Comment by juancn
2 days ago
Windows is not for doing serious stuff anymore, the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC (if you turn off all the nags, it's pretty decent).
I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.
2 days ago
Windows is not for doing serious stuff anymore, the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC (if you turn off all the nags, it's pretty decent).
I work on a Mac, I run servers on Linux, I game on Windows.
>the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
More and more it seems people don't even find it necessary for that.
I'm "the Linux friend" for a lot of my friends, and over the last year-ish a surprising number of them have asked about advice for switching to Linux. I've helped four people attempt the switch, and three out of the four have stuck with Linux so far.
All the damn developers keep turning off online play for Linux users though... I play two games a lot currently, Apex Legends and Battlefield 6, both block Linux players from online play thanks to their shitty kernel rootkits not supporting Linux.
Apex Legends at least was running fine on Steam Deck prior to november 2024 when they instituted this change, and I can tell you from personal experience it had very little impact on cheaters, which was their excuse for the change (supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients).
> supposedly most cheaters were connecting via Linux clients
I always find this so hard to believe, mainly because the majority of players are on Windows, which means that the market for cheats is there and statistically most likely to happen there.
I just don’t play games by devs that snub Linux. There are many to choose from.
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yup i am too, steamdeck helped convert me fully. this year my goal is to move my main gaming desktop to linux with tiny spare ssd for windows to run the odd anticheat game on.
How do you like the steam deck? Do you feel like it was worth the cost?
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cachyos has been nearly flawless for a non-steam deck (gpd win mini 2). Upgrades broke my tv being set to the primary display under gamemode but that was an easy fix.
The other game changer (heh) was going all in on amd: cpu, integrated gpu, and discrete gpu via oculink.
Nvidia may be the best overall performance for gaming and ai workloads, it still doesn't play nice with linux gaming
I don't think that's Nvidia's fault, I've never seen an eGPU enclosure system of any type work seamlessly on Linux.
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I can't even be bothered to dual boot into Windows to game anymore. Wiped my Windows drive over the weekend so that it could be used as a snapshot drive. If the game doesn't work on Steam on Linux I'm not interested - simple as that.
Gaming is a smaller thing for me than the Adobe creative apps, especially Lightroom.
Granted, I could get that on Macintosh. But while their fans like to claim that Apple's engineering is all about usability, that hasn't been true for quite some time. It's now become a status/elitism thing (see, e.g., yesterday's conversation about Tahoe icons). And their UX model is very contrary to my way of thinking about things.
Apple has a lot of failings recently. But macOS still has far more claim to “usability” than Windows!
If only because of the fact that the start menu (equivalent - the dock and applications view) isn’t an ad filled react app.
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I strongly disagree, but de gustibus non disputandum
Unless you need compatibility with Adobe file formats, Free editing software works fine too. I've been using Darktable for about a decade. People bash on GIMP for not being able to do what Photoshop can, but it's because GIMP is built with the intent of being extended by the user. It can be extended to do what people complain that it cannot do. Kdenlive is good at filling the needs met by Premiere. I think the hardest Adobe application for me to recommend a portable alternative to is After Effects. Maybe Blender can be coaxed into filling some AE uses.
I strongly disagree. Have you used Lightroom in the last, say, two years?
They've had a revolutionary upgrade in their masking tools. ML models power automated, smart mask creation. For example, on a landscape photo I can get, with just a couple of clicks, separate masks for sky, water, land, foliage, structures, and natural ground. The power that this gives me to edit my photos is amazing. To the best of my knowledge, Darktable and others have nothing approaching this.
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Users of creative apps are rarely also programmers capable of creating the extensions you mention. If the goal is getting people to switch to your application, open source or not, you need to provide a level of minimal functionality. What is minimal functionality varies from person to person and may include the way you interact with said functionality.
While Gimp and Krita are very useful and even usable for a lot of people... that doesn't mean it's a suitable replacement for the Adobe products. Some will get Affinity running with Wine... frankly it would be nice if there was an "easy gutton" to doing a lot of this. I'm not sure about the legalities of copying actual MS dll's from Windows for use with Wine even... even if yoou have a license, as I'm not a lawyer, which can impact the ability to make it easier to do/use.
It would be nice if more software at least got tested to run on Wine/Proton with closer to first party support. Bridging the gap between a full Linux version, and something that can at least run in Linux.
This flowchart continues to be more or less accurate: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho...
Might need a little update to bring it up to date.
Disclosure: I fear technology and my daddy is not rich.
I get the joke, but I disagree. It mixed hardware with software in a weird way.
Macs are as much about the hardware than the software, and the OS is just another Unix variant. Much closer to Linux/BSD than Windows.
I like tech (no fear, I've been coding for 41 years at this point), but I don't like configuration, I'm a programmer, not IT, and also I heavily lean to getting shit done, so I prefer tools that don't get too much in my way.
I abandoned Linux on the desktop after I lost a battle with Linux audio. I can't freaking believe there's not a single thing that unifies everything, it's such a pain in the ass to setup right.
On notebooks it's a lost battle due to issues with power management that require way more fiddling that I'm willing to invest into.
I’m not sure what distro you used or how long ago this was - but I’ve been using Pop!_os as my general OS + dev env (and more recently switched off Windows to Bazzite for gaming) - and I’ve never once had to battle with audio or weird twiddling with settings to get stuff to work. In my experience - both have had the kind of out-of-the-box experience I’ve come to expect from Windows. If anything - Windows has required a lot more fiddling with settings and hunting down drivers as of late.
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For me it's Autocad. Although I heard people managed to run it to Linux and don't complain.
I do exactly the same as you. I wish that I didn't need windows for gaming, and things are getting better on that front, but my favorite game (AoE 2) works significantly better on windows than on wine :(
> the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
Love cachyos. Such a great OS. Wanted to love bazzite, but it's got too many opinionated takes and rpm-ostree is a PITA. pacman does have its pitfalls, but aside from upgrades, it's been appliance-level stable for a 100% gaming laptop docked to my tv
> rpm-ostree is a PITA
yup...at first i thought, "at work i have to manage rpm-ostree servers, so why not use the same tech at home?", well, because the tech is freaking buggy, annoying and deprecated already (imagemode/bootc).
Bazzite also had strange issues with the XBOX controllers i use, those issues went away with CachyOS. in the end it doesn't matter that much, on both i use(d) KDE Plasma. GF also uses the PC with her own useraccount to play her games. overall very satisfied, can't complain.
don't lynch me, decided to go for the pretty standard instead of Sway or Hyprland, as i feared that this would bring more issues with gaming. maybe that's an irrational fear, who knows.
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I mostly agree with you. Now with proton/steamos, the only games that need windows are multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat mechanisms (e.g., destiny 2).
Otherwise, spot-on to my MO
How many games do you use on Windows that you can not use on Linux?
For me the last one was Blade and Soul, and in the end, I dropped it rather than put up with it.
Even live-service games are less of a hassle than they used to be. BDO works well, Genshin works with occasionally having to update Proton, and the new shiny Where Winds Meet worked for me from the first day (never even tried it on Windows :P)
I think in the last 6 months, I've dual-booted for pretty much these things:
* To install a new motherboard's RGB-tweak utility because it doesn't work right in OpenRGB yet. Ran it once to pick settings, then it seemed to write to NVRAM since it's been stuck that way now.
* To use ham radio programming software that was clearly written by a single hobbyist and I didn't expect to work on anything but happy-path Windows systems.
* To try a weird specialty keyboard with a nonstandard card-reader (most of them just appear as normal HID keyboards, this one was a custom USB endpoint which apparently emulated a serial device with the right software. In the end, it didn't work well in Windows either-- the software was apparently mostly Win7-and-below.
* To deal with an old scanner that the vendor provides a Linux software package for, but only as a binary .deb that didn't seem to work well on Void. (Problem solved by picking up a used scanner explicitly supported by SANE for $10 at the Goodwill)
Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, GTA5 online (and likely gta6 online).
Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.
How many of these will not run under Wine/Crossover/Hangover?
My guess is that most DRM'ed games won't work right, but they often don't work right under Windows either.
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It's not the "can't" necessarily, it's about friction, I could get it working on linux, but then I'd probably be just fiddling with settings way longer than I do today.
Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).
Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.
I installed Bazzite just last month, it's set-and-forget. Zero hardware / driver issues, everything autoconfigured.
Didn't even need to download steam.
Absolutely shocked me how smooth the out-of-box experience was compared to even Windows 10.
To my further surprise, I found my game library's compatibility on Bazzite was stronger than Windows 10 somehow. (Some old games like Moonbase Commander don't launch on Windows 10)
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FWIW - GOG and Epic games play just fine via the Heroic app on Bazzite. I’ve only played a few games from those platforms so far - but it’s been as seamless as playing games off steam in my experience.
Set my teenage son up to dual boot his gaming rig with SteamOS this Christmas. He hasn't rebooted to Windows since...
> the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
Amiga users have been here before.
GPU drivers are legit easier on Linux than they are on windows at this point.
I get ~weekly crashes using an Nvidia card with arch/hyprland, but honestly it's less problematic for me to deal with than windows updates. I can format and rebuild my machine from scratch in less time than windows takes to download and perform an update.
Flawless experience on non-nvidia hardware though.
That's arch/hyprland though. You're even making it harder for yourself than it needs to be.
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I don't have that problem with Arch+COSMIC, which has the tiling you get with Hyprland but without the overly complex configuration. You can also switch to floating windows with one button if needed.
I haven't had any issues with NVidia's on the latest machine I built (like nothing).
It's just an optional update whenever I remember to check for one.
Ha... Ha haha haha... Ha!
Valve saw exactly this scenario, because you're right: Windows isn't good for stability any more. Windows isn't good for driver compatibility anymore. Windows isn't good for being easy to do your own thing. It's only good for gaming...
So: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
I mean, macOS is not a serious OS either. It has worse error management/reporting than Windows - Microsoft at least give you the courtesy of pretending they're trying to help you resolve the issue with an indecipherable hex code and badly localised error message, that you may, if you're very lucky, be able to Google.
Apple give you a middle finger with a "Something went wrong" or just spins forever. No information whatsoever on what the problem is and how you could possibly debug it. Compete lack of tooling to help with that too.
Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"? HA, FUCK YOU. I spent hours trying to debug this (so there is a tool that can give you power use per USB device, but it's a point in time one). In the end rewired everything because it was just impossible to discover what the hell was its problem. Another fun one was trying to extend my macOS screen to an iPad, where the button just wasn't there. Why? What was I missing? Who knows.
> Probably my favourite example was when it was giving me an error message of "A device is using too much power, try unplugging and replugging it". Which device? Which port? What is "too much"?
Another fun one: “Updates are available. Do you want to install them?” What updates? What software is getting updates? What do they fix? No information, just a notification asking you whether you want to install vague updates.
[dead]
Gaming will be dead soon too... Thanks to hardware shortages..
Ah I see, people don't remember the time where most games just released on console, because it was the biggest target group. This time will come back. Like it or not. People won't buy a pc for 2k.