> That is what anti consumer looks like. Not SIP.

It's not an either-or. Both of those are super anti-consumer. If you want an OS without anti-consumer "features", then install Linux.

I recently moved back to Linux, perhaps permanently.

What kept me from it was not being able to reliably play games, but I can confirm that is no longer a problem.

I can't properly describe how happy this makes me.

What distro did you go for? I'm thinking about moving to linux, I'm avoiding a Windows 11 upgrade, and am not a fan of mac.

I ran Linux Mint on a Lenovo Legion gaming laptop for 2 months.

Almost everything related to gaming worked but I did have problems.

Under X11 + Gnome, fractional scaling was pretty badly broken for some things, especially the Steam app. X11 + KDE fixed that issue.

Under X11 + KDE with hybrid graphics mode (automatically use APU for light tasks, dedicated GPU for games), the laptop's brightness controls were totally inoperable. I tried to research this but could not find a working solution. If brightness was problematic enough, I could pick one of the fixed graphic modes and log out and back in - mostly I left it near or at 100% and didn't touch it.

One game (Anno 1800) would not connect to multiplayer, but works completely under Windows.

Hogwart's Legacy ran horribly and was unstable in Linux Mint. It ran with much higher quality/performance and 100% stability under Windows.

Other games like ARK, Conan, Valheim, StarCraft 2 (using non-Steam Proton), Deep Rock Galactic all ran identically (from what I can tell) to Windows.

Also about 50% of the time, booting would hang for Linux Mint and I'd have to hard-reboot, probably pick an older kernel to boot into, and then I could reboot and go back to the latest kernel (a minor release under Linux 5.15). Fortunately rebooting is mostly infrequent.

Overall it wasn't quite in a state I was comfortable with, so I'm back to Windows 10, which is much better than Windows 11 (or much less bad?).

> Hogwart's Legacy ran horribly and was unstable in Linux Mint. It ran with much higher quality/performance and 100% stability under Windows.

Do you think this is because it's new? If I could only play games with a year or two delay that would be fine. Cheaper too.

I can only guess!

It's very rare for me to even buy a new game (unless it's a $20 early access game) but my spouse was very excited for it and I wanted to play alongside. (It's not multiplayer but we can still talk about the parts we've played.)

Mint, because I'm a filthy casual :)

I just love Mint, but I think any Debian based distro should work just fine for playing.

I started with Red Hat 5 bought in a box in 1998 from Microcenter, compiled my own kernel with the original Gentoo, ran XMonad under Arch, and need both hands to count the number of distros I've used as daily drivers.

I have settled on Linux Mint. It just works, and looks good.

From one "filthy casual" to another...

Haha, good to know that my laziness is not looked down :P

I used Ubuntu for a while, but fell in love with Mint. I really like how the interface looks, and how things are organized very intuitively. It feels so unfair to use it for free thay I donated 20 bucks, just to show appreciation.

Honestly, easily beats Windows or Mac OS for me.

I've used some form of *NIX since 1999, almost exclusively.

Began with Red Hat 5. Moved on to Slackware for my server at the time, and Debian for workstations (I also had various MacOS machines as well). Dabbled with Arch for a few years and Manjaro. Recently, I sold all of my Apple equipment and standardized on...Linux Mint.

Mint + Cinnamon DE is simply amazing and even with lower specs on the current laptop I'm running (Thinkpad T460S vs. Apple MBP 2019 i9), the difference is stark. Not to mention rock-solid stable.

No going back for me.

Basically whatever runs Steam, if you want to play games.

Sure, but Steam doesn't run natively, and is very heavy on battery and GPU. So it isn't good for playing on a laptop when mobile; signficantly worse to native game binary running on a tablet or laptop.

> Sure, but Steam doesn't run natively, and is very heavy on battery and GPU. So it isn't good for playing on a laptop when mobile

I'm assuming this statement is referring to the large amount of software that is Windows only on Steam and runs in a compatibility layer on Linux, rather than Steam itself.

This really isn't that big a deal vs "native" for Steam on Linux and it's getting even less so with time - the Steam Deck mobile console and other x86 handhelds use the exact same Proton tech to run Windows games under Linux on a pretty small ~40Wh battery.

Power consumption of the Proton compatibility layer isn't really any better or worse than running native in my experience - its a wash.

Steam runs natively. It is a linux application (to my knowledge, and it wraps "a webview", so there might be some nuance here. But native enough for this distinction).

Steam uses a compatibility layer called Proton to run Windows games under Linux. Running the games that way is not significantly worse. It can get the same or even better performance (but sure, sometimes worse) and will affect battery life pretty much exactly as if running the game via Windows on the Laptop.

Proton is based on Wine, and Wine is not an emulator. Translating the calls does not make them heavier.

Functionality for older windows games is a little bit more absurd. I have a few games I kinda gave up on because they stopped working on windows 10, until I chucked them into proton or wine and suddenly those games were working. That was a confusing evening for a moment.

> Steam doesn't run natively

What do you mean by this?

If you're worried about battery life when gaming on the laptop as the decider between Linux and Windows, you should go with Windows.

Otherwise, Steam doesn't really emulate anything, it just reimplements Windows API calls, so games run roughly as efficiently as they do on Windows.

Not true. Some games perform better on Proton (less power consumption than native). Overall no difference in power consumption.

I was referring to "Steam games" not (obviously) "the Steam client".

a) Not all Steam games are on Proton [https://www.protondb.com/]

b) Not all Steam games that are on Proton run efficiently without tweaks e.g. one that I found unplayable due to overheats (on MacOS) was Sid Meier’s Civilization VI [https://www.protondb.com/app/289070]

c) Not all Steam games where you had the pre-Proton version installed, download the right version update. See Steam's forums, people saying disable Steamplay; and have to do that globally, not per-game.

d) In addition, I found the Steam updater daemon (interacting with MacOS Mojave Quarantine) also burned power like no tomorrow.

If you like simplicity, Alpine.

Just not if gaming is the goal. Steam would be only available as a Flatpak, says https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Steam. And the Flatpak version is problematic.

Void would be a better choice if liking simplicity. Or to keep it simple, maybe Pop!_OS. Or Debian. Or Arch. Pretty much everything not Alpine ;)

I’ve used Alpine, Void, and Debian for years.

I certainly would never use Alpine for gaming, any more than I’d use OpenBSD. I don’t use it for multimedia, either.

My normal setup is i3 on Alpine. I like to think I have a good understanding of how an Alpine system is built up via its install scripts and maintained by its packaging system.

There’s not a lot of cruft lying around that I don’t need and didn’t request.

That’s what I intended by using the word “simplicity”.

Why would you think that Debian and Void are simpler systems than Alpine? They are much larger.

They are much easier to use for gaming, as you can install Steam without any hurdles. Note how the grandparent comment of your response mentions that being able to game easily now was what made the switch to Linux possible.

I’m currently building a rather powerful W10 box solely to run MS Flight Simulator 2020.

The issue with Linux for me is how crude and unpolished the desktop environment is compared to windows and Mac. For the average user the desktop is everything and Linux lag way behind on that. Why are there basically only 2 choices on Linux and both have the same boring font?

I assume when you say two choices you mean Gnome and KDE?

But there are other options like Xfce, and there are quite a few variants, like Cinnamon, MATE, i3, etc. [0]

I still think Windows 10 looks and feels relatively polished (if you don't dig too deep and see just how many iterations they've gone through and still haven't gone back to fix.) I think Windows 11 feels a bit goofy - like they are trying for polish now, but it's in that modern overly spaced out and flat look that I can't seem to appreciate.

I found Linux Mint Cinnamon to be quite nice, and KDE is really nice in my opinion. More consistent than Windows in some ways.

[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/gnome/

I much prefer the desktop environment of Mint + Cinnamon over Windows or Mac.

Ditto, I am not an average user, but Windows was only really good on Windows 7, and I never really liked Mac OS (use it at work as a MCB is the laptop they issued for me)

Have you used Linux recently?

Windows 11 and Windows 10 with the last updates as well are just awful in terms of UI; the UX works more or less alright, but many of the default applications, and specially the settings, control panel, etc. are just an inconsistent mess, awful flat UI without any kind of colors, etc.

Mac is much nicer, nicer fonts, colors, overall look although personally I can't stand the UX too much (specially in terms of window management) apps are usually great tho.

I'd very much rather use something like Kubuntu or Pop_OS, Cinnamon works fine as well, honestly nowadays they just work and are usually better off than Windows by default.

> the UX works more or less alright, but many of the default applications, and specially the settings, control panel, etc. are just an inconsistent mess, awful flat UI without any kind of colors, etc.

The whole GTK2/3, now 4? and KDE, Plasma, Kirigami, what have you nowadays, isn't an inconsistent mess? I was using Linux (fedora 37) recently and it was not a consistent experience, either.

If anything, W11 is more consistent across all applications even if the settings/control panel have a weird Jekyll/Hyde personality to it at times.

What elements of polish are you missing?

Have you used gnome shell in the last five years?

My desktop experience on Linux is so clean. Everything is a "windows" key press away. I hit they then enter the first characters of the program name. It's all composited and GPU accelerated too, and interaction is instantaneous.

Almost anything that needs additional polish is on the web and looks the same on every computer...

For me, what seems janky is stuff with the systems on MacOS (planned hardware obsolescence = jank, batteries that die after a predetermined number of years, expanding until they break the motherboard = jank) or the user treatment and configuration of Windows (the article in question gives a lovely example of windows jank). In short, being treated like a consumer = jank. I can't understand how anyone puts up with it, much less says "polished" when referring to it. But I'll admit I'm weird!

Have you ever tried to develop GUI applications for GNOME versus macOS/Windows tooling?

It's a bit of an exaggeration, but I've written the whole Linux application in the same time that I needed to get my build environment working on Windows. I still don't know how people can like developing on Windows, especially if it involves anything regarding C/C++ libs. (Not using a paid version of Visual Studio, fwiw).

The fact that you lack the experience with proper Windows development tooling kind of shows, it isn't an exageration, otherwise you would realize how stone age is anything Gtk+ related, specially after Glade was killed.

I dunno, I've used Qt. You can argue that it's not "proper windows development tooling" and I can argue that 90% of apps I've written in my life have benefitted from being cross-platform. Happy to be corrected here, but I've seen most hobbyists not use Visual Studio because historically you had to pay for it in the first place, and it's only common between Windows-only devs, to no surprise.

Qt isn't GNOME either.

Visual Studio has had free express editions, before community was introduced, since 2010.

Even those express editions were more feature rich than GNOME tooling.

If you use the Visual Studio build system the way it's designed to be used and use vcpkg to manage your third party libraries, then C++ on Windows is pretty great, even when using the free version of Visual Studio.

Trying to force a UNIX shaped build environment and development setup into a Windows shaped hole on the other hand can be a pain.

To me a desktop is mostly determined by what can be done with a file browser and the file browsers that come with a Linux distribution (dolphins, thunder, etc) are much better than finder or explorer.

In fairness, SIP can be disabled. Having said that, Linux is way more appropriate than MacOS for the preschool to highschool crowd. It's bursting with educational resources, and it's relatively easy to set up a locked-down non-administrator account that's appropriate for kiddos (e.g., lots of programming environments and educational games from the 90s; no internet access. If you need cloud backup, you can use cron + rsync).

> In fairness, SIP can be disabled.

For now. A year ago, I predicted that this will change within 10 years, and I still stand by what I said then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31067592

If they wanted to remove that option, they would have done it as part of the Apple Silicon transition. Apple might have its issues (App Store, Right to Repair, etc), but they seem quite set on not locking down the Mac.

I dunno. Seems like a boiling frog scenario. They keep adding hoops and one day they'll lock it away. There's no reason they had to wait for the start of the AS transition to do it either. Over the Intel era we saw them lock things down with the introduction of the T1 and T2 chips. AS was another small leap. Maybe M4 will introduce something else like software fuses to prevent rollback or something.

T1 was just for Touch ID. T2 did change a lot, but SIP is still as easy to disable as it was before T2. When Apple Silicon came out with a completely different boot process, they still allowed disabling SIP (and added the ability to do it per OS instead of at a global level), and despite the secure boot, they give you the option to turn that off and boot whatever you want (see Asahi Linux). I doubt they would have put the engineering effort into that if their plan was to lock the Mac down.

They even made quiet updates that helped the Asahi Linux project. I agree, it’s not going to be totally locked down anytime soon.

people have been saying such things for nearly as long as SIP has existed. going on 7 years now and still just as easy to disable.

100% this. My journey was Windows to OSX to Linux. Couldn’t be happier. I just want a good Linux phone to free me from Apple altogether.

Isn’t Android Linux?

> > good Linux phone to free me from Apple altogether

> Isn’t Android Linux?

Yes, but it isn't good, especially not in the ways that desktop Linux is good.

Reminder: this thread is about avoiding anti-consumer behavior from manufacturers. Android is practically useless for that.

If you get an Android phone that can run something like GrapheneOS or Replicant, then wouldn't it be good?

This seems like where RMS would chime in. Because what we're actually missing on Android are the GNU tools - we have the kernel, but not the userland tools that define the experience.

GNU/Linux phones already exist, see Librem 5 and Pinephone.

I have one and the hardware is so slow and the software ecosystem is still so incomplete... I understand still holding out for a 'good' Linux phone despite those things.

I'm using Librem 5 as a daily driver. Yes, it's behind Android or iOS, but it feels very empowering to not rely on the overlords.

I hear you, and that's why I bought a Librem 5 as well. Since it finally arrived like five (plus?) years later, I haven't yet spent enough time to settle in with it. But I hate my Android phone, and would like to eventually.

Still, I wish we could get better hardware and the software support definitely still has growing to do. And I understand those who feel like it's not a viable option for them yet, but do want to switch in the future— because that's kinda where I'm still at myself, even though I have one of those devices.

I've run semi-proprietary Linux distros that are (in practice) parasitic on Android but include a GNU userland as well, like Sailfish.

They are a lot better in some ways, but I think much of the issue is present in the kernel alone, where dependency on binary blobs and proprietary drivers means kernels are frozen in place forever.

The issue is software freedom in general, beyond just the missing parts of the desktop Linux software stack that we know and love, like our package managers, GNU utilities, Wayland, systemd, etc.

Yes, Android is an operating system that uses the Linux kernel.

So, it isn't GNU/Linux...

Not really. In same way Linux VM running on QNX isn't Linux.

Android is a mess of propietary blobs that runs Linux, but Linux isn't its OS.

So a security feature that doesn't impact normal use and can be turned off if you're so inclined is anti-consumer?

how is SIP "super anti-consumer"? You can easily turn it off if you want to. AFAIK there are no repercussions if you do even other then your computer being more susceptible to malware.

iOS apps don't work with SIP disabled.

A. Does anyone actually use iOS on Mac?

B. This is actually platform consistency for iOS developers. If you are building an iOS app, you should be fairly comfortable knowing it will be running on a locked-down device, particularly if it’s a social media app with anti-robot technologies. You shouldn’t need to engineer around macOS blowing a hole in that security. If you could run iOS apps on macOS without SIP, what is iOS security good for again?

B is clearly anti-consumer. Software running on “my” hardware should be in my control.

SIP is pro-consumer. Makes it much safer for common users.

> Both of those are super anti-consumer.

That’s like saying air bags are anti-consumer. Two differences between air bags and SIP: Consumers don’t know SIP exists, and anyone savvy enough to understand the esoteric reasons for needing to disable SIP can do that.

This is a false dichotomy. Security in software can be achieved without destroying user rights.

How is SIP not a stellar example of how to achieve security in software without destroying user rights?

Linux is only free if your time is worthless. ;)

I would happily submit ALL the time required to set up my perfectly-tailored Linux environment once and have it stay that way, just to not have Windows Update (or a random blue screen or 100% disk utilization etc) make my machine unavailable for 40 min just before a hugely important client demo one more time.

Various Linux distros still have ways to go in terms of polish and stability - but, anecdotally, the only times my Arch + KDE failed were when I did stupid things and went too far with tinkering without thinking.

You can do this with Pro and a group policy setting. Yeah it's not optimal, but most of us that use Windows professionally (IT/Dev at least) already have this set up.

Does that mean that paying for an OS means your time has negative value?

Surely the time spent installing, configuring, and messing around with your personal desktop or laptop after already having paid for a complete OS is tantamount to buying a prebuilt PC, taking it apart, and putting it back together with a few missing screws.

Zero is still greater than any negative number.

The argument is that you will lose relatively less money from the time wasted. So instead of wasting $1000 worth of time, you only are wasting $200 of time.

An operating system that lets you waste less money, means that you will save money. Saving money is what can make purchasing something worth it.

As alluro2 pointed out in another comment on this little chain, you also get to pay less money for the guarantee of control over that configuration.

Phrased another way, you're paying more for a limited set of tools, it's not that you must spend $1000 worth of man hours to configure the minutiae of a Linux system, it's that exploring 100% of the configuration options on Mac (or even windows to a lesser extent) is so limited you only have $200 man hours of total possible configuration space.

Confusing analogy aside, you just have less possible room to move and thus people spend less time moving. That doesn't mean you must move on Linux, just that you have the freedom to do so.

Have you read the article?

Not only you're paying Windows but you have to waste time to disable its antifeatures..

20 years ago windows cost me more time than linux, from what I hear it’s not got any cheaper

That was 15 years ago. Today, it's a big time saver compared to Windows.

Over the last 10 years or so, I'd try out Linux for a week, get frustrated for one reason or another, and then switch back to Windows.

Back in February I decided to try Linux Mint again, and this time it worked, and I haven't switched back to Windows yet. I think Linux is starting to get good, even for someone like me, who doesn't want to become a part-time Linux admin.

(Your joke still made me laugh, for the record)

For basic office tasks and browsing the Internet, Debian stable won't waste your time: it should just work.

Add two HiDPI monitors and you’ll see.

That's also a pathological failure case with MacBook (depending on the trim level of MacBook, you'll run into situations like only 1 monitor working. Or both monitors work, but randomly trade position when the computer wakes from sleep)

That's from Microsoft's and Apple's marketing material, not a reflection of reality.

Windows and macOS have both wasted plenty of my time over the years too!

They suck too of course. But they don't presume to be free, like Linux does.

There are much more time efficient operating systems than Linux, Windows or macOS.

Here's Lars Brinkhoff studying to become a 10x programmer:

https://twitter.com/larsbrinkhoff/status/1642569175657771009

One of the most beautiful things about the open source / Linux world is that you rarely have to learn a new way of doing things, unless you want to. Prefer Gnome 2? Fork it. Not flippant advice -- enough people preferred it that a new community project started. So you can still run the desktop environment you did 15 years ago. That's simply not an option - no matter how many users might want it - with Windows should Microsoft make a decision about the direction of Windows. You will spend time and effort relearning after forced changes.

And the important bit is, you can still run the desktop environment you did 15 years ago AND have current applications and current hardware

that sounds like you either never tried Linux… or maybe sometimes 25 years ago. The reality is (and has been for quite a long time) that Linux actually takes far LESS time than Windows. Heck, when I see the type of shitty problems I hear from Windows users, I wonder why they put up with it.

Are mainstream Linux distros as user-friendly to a 10-year-old as the other two operating systems, even if the latter are more anti-consumer? As the article states the author was trying to set up a first-time computer for his son. Which flavor of Linux to install is clearly an important factor for such an audience, as it makes distros like Arch out of the question.

Stock Ubuntu with gnome is effectively an appliance. Annoyingly simplistic.

Yes, at least much moreso than Windows 95 was.

Rediscovered Windows on a new Surface recently (so the pure Microsoft experience...), and yes it's pretty bad out of the box. Not just the ads, but the presets and aren't great either, so you're expected to take a bunch of time to make it sane first.

The general advice I got was to start with a debloating program [0], especially for people new to the platform.

My take is, Windows 11's lows are really low. Having to debloat is one thing, the overall mild bugginess is another (everything kinda only works 99% of the time, that 1% of FU doesn't seem to disappear). Then the arcane science of digging through old layers to resurect past UIs that are still more powerful than the newer ones.

On the other side the highs are way way higher. People stick with all the crap because that's the only path to where they want to go.

[0] https://github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy

I built a gaming PC recently, so also new to Windows (normally Linux main). I was very surprised to see advertising in the operating system, for an operating system that people pay at least $190 CAD for.

This issue is made worse by every hardware vendor needing to install their own bulky applications with their own popups. It's extremely noisy.

My main take is that Microsoft has lost all pride in Windows and they're uninterested in actually competing.

Try installing Linux + steam on it. I think you'll find it's a better environment for gaming.

For _some_ games and hardware combinations it's great. Some games are still windows only, and for some games the performance on Linux is abysmal, even with Proton.

This is irrelevant for multiplayer gaming, where the anti-cheat software only runs on Windows because it needs to establish a security baseline for all players.

Easy anti cheat works in linux now.

Most games now just work

EAC has worked on Linux for like a decade. That doesn't mean that those games will let you play on Linux.

That's patently untrue. There were a few kernel patches necessary only a year ago to make certain EAC games work.

Here are all the games I play regularly with no problem:

League of Legends Counter-Strike Global Offensive Apex Legends VRChat Civilization VI Factorio RimWorld Path of Exile Skyrim Final Fantasy XIV

And my performance is usually better.

Most of these games don't do a great job at preventing cheaters; for years all Riot did to deter cheaters in League was threaten legal action against the cheat creators (In particular Joduska.me which was a scripting framework that enabled automated performing actions perfectly), Blizzard dealt with cheats by threatening legal action against WOW botters, CS:GO has Overwatch because Valve only mass-bans cheaters once every few years (and only when that cheat developer has amassed tens of thousands of customers and has open signups), and personal anecdotes from friends suggest that Apex cheating is somewhat still a problem. For VRChat, what would cheating even be for? Epilepsy / bypassing model age rating?

I don't really get why you keep playing the contrarian in this thread. Linux works for me for all the games I play. I get incredible performance. And the anti cheat stuff I don't really care about. I used to play CS 1.6 and there were cheaters sure but it didn't really change my ability to be a PC games enjoyer.

I'm not gonna read your comment and be like "omg he's right. my linux install sucks. back to winblows". I used to constantly wrestle with my Windows install and now I wrestle with my Linux install less.

I'm not playing the contrarian just to do so, I'm noting that there is a potential correlation between "allows linux users (AKA relaxed requirements / a lower baseline for cheating assurance)" and a higher percentage of cheaters in their game. At the start of both Valorant and Overwatch's lifetimes, it was effectively impossible to find a cheat in a PC match, and even now there isn't much evidence for there being widespread cheats available for <$100/month for these games.

You haven't actually offered any evidence of this being the case. It's just as easy to make cheats for games on Windows as it is on Linux. In fact most cheats are made for Windows precisely because most of the people buying these cheats are using Windows.

That's not what I said - my point is that companies with a relaxed security baseline (ie. not having a dedicated team of people tasked with investigating cheats and improving their anti-cheat system) tend to invite an increased number of cheaters into their games, and I back this up with real events.

- These companies will send cease-and-desist letters to cheat makers instead of working to detect their cheats (Joduska.me ceased operations due to a Riot C&D, and Bossland GmbH was actually sued and lost). If these cheats were instead detected and users banned on a continuous basis, no lawsuits would be needed.

- CS:GO implemented (as in, almost a decade ago) an "Overwatch" review system to allow players to review potential cheaters and have a consensus on whether or not cheating is likely. Valve is knows to be very relaxed on VAC - and knowing the company culture @ Valve being what it is, these ban waves probably only happen when one of the seniors @ Valve gets killed by a cheater in-game themselves and tasks someone with implementing some detection mechanism into VAC. Only recently (~4 years ago) has valve supposedly started to incorporate more advanced automatic detection and punishment systems[0], but at the time it wasn't doing anything about wallhacks and at auto-headshot cheats tend to be pretty good at adding enough noise to make it look very close to what professionals can do and thus these cases still end up in the overwatch queue (and note that this system probably hasn't been iterated on much; Valve doesn't do dedicated teams that own specific products).

Of course, there is no hard evidence for the actual number of cheaters in all of these games. But my point isn't that Linux is the vehicle or platform cheats are used on, just that a video game without a rigorous cheat detection system is more likely to open up their attack surface to other platforms. Valorant still has firepower behind it, so while there are cheats, Riot is invested in keeping it Windows-only to ensure they don't incidentally have to split their resources between detecting cheats and hardening their executables on Linux and Windows at the same time.

0: https://youtu.be/SnRgW54EWwA?t=299

>There were a few kernel patches necessary only a year ago to make certain EAC games work.

You are thinking of getting the Windows version of EAC working. EAC has had a wine version for a long time. EAC will detect if you are using wine and try and download the wine version.

Don't some big publishers of 'important' trendy multiplayer games with strong network effects still basically refuse to enable EAC's Linux support, though?

Do you know any recent articles or blog posts summarizing the state of affairs with competitive multiplayer games rn?

Check the proton database. Most games you're thinking of work just fine.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/

GloriousEggroll is a Red Hat employee who works on the proton compatibility layer full time. He typically posts his progress on Twitter and will have world first screenshots of certain games working. His Twitter is a good resource.

Epic hasn't even enabled it for Fortnite, and UE5 definitely should enable fairly seamless Vulkan usage on other platforms (although the reasoning could be because the market is so small and Fortnite's QA team is already stretched incredibly thin)

Destiny 2? Bungie has been unpleasant about this, as I’m sure plenty of other devs still do-which, unlike the past where they could claim no market share, makes less sense now that Steam Deck is a thing and doing great.

Bungie is specifically and on-purpose making the game broken on Linux for no apparant reason. Other BattleEye titles work just fine. There's no technical reason why it doesn't work. All the technical work was done all the way in 2021.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31046...

This is one of those cases where you need to vote with your money and stop supporting studios that are hostile to Linux. I actively avoid all Bungie titles for this reason.

As someone who has been on both sides, developing cheats and working in anticheat, AC on linux will always be significantly gimped compared to windows because of GPL related issues, anyone saying otherwise is doing it entirely for marketing reasons.

On windows a closed-source driver that can utilize and scan for anomalies in reverse engineered undocumented internal kernel structures is feasible. If you want to do something similar on linux you need to find a reverse engineer that has never laid eyes on linux kernel sources(good luck with that), have them reverse engineer and take very detailed notes on relevant kernel structures and functions, and then find a software developer that has also never laid eyes on kernel sources to write a driver according to those notes. Needless to say, this takes a fair amount of time and therefore money.

The alternatives are to implement your detections in usermode, where they can easily be fed false information from the kernel, or to publish the source code for your detections making them almost worthless.

Cheat developers have it much easier, they do not give a fuck about licensing and will just read kernel sources and ship a closed source driver, or ship a hypervisor that tampers with kernel data structures that they are able to just copy and paste out of the sources.

They really advertise to you inside the operating system?

I've been a Linux user for 20 years so I don't know.

Yeah they do. It started with Windows 10. It’s one of the reasons I moved over to Linux for gaming last year (I have been using Linux for work for years)

I asked chatgpt about this recently and it seemed adamant that windows advertised to you and it was ok as you could turn it off and it helped fund the development.

I assume windows is free nowadays? Back in the 98 days you used to have to buy it, or at least acquire it in questionable legal circumstances

Why do you share what an AI may have hallucinated?

The rising prevalence of comments like this is concerning, and I’m worried this indicates the existence of a large number people using AI this way that don’t warn us.

Windows isn't free, though upgrades have been for a while after major releases since 10. You pay for it with a new PC or you have to buy it for custom built PCs.

ChatGPT was trained on data from 2021 and earlier. It's not a good original source.

So the adverts don’t pay for windows development? Where does the money go?

Or are Microsoft double dipping?

I recently deleted my Windows partition, but I recall how after an update it blocked me from login in until it could tell me I really should try out Office 365, informed me Edge is better for me than whatever browser I was using (Firefox) and asked me for a Microsoft account.

> I was very surprised to see advertising in the operating system, for an operating system that people pay at least $190 CAD for.

Most people don't pay this - and I don't mean buying keys from lower-buying-power countries, I mean that anyone with a gaming laptop (which is a 2x bigger market than desktop[0]) is really only paying maybe $50 for Windows since Dell/Alienware, Acer, etc get very large volume licensing discounts.

0: "In 2021, gaming notebooks are forecast to account for nearly 43 percent of shipments in the global gaming PC market, with gaming desktops making up 27 percent of shipments. In 2025, the shipment share of gaming notebooks is expected to grow to 46 percent globally." https://www.statista.com/statistics/1119850/gaming-pc-market...

> Most people don't pay this

This is true. However, I have to say I still dislike the (kind of) double charging of selling the OS as a product and using it for advertising. The position Microsoft has allows them to both sell the cow and have the milk but that doesn't make it seem like a fair deal.

Discounts for Windows licenses to OEMs have been a thing for decades (maybe always?), yet Windows was still seen as one of Microsoft's crown jewels and an important business, and Microsoft didn't exactly go bankrupt.

Filling a paid product with advertising and monetized data collection just seems like a cheap move, even if the product is sold at significantly less than the list price in most cases.

> they're uninterested in actually competing.

Microsoft has not had the need to compete on the merits of their software for very long, and this is really by design.

In the corporate world they sell to people who can't make informed choices and will never be held accountable for the choices they make.

In the home market they mange to get pre-installed on most hardware.

I ran windows 1.0 back in the day through 11 (arm) in a VM now. I ran OS/2 at a prior employer years back so I could do builds for Windows 16 as well as do other work. Windows is a tool. I have run laptops using Windows to FreeBSD. I run MacOS as a choice because Linux sucks for dealing with multiple environments and printers and the things that make a "desktop OS" useful.

Windows 10 / 11 let marketing be stupid and added things like Candy Crush, etc. I'm not a fan and wish they had done different. There are things to "like" about windows - backward compatibility being one that has been pretty amazing.

Windows is weird, from a Linux or MacOS point of view. It is always broken, but also poorly written, so the user can just make a workflow happen by accumulating kludges.

I think Microsoft might have hired too many people who were familiar with other operating systems, resulting in a Windows 11 that actually manages to implement their vision.

This is unfortunately the new state of Windows, and why I also may be switching away after being a dedicated user since Windows 3.1

I doubt I'll go to Mac, I'm just not a fan, so looking at different linux options, even though I barely do any coding anymore.

Windows used to have bloatware and shareware, but I never felt it was in your face like it is now.

But it really is the volume of advertising and crap that has gone into Windows 11 which is why I've stayed on 10 and am avoiding upgrading.

> stayed on 10 and am avoiding upgrading

It still tries to move you to 11, big You Have Free Upgrade window on startup. I declined maybe 4 times already. It still shows.

Im totally a MacOS fan, i use Linux daily but only for my servers. Windows in on my gaming PC.

It’s hoping to catch you off guard one day so you miss click or wear you down.

This happened to me ;_;

I use both Linux and Windows. Windows Pro 11 on desktop and Linux on desktop and servers. I removed ads from "Search" using settings and see no other ads. Am I special or it is related to Pro vs Home?

Everybody on here like to think they are amazing power users but can't disable a single setting, that I'm pretty sure is part of the standard setup process, to get rid of ads. I've used a number of Windows 10/11 pc's and never seen any of the issues hn complains about regularly.

as a general windows fan, I also hate windows 11. I upgraded my 11 to windows 10, and if windows 12 doesn't resolve this horrible apple/android copy cat nonsense, I will regrettably move to Linux full time. I run kde on hardware for my work computer as the only os on the device for over 2 years now. I still use windows 10 at home for personal computing. kde based Debian is good, better than osx and windows 11 for sure, but I just can't swallow it as my only os for entertainment, it just isn't there yet.

Which part is Apple copycat? Seems like they're wrecking it plenty by themselves without needing to take cues from macOS.

I guess centering everything on the taskbar? I mean, one can (and I do) set it back to left alignment, but that’s probably what’s being referred to.

That probably has simple practical reasons, as more and more screens are wide today.

both in MacOS and in Windows you are mere cattle

there is no reason to keep using a walled, closed desktop OS in the 2020s

For better and worse everything productive is becoming OS agnostic. In 15 years I don't think many first-class applications will be truly native. They will be UI via HTML (webapps, electron, etc), CLIs based on POSIX, or company maintained UI frameworks which break OS styling conventions (JetBrains, etc).

OS agnosticism isn't just webapps taking over. Docker is making development from the ground up be OS agnostic.

I see this in my personal life as well. Every day I use MacOS, Linux, and Windows -- OS doesn't really matter much anymore to me.

> Docker is making development from the ground up be OS agnostic.

Docker is not really OS agnostic, on macOS or Windows it involves some kind of Linux VM.

The weird revelation to me was that the goal of what a decent OS is keeps moving, even as what we want to do doesn't change much in nature.

20 years ago I was on FreeBSD and it was fine. But as laptops became mainstream, and even the main linux distros were completely impractical.

Now we have really good linux laptops, but tablet form computers are maturing and we're starting to see very good ones, and linux support is still generations behind (heck, windows support is still meh)

I'd expect linux to be viable there in 4 or 5 years, when the dust settles, but then will the compatibility extend to the machines on the better form factors of that time ?

Basically "the year of linux on the desktop" meme has stopped being about sheer viability and more about what you're willing to give up to keep using linux. As long as it doesn't become the primary target of the more innovative hardware makers out there, I wouldn't expect to solve this situation anytime soon.

The frame laptop is a move in that direction.

This is just more fuel for the fire, which is the potential death of the personal computer. It seems like a lot of people are fine with tablets/phones; imagine switching from an iPad to the latest windows atrocity…

That was life when vendors would pre install all sorts of crap. Then you would do a fresh install of windows and lose all of those stuff. (Tears!)

Now this comes by default with windows. I think Microsoft too is feeling the blandness of its product without vendor crapware.

There was a time when Microsoft themselves realized the crapware experience sucked.

Back in the Windows 8 days, Microsoft had a few physical mall shops trying to capture some of the Apple Store magic. One of their selling points was "Signature PCs"-- guaranteed to have nothing on there but Windows and drivers, no vendor bloat.

Strange they don't recognize the spam when it's coming from inside the ~~house~~ multinational.

* * *

The thing is, those claims about MacOS have been true for some time, while Windows becoming this bad is a relatively recent thing. 10 was the start, and 11 was a huge escalation.

It already started with 8.

It's not because they were lying, but Windows was changed delibaretly in the wrong direction, and MacOS got much more usable because of open source contributions.

I miss the consistency that I had with Windows 7 (renaming a file anywhere with the F2 key), but those days are over.

With Mac I still don't know what the Mac / option / control / fn / shift keys mean and can't remember keyboard shortcuts, so I'm much more dependent on the touchpad, but at least the touchpad is awesome.

What is 'SIP' in this context?