[Grom_PE]

I've gone over to Linux after using Windows for 25 years.

As someone who enjoys older games, I am pleasantly surprised that Wine (with dxvk and cnc-ddraw) lets me run more games in a better way than I was able to on Windows.

I can run some 16-bit games on a 64-bit OS!

Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.

I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in:

    gamescope -S integer -F nearest --borderless wine game.exe

Also there is a potential to use a different Wine configuration (prefix) for every game specifically. So far I haven't had to resort to this.

I noticed some Unity games waste disk space with gigabytes of zeroes, Linux lets me run them from inside a compressed SquashFS image, this even makes the game load faster:

    mkdir ./game
    squashfuse ./game.squashfs ./game
    pushd ./game
    wine game.exe
    popd
    sleep 1
    umount ./game
    rmdir ./game

I encountered a game that crashes due to multiprocessor system, the fix is simple, restricting it to one CPU:

    taskset --cpu-list 1 wine game.exe

[raron]

> Games that rudely switch to fullscreen, I can run in Wine Virtual Desktop. Previously on Windows, I had to configure hacks like DxWnd and it didn't always work.

Maybe Wine could be ported to Windows :-)

[usrusr]

There will be a day when Microsoft ships a "Windows" that cuts all legacy compatibility except for an included distribution of Wine.

[cogman10]

Microsoft might not do it, but there's always reactos [1]

[1] https://reactos.org/

[Tajnymag]

At this point, that's exactly what Windows needs. As Microsoft only adds new features and doesn't remove almost any, Windows is getting reaaally bloated. And what was Microsoft's response? Everyone should buy a new faster computer to run Windows 11.

[flohofwoe]

Tbh, a better strategy would to slim down Windows again would be to remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades. There have been significant improvements in the kernel and DirectX, but on the surface, Windows somehow managed to remove user-facing features while at the same time adding an incredible amount of bloat in layers above the core operating system. From a usability perspective the Windows desktop UI in Win2k was singnificantly better than anything that came after.

[M95D]

> remove all the new user-facing stuff which was added over the last two decades

That's not all that needs to be removed from Windows, and it's not what they're interested in removing. The old MFC, GDI, COMCTL, COMDLG, Winsock etc. must be a lot higher in their "do delete" list.

[avadodin]

Win2k with WSL without systemd would be so kino

[pjmlp]

Hardly, given that systemd author is a Microsoft employee nowadays.

[kruffalon]

> [...] kino

IHaveABanana Is this a thing or are you just now trying to make it a thing?

Either way, I like it :)

[pjmlp]

That was the idea with UWP and Windows 10X, but folks really want that backwards compatibility.

[Tajnymag]

Well, yes, but APIs aside, as long as the developers and users have the choice, they won't choose a new backwards incompatible solution if when they can stay with their old solution.

Look at Apple Macs, all went from x86 to arm, breaking software and fixing incompatibilities later. Users had no choice but to use m1 macOS if they wanted a new device.

[pjmlp]

And leave software behind, hence why many postpone their acquisition until the hardware dies.

[bigyabai]

It was/is unironically a "solution" to some games (eg. Elden Ring) with unfixable stuttering on Windows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAooLiCy7rE

[mkl]

You can already run it in WSL2, apparently.

[djtango]

Running windows to run linux to run windows is delicious

[caminanteblanco]

It already is in some form! This is what I used to play Sid Meier's Civnet with my brothers: https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

[anthk]

https://fdossena.com/index.php?p=wined3d/index.frag

This is the proper Wine for Windows but just for DirectX->GL or DirectX-Vulkan.

[unparagoned]

Just run it under wsl

[throwaway2046]

>I only wish Wine also allowed me to zoom 2x or 3x, but this is where Gamescope comes in

Also possible using dxwrapper (for DirectX 7-9 games):

https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper

Similarly to dxvk, you drop a few DLLs into the game directory then edit one config file. No need to use a dedicated program.

[riizade]

Can you elaborate on Unity wasting disk space on gigabytes of zeroes?

How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game?

I can't find anything about it online.

[Grom_PE]

I suppose that is an issue how a specific game was made, not inherent to Unity.

I like to look inside game files and a .zip archive of 1GB unpacking to ~10GB game made me suspicious.

[marcosdumay]

My first guess would be it has lots of uncompressed images or badly compressed videos as artifacts.

[riizade]

Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)

So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did

Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+

[wtallis]

The right tradeoff for compression ratio can change with just a few years of technological progress, or even quicker if it's a half-assed port from console to a high-end PC. There are similar issues for a game's decision of how many threads to spawn based on the CPU's core count. The developer's assumptions may not have been right to begin with, and even if they were, they're not likely to stay right for long.

[dontlaugh]

Exactly. Guaranteed SSDs and a spare CPU core have made compression almost always faster.

[ethbr1]

It never ceases to surprise me that people still embed 5+ MB resolution photos on their sites, then use them scaled down to thumbnail size, but here we are.

[stuaxo]

Put a chunk of work into optimising the images on a site once, of course as soon as I left this was undone.

The office we worked in had really fast internet, but I was fixing things for the users.

[jayd16]

Reminds me of the mention of "contiguous zeroes" that used to be in the Apple App Store docs.[1] Which seemed like just a backhanded way to say "we encrypt and then compress so don't expect easy compression."

I suppose this might be asset padding or perhaps these are raw textures with full alpha sections? Still, it seems pretty strange. What game, what asset?

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42478186/app-size-on-app...

[apatheticonion]

Same! Fallout New Vegas runs phenomenally on Linux but struggles on Windows. Same with Call of Duty 2 and even some newer titles like Borderlands 2.

[jeffbee]

Neat. I am in the habit of using the kernel squashfs with privileges. TIL about squashfuse.

[Dwedit]

OTVDM (based on Wine) allows you to run 16-bit programs on 64-bit Windows, so it's not just a Linux thing.