The workaround is to use Linux :)

I only use my Windows PC for gaming now, where it's kinda unavoidable.

Keep an eye out for games supported on Proton (Steam's Wine facilitation) on protondb.com. In a mere five years gaming on Linux went from a solid selection of native games, to those, plus an impressive amount of high profile titles that just work out of the box (often with better performance on Linux).

Of course there may be one or two titles that tie you to Windows, or perhaps multiplayer specific gaming related software, but if you are flexible in that regard gaming on Linux is just… good.

My biggest pain point is that some of the mainstream multiplayer anticheat implementations don't work on wine. I'd like to be able to play Tarkov or Hunt or Apex on Linux, but I can't. So far, I have just not played those titles, even though I really want to. I don't really want to have to dual boot just to play them, because Windows 10 messes up my EFI booting. I used to run Windows with a GPU passthrough, but I stopped doing that once proton came along. Maybe I'll look at doing that again, though it was hell to set up on Gentoo at the time. Maybe other distros have smoothed that out a bit? It's been like 6 years since I did it the last time.

I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.

It's gotten much easier with Nvidia cards thanks to VM gaming being officially supported. No more hiding the VM and that Error 47 nonsense.

Basically you bind the graphics card to the vfio driver by writing the PCI ID to /sys/bus/pci/drivers/vfio-pci/new_id and then you can use it in qemu with -device vfio-pci,host=01:00.0.

If you have sane IOMMU groups and have an extra GPU for the host it should work with just those two steps. You still have to decide about how you handle input and output, but that's very user specific. Virtual input over the qemu GUI works well enough, there's also an evdev thing that lets you switch by pressing both Ctrl keys, or pass an entire USB controller. For audio I recommend scream[1] for the lowest latency (I get 2ms VM->PA->Speaker with MuQSS scheduler) with full 7.1 audio and if you don't want a dedicated monitor or switch monitor inputs there is Looking Glass[2] which captures frames and shuffles them to the host over shared memory. It also handles input via spice.

It's still a bit of work, but for me that's mostly on the Windows side rather than the passthrough stuff itself.

[1]: https://github.com/duncanthrax/scream [2]: https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass

Thanks for the info. I appreciate that you took the time to write this. I think I will check out vfio passthrough again.

Something like Looking Glass looks cool. I definitely disliked having to switch monitor inputs back and forth every time, though that was just more of an annoyance than anything else, of course.

"just work out of the box" is an overstatement.

I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support.

I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have).

Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.

Many Linux games are only tested on Ubuntu. I personally haven't had more issues running Linux native games on Ubuntu than Windows native games on Windows.

Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games, ...

Admittedly I now dual-boot to Windows to play videogames, but that's not because of faults in native Linux games, just the reduced selection.

It's possible that some of the issues I ran into were due to Manjaro not being Ubuntu, but they could also have been due to drivers or some random setting somewhere in the system.

Plenty of people on protondb reported zero issues with the same games on their Manjaro/Arch boxes.

> Playing games on Windows often requires fiddling as well. Either having to lock the mouse to one monitor, fiddling with V-sync and FPS limits (often only possible through graphics card drivers, launch arguments or text config files), disabling Windows malware scanning, fiddling with Windows compatibility settings for older games

Maybe it's the type of games I play, but this is extremely rare in my experience. I don't remember the last time I had to fiddle with anything outside the game's own settings despite having a multi-monitor setup.

Steam Proton and Soldier runtime do wonders. I am playing Witcher 3 through it. Using mods. No lags or crashes.

The annoying bit with those is that they are Steam only. I try to avoid Steam and instead buy from GOG because they are DRM-free and i keep offline copies of all of my games, but Wine still (just tried yesterday the version Void Linux installs in a VM) seems to have issues even with slightly older games.

There used to be a way to run Proton outside of Steam but i think it is now discouraged.

It's not impossible to run gog games through the proton compatibility layer of steam. In short:

1. Download gog install files into the same directory

2. Add the install executable as a non-steam game, and enable proton compatibility before starting it up.

3. Run the installer and complete the installation. Gog installers typically give the option to run the game from the installer, but that will only work once.

4. Find the path of the installed game, and the working directory of that executable by searching in ~/.steam

5. Edit the entry created from 2. with this exec path and working dir, and look up possible args from protondb.com

This requires Steam to be there, as i wrote i try to avoid using Steam.

In that case, please give Lutris a solid look. It's a great app that eases the pain of installing games via WINE (and makes it easy to install particular versions of WINE on a per game basis).

It's how I run my GOG games on Pop OS.

Doesn't Lutris download and execute random scripts written by random people online? I'd rather avoid that and do it myself.

TBH i do not think things are completely unsolvable, it is just that i wish Proton, etc wasn't tied to Steam.

I have good experience with recent wine and dxvk too. I don't have steam.

Great. The workaround is much worse battery usage, screen tearing and a horrible trackpad experience.

Regarding screen tearing and trackpad issues, these are largely gone. Wayland has more or less solved the screen tearing issue and I have yet to encounter a poor trackpad experience using a modern machine, in my case an XPS 15 9570.

Neither of these issues have been resolved by Wayland on my modern Thinkpad 490. There is still awful screen tearing when watching videos and trackpad multitouch gesture support is still a mess on Linux. Gnome 40 added some gestures for navigating the desktop but beyond that the situation is horrible.

Screen tearing isn’t gone, unfortunately. Watching videos on my Linux machine is a pain. I use a Lenovo T460s and I’ve spent too much time looking for a solution (more then an hour). I like the freedom of a Linux OS (i3m is cool) but it looks so bad compared to MacOS.

Wayland is great, however it also makes screen recording more difficult.

True. For "wl-roots"-based compositors like swaywm, check out wf-recorder[1].

[1]https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder

I know about those solutions, and it works for me on sway in general. But is was not a simple out-of-the-box experience you have with X11.

And there are still multiple issues: For instance with X11 you can select a specific window. I have not found a way to do this in with a wayland compositor yet.

It's funny, I've been using Linux pretty much my entire adult life, and out of the issues you've pointed out, the only ones I've experienced have been with Windows; always reminds me to do a full wipe, not a dual boot.

The track pad issues seem to largely be gone.

I still get screen tearing.

I am running on a laptop, but I typically keep it plugged in as often as possible to save the battery so I haven't noticed if it's good or bad.

It's still a good trade IMO.

Trackpad is silky smooth on Star Labs laptops.

It isn't whether it is smooth or not. The issue is the mess that is multitouch gesture support on Linux.

What kind of gestures do you have in mind? Scrolling and zooming seems to work fine for me.

Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, Manjaro/Arch.

Spend the time to get acquainted, soon you will see you can do almost everything you need on linux (and more) that you can on Windows/macOS, but with less mental overhead (after you are used to linux, it really is simpler).

I feel like comments like this gloss over the many UX issues many Linux distros have. For example the file picker. When you open a new file from the web browser (Firefox usually) you navigate to your file and pick it. Now if you open up another file, it forgot your last opened directory and takes you back to your home or default. On windows and Mac I believe it remembers your last directory.

Also saving files in Debian is a bit of a pain. I think it keeps searching instead of actually typing the file name when you save a new word doc from libre office or another application.

Plus other services, like Netflix and Hulu, may not work out of the box. You’ll have to find a workaround but I think their official stance is still “Linux is not a supported platform”.

Don’t get me wrong Linux is great and it’s in a wonderful spot compared to 10 years ago. But it still does not have the polish or UX that users from windows and Mac expect in an operating system.

Right but your comment glosses over the many UX issues windows has. For example, virtual desktops are associated with all your screens, not with individual screens. Never had this issue in any linux distro.

(I'm all ears on how to solve that file picker problem though, that is mildly annoying).

>I'm all ears on how to solve that file picker problem though

Use the for long time available patch for GTK file chooser, use an XDG portal to open KDE file chooser instead of the GTK one, or use a Qt-based (KDE or Deepin) rather a GTK-based environment. And for any interested programmers, a maintainer recently has outlined some steps[0] to introduce that functionality in a way that probably GNOME devs will accept.

[0]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_1106706

GTK! I should have known that was the culprit. Remember gtk2 when there was a bunch of great apps that just worked? I remember :(

Next time I'm on a graphical linux system I'll muck around with XDG to get PCManFM or whatever as default. Thanks.

I find that compared to the the UX issues of Windows it is fantastic.

Obviously this varies from person to person but I have verified already a more than a decade ago that it worked very well with ordinary users as long as they didn't need MS Office or anything like it.

And true: Netflix doesn't work but for that I use my phone/tablet that I cast to my TV.

You may say: not everyone has a PC and a phone but as far as I can see the overwhelming majority who has a PC also seems to have a smartphone.

The netflix complaint is a pretty confusing one. The last time I used windows was back when Netflix was a DVD rental service, and while there was a time when you had to go get Google Chrome to stream via Netflix on linux, even that hasn't been the case for quite a long time. I swear half the people in these threads tried like one distro ten years ago, ran into one issue, and sees this as a knockdown argument that normal computer users can't tolerate a single learning curve. Meanwhile, any time some acquaintance tries to do a simple task they've never done before on the OS they claim is easy to use (whether this be windows or macOS), it ends up being a huge hassle anyway, and sometimes there is simply no solution to the problem they want to solve

Like, yes, most things have a learning curve. I have yet to encounter any evidence that Windows having a particularly easy one for anything is more than propaganda

Netflix works fine on Linux. Either enable DRM on Firefox, or install Google Chrome, then use your browser of choice to access https://netflix.com.

Netflix works fine in Firefox. Nothing to install.

I've got rid of my Netflix account; between Sky, Youtube and Freesat, there's more stuff to watch than I have time in the day.

I reckon Netflix restricts to low resolution only if you don't enable DRMs.

Regarding file-picker dialogs. I always found the most annoying dialog was actually with Windows: The folder chooser.

You only have a directory file tree, that is often not in the right directory, where the application was launched from. No really way to directly jump to a directory via a path, that you copied from a open Explorer, which you might have open next to it, because you started the .exe from there. So you have to click your way through.

The default Windows file-picker has let you paste in a path for decades. The address bar at the top can let you paste in a path and the "File name:" prompt at the bottom supports several different kinds of paths.

I don't mean the file-picker, but the folder-picker (FolderBrowserDialog).

That one: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...

I use Linux in my main PC, both to work on programming and to play games. I've been familiar with Linux and using it on an off for more th as n 15 years.

Nevertheless, my days of advocating for others to use it are over (I even used to frequent comp.linux.advocacy!). People that are used to Windows will have a very hard time moving away of it. No matter how easy the migration path, there will always be something painful. The path of least resistance will always be running Windows. And in addition even the most polished Linux versions have issues. I've run them all. They are nice, but once you get into an obscure singular case, the console dance start. Wifi, sound, bluethoot, video, media-keyboard or mouse, fingerprint reader. There's always something.

We People who have been using linux for years are already used to it: google for a couple of minutes, open the terminal and copy/paste a bunch of commands. Sometimes it works, other times we compromise by not using that feature that doesn't work.

For people used to Windows this is very painful.

Just as an example of something that happened to me just today: I wanted to connect 2 monitors to my linux Home PC: 1 in the Nvidia GPU HDMI and another one in the integrated Intel HDMI. It doesn't work out of the box, and it is apparently not possible, at least not without thinkering with the BIOS and some config files (and the main response returned by google https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=265946 doesn't work).

So yeah, I can imagine how people coming from windows might be frustrated with that.

Meanwhile on Windows, the setup for that is:

* Plug in monitor 1

* Plug in monitor 2

I use a Microsoft account so I can use the same account across my multiple desktops, my laptop, my wife's surface, and several different friend's PC's as well. We do our file permissions on our network storage based on our Microsoft accounts so it's super easy to grant/revoke permissions to things and have that work globally for us. On Windows, this is all free (not a single second of additional setup) with a Microsoft account. What instant thing would do the same for me in Linux?

None of the tools I use run in any of the Windows compatibility gadgets for Linux. The open source options are probably great if you can't access the good proprietary tools, but they're not remotely close. Some of them I used extensively before switching, so I speak from experience.

Win11 pro will not be subject to this requirement.

References? Is there some sort of official statement?

Windows 10 was also not subject to this requirement, yet you're harassed when you try to keep your local login.

Does it matter? MS are back to their old tricks one way or another. Makes me wonder if I should ditch C# and ASP.Net.

Yes you should. They are now pushing the 'your experience is better with a Microsoft account' shit in Visual Studio.

I use VS Mac exclusively. Wondering how long it will be before they try to leverage VS Code. There must now be plenty of young devs who have never used anything else.

Aha I'm glad, thank you for pointing this out! I see now that the article specifically mentions Windows 11 Home only, I should have noticed that.

It was never a requirement. It uses dark UI patterns (You have to click cancel, then there is a tiny link at the bottom that allows you to create local pc admin account with no MS attachment). Media likes to overblow things.

Haha, how can you defend Microsoft like this.

Imagine McDonald's applying such dark UI patterns: maybe forget part of your order, put your change on the table under a napkin so you don't notice it, only offer you the free ice cream the 3rd time you ask, etc. People would be up in arms!

But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?

No evil to see here, sir!

"But Microsoft?! Well, they are the darling of the tech world now so it must only be a prank no?"

Google and Apple do it too and no one has complained. Why suddenly the up and arms when Microsoft does it? That doesn't sound like a darling of the tech world to me.

Whataboutism.

People complain about Google and Apple too.

Though, not even Apple applied such dark patterns to force you to create an account with them. There's still time though!

I'm not sure this is true anymore. I bought a new laptop, and I could not figure out how to avoid signing in to a Microsoft account without starting over and refusing to set up Wi-Fi. I am quite savvy, but admittedly I had not used a consumer edition of Windows in quite some time. Nothing overblown here; dark patterns ought to be called out loudly.

Yep. I literally had to solve this yesterday helping a friend setup a brand new laptop (with Window Home edition) That little link is gone now. I had to Google to find that you create the local account by turning on Airplane mode before entering that screen. It then let me create a local account. ( And of course the other thing I did was immediately remove the McAfee security nagware - at least Microsoft has Defender already installed ready to take over AV duties )

I just recently did re-format my gaming PC with latest Win10 and it was possible. Maybe because I have "Pro" version, but it was possible on latest Win10.

Yes, Pro is different. Windows 10 Home will require an account at setup if there's any way it can get to the internet. (No wifi and nothing plugged into the ethernet port will give you the option.)

I'm aware yes. It was also possible by not connecting to WiFi or Ethernet while setting up Windows 10. But I thought that this meant that that option would go away with Windows 11. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, all I have is the news to go by!