on Nvidia...
- jjcm 1y ago
  Am currently on nvidia and have no issues with their proprietary drivers. While they aren't following the linux ethos, the software runs just fine.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    Have they fixed the drivers on wayland yet?
    - callc 1y ago
      I’ve been running on Wayland with nvidia drivers for around a year. No issues for development work. Haven’t tried gaming.
    - WD-42 1y ago
      Been using Nvidia+Wayland for years now, even on an optimus laptop. I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues. Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.
      - debugnik 1y ago
        Ubuntu-packaged NVIDIA drivers freeze my entire system on wake-up. The switch to Wayland and the new half-open drivers made it worse.
        bsdz 1y ago
        I feel I'm in the same boat. For several months I've been thinking my GPU was on its way out (it's a pretty old 2080 now). My desktop freezes randomly. I can log into it remotely but all the usb devices stop working and the screen goes blank. l took a good look at the logs and noticed a bunch of pageflip timeouts followed by usb disconnections. I later discovered the Nvidia forums seem to have many recent complaints (with similar logs) especially around their latest drivers and Plasma + Wayland compatibility.
hypercube33 1y ago
WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.
- snailscale 1y ago
  For anyone curious (as I was) the basic difference is that WSL1 implemented the Linux syscall table directly whereas WSL2 actually runs Linux on top of some virtual drivers (hypervisor).
  - mbilker 1y ago
    WSL 2 runs a full Linux kernel under Hyper-V. There are some out-of-tree or staging drivers included in Microsoft's Linux kernel derivative and they publish their kernel sources at https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.
    - dangerboysteve 1y ago
      i routinely upgrade my WSL2 kernel. Now on 6.6.87.1. Personally, I love WSL2.
  - marshray 1y ago
    Note that in recent versions of Windows, typically the bulk of Windows now runs under a hypervisor (i.e., "in a VM") as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-vbs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
- dbdoskey 1y ago
  If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.
garylkz 1y ago
Curious, if you don't mind answering, do you mainly uses Ubuntu or Nixos, and which one do you liked more ATM? Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak? What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.
- RussianCow 1y ago
  > I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet. I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.
  - barrkel 1y ago
    If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to half the frame rate. But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.
  - garylkz 1y ago
    Don't get me wrong, what I meant is that I only uses windows on games that runs poorly for me, I use Linux as my daily driver. Regarding fps, it's around 15fps diff, and it's bad in my case because I had a potato machine.
- rcleveng 1y ago
  I try to use debian, since it's a bit older (read: stable) than ubunutu and I've found that if something compiles and runs on debian it'll run on ubunutu and others but the inverse is not true.
gloosx 1y ago
I truly believe if AAA titles would not release for windows exclusively no-one would have a good reason to use windows really besides inertia.
- 0xEF 1y ago
  Businesses would. The problem with that is you have decision makers in said businesses who don't know any better, so Microsoft-all-the-things gets pushed down the line. Offices are all trapped on Windows 10/11 and using Teams/Outlook with Exchange/Entra/Azure chugging along in all its misconfigured glory. Heck, half the MSPs I work side-by-side with seem to only offer support on Windows machines. It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home. Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried. Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.
  - miroljub 1y ago
    Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux. I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it. And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.
icemelt8 1y ago
I'll take Linux seriously when I can play Starcraft 2 and Fortnite on it
- neogodless 1y ago
  StarCraft 2 definitely works on Linux, with a relatively simple act of adding it to Steam as a non-Steam title, and then letting the Proton layer do its thing. And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows. I have not tried Fortnite. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcraft2_on_linux_via_steam_is_effortless/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...
- graynk 1y ago
  Starcraft 2 worked well for years. Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.
- steve-chavez 1y ago
  I played starcraft2 13 years ago on Linux, the wizard installer worked just fine.
meandmycode 1y ago
I think actually Linux has come a long way and recently I actually dual booted fedora with windows and fedora was easily my main choice unless gaming.. unfortunately when updating from 41 to 42 there was clearly an issue with the GPU not having drivers for acceleration or cuda, updating the drivers bricked the OS immediately and while I could recover, I spent hours and hours on this and could never get the GPU drivers installed again without bricking it.. ultimately I realised how at mercy of drivers Linux is. I hope though that in the next few years things improve as windows is dismal to work on these days
- godzillabrennus 1y ago
  I just had a problem with Windows and Nvidia drivers/CUDA not working properly on a two year old Windows 11 install. I had to reinstall the operating system after days of troubleshooting and attempting different things to get it operational again. It can happen on there as well.
gosub100 1y ago
I was excited about it too, even just having a tmux and using it for grepping and file copying. Then after a year or two on windows, my computer started slowing down. Tale as old as time. I'm not surprised, and some of the issues aren't ms' fault, but nevertheless I see CPU spikes to 100 with several browser tabs open, or the drawing tablet driver goes to 100% cpu usage even though I never even use it. The UX shouldn't degrade like a mechanical system.
prmoustache 1y ago
Why would anyone run malwares on purpose on the same machine they use to do development/work?

by jjcm 1y ago

nickserv 1y ago

Just curious, which games gave you problems?

jjcm 1y ago
Overwatch is the big one - lots of random issues with it. But basically any game with Denuvo DRM is extremely high risk, resulting in either a ban or the game not running at all.
- zamalek 1y ago
  Denuvo counts each proton version as a unique activation, might help you avoid this issue going forward
- foresto 1y ago
  Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful. One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)
zamadatix 1y ago
Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781 https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781
- rossy 1y ago
  There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.
- ozgrakkurt 1y ago
  Really hope valve’s server side anti-cheat will be a success and more competitive games will move over to that.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    I'm not familiar with what new changes Valve has been working on in the anti-cheat space but historically most major anti-cheat systems, such as Easy Anti-Cheat, already have long included a server-side anti-cheat component. The catch rate (and overall accuracy) with both is just always going to be higher than only going with one approach.
- dncornholio 1y ago
  Nowhere it says they don't want to.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    I think you're hitting on ideal vs. constrained wants (or, at least, that's how I've always referred to them). That is: what they want to be able to allow in itself vs. what they want to allow given the trade-offs with other wants. E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.
mococa 1y ago
For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.
- la_oveja 1y ago
  i play rdr1 via proton on opensuse + amd and i get better frames than windows
- margorczynski 1y ago
  In general you want to avoid Nvidia if you want to play games on Linux, but maybe things will get better.
  - arzig 1y ago
    Isn’t pop_os shipping ancient components at this point due to their hate brained idea to try and create their own de and pinning their next release to it?
    - mococa 1y ago
      RDR is now working fine on Pop_OS with Proton 10.x.
npteljes 1y ago
For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming: https://www.protondb.com/ https://www.protondb.com/ Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
- frollogaston 1y ago
  AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    Yeah there's a lot of random issues with the different games. In case user experience is the main goal, I always recommend going with the main supported ways, which in this case would be Windows 11. I personally try things first on my Linux, but I always keep a backup Windows just in case.
  - alexjplant 1y ago
    Did this change recently? I haven't played in a month or so but it's been working great for around a year now for me.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      It's been waffling back and forth but always had a "gold" rating even when I verified it was broken. I haven't tried recently (haven't really played video games in years), but there's a comment from 5 days ago saying it's broken again. At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust. Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Escape from Tarkov and GTA V (online).
falcojr 1y ago
https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/ Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.
neogodless 1y ago
When I ran a two month experiment, Hogwart's Legacy and Anno 1800. The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues. The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out. (Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )

1oooqooq 1y ago

i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again. then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again. then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again. now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.

kmacdough 1y ago
For consumers. A load of professional software still exists only for Windows, particularly as you do more niche.
7bit 1y ago
For me it's Adobe Phuckushop. But yeah, always that one thing holding one back from swapping
mulmen 1y ago
> gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
sertraline 1y ago
It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features. No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.

ozgrakkurt 1y ago

I had the same experience. Even installing linux is easier for me now. And with new spyware features of windows, there is really no incentive to use it

jasonm23 1y ago
Honestly accurate for a dev work machine. For a gamer... still not quite, but very close. For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.
herbst 1y ago
Could have written the exact same sentence when Vista came out. I still wonder when it's finally enough for the poor souls still stuck in windows
- BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
  It’s finally enough for me at least. I’m skipping windows 11 and going to Linux instead.
- xeromal 1y ago
  When we die off I guess lol. I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess? My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing. Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.
  - graynk 1y ago
    I have a video of me typing things into Microsoft Word at ~3-4 years old. I still hate Windows with a passion now (Mac too, tbh).
  - herbst 1y ago
    Definitely not for me. Was in Windows between 95 and XP, never looked back. Same for my first programming languages, glad I am not stuck still doing PHP and Java. Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.

throwaway148773 1y ago

Except if you're on Nvidia...

jjcm 1y ago
Am currently on nvidia and have no issues with their proprietary drivers. While they aren't following the linux ethos, the software runs just fine.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Have they fixed the drivers on wayland yet?
  - callc 1y ago
    I’ve been running on Wayland with nvidia drivers for around a year. No issues for development work. Haven’t tried gaming.
  - WD-42 1y ago
    Been using Nvidia+Wayland for years now, even on an optimus laptop. I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues. Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.
    - debugnik 1y ago
      Ubuntu-packaged NVIDIA drivers freeze my entire system on wake-up. The switch to Wayland and the new half-open drivers made it worse.
      - bsdz 1y ago
        I feel I'm in the same boat. For several months I've been thinking my GPU was on its way out (it's a pretty old 2080 now). My desktop freezes randomly. I can log into it remotely but all the usb devices stop working and the screen goes blank. l took a good look at the logs and noticed a bunch of pageflip timeouts followed by usb disconnections. I later discovered the Nvidia forums seem to have many recent complaints (with similar logs) especially around their latest drivers and Plasma + Wayland compatibility.

hypercube33 1y ago

WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.

snailscale 1y ago
For anyone curious (as I was) the basic difference is that WSL1 implemented the Linux syscall table directly whereas WSL2 actually runs Linux on top of some virtual drivers (hypervisor).
- mbilker 1y ago
  WSL 2 runs a full Linux kernel under Hyper-V. There are some out-of-tree or staging drivers included in Microsoft's Linux kernel derivative and they publish their kernel sources at https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.
  - dangerboysteve 1y ago
    i routinely upgrade my WSL2 kernel. Now on 6.6.87.1. Personally, I love WSL2.
- marshray 1y ago
  Note that in recent versions of Windows, typically the bulk of Windows now runs under a hypervisor (i.e., "in a VM") as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-vbs https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
dbdoskey 1y ago
If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.

garylkz 1y ago

Curious, if you don't mind answering, do you mainly uses Ubuntu or Nixos, and which one do you liked more ATM? Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak? What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.

RussianCow 1y ago
> I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet. I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.
- barrkel 1y ago
  If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to half the frame rate. But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.
- garylkz 1y ago
  Don't get me wrong, what I meant is that I only uses windows on games that runs poorly for me, I use Linux as my daily driver. Regarding fps, it's around 15fps diff, and it's bad in my case because I had a potato machine.
rcleveng 1y ago
I try to use debian, since it's a bit older (read: stable) than ubunutu and I've found that if something compiles and runs on debian it'll run on ubunutu and others but the inverse is not true.

gloosx 1y ago

I truly believe if AAA titles would not release for windows exclusively no-one would have a good reason to use windows really besides inertia.

0xEF 1y ago
Businesses would. The problem with that is you have decision makers in said businesses who don't know any better, so Microsoft-all-the-things gets pushed down the line. Offices are all trapped on Windows 10/11 and using Teams/Outlook with Exchange/Entra/Azure chugging along in all its misconfigured glory. Heck, half the MSPs I work side-by-side with seem to only offer support on Windows machines. It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home. Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried. Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.
- miroljub 1y ago
  Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux. I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it. And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.

icemelt8 1y ago

I'll take Linux seriously when I can play Starcraft 2 and Fortnite on it

neogodless 1y ago
StarCraft 2 definitely works on Linux, with a relatively simple act of adding it to Steam as a non-Steam title, and then letting the Proton layer do its thing. And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows. I have not tried Fortnite. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcraft2_on_linux_via_steam_is_effortless/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...
graynk 1y ago
Starcraft 2 worked well for years. Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.
steve-chavez 1y ago
I played starcraft2 13 years ago on Linux, the wizard installer worked just fine.

meandmycode 1y ago

I think actually Linux has come a long way and recently I actually dual booted fedora with windows and fedora was easily my main choice unless gaming.. unfortunately when updating from 41 to 42 there was clearly an issue with the GPU not having drivers for acceleration or cuda, updating the drivers bricked the OS immediately and while I could recover, I spent hours and hours on this and could never get the GPU drivers installed again without bricking it.. ultimately I realised how at mercy of drivers Linux is. I hope though that in the next few years things improve as windows is dismal to work on these days

godzillabrennus 1y ago
I just had a problem with Windows and Nvidia drivers/CUDA not working properly on a two year old Windows 11 install. I had to reinstall the operating system after days of troubleshooting and attempting different things to get it operational again. It can happen on there as well.

gosub100 1y ago

I was excited about it too, even just having a tmux and using it for grepping and file copying. Then after a year or two on windows, my computer started slowing down. Tale as old as time. I'm not surprised, and some of the issues aren't ms' fault, but nevertheless I see CPU spikes to 100 with several browser tabs open, or the drawing tablet driver goes to 100% cpu usage even though I never even use it. The UX shouldn't degrade like a mechanical system.

prmoustache 1y ago

Why would anyone run malwares on purpose on the same machine they use to do development/work?