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Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday February 15, 2018 @02:54PM (#16386989)
Gamers who bend over for the sake of their hobby are a pathetic bunch. Linux has many, many great games, and if that's not enough supplement it with a PS4 or something and you'll never be bored.

Most professionals would have no problem using Linux for their needs. What applications are you suggesting aren't up to snuff?

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by unethical_ban on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:01PM (#16387058)
Because the XBOX and PS and Switch are totally safe, open source products that respect personal information.

Linux has more gaming than it did 5-10 years ago, but if someone wants to play a game at top performance on PC, you typically need to choose Windows.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by wizbright on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:08PM (#16387134)
Even if a game performs better on PC, whose to say it isn't optimized? Some of Vavle's own games have performed better via the Linux build compared to Windows or Mac. It's also super sketchy to not be able to see what's fully happening in one's system.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by monochromatic on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:24PM (#16387281)
How do you feel about the closed BIOS and Management Engine that underlie everything?
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:10PM (#16387657)
Frustrated, and I rally against it too. My laptops run coreboot. But the difference between your closed BIOS and your closed OS is that most people actually can choose their OS, whereas fixing the BIOS problem is a much more difficult obstacle.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by mykull on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:29PM (#16387811)
in my case, it makes me feel double-plus un-good. which is why I go to the trouble of killing the ME on any system I can, despite the at-best trivial impact of doing so.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#16387099)
>Linux has more gaming than it did 5-10 years ago, but if someone wants to play a game at top performance on PC, you typically need to choose Windows.

You can make an argument about the size of the respective platform's game libraries, but not about their performance. Games on Linux often perform as well as or better than Windows. There's no clear trend that suggests the performance of games on Linux are worse than on Windows.

And even if it were, what good is 70 FPS over 60 FPS beyond pissing contests? You're limited by your display's refresh rate anyway.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by greenknight on Thursday February 15, 2018 @11:14PM (#16389805)
Actually, competitive esports players consistently play at a higher refresh rate than what is displayed (CS:GO in particular).... the main reason is that the computer is computes the inputs at the framerate, regardless of whats shown on screen.

This leads to a more responsive and fluid response to your input commands... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjWSRTYV8e0

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Alupis on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:20PM (#16387235)
More and more games are coming to Linux, for sure (I'm a huge fan of games on Linux!), but Linux still is missing the latest-and-greatest AAA titles... think the Call of Duty's, Battlefield's, Skyrim's, Fallout's, Wolfenstein's... and many many more.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by nottorp on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:49PM (#16387495)
I find that as I grow older I'm less and less interested in the design-by-commitee AAA crap. The really interesting stuff is mostly in the small fry scene, and those tend to be cross platform.

I do have a Windows install specifically for gaming, but I haven't booted it in ages.

Edit: my main entertainment IS games.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by taurath on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:30PM (#16387814)
My experience is most of the indy games coming out I’m interested in are windows only. Also really good games this generation like Divinity 2 have no Linux support
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by nottorp on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:53PM (#16388061)
Well it depends what you like. I never tried any of the Divinitys because I'm under the impression that the storyline is unimaginative and just game mechanics mostly don't cut it for me (let's not mention how much time i spend in Minecraft though).

My 2nd place entertainment activity is reading, and there are few games that can approach a good book in storytelling.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by disgruntledphd2 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @05:05PM (#16388181)
I don't normally click on timestamps to add to a deep thread, but if you like good storytelling, check out Pillars of Eternity. If you're a pen-and-paper nerd, then it might be right up your alley and the storytelling is really well done.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by nottorp on Friday February 16, 2018 @04:44AM (#16391128)
I was on the kickstarter (same for II) and finished it a while ago, thank you :)
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by disgruntledphd2 on Friday February 16, 2018 @10:52AM (#16393158)
In that case, thank you for backing! I am currently replaying 1 on POTD, and enjoying every minute (I discovered it too late for the second Kickstarter, unfortunately).
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Fnoord on Thursday February 15, 2018 @08:06PM (#16389166)
> Wolfenstein's

The latest ones you meant?

Cause Wolf3D, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory had native clients in early '00s when I played them. RTCW: ET was even completely free (as in beer). I played it for countless of hours!!

Back in those days we had a few people porting games over such as Ryan Gordon from Icculus or Timothee Besset (TTimo) from ID who ported, perhaps sometimes even as an after thought because the original floppies or CD (!!) didn't contain the Linux client.

We've come a long way. These days, you can just have one application to install a shitload of games (Steam, Humble Bundle) and you can find games for whatever platform you run, pay, install, and run it. With far, far more titles. Add to that: WebGL games are going to work on *NIX out of the box. Like Airmash, for example.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by striking on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:31PM (#16387336)
Wine recently got a DX11 layer, so we're a lot closer to that than before.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Bl4ckb0ne on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:34PM (#16387365)
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by falcolas on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:13PM (#16387180)
Many people use monitors with 144hz refresh rates. And increased FPS means you can turn graphics up, or enable more sophisticated anti-aliasing solutions, without impacting absolute performance.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by wizbright on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:23PM (#16387265)
That's true, but also some companies cough Nvidia cough have drivers that aren't up to snuff with an OPEN SOURCE system. It's crazy that the software is FREE to access and really there would be no need to pay any real fees to develop better drivers for systems. AMD is one of the big players that has actually been working with the community to help support their cards.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by jwagenet on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:30PM (#16387327)
This is not true: If you increase your target FPS to meet a monitor refresh rate, you must turn down your AA or other graphics settings to compensate when using the same hardware. Going from a 60 Hz to 144 Hz monitor more than doubles the FPS required for Vsync, which requires double the hardware performance to take advantage of the high refresh rate.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by falcolas on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:27PM (#16387795)
If you have 160FPS on a 144hz monitor, you can turn things up. If you have 145FPS on a 144hz monitor, you can't.

That's the only point I was trying to make there.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:19PM (#16387221)
My point is that the difference isn't going to be enough to be meaningful. If your GPU can drive 144 FPS on your Windows install it can probably drive 144 FPS on your Linux install with the same graphics settings.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by falcolas on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:29PM (#16387806)
I'm just noting why it's not "just a pissing contest". You're right that performance will be similar for games which were built with cross-OS compatibility in mind. But the differences in performance do matter.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Kagerjay on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:29PM (#16387320)
There's a huge range of applications that are only macOS or windows only that are a miles better in everyway.

For instance, apple's sketch. You won't find anything like it even on Windows.

For instance, windows PC. You have a ton of native autohotkey applications for writing macros, powerful 3rd party file explorers like directoryOpus, etc. You can't play video games on it, naturally gamedevelopment is a hassle as well. You can't run CAD programs, etc

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by badsectoracula on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:43PM (#16387959)
> You have a ton of native autohotkey applications for writing macros

Note that you can do that with X11 too using tools like xbindkeys, xdotool, xnee, xrebind, wmctrl, etc.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by emodendroket on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:49PM (#16388012)
Well, sure, and DirectX applications could all be written as OpenGL applications instead. But who's going to do that work?
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by pjc50 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:05PM (#16387096)
PS4 is also a closed ecosystem, far more so than PC gaming on Windows?

Inevitably people end up with a requirement for some Windows program that trips up users or administrators in the workplace. Some workplaces (e.g. mine) are fully paid-up committed Microsoft shops where everyone has MSDN.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:11PM (#16387158)
>PS4 is also a closed ecosystem, far more so than PC gaming on Windows?

Baby steps. I don't own a PS4 anyway, but I'm so tired of discussing Windows with people who whine about losing their games that I feel the need to specify an out.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by emodendroket on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:30PM (#16387813)
"Just use Linux."

"Well, maybe I would, but this program I use frequently is not available on Linux."

"So? You shouldn't want to use that anyway."

With a sales pitch like this I can't believe the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come to fruition yet.

Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by gambiting on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:25PM (#16387286)
And I feel a need to point out that you behave like a jerk in this thread and well below the standard HN is known for. If you have a problem with Windows, that's fine, calling people pathetic is not.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by mmagin on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:02PM (#16387078)
Please recommend a Linux CAD program that's as easy to use and featureful as Fusion 360.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by Mononokay on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:40PM (#16387415)
Okay, Mr. Stallman.
Re:Hey Microsoft, Stop Installing Apps on My PC Without Asking by CamperBob2 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @05:49PM (#16388485)
"Okay, Mr. Stallman, you've successfully forecast everything that's happened in computing over the last few years, and done so literally decades in advance, so thanks for that I guess, but please take off the tinfoil and go away now."