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I have windows on my desktop pc because it's easier to get executable mods (downgraders, engine fixes, etc) working on windows than linux. There's also the mat
by wing-_-nuts 6mo ago
I have windows on my desktop pc because it's easier to get executable mods (downgraders, engine fixes, etc) working on windows than linux. There's also the matter of 'kernel level anti-cheat' games not working.
But if I just judge windows vs linux, on even ground, W11 is painful. I've main'd linux on my laptop for ~ 25 years. There was a time when it was a jank experience that I put up with for better devex, but that ended in the late 00's. From that point forward, unless you were trying to get bleeding edge hardware to work, linux has been hands down better.
It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience.
- Aardwolf 6mo agoI don't seem to have issues modding games like Skyrim, Fallout 4 or Factorio on Linux
- wing-_-nuts 6mo agoDo you use executable mods? Downgraders, engine fixes, etc? I'm also curious what mod manager you use, because getting MO2 to work under linux is a bit janky as well.
- joombaga 6mo agoI use MO2 on Linux through Steam's Proton runtime, to play TTW (Fallout NV mod). Works fine. The TTW installer did require an older Proton version though.
- Aardwolf 6mo agoProbably not often I'd say, but at least there were some games I played with wine where some executables to apply mods also ran in wine and worked, I vaguely remember some fix to make something be able to use more than a few GB of ram to allow farther or better remdering, sometimes just a strange combination of things is needed to get something to work. But that's actually long ago, these days everything just works in Steam instead
- ChoGGi 6mo ago> I vaguely remember some fix to make something be able to use more than a few GB of ram to allow farther or better remdering. A 4gb patch probably (let's you use 4gb instead of 2gb for x86 executables).
- Neikius 6mo agoJanky but works. I started experiment with game scope I think is called. Interesting results upscaling some games. Fiddly though
- dathinab 6mo agoit's a question of tooling, modding kits most times it this tooling which causes issues not the mod itself For very popular games it's not rare if moddingkit/tooling producer (or contributes) made the tooling work on Linux, but it can be very hit or miss. but it increasingly more "just works", kinda, somewhat
- delecti 6mo agoYeah. I recently tried to run an auxiliary program (Mass Effect save editor because the character creator sucks) on Linux which was only written for Windows. Getting it running in the same Proton "space" (bottle?) was not an enormous challenge, but it was very far from "just works".
- californical 6mo agoI just run two drives - one with windows and one with Linux. I treat the windows one as a console essentially, not even logged into my password manager or email or anything. It is only for games. Basically an Xbox, with all sorts of normal annoying UX, but it doesn’t matter for all of the ~2 minutes until I can launch a game Separate linux drive for everything else.
- wing-_-nuts 6mo agoThat's ...not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Now I just have to wait till prices come down on ssds again. While I can of course afford it, it wounds my soul to pay the AI / tariff tax on components.
- fhd2 6mo agoI typically install both systems on the same disk, different partitions. Then work with additional SSDs strictly for game storage. Only annoying bit is that some games _need_ to be on C, but very few in my experience. If you have enough space to shrink your Windows partition, that could work without waiting for an SSD. Though I guess the one OS per disk setup is ultimately cleaner. Been dual booting for >20 years now. It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days, and of course I had fun messing with Wine manually to get some stuff to work decades ago. But it really doesn't bother me too much to reboot when switching between gaming and literally anything else.
- keyringlight 6mo agoThe issue that has occurred a few times is that some windows updates will decide that they 'own' the disk it's installed on or knows better than whoever is running the system, and overwrite any other boot manager with window's own and you may need to break out a live boot to recover it. Using a single isolated disc at OS install time (if you can have multiple physical drives) and using a motherboard boot selection hotkey means that risk likely goes away.
- 6mo ago
- MiddleEndian 6mo agoAnecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script. But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.
- Neikius 6mo agoMultiplayer online games work mostly fine. There is just a small fraction that is not.
- connicpu 6mo agoFor me last year was the tipping point, with Windows 10 hitting EOL I refused to move to the buggy mess of 11. All the games I regularly play are now nearly flawless in proton and games that refuse to run on Linux just don't exist for me anymore. Admittedly I already didn't play the kinds of highly competitive online games that like to use KLAC, so might be a tougher sell if that's your jam. Most of my game time goes to FF14 and GW2.
- pawelduda 6mo agoI repeat this story every now and then but I "maintain" a 18 years old laptop with Ubuntu (mainly for Internet) for non-tech savvy user. I put it in quotes because I just run apt update every now and then - that's it. Just works. The only bottleneck is how resource-hungry browsers got over time but it remains usable. Ubuntu was installed sometime back in 2017 and there was no need for fresh reinstall since then.
- rbanffy 6mo agoI did that for my mom. At some point she learned to click through the Ubuntu updater and she kept her machine updated by herself. I only kept tabs on her computer via the server monitoring tooling I had on my network.
- Barbing 6mo agoThis sounds like the move, vs. having mum on Win+Chrome. If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members. Unforgivable btw Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell
- SoftTalker 6mo agoThat can't be literally true, no release of Ubuntu is still getting updates after 18 years. At some point you have to upgrade to the next release, and that's not quite as simple.
- LetsGetTechnicl 6mo agoThe laptop is 18 years old, Ubuntu was installed in 2017.
- HerbManic 6mo agoIt might not be 2035 but give it a few weeks and we will be there. Or at least it will feel like it only took a few weeks.
- tracker1 6mo agoI tend to run pretty close to the edge on hardware (9950x, 9070xt, gen5 nvme)... I've had a few issues with that in Linux... that said, I've been using Linux as the main OS on my desktop for a while now, and when I upgraded about a year ago, I ditched the Windows drive entirely. I do have a Windows Server 2025 and Win11 VM running for a couple testing issues, but that's about it. That said, there seems to be a few integration issues on Wayland where the RDP client or the VM UI both will not intercept hotkeys like alt-tab, which makes it kind of painful to use the VM effectively. Even with the rough edges in Cosmic, I'll still take it over the jank they keep addding to Windows.
- vidarh 6mo agoYeah, I mostly stopped checking hardware compatibility for Linux ~10 years ago. Every now and again there's an issue, but it's usually easy to work around, or I wait a little bit and it's resolved. When it got to the point that I felt I didn't need to check any more, it was a big deal.
- tracker1 6mo agoI had an RX 5700XT at launch, that was about the most painful... but 6mo later it worked fine... But by then I did switch back to Windows because I couldn't deal with the day to day issues... A year later, I went back to Linux and haven't looked back though.
- TheGRS 6mo agoIts always been a momentum thing for me, grew up on Windows, esp in my LAN party days. The guys running linux couldn't play 90% of the games the rest of us were. When dev became more important to me I would typically reach for something else because the windows dev experience always kind of sucked IMO (unless you were a .NET person, which for the most part I was not). I have a spare laptop with Pop OS on it now and I'm really enjoying it. Kind of forget I'm on it sometimes. I'm considering putting it as my OS for my main powerful laptop that I play most of my games on.
- HerbManic 6mo agoI haven't had Windows in the home for maybe 10ish years. It is funny how quickly you forget about it once you are entirely over to your new normal. I am only reminded when very occasionally someone is around and they see my system running, they ask "What is that?", but most of the time nobody notices or cares.
- iLoveOncall 6mo agoI run Windows 11 as my main desktop (and use Mac at work and have a bunch of servers / NAS where I run debian), and W11 is not painful at all. I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then. Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.
- mancerayder 6mo agoSome people don't mind ads on the radio, when they're watching a show, some people don't mind pop-ups, etc. Now, if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet? Users had had browsers for over two decades, who has asked Microsoft to mix local search, application startup and web search? As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career. I guess different personalities here, as well.
- iLoveOncall 6mo ago> if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet? This is how I launch most of my programs and it has literally never been an issue for me, it always does exactly what I expect, which is to launch the program I have installed locally. I don't give a fuck if it makes an HTTP call or performs an incantation to the god of search in the background, as long as it just gives me my locally installed software instantly, which it does. > As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career. Read my bio.
- minetest2048 6mo agoSometimes its not instant though.. sometime web search completes faster then locally installed software and because of muscle memory I accidentally opened a bing page about scrcpy (where the first result is an unaffiliated web page instead of official github page!) instead of my locally installed scrcpy
- baq 6mo agoLinux is missing good vm defaults (dirty_bytes etc.) - out of the box settings on the distros I tried are abysmal; both windows and macos are much saner. Other than that, yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. It's treating the user primarily as an upsell funnel.
- seabrookmx 6mo agoI assume this isn't the case with every machine, but every hardware I've ever owned (including the Framework 13, which has pretty good Linux support) has had worse battery life under Linux (mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu). To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get. That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.
- wkrsz 6mo agoDavid Heinemeier Hansson reports excellent battery life on 2026 Dell XPS 14 with Panther Lake https://world.hey.com/dhh/panther-lake-is-the-real-deal-4bd731f1 https://world.hey.com/dhh/panther-lake-is-the-real-deal-4bd7...
- seabrookmx 6mo agoI'm a little gun-shy of getting another Dell after two bad machines in a row (two separate models with swollen batteries < 3 years old), but I'll admit the 14 looks nice now that they've brought back the physical function keys!
- ebbi 6mo agoI'm waiting to see some other reviews of the Omarchy and Dell XPS combo on battery life. DHH has overhyped some things in the past - he posted a screenshot on X last week showing ~40 hours battery life remaining on the Dell. But it's so good to see the Windows side catching up to Macs now. So tempted to try out Omarchy on the XPS.
- IshKebab 6mo agoInstall the IoT LTSC edition. No crapware at all. It's a really solid OS. Less painful than Linux overall.
- delecti 6mo agoIs there any legitimate way to do that? Last I heard, that version needed an Enterprise license which end-users realistically can't realistically get.
- IshKebab 6mo agoNot for a reasonable sum of money. You can just buy a cd key from the grey market though. There's no risk for personal use.
- dartharva 6mo agoBut you'll lose out on driver and QoL updates if you have new hardware
- LetsGetTechnicl 6mo agoI dual boot Windows and Pop OS. I find the Windows 10 LTSC experience totally perfect, and it has a longer EOL.
- themagician 6mo agoLTSC is the “real” Windows. It’s so boring and terrific. What I don’t understand is why they don’t make it more available. Just let people pay for it. I do not understand why they don’t.
- com2kid 6mo agoFor the same reason everything is moving to being ad based - because ads pay more, and because the high income users who are willing to pay to get rid of ads are the most valuable users to show ads to.
- supertrope 6mo agoGoogle and Facebook showed the way. Consumers see FREE service and it sets the market equilibrium. Retail Windows licenses were already a slim minority. Those who would buy Windows 11 LTSC for Home would be an even smaller group.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago> Those who would buy Windows 11 LTSC for Home would be an even smaller group. Because Windows LTSC is not sold to home users.
- LetsGetTechnicl 6mo agoIt's pretty easily available if you know where to look, and I hope they never close the free activation loophole.
- bradley13 6mo agoIf you avoid games that demand kernel-level access, gaming on Linux works just fine. Honestly, I don't trust game producers enough to grant then kernel access. Do you? Really?
- wing-_-nuts 6mo agoI don't trust windows with access to sensitive data, much less games. I do all banking, etc on my linux laptop. My desktop is for messing around with AI / ML / games
- augusto-moura 6mo agoI usually don't care enough about the games that only run on Windows. Most of the games I play are 100% playable on Linux, even the online competitive ones. Never liked League, PUBG or GTA Online anyway
- Neikius 6mo agoThere is like 20 online games that don't work... No need to give it all up if you switch
- lqstuart 6mo agoI switched from Windows to Linux because I got a Steam Deck, which caused me to realize that the only games in my library that don't also run flawlessly on Linux are the ones that have invasive anticheat that I'm really not comfortable installing. Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.
- brianwawok 6mo agoHave a Linux gaming machine with bazzite. Fantastic! So far any game I care about works and with AMD drivers it’s even stable..
- ljm 6mo agoI could tolerate Windows more if it stopped being a rental OS that thinks MS own your laptop more than you do. Like it was in Windows 7. All I ask is that things I uninstall stay uninstalled -- I got rid of OneDrive and Teams for a reason, stop adding that shit back! -- and that it doesn't shove Edge and Bing down my throat and decide that MS knows better than I do about what I want.
- aucisson_masque 6mo agoLast time I checked, Linux didn't have hardware acceleration for videos in most browsers. I think it was 2 or 3 years ago, certainly way after "the late 00's". In my opinion, an operating system that sucks the battery out of your laptop is not good enough. Just one exemple but I think it's pretty straightforward.
- jasomill 6mo agoWorse: while, as a technical user with decades of *nix experience (SunOS since 4.1.x, FreeBSD since 2.x, Linux since Red Hat [not Enterprise] 6, NEXTSTEP and its successors since 3.3, etc.), I've never had trouble getting hardware decoding working in Linux browsers with a little elbow grease, the overall support picture is not straightforward at all. Whether hardware decoding works in browsers on Linux depends on the Linux distro, the browser, the hardware, and how the browser is packaged and configured. It may be disabled by default. X11 backends may in some cases have broader decode support than Wayland backends or vice versa. And at least one popular distro, Fedora, packages video decoding libraries with patent-encumbered codecs disabled, which need to be replaced with libraries from a third-party repo for hardware decoding to work except in the case of applications installed via packaging mechanisms that vendor dependencies like Flatpak.
- Neikius 6mo agoThis one is a real pain yes. Contributes a lot to bad battery life on laptops
- aucisson_masque 6mo agoWhat a mess
- d3Xt3r 6mo ago> It's enough that I've considered giving up online play all together just to have a nicer computing experience. Why don't you play games that actually work online, instead of giving it up altogether? Diablo 2/3/4/D2R/PD2, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys, Age of Empires, Forza, MS Flight Simulator, Quake 3/4/Champions, The Finals, CS2, TF2, Halo Infinite... there's a bunch more I'm missing, but you can certainly game online on Linux.
- dugite-code 6mo agoUsing Proton tricks hasn't been too difficult a task for me on Bazzite and my steam deck. But my modding experience hasn't been that extensive. Mostly tinkering with Deus ex and Starwars x-wing alliance
- johnnyanmac 6mo agoThe only reason I haven't fully swithed to Linux at this point (because I'm very comfortable in it) is that my work pretty much requires it. Having the enterprise world in a strong hold to the point where important industry tools simply have zero/very weak Linux support feels like half the reason the fabled "Year of Linux Desktop" hasn't come to fruition. Many engineers and artists literally cannot afford to switch. Many other industries have too much data in servers or spreadsheets to efficiently move over.
- darkteflon 6mo agoThe multiplayer stuff with kernel level anti-cheat - it’s mostly the kind of thing that’s also on console. I bought a PS5 for that and called it a day. Desktop rig runs Bazzite and I’ve a Steam Deck. They play most everything in my Steam library with Proton (ymmv, of course). One of the last ones that didn’t work was Assetto Corsa - some kind soul here on hn helped me get it working recently. I used to dual-boot Win 10 with Bazzite (separate drives), but finally ditched Windows 6 months ago. It can be done; a lot’s changed in the past couple of years.
- eqqs 6mo agoI switched to Fedora on my laptop and it has been mostly stable and stays out of my way. I kept Win11 on a separate SSD to test my windows game builds before updates. I bought a PS5 solely for kernel level anti-cheat games.