The Duff CEO with a Windows-Logo on his forehead: “Gamers use Windows because of its’ user experience not our de facto monopoly.”
Next Image: Duff CEO with Windows-Logo in front of a “Out of Business” sign. Subtitle: “30 minutes after SteamOS is released”
Edit: Yo, I’m not saying this is gonna happen. I just want to say that Windew’s UX sucks ass.
At least we didn’t have to look at goddamn Ads in the menu. Also the AI “”“integration”“” fucked up things pretty badly. Sometime you just need a simple, light, OS to do your thing.
This is the main problem right now.
People want to return to a lighter simple Windows OS, but Microsoft is making that increasingly hard to access. The LTSC version of Windows 10 is close(No AI, No Ads, and minimal telemetry that can be disabled), but they dont sell it to the public unless you buy 5 copies, and
there is no LTSC version of Windows 11 yet.looks like they finally released it a couple months back, but people are unhappy with it.Linux offers an alternative, but compatibility is still a huge issue despite the impressive gains Wine and Proton have made in the last few years.
The reality is that if you have a Windows PC you can basically guarantee that you can install anything you might want(barring hardware limitations). You can often make that software work on Linux too, but there is always some tinkering involved and the general public doesn’t want to deal with that, nor do they want to change to a FOSS alternative.
And if you like playing certain games with kernel anti-cheat, the only way you’re getting away from Windows is on console. Unless gamers jumping from Windows to Max/Linux increase by improbable orders of magnitude, that’s not changing anytime soon.
Always had windows. Never wanted Linux because I didn’t want to dick around with every game install. You give me an OS that lets me browse and game WITHOUT having to dick around with every application, and I’d switch in a heartbeat.
It’s actually gotten a lot better over the last few years; Valve has been putting in a lot of work into making gaming “just work” through Steam. It’s still a bit jank, but honestly all OSes are a bit jank.
If anyone in this thread is interested, I’d recommend giving Linux Mint a go. There’s nothing really to lose.
Anyway, I’m done shilling Linux so I’ll let you get back to your Simpsoning. :P
There’s nothing really to lose.
Just hours of your time as some random miniscule feature you were reliant upon without realizing it until it was missing, then have to look up a dozen different fixes using some stone aged console commands, none of which actually fix your issue…
This is my current experience with pop os. Took a while searching and digging through age old threads to figure out how to fix Rivals so it actually launches, then more searching to fix an issue I was having with the screen blacking out, and it’s going to be more searching to figure out why audio keeps tearing while I’m full screened. It’s a pain trying to make things compatible, so much so I’m extremely tempted to switch back to Windows 10 despite it hitting EOL this year. I really don’t like having to waste my personal time making something work when there’s an incredibly easy alternative where everything works always (aside from hardware issues)
Edit: especially peeved about trying to fix ffxiv. I want my shaders back >:(
I had tried mint years ago, and gave up when I couldn’t even get my extra mouse buttons to work. I’m not going back to 1995 with a shitty 2-button
Did u try installing the driver for ur mouse lol
Hurr durrr… Yes I did.
That is pretty much my experience when I have to use a windows machine at work. Sorry, the powershell command is how long? Just got this from ChatGPT, no idea if it works and I am not booting windows to test it.
Bash: grep -iRl “test”
Powershell: Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-String -Pattern “test” -CaseSensitive:$false | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Path -Unique
Which is why people use the GUI for pretty much everything. Linux demands you use archaic commands to do anything useful.
Is there a decent way of doing that in the GUI in windows? One of the more common commands I use at work which is the only time I use Windows. Rather than the PowerShell I usually use WSL for it currently because there are usually a few other things I will want to do after as well.
I can’t even remember the last time I had to fuck around with a Steam game, all the ones I want to play just work
Lucky you, not my experience at all, even ended up repurchasing a game on Steam while it was on sale because at some point, time is money and I had spent a whole lot of money trying to make it work.
It’s a pretty seamless experience nowadays. I installed CachyOS on my handheld and installing games outside of Steam is pretty seamless with Lutris and Heroic Launcher
Needing another launcher to launch a launcher isn’t seamless and sometimes it works like crap and requires a reboot to get things working.
thats not how that works though. Lutris and Heroic are not the same as steam. They are seperate launchers. Also why do you have to reboot anything? Generally I have not had a single piece of software that required a reboot to work on Linux. Even the updates don’t require reboots.
Funny how Steam having to launch EA app to start a game = people complaining about Steam launching a launcher, but Lutris launching EA app to launch a game =/= a launcher launching a launcher for some reason…
After installing the game on Lutris or Heroic I can just add it to Steam and then launch the game directly from steam. In terms of UX I just need to press the play button, wait a little bit and then see the game main menu. Sometimes you see other launchers but there’s a lot of games that have their own launcher before launching the game, Fallout 4? Nixxes ported games?
I don’t know what anything else that you want. Even on Windows same shit still happens.
You want to play the wrong games.
A Linux user doesn’t touch “AAA”.
I can eat from whichever dumpster I choose, thank you very much.
Bruh I play Baldur’s Gate 3 on Linux. Shitty AAA I agree with you.
Then Linux shouldn’t be suggested as a replacement for Windows for gamers.
AAA games work on Linux, sometimes even sooner and better than on Windows.
It should and will continue to be.
Not if it can’t run games that people want to play.
They shouldn’t want to play them.
No true Sgotsman fallacy.
I only use Windows at work and played RE games and Control without issue.
The first time you try Linux will have an initial learning curve. Just like the first time you tried Windows. But once you have everything set up the way you like and get used to it, you really won’t find yourself having to troubleshoot very often. You certainly don’t have to “dick around with every game install” either.
Steam on Linux already does exactly that. You hit play and that’s it, exactly like on Windows. The rest is done for you automatically.
Tinkering might be required with a few non-Steam games and programs, but for the most part, they just work as well.
And lets be honest, it is not as if tinkering isn’t required for a lot of things on Windows too, it is just that the tinkering is a lot more random “hope & pray” stuff like uninstalling and reinstalling things, rebooting,… and hoping the problem goes away.
True!
What? No.
One of the best things about Windows is the incredible huge support on how to fix things.
Maybe not on the Windows forum, about Microsoft software. But every other software is not a problem. Because Windows has such a huge userbase, it would be weird if you encountered a bug that nobody has ever encountered before. And tons of techies already posted several solutions to it.
Not my experience with Windows at all. Windows has a lot of the kind of users who see the system as some mystical thing that can not be understood and they speculate on reasons but their solutions are always more along the line of cargo cults than proper, well-understood solutions.
For the most part that’s true, but when something goes wrong, it really goes wrong.
For example, I wanted to play Path of Exile 2, and it would get stuck at a black screen on startup. The fix is “easy” on Windows, you just edit an ini file in “My Documents”. To fix it on Linux, that same file is stored in
/home/[YOUR USERNAME]/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/2694490/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Path of Exile 2/poe2_production_Config.ini
Which is insane by any standard.
So fix for both OS is to edit a text file, path is just different?
Yes, one path is easily discoverable, the other looks like an incantation to summon Cthulhu. If you can’t see why one of those options is hostile to users, you are being deliberately obtuse.
If you type it by hand sure, but copy/paste exists.
It’s not about typing it, it’s about finding it.
This is bad yes, but out of all the problems you can have with linux this one is pretty mild.
True, Wine and by extension Proton adds some overhead in such things, which makes troubleshooting a bit less user-friendly
Though that’s a matter of habit. Then you know where everything is.
Good news, then!
You can do that now if your games are on Steam.
That’s the problem, IF your games are on Steam.
If they’re not, then it’s usually pretty easy to add them to steam as a non steam game, or sometimes you can use Lutris.
Then you have a launcher launching a launcher to launch a game, when that happens on Windows people are pissed, when that happens on Linux people act like there’s nothing wrong with that experience.
You can run games with Lutris, which allows you to create shortcuts for games so that they would be launched through Lutris without invoking a UI
So from a user’s perspective, the game just opens up as normal without any launchers or interfaces in between, like if you ran an .exe
Besides, plenty of non-Steam games can be run simply through Wine, then you literally double-click a game .exe and there you go.
But what about LEAGUE!? And Blitz, I can’t be fucked to pick my own runes.
Windows will be worse soon thanks to passkey bullshit they are trying to force. I really think that Blizzard buyout may have entirely sunk current projects.
What? Why would an OS be worse because of a more secure and more user friendly authentication alternative?
And how are they trying to force it? They just encourage it.
Passkeys are pretty much being adopted industry wide (kinda slowly at the moment but still).
Every OS should have good support for hardware bound keys.
I use Linux. I install games via Steam. The most ‘dicking around’ I’ve ever had to do to get a game to work is changing the Proton compatibility setting, choosing a release from the drop-down menu.
I’ve considered Windows a toy OS for decades because the only use case anyone can legitimately make for needing to use it is to play games.
Ah, there’s Adobe and maybe some 3D modelling software
Adobe is sadly huge for design professionals. Also fuck Adobe
I was looking at Ubuntu studio which can work with adobe filetype, but i wouldn’t switch unless i had a backup machine with adobe software just in case.
Autodesk is huge as well. Also fuck Autodesk
Yes and also yes
Adobe is the only reason I still have one of my PCs set to dual-boot Windoze.
Among consumers, sure. But they also have put decades of effort into understanding how business buy and pay for software and computers.
Oddly enough, the rise of software as a service I think has led to Linux being a more viable option for business use. For my work, I’d still be personally missing MS Excel but that’s because I hate LibreOffice Calc with a passion. I cannot understand some of their keybindings which are not changeable. But so much of what I use these days is just in web browsers.
Yeah, it’s true. I don’t think that’s by accident either. The “evil” in Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto was at least somewhat inspired by Microsoft. Now, you can argue about how evil Google has become, but even very early on they saw Microsoft as a prime adversary. That meant not tying themselves to Windows in any way, and it also meant building a lot of capabilities into Chrome that made it so that people weren’t tied to Windows. That has opened the door to SAAS being a thing that happens in the browser, and not in GUIs written in Visual Basic, or something that is tied to the MS platform, which means you’re more and more able to do your normal work on Linux.
I am able to run Linux in a M365 company, and whether Google or Microsoft had more influence on the current state of things, it IS nice that the whole suite works great right there in Firefox.
Member when instant messaging, email, and cloud file storage didn’t need to be deeply integrated into the OS? I member.
I think one reason I really like Lemmy / Mastodon is that they remind me of the days when people ran their own IRC servers, and/or Jabber servers and when that was a normal and standard way to communicate.
Yeah, and you interacted with them on your PC. So I thought you might like this anecdote.
I’m totally accustomed to using my phone on the fediverse. Voyager ftw. But, just yesterday I relocated my main PC so that I could use it with a cantilever lap desk on my end of the couch. In my household we tend to hang out together in the same room all the time, so this is a game changer.
Plus it’s only been a few weeks since I switched this former Windows gaming PC over to Linux Mint. So all the massive UX improvements that brings still feel fresh and impressive for the stuff I use it for. Been running linux on my work machine much longer.
It’s a proper old man PC setup. My feet are up and I am typing on my old full-sized mechanical keyboard that has the circuit board inside mounted to a slab of metal. I can feel my beard turning gray!
Its the only os with functional cad as well. Freecad is a user hating joke.
I’ve used several CAD solutions as a toolmaker. And tested even more. All Windows only. I wear the sackcloth and ashes of FreeCAD at home because
1: It’s free and I don’t need to buy a subscription. Billed monthly or annually-- your choice. I can use FreeCAD as I see fit.
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It does NOT require me to store my data in the cloud. I have worked on things that were trade secrets.
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If my internet connection goes down I can’t access my work with the full ability to manipulate it.
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I absolutely detest the clown car UX that is Fusion 360. I don’t want to click an icon and get a dropdown menu that’s a dozen entries long, then click one of those and getting a submenu that’s ANOTHER 6 entries deep. Ain’t nobody got time for that shit.
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Learning difficult things does not scare me.
Honestly part of the thing that drew me to FreeCAD is it reminded me a bit of CATIA. (Mostly it’s the Linux and free part, but the CATIA but helped). It’s certainly got its quirks (to put it mildly) but 1.0 has made strides.
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Fact. I only still use it because of game compatibility.
Cries in professional CAD-Software-User-Noises
Honestly Onshape is great and works in browser
Some of my customers would skin me alive knowing that I upload their Data to some online CAD Service… sorry.
I like FreeCad
I wish I would. I feel like my dependency on windows holds me down professionally.
Requisite “you don’t need to wait for SteamOS” post.
Gamed on Linux for over 2 years. The time is now. Shit just works (mostly).
Edit: and yes, you can often get better performance on the same games with the same hardware.
you can often get better performance on the same games with the same hardware.
Because there’s a reason why Linux does not randomly use the disk like Windows does
Back when I was still on an HDD the difference between NTFS and ext4 was night and day.
I remember having the need to defragment my drive on windows every few months, or Batman Arkham Asylum would actually start to lag and stutter trying to load textures.
Meanwhile World of Warships, another texture heavy game, would load significantly faster when I tried it on Linux because surprise surpsise, ext4 doesn’t fragment until your disk is nearly full.
Windows honestly gg ez’d it’s way out of making a newer FS with the advent of SSDs, but there was a period of time where upgrading to Windows 8 would blow up your drive usage to 100% the entire time the PC was on.
NTFS is imo even worse than exFAT because at least exFAT didn’t eat your disk alive
My whole family largely uses Linux as our daily driver - ages - 40, 38, 18, 9, 7
The only one not running Linux is my 38 year old wife.
HOWEVER - my 9 year old got an occulus for Xmas, and suddenly we are dual booting and that’s a real shame.
Shit just works (mostly).
That’s the “damning with faint praise” that has been the bane of Linux since slackware came on 500 floppies.
Sometimes that “mostly” is just “oh, you have to do this simple thing that is in a FAQ once and then you’re golden”. Other times it’s “oh, that hardware isn’t supported, so I guess you don’t have a usable video card”.
I think what many of us are hoping with when it comes to SteamOS is that a few of the remaining really sharp edges get sanded off. And, just maybe, there will be a tipping point where the smoother the experience, the more people use it, and the more people use it, the smoother the experience will be.
Bro I had to spend 4 hours on forums trying to figure out why Windows won’t reboot into BIOS. It’s linked to the Fast Start option that won’t turn off without rebooting into BIOS.
Frankly I just shouldn’t have put the mostly. I’ve literally had one issue in the last year. Point is: just try it.
What distro do you recommend if it’s a machine mostly used for gaming?
If you’d otherwise just be waiting for SteamOS to drop: Bazzite. It’s the closest thing to Steam OS, but with a better Desktop mode when you want to switch to that.
I’ve primarily been using PopOS, which has been fantastically stable and very easy. I have an all AMD system, but my understanding is that the nvidia version of Pop also makes some of the nvidia driver stuff a lot easier.
I also play on Arch sometimes, but realistically you probably don’t want bleeding edge stuff if the point is just making sure games work. That’s where the relative stability of something like Pop / Mint / even just pure Debian comes into play.
Easy doesn’t matter as much for me, since I’ve been using Linux for more than a quarter century, but stable is important. And, something that makes it easy to deal with the video card drivers sounds very nice.
I assume that if it’s Linux that a system that is optimized for playing games could still be used as a web server, or to develop software. But, seeing as how my gaming machine is mostly used for gaming / web stuff, it would be nice to choose a distro with that as the focus.
Same experience here. People waiting for steamos don’t know most good distros work how they think steamos is gonna. Games with kernel level anti cheat that are worth playing are few and far between. And fuck their communities for not rioting when their fellow members get removed from the game for no reason.