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[Opinion] Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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The only thing holding me back from diving headlong into Linux is gaming support. I've been a windows user since W98. XP was the shit, 7 was rock solid, ten was pretty good, but it seems like Microsoft is dead set on speedrunning enshittification with 11.
Gaming support on Linux is the best it has ever been. Other than select games, nearly everything works now. It's mostly competitive multiplayer games that don't work because it's the kernel anticheat that is the issue. Notably, Call of Duty and Destiny 2 don't work. Halo does 100% work now, which is awesome. But if you mostly play single player games, you are probably totally fine.
True. Gaming is extremely awesome on Linux compared to a few years ago right now, though. Anti-cheat holding you back?
Everything on steam works except modern anti chat games.
If i knew it was this good... Woulda jumped sooner
Er, what's a modern anti chat game
It's a typo, should be anti cheat.
You can chat away to your heart's content.
A game where using the in-build chat is a bannable offense.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for example runs Ricochet Anti-Cheat on kernel level which fundamentally contradicts Linux architecture and will never run.
Easy Anti-Cheat is an example where the devs gave in paving the way to a proton addon which allows you to play Apex, for example.
A modern game with anti cheat software.
No, I'm not big for online gaming, just heard that not all games that work on PC work on Linux, and I'm not sure about the status of various emulators that I use.
Check out Protondb, it's not only for the steamdeck, but (probably) all Linux derivates. You can sync your steam library to see, what works and how well.
Most people will include their distro in the comment details, but it rarely matters because Steam ships pretty much all the dependencies games need, so whether you're on Debian (old packages) or Arch (new packages), the games will be running the same versions of common libraries.
So your distro choice really doesn't matter that much, and if it does, you can use the FlatPak, which includes even more dependencies and is common across distros.
I'm running Windows 10 and Linux Mint on my PC. I booted into Mint earlier this week, and out of my 189 (mostly older) Steam games, 186 work with no tweaks. It's definitely worth looking at :)
I've got a Steam Deck which is essentially a portable Linux machine, and I've been positively surprised by how well every game I throw at it has worked (even the ones that aren't officially verified to work on the Deck). Of course it's an underpowered system compared to desktops, but Proton - the not-emulation system based on Wine - is absolutely terrific, and it can be used on other Linux OSs than just SteamOS. I'd recommend giving Linux a go on a separate partition, you might find that your games run pretty much out of the box as long as you have Proton installed
I regularly watch stuff about Steam Deck on YouTube and they're always emulating just about everything. I don't know anything about the subject but it seems to me it works pretty well on Linux.
https://www.emudeck.com/
Emulation is in a great place on the Deck!
The only games that don't work with a Linux solution are games that the developers have purposely done something that makes it not work.
Check out https://www.protondb.com/ Some games might require a little tinkering. The Vulkan api will win the graphics war because Microsoft hasn't done much with DirectX and DX12 is not doing very well supporting the features it claims it can while being difficult to program. It's only a matter of time before Windows loses it's hold on the desktop. And Microsoft doesn't seem to really care. They make their API for Azure work with Linux.
DX12 won't die since it's the only supported API for XBox. Any game that supports XBox and PC will be DX12 because the XBox is just runs a virtualized Windows 10 (maybe they're on 11 now, I'm not sure) instance that requires DX12.
VR gaming is also shit on Linux. Mostly because it (similarly to Linux gaming in general) adds a layer of complexity and oddness you sometimes need to fix or debug... When you layer these kind of things the issues and complexity tend to multiply.
linux gaming is growing stronger as well
For me, lack of HDR support is a big issue. Also, Nvidia's Linux drivers are trash. I have a Linux install for work (much more powerful than the work laptop), but for gaming I'm sticking with W11 for now. Hopefully Nvidia can improve their drivers (or the community can make better userspace drivers based on Nvidia's new open source kernel driver) and HDR support can get added to Wayland soon.
The problem with the Nvidia drivers in Linux are distribution related. Try a different distro or compile your own kernel and apply the Nvidia driver manually and you might have better luck
They are not distribution related. I'm on Arch Linux, which has been by far the best experience with Nvidia drivers out of the distributions that I've tried. In the past, the only problems were occasionally the kernel being too new and the drivers not supporting it properly, in which case I would just fall back to the LTS kernel. However, the quality of the drivers has gone down dramatically. There is no kernel level support for HDR like Intel and AMD have, which will be useful when desktops add support as well. This also means that HDR content can't properly be played by Kodi, which can run without X11 or Wayland and support HDR like that.
On top of that, their BS EGLStreams-based Wayland support is broken. I'd been using Wayland on my systems for years, and the latest drivers caused so many issues that I had to revert back to X11. Firefox crashes very frequently with the new drivers on Wayland, and Google Meet in Chromium (which I use because it doesn't support background blurring in Firefox) has an issue where the camera sometimes freezes and I have to click the button in the UI to turn if off and back on again. These are Nvidia wayland specific problems. They'll supposedly be fixed in the next driver release (545) according to Mozilla, but the fact that they broke it in a production driver and are fine with leaving it like that for another couple months until the next release is ridiculous.
I also have an nvidia based machine connected to my TV that I had to switch to X11 before the buggy driver was released because it wouldn't support 4K at 60Hz in Wayland, only X11. Under wayland it only supported 4K at 30Hz. No other machine I had had this issue, only the nvidia based PC.
I won't be using any Nvidia based devices again unless an open source driver similar to AMDGPU is made and they fix the wild pricing that their current GPUs have.
It's your install then.
I highly recommend you try Linux gaming, it's still not perfect, but has massively improved in the last few years.
You should try it. Keep in mind that Valve has never sold a Steam Deck running Windows, and it's a hit. A lot of folks never even realize that they're gaming on Linux. It's that transparent.
They need to make sure users will have a good reason to upgrade to Windows 12.
They don't need any reasons at all anymore. Microsoft won the PC wars a long time ago and has been able to coast ever since. People will upgrade because Windows is the only thing supporting whatever apps they use in the workplace, because Macs are too expensive, and because Microsoft (for all its flaws) still cares about backwards compatibility.
Just because a new Windows version is available doesn't mean that Windows users will upgrade. My work computer is Windows, but I have still not touched Windows 11 at all to this day. But if the latest Windows is far better than the other available versions, then users and enterprises will likely want to upgrade.
Enterprises will have to upgrade once security support for 10 is dropped. Microsoft can even charge them extra to extend that maintenance window if they wanna squeeze more life out of the OS but it's so crazy expensive that Microsoft clearly has the upper hand here.
Through their OEM deals, you'll have a hard time finding a new computer with anything other than 11, and software developers can only support so many versions of Windows so they'll have to drop older releases to be sure they can keep up with all those new computers people are forced to buy.
No one wanted to upgrade to 10 either, yet here we are. Microsoft knows exactly what they're doing and have no qualms about how insidious it all is.
So true. Just a reminder that alternatives exist the next time someone tries to recommend a Thinkpad or Dell:
My HP came with FreeDOS.
https://blog.tmm.cx/2022/05/15/the-very-weird-hewlett-packard-freedos-option/ is a good read on what this option really is. It's clear that the intent on HPs part is to give you an option to buy the laptop without Windows garbage on it. Even if it's a bit janky on it's own.
I looked into it a bit, found a version of Fedora called Nobara. I bought a second m.2 drive and installed it. I almost never boot Win 10 anymore. The only gaming issue I have is anti-cheat not supporting it, come on Marauders, you look cool and I want to play. Also, some modding in things like TESV is a journey. Honestly though, simply using my rig feels better, faster, leaner. Gaming is great, Nobara has a setup wizard for my nVidia card as well as my XBox controller. It really isn't hard to switch, I just thought it would be before I tried.
There's bugs and glitches I've had to troubleshoot, but whenever I find myself annoyed, I just think about how many glitches and issues I had with Windows. Nothing is perfect, but Linux gaming is pretty good.