I bought a Windows gaming laptop in December, first time Windows gaming since 2010.

Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.

I've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc. Perhaps I am too pampered/spoiled, but I'm pretty sure 99% of Windows users are just experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.

If you don’t work in tech and you aren’t actually interested in tech which is quite a large proportion of home users then switching away is too much work.

> Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use and have spent 10-15 hours troubleshooting it.

> 've railed in the past about how Windows users think it's acceptable to constantly reboot your machine, experience crashes, etc.

Probably because most of us don't have such issues. I have both a Windows box and an OS X box, and they both need about the same amount of rebooting (maybe once a week? I don't actively keep track). My current Windows box (about 4 months old) has never crashed. My previous Windows box rarely crashed (but it was >10 years old, so it _did_ have some crashes).

I haven’t seen a bsod in over 15 years on any of the 4 personal or handful of work machines I’ve used in that time. Last one I can even remember seeing was in Vista and it was from legit hardware failure. Can’t remember the last time I was forced to reboot either. It’s been suggested plenty, but ignored without issue.

That is one nice thing about blue screens now. If you get them now it defiantly gets your attention. There is either a driver issue or a bad hw component (overheating, poor/broken connection) on the gp's new machine. I have not see one on my own machines in probably 4 years (bad driver). My wife gets one about every 2-3 months. They are identical hardware. I dropped her laptop on the floor one day by accident. It has not been quite right since (especially if she leaves an 360 controller plugged in). Forced reboots can happen. Usually about once a month you get a shot at it when they do their monthly update cycle. So if you happen to stay up past 3AM on the second Tuesday of the month you might get one.

You are not into any form of overclocking I gather.

I literally can't remember seeing a BSOD in Windows in as long as I can remember, at least 5 years or more.

I haven't rebooted this particular machine since the time it said it was required for an update, which was weeks ago.

I use it as my primary dev machine for my day job and it's a gaming machine that I use for gaming daily.

Something else is wrong. It's installed on billions of devices, noone would accept constant BSODs, crashes and forced reboots if this was the normal experience.

did you do a memory test? grab a linux usb stick and select memtest86+ on boot and let it run overnight or for how long as you can

Do you seriously think those of us running Windows deal with reboots and BSODs constantly and that you didn't happen to buy bad ram or some other hardware problem?

It's very likely that there's a hardware issue. While it could be a driver bug, that's the kind of thing you would be able to easily find others with similar systems complaining about.

As others have said, this is not normal. Your laptop appears to be broken or misconfigured and you should probably make a warranty claim. If you bought a used laptop someone ripped you off with a lemon device.

Having had several gaming laptops and basically every single laptop in the past 15years had a dedicated GPU, gaming laptops are a gimmick, if you emphasize on gaming.

They do make pretty decent machines for work, due to spec., large battery, and generous cooling. While many find them too heavy or bulking, but I do not mind that bit at all. However, the amount of heat needed to be dissipated, and GPUs having very low power envelop, makes them quite pitiful for the price paid.

Pretty good chance it's either a bad driver for some hardware you are running, or a physical device fault. If the fault is different devices each time, likely ram. I can't stand Windows at this point, but the experiences you are seeing definitely aren't normal. What do the temperatures look like? It's possibly just a bad thermal design or fan curve for your model.

> Currently I consistently get BSOD after 5-10 minutes of use a

You don't honestly think that's what everyone else experiences, do you?

I'm a gamer running Win10. In the past 5 years, I've had 4 BSoDs, 3 of them caused by Riot's Vanguard anti-cheat (Which I've uninstalled since I don't play Valorant anymore).

It sounds to me that you got a faulty laptop, and rather than consider that possibility, you decided that Windows is to blame.

Linux gaming is almost in a state where I'd find it quite tolerable, except that VR on the platform is still a sitshow (yes, even on Valve's own hardware) and, unfortunately for me, I've become quite attached to a few VR games.

As it is though, I'll just give up on VR and whatever else I like that doesn't work on Linux before I go to 11.

> Linux gaming is almost in a state where I'd find it quite tolerable

Definitely agree. It's almost there. But some things are still holding me back.

1) As you mentioned, VR is shit. I don't use VR a lot, but a couple of times per year I just want to try it again.

2) There's definitely a performance hit. Some games are very jittery on Linux, while running smoothly on windows. I spend a lot of money on my gaming PC because it's one of my oldest and favorite hobbies, and if an OS just tanks the performance it's kind of annoying.

3) Some games just don't work. Mostly multiplayer games. Normally I exclusively play offline, singleplayer games. But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties. Which I can't really do with Linux without spending half a day with debugging.

3.1) My work-life consists of debugging linux servers and fixing them, or setting them up. After work I just want to turn on my PC and game a bit. With Windows, that's 99.9% doable. With Linux, I have to debug and fix things during my free time as well, because the chance that a game just works out-of-the-box is pretty slim for me, even though Steam Proton is quite awesome.

4) A smaller hobby of mine is video editing, which is also not optimal on Linux. Aka., I would have to find a different tool, which I've tried unsuccessfully.

Basically, I use windows on my daily, free-time PC because gaming "just works" and sometimes I like to use VR or video editing softwares. If all I'd do in my free-time was browse the web etc., I'd just use a cheap laptop with Linux on it. After all, I really dislike Windows for anything else because it's such a bloated piece of shit OS ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've been playing games on Linux daily for years now (even AAA games like Cyberpunk 2077) and this is why I am still holding out on VR. I just don't want to be forced to go back to Windows just to play the games I want to play.

I'm waiting for Valve to maybe make a successor to Index with proper Linux support, but I'm not holding my breath.

Have you ever compared in-game performances between Windows and Linux?

Same here. I can't stand windows 11 feels like someone's taking over my OS. I was so upset that I wrote an article about it[1].

I was a Windows user for a long time until Windows 11 came out that was the last straw for me.

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

> But sometimes I like to visit private LAN-parties. Which I can't really do with Linux without spending half a day with debugging.

Man I havent played at a lan event in a long time. So many games now don't seem to support that. All my friends I use to play with have moved away. I would be nice to attend a LAN event again someday :D

Well, maybe I have to clarify what I mean with these parties :D Me and three friends meet from time to time, and each of us takes their PC to a friends home, where we game and watch movies from friday evening to sunday afternoon. Sometimes we play local games but a lot of times we'll also play global multiplayer games. It's just about being physically together for a couple of nights :)

A selection of games is Minecraft, Valorant, Left for Dead 2, CS:GO, Age of Empires, Stronghold, The Forest/Sons of the Forest, Valheim and some others.

It is really odd how little Valve care about their VR implementation on Linux compared to their Linux gaming efforts in general. Perhaps the VR and Linux people at Valve just dont overlap that much?

I just dual-boot, altought I usually try the game via Proton and it often "just works" on Linux.

Way too many of my hobby stuff is better dealt with on Linux

> dual-boot

Don't know why I never considered this... Should try it :D

Then I could use Windows for video editing and windows-only games and Linux for everything else.

what's wrong with kdenlive?

I could try it out again. Tried to use it like 5 years ago and wasn't that happy, but don't remember why. I think the video playback was very laggy and I had more crashes than tolerable.

Saw that it's even usable on Windows, so I could try the workflow before having to switch the OS completely. Currently I'm using Davinci Resolve but I'm not really a power-user anyways.

Thanks for the tip!

> video editing

Yes I recently switched from windows to PopOS[1] and this is one thing that I haven't found a solution for. There doesn't seem to be any good video editing software for Linux other than blender and in my experience video editing on blender isn't that great.

[1]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-transi...

Most seem to prefer KdenlLive or Davinci Resolve (which has a free version, but many pony up for the paid version, get the hardware key). A lot of the YouTubers I follow have started using Davinci, even those sticking to Mac and Windows.

> or Davinci Resolve

AFAIK Proprietary codecs(H.264/265, AAC) are not supported on Davinci Resolve on Linux. Maybe they fixed it since I last checked.

I guess not, which is surprising... maybe Davinci uses OS provided codecs in Windows and Mac? From a thread I looked at...

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Did you try the Linux appimage of "Shutter Encoder" shutterencoder.com/en/, it works fine for me to convert H.265 to DNxHD or DNxHR (a better format than h.@265 for editing in Davinci) and I can use these files in the free version of Davinci Resolve 17 & 18. But I'm just a hobbyist and I'm using Davinci only for basic things, I'm at the beginning of my learning path... So I hope I'm not giving you a bad advice !

I'm on Arch Linux with ffmpeg4.4

WINE is pretty good, and Proton is basically pre-polished WINE. Works basically just out of the box, and anything that doesn't work perfectly can usually be addressed with posts in the WineDB or ProtonDB

Unfortunately Gaming on Windows is "basically flawless", compared to Proton being "pretty good". I just got sick of debugging games because I didn't want to do the same thing during my free-time which I'm doing during the day at work.

Now, I love Linux and don't really like Windows that much, but when I want to game I just want the experience to be as smooth and easy as possible. And if I spend thousands of dollars on hardware I want it to be used as effectively as possible.

Maybe the problem with gaming on Linux is my own laziness...

When's the last time you gamed on Linux?

In the past few years protons come a long way in my humble opinion.

Beginning of last year. But then I wanted to 1) game in VR again and 2) play games with friends which contained anti-cheat software which wasn't compatible with Windows, so I spontaneously went back to Windows for these two things.

I'm someone who switches games pretty fast, I'm not one to play the same multiplayer game for a long time. So each time I started a new game, I had to debug in Linux to get it working.

Since January I've played Planet Crafter, Steep, Back 4 Blood, Bioshock Infinite, Atomic Heart, Hogwarts Legacy and now Elden Ring. No idea what percentage of these games "just work" on Linux, but I doubt that the experience would be the same as on Windows.

Gaming on Windows is quite broken for ultrawide screen, or dual/triple screens. Other than that shader compilation is the bane of many (depends on the CPU) - resulting into 'random' stutters. The latter issues are a poster child of the fact most games are just console ports. So calling 'flawless' is an overstatement.

> ultrawide screen, or dual/triple screens

Well, you know, if you have to take an edge-case which doesn't apply to my situation to tell me that windows isn't flawless for gaming...

Does ultrawide/triple screen work better on Linux?

I generally go "try with proton" -> "Switch to experimental branch and try again" -> "reboot and play in windows".

Only if game is on Steam, got no patience to fuck with wine/proton manually

> I generally go "try with proton" -> "Switch to experimental branch and try again" -> "reboot and play in windows".

Yeah, I think the best tip I got is to try dual booting to make it easier.