[TACIXAT]

I just made the switch. I had been developing on Windows for the last couple of years, mostly to get used to the ecosystem. I wanted to be able to write C and C++ like I do on Linux, without an IDE and with the native toolchain (i.e. no cygwin). On top of that, I play Overwatch every night.

Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes.

I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline.

It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.

[SteveNuts]

The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

[Wowfunhappy]

> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

And backwards compatibility.

They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.

[dijit]

Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux.

This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.

Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.

It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.

Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.

[zigzag312]

What win32 apps were killed by UWP migration? When UWP was added win32 wasn't removed. Win32 applications still work.

> Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race

That is actually a big win as some manufacturers only provide binary blob drivers and a lot of commercial software is distributed as binaries only.

[dijit]

Binary applications do not include drivers. I only mean applications, drivers do not transfer cleanly between versions of Windows.

To answer your other question though; Any GDI that is not accessible through DirectX- The Contacts API, Timers API, BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), The inbound HTTP server API, NDF (Network Diagnostic Framework), SNMP.

AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone, NamedPipes (something I used to use extensively) are gone. Toolbar and Statusbar APIs are gone and direct manipulation APIs for the Desktop.

I mean, I can keep going.

[int_19h]

You are describing limitations on sandboxed UWP apps, but Windows still supports regular Win32 just fine, and everything that you describe is available there.

I still run 30 year old games on Windows and write new software using WPF and WinForms even, and it all "just works", much more so than similar attempts at software archeology on Linux.

It's really too bad that Microsoft is hell bent on shoving ads, AI, and dark patterns everywhere in what could otherwise be a decent boring "it just works" OS.

[zigzag312]

Surprising amount of drivers do transfer between versions of Windows, even if not officially supported. But yes, most break at some point.

I'm able to run binaries compiled over 20 years ago on the latest version of Windows most of the time. They do require enabling compatibility mode and sometimes installing legacy features.

I don't know, if APIs you mentioned are available in compatibility modes, but at least named pipes can still be enabled.

But Windows is going downhill lately, so backwards compatibility isn't what it used to be. Improving backwards compatibility for running old binaries would make Linux adoption easier. I hope that Linux PCs market share keeps improving to cross the threshold where it becomes an economically viable platform for most of commercial software.

[71bw]

>AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone

...sorry, what? I use these intensively and they are still available to use.

[ectospheno]

> Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux. This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Every Windows release I compile code straight from a Windows programming book from the 90’s. The only changes I made last time was a few include statements and one define.

[MiddleEndian]

>backwards compatibility

They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.

I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.

[Wowfunhappy]

That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself!

What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.

[dham]

I used some software called Project 5 from Cakewalk back in 2006, as well as VST plugins. I can still install it and use it on Windows 11. Meanwhile, basic plugins from that time stopped working on Mac OS X Lion.

[MiddleEndian]

That detail is definitely true, I just think that in practice the frustration with behavior like this from MS will trickle down(/up/whatever direction). Like the benefit of Windows as a regular user or power user was also that after the pain of dealing with whatever shit MS decided, you could configure it more-or-less however you wanted and it would not change. It will be delayed in the corporate world but it will happen.

[vee-kay]

Just use Thunderbird Portable as email client.

Since M$ is doing away with simple free apps (such as Mail) and forcing users to move to cloud-based expensive apps, you can use FOSS (Free and Open Source) alternatives -- especially the Portable ones (e.g., apps from PortableApps.com) that don't need an install, they can run off a USB drive, and app+userdata can be easily backed up without fuss.

https://alternativeto.net/software/mail-calendar-people-and-...

[MiddleEndian]

I tried Thunderbird first, but unfortunately it was kinda heavy and was fairly unreliable, which kinda tracks with my experience before (at least on Windows). Mailspring works fine and is also open source.

Couldn't find a decent minimalist calendar program that integrated well with Windows. People say they like OneCalendar but I refuse to use the Windows Store, I even got WSL set up without it lol

[int_19h]

Try Vivaldi. It's a "kitchen sink" browser in the same vein as Opera used to be back in its days of glory, so it comes with an email and calendar client that can be optionally turned off:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-calendar-feed-reader-a...

But you can also just use it as an email client and ignore the browser part.

[the__alchemist]

Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.

[hamdingers]

Ironically, you can run almost any vintage Windows or DOS software on any modern GNU/Linux OS too, using compatibility layers.

[krferriter]

Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many years. No amount of tweaking could make it perfectly smooth and have comparable battery life and cooling.

New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.

[gchamonlive]

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support.

I once had to patch uvc to support a webcam that wouldn't work natively on Linux. It would advertise one version of the API but implement another. That didn't affect windows which probably already knew and had proper patched drivers for it.

We can all but wonder why, but my guess isn't that there is some sloppy dev there and windows is just making up for it. It all seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.

So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.

[Yoric]

I believe that Linux is just a low-priority target. There are so few users on Linux that it's not worth investing in Linux support unless you specifically target Linux crowds.

[gchamonlive]

Makes sense

[int_19h]

If you start thinking about a conspiracy, the first thing you should do is ask yourself how much effort it would take to keep it under the lid without anyone leaking.

[gchamonlive]

As the other commenter said, way more likely that Linux is just a low priority for hardware manufacturers.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support

My experience has been that I can generally just install Linux on a machine and pretty much everything will just work straight away, but with Windows, I have to go and find the relevant Windows drivers to get things like iSCSI working.

[brettermeier]

When did you install your last Windows? Like 20 years ago?

[red-iron-pine]

"I had to patch drivers to get the dot-matrix printer working, and it didn't play nice with the PS/2 used by my mouse (the big one that goes on the nice mousepad)"

[ndsipa_pomu]

I recall lots of reports of printers and scanners becoming unsupported during one of the Windows version upgrades (possibly the Windows 7 upgrade?).

[int_19h]

Likely Vista, that's the last time they did a lot of breaking changes around drivers.

[happymellon]

> And backwards compatibility.

I have plenty of printers that have stopped working on Windows over the years, my current Brother laser doesn't have drivers that Windows will allow to be installed anymore. Its fine with Linux, so I just print share it as a generic so the Windows clients can connect.

[anonymars]

My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.

How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?

So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.

I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.

[protoster]

Windows struck the iceberg back in 8. It took until 11 for people to finally start to abandon ship in numbers.

[anonymars]

I wonder if it was losing Jim Allchin that did it. He retired after Vista and I'd say he was in charge of Windows during its golden age. 7 was basically Vista SP3, and then things took a different direction.

But, to every coin there are two sides:

"I consider this cross-platform idea a disease within Microsoft. We are determined to put a gun to our head and pull the trigger."

[hamandcheese]

I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.

[tobyjsullivan]

Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies.

I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.

[SteveNuts]

My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel.

I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.

[ThrowawayB7]

> "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel."

There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.

Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?

[cyberax]

Linux has won on phones (Android) and on the server side. I don't think Windows Server is seriously used for anything but Exchange/AD these days, outside of hosting specialized or legacy apps.

Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.

So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.

[int_19h]

There was also the whole "web apps are coming and they run everywhere" thing. Which actually did work out exactly as people expected it to, although it took longer than most predicted - but your average casual PC user spends most of their time in the browser these days.

However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.

[handbanana_]

This 100%. These threads are the same shit I was reading on Slashdot in 1999

[vbezhenar]

I don't see that making much sense, honestly. Windows kernel is super solid and well architectured. There are thousands of drivers for every peripheral on the Earth. And I don't believe that Microsoft spends that much on kernel development to be incentivised to cut it.

If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.

[doublerabbit]

I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin user, all the features of linux but done differently. Been using FreeBSD for years now.

[monocasa]

I think that's true for the consumer side, but I believe Micrsoft still sees value in truly owning a complete system software stack.

Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.

[pjmlp]

It does, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

[dangus]

I disagree. I think the end of the “world revolves around Windows” era of Microsoft has been hugely beneficial to the OS. Microsoft is way less hostile to other platforms now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.

WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.

[yndoendo]

I disagree that Microsoft benefits the end user. Their IoT which took over the Embedded version of Windows is completely bloated in 10 and higher. Version 7 allowed for only installing necessities where their successors force XBox and other built in forced features. Windows 11 IoT is also forcing the creation of a Microsoft account instead of allowing an local account. IoT / Embedded does not mean it is connect and often air gaped. They are also often used to host products and should not have a Microsoft account assigned.

Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.

[dangus]

Isn’t Windows IoT a pretty niche distribution? Surely it’s less than 1% of Windows users.

[HighGoldstein]

> now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.

[PeaceTed]

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?

I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.

At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.

[bee_rider]

I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware.

Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.

[tpxl]

> I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0.

The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.

[galangalalgol]

None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.

[CamperBob2]

I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.

[sylens]

I think a lot of power users would prefer to pay somewhere between $50-$100 for a Windows license if it meant the enshittifcation wasn't included

[akho]

The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.

[nisegami]

Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.

[bee_rider]

I think their earnings are detailed here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...

IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:

> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates

So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.

But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.

[ehnto]

Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.

I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.

[rewgs]

Perfectly put.

[dangus]

While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software.

Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.

It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.

The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.

Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.

I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.

[II2II]

> Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things.

Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.

On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.

I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.

I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.

[shmeeed]

It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

[evilduck]

> I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud

Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.

[dangus]

A lot of this isn't very relevant to my personal use case and/or has not been my experience.

- I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me.

- As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts.

- It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there.

- Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there.

- I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.

[dm319]

Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.

[SteveNuts]

And then you still have to wonder if “My Documents” is actually “My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro” or something

[marcodiego]

And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have thumbnails.

[MiddleEndian]

Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker

[dangus]

In what application is it like this? I don’t find this true at all. It’s a completely customizable sidebar.

[gmueckl]

Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive.

Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.

[dangus]

Yeah, this is the only Microsoft application I am aware of that does this, and I actually think that most Office users want to save to OneDrive and that it makes sense in this context.

The median Office user is using it at work and your employer doesn’t want you saving documents in places you will lose them.

Ditto for universities and schools that provide 365.

[codingrightnow]

I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.

[sgjohnson]

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)

[kbenson]

I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.

For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.

Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.

It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.

[andyjohnson0]

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.

[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.

[koakuma-chan]

I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.

[Krssst]

I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.

[deafpolygon]

one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms

[eek2121]

I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time.

I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net.

The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.

Not really missing anything.

[saghm]

It really is hard to overstate just how much progress there's been in the past few years. I first started using Linux in late 2012 (with Ubuntu 12.10 being the first version that actually came with my laptop's wifi firmware in the default installtion; when I first tried 12.04 I had to plug it into ethernet just to download it), and by that point, graphical stuff mostly worked without needing a ton of manual work, and it was past the era where I would have had to compile a custom kernel or something (although a few years later I did learn how to do that just for the fun of tinkering when I got a macbook with a wifi driver that wasn't released in a stable kernel for another few months), but when I started getting into gaming in the later part of the decade, I had to spend a decent bit of time learning about Wine, Crossover, Lutris, etc. Over the course of the next few years I started playing around with Proton in Steam, even for games that aren't released on Steam, and nowadays I don't even have Lutris or Crossover installed, and I can't remember the last time I tried to play a game that Proton couldn't run.

At this point, Valve has done enough to make Linux gaming viable that they might have permanently bought my goodwill. Right now I mostly play on my Steam Deck an equal mix of games that are and aren't from Steam (streamed from my desktop with Moonlight, which itself is a third-party app rather than from Steam), but even if they started trying to lock things down more, I'm not sure I'd be able to get mad at them. So much of the investment they've made into the ecosystem has been in the tooling itself that isn't exclusive to them, ostensibly for the purpose of entering the "handheld desktop" gaming market (not sure what exactly to call it, but playing the same PC games on handhelds is demonstrably different from a handheld console with a separate catalog), but they did it in a way that benefited a lot more than just that. I don't pretend they're a perfect company, because those don't exist, but as far as companies go, this might be the first time I actually identify as a fan of one.

[ErroneousBosh]

> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning

Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.

Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

[andyjohnson0]

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I regularly move my work Win 11 Pro laptop between three different multi-monitor (hdmi) setups, and it works flawlessly. I don't recall any problems with Win10 over many years either.

What am I missing out on?

[chrneu]

My last 2 laptops have really struggled with win10/11 multimonitor support. Explorer would often crash, taskbars would not populate, behaviors weren't consistent, taskbars would reset themselves, settings would change randomly after reboots, not including updates resetting all my settings and having no real way to disable updates cuz windows would re-enable them.

did i mention explorer would crash pretty often? like, half the time I plugged in a docking station it would crash explorer. That then reset all the settings. lol just a mess.

Pop OS! is a simple plug and play on any setup i've tried it on, over usb3 or hdmi/dpi. Works great.

[da_chicken]

Multi-monitor mostly works fine for me in Windows 11, but I do have consistent issues when dragging windows between displays with different dpi scaling. They have the same resolution but the dpi scaling on the laptop display doesn't match that on the two 27" displays next to it.

Adobe Acrobat in particular takes multiple seconds to drag a window from the laptop screen to one of the attached displays when a PDF is open. Now, this is on a 6 year old laptop due to be replaced, but it was fairly high spec when it was purchased (64 GB, RTX 2060, NVMe SSD). It really shouldn't be making me wait on 2d rendering of a document.

[samplatt]

My non-corporate desktop has 3 screens, screen#2 is shared with a corporate laptop (via a KVM, but the issues happen without it as well).

If I switch that monitor to the other machine, Windows re-arranges ALL windows to appear on the new "primary" portrait-oriented screen#1, some maximised to fill the screen, some not. They stay there after the other screen is reconnected.

Possibly because the screen being switched is the "primary" screen? At least it's consistent behaviour between both Win10 AND Win11, which is nice.

[efreak]

Why can't I lock my computer and have Windows turn off my displayport monitor without having it turn itself on and off every few minutes until I log back in?

Why can't I turn off the power button on my monitor and then turn it back on to keep using it again without having to shut down my PC, turn off the PSU switch, press the power button to fully power it down, then bring everything back up? I just want my monitors off when I'm in bed...

[int0x29]

> Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

I've never seen this work correctly. My work dock breaks monitor ordering on MacOS reliably and Gnome+Wayland frequently. I don't remember if it broke for Xorg. My home monitor setup breaks mouse behavior in borderless fullscreen and libreoffice scaling on KDE+Wayland.

[baobun]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45793218

Don't hold your breath... This is configurable in Linux (at least I recall Xfce and KDE having display position config built in for years).

[bigstrat2003]

I do that all the time. So it seems to be something hardware-specific, not that it makes it less annoying.

[chrneu]

Multimonitor support and bluetooth are the two biggest reasons I ditched windows a couple years ago.

I have no idea how multimon got so, so bad on windows.

Then bluetooth ...wtf? Again, how did they get so bad?

[ssl-3]

I don't do a ton of multi-monitor stuff with Windows these days, but I certainly have done a good bit of it. It worked OK on my desktop at home with three screens, and when I sometimes plug an extra monitor into my laptop at work it seems to put things back how they were last time.

But I don't recall a time when Bluetooth was "good" on Windows -- like, at all. I've spent somewhere in the realm of 20 years now dinking around with it. As far as I can tell, it has always been a miserable experience.

[JamesBrooks]

> and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net

Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).

If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!

[WD-42]

I added the battle.net installer as a non steam game in steam and it just worked. Proton is really good.

[JamesBrooks]

I was trying to do it through Lutris, I'll give a non-steam game in Steam a shot, thanks a lot!

[ok123456]

CreateProcessA() on Windows is very slow. A significant portion of the perceived speedup for development tasks is that fork() takes on the order of microseconds, but creating a Windows process takes ~50ms, sometimes several times that if DEP is enabled. This is VERY painful if you try to use fork-based multiprocessing programs directly.

[magicalhippo]

I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn.

Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.

Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.

[ok123456]

Some people use WSL as an epicycle to fix this.

[Krssst]

Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).

[dustbunny]

I run mint as well and really love it's esthetic. I prefer AMD GPUs on Linux and they have always "just worked".

I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.

[yxhuvud]

Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.

[dijit]

not to split hairs, but I think the parent is justified in saying they “always worked” if they’ve been this good for a decade.

If I was 10 years younger than I am today, my perspective would have been that it “always worked” and at some point we have to acknowledge that there has been good work done and things are quite stable in the modern day. 10y is not a small amount of time to prove it out.

[hoten]

> React based start menu with visible lag

That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

[monocasa]

Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests.

Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.

[accoil]

The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React

[1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler

[cluckindan]

I wouldn’t be so sure…

https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-xaml

[accoil]

Oh, interesting.

[andoando]

I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory

[gambiting]

It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every single time it opens unsorted, the photos are in some random god knows what order, and literally 10 seconds(!!!!) later they suddenly move themselves to the correct position. Every single time. That's with maybe 200 photos? On a machine with 16 cores and 64GB of ram. People coding on 16kHz chips decades ago could do this faster than whatever microsoft is doing.

[chrneu]

it's also worth mentioning that windows 10 search was a huge regression from 7 and xp.

[abnercoimbre]

And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech

[morganherlocker]

"Everything" is another that puts the default search to shame. I've also seen people who just have a script that pumps all new files into a txt file every so often and runs bruteforce ripgrep on it, which gives instant interactive results. It's really hard to imagine coming up with a search routine that is as slow and unreliable as what ships with mainstream OS file managers.

[eviks]

File search is also the fastest thing among all the 3 OS it's not even funny. Just use the Everything search app and a good file manager that can integrate Everything.

[marcosdumay]

I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either.

Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).

[3eb7988a1663]

For a look into a parallel universe of what could be, check out Everything[0]. Super fast search that should be embarrassing for Microsoft.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(software)

[0134340]

It's a must have for me on Windows. Now that I'm on Linux, Fsearch is a pretty good replacement.

[dangus]

The “Everything” application is what you want:

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

[Traubenfuchs]

One of the most powerful and unique tools for windows ever.

The only thing I miss being on OSX, I hate its search.

[TACIXAT]

It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.

[Bolwin]

You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find

[formerly_proven]

> file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them

It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.

[TACIXAT]

I have this exact same problem with OGG files. Either their parser has some insane bugs or they are starting an isolation VM per file to run the parse. Either way, unusable.

[giancarlostoro]

I did the same, I had jumped into POP OS instead, which is also Ubuntu based, then a year back I got into EndeavourOS an Arch based distro, and have not looked back since. I use it on everything I can put Linux on.

[specproc]

Plus one for an Arch-based system, way better than Ubuntu/Debian for gaming. All these Nvidia driver issues totally disappeared when I switched.

Rolling release is a hell of a lot better in this context. SteamOS is Arch, IIRC.

[giancarlostoro]

For me it wasnt driver issues, moreso “you need glibc to be a version that Debian / Ubuntu cant upgrade without it being potentially problematic” just to run 3D printer slicer software. I said screw this give me bleeding edge and give it to me now. I had been itching to try something slightly more bleeding edge, Fedora was on my mind but it did not work out as I wanted it to.

[bogwog]

> I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough.

Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.

[try_the_bass]

Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

[hamdingers]

If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters.

Also, there are 540Hz displays.

[badsectoracula]

> even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later

Note that this is only the case if you have vsync enabled. Without vsync you will see the action (or some reaction anyway) +2ms later instead of +16.67ms, just not the full frame. This will manifest as screen tearing though if the screen changes are big - though it is up to personal preference if it bothers you or not.

Personally i always disable vsync even my high refresh rate monitor as i like having the fastest feedback possible (i do not even run a desktop compositor because of that) and i do not mind screen tearing (though tearing is much less visible with a high refresh monitor than a 60Hz one).

[try_the_bass]

> If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later.

Okay I think I follow this, but I think I'd frame it a little differently. I guess it makes more sense to me if I think about your statement as "the frame I'm seeing is only 2ms old, instead of 16.67ms old". I'm still not seeing the action for 16.67ms since the last frame I saw, but I'm seeing a frame that was produced _much_ more recently than 16.67ms ago.

Thanks for the explanation, it helps!

[mattmanser]

This is mostly like high fidelity audio equipment, or extreme coffee preparation. Waste of time for most people.

I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.

Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.

I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.

But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.

[vintermann]

I'm sure that's true, but low latency can just plain feel good. I don't play FPSses at all, and I can totally understand how low latency helps the feeling of being in control. Chasing high refresh rates and low latency seems a lot more reasonable to me than chasing high resolution.

[gf000]

A game doesn't necessarily have to process input at the same rate as it displays frames, does it?

[hamdingers]

That's correct, and the most competitive multiplayer games tend to have fixed tick rates on the server, but the higher FPS is still beneficial (again, theoretically for all but the highest level of competition) because your client side inputs are sampled more frequently and your rendered frames are at most a couple ms old.

[adastra22]

I think you're missing the point. The game could be processing input and doing a state update at 1000Hz, while still rendering a mere 60fps. There doesn't have to be any correlation whatsoever between frame rate and input processing. Furthermore, this would actually have less latency because there won't be a pipeline of frame buffers being worked on.

Tying the input loop to the render loop is a totally arbitrary decision that the game industry is needlessly perpetuating.

[hamdingers]

No, I'm explaining how most games work in practice.

You're right a game could be made that works that way. I'm not aware of one, but I don't have exhaustive knowledge and it wouldn't surprise me if examples exist, but that was not the question.

[fizzynut]

Doing that will increase input latency, not decrease it.

There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.

It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.

In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.

[Keyframe]

Game has to process the input, but it also has to update the "world" (which might also involve separate processing like physics) and then also render it both visually and audio. With network and server updates in-between things get even more complex. Input to screen lag and latency is a hardcore topic. I've been diving into that on and off for the past few years. One thing that would be really sweet of hardware/OS/driver guys would be an info when the frame was displayed. There's no such thing yet available to my knowledge.

[nemomarx]

It doesn't and well programmed games won't be tied to fps that way. I'm not sure anything past 300 fps plausibly matters for overwatch even with the best monitor available.

[iwontberude]

Yeah it felt like I got caught in an early 2000s timewarp for a second. It was nice.

[Jhsto]

You want your minimum FPS to be your refresh rate. You won't notice when you're over it, but you likely will if you go below it.

In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.

[rkoten]

Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.

[omnimus]

To certain extent for online games it can be advantage (atleast it feels like it to me). AFAIK The server updates state between players at some (tick) rate when you have FPS above tick rate then the game interpolates between the states. The issue is that frames and networking might not be constantly synced so you are juggling between fps, screen refresh rate, ping and tick rate. In other words more frames you have higher the chance you will "get lucky" with latency of the game.

[sznio]

If you're not using V-sync, if a new frame is rendered while the previous one wasn't fully displayed yet, it gets swapped to the fresher one half-way through. This causes ugly screen tearing, but makes the game more responsive. You won't see the whole screen update at once, but like 1/5th of it will react instantly.

I used to do that until I switched to Wayland which forces vsync. It felt so unresponsive that I bought a 165hz display as a solution to that.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

The reason is triple buffering:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferin...

I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:

"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."

[TACIXAT]

I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match your refresh rate.

[try_the_bass]

Huh, I didn't know those existed now. I think the last time I was shopping for a monitor, 144Hz was the new hotness.

Things have come a long way since then!

[marcosdumay]

Tying the input and simulation rates to the screen refresh rate is an old "best practice" that is still used in some games. In fact, a long time ago it was even an actual good practice.

[shric]

I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.

[cwillu]

osu (music beat-clicking game) has a built-in screen frequency a/b test, and despite running on a 60hz screen I can reliably pass that test up to 240hz. It's not just having 60 frames ready per second, it's what's in those frames.

[try_the_bass]

I don't understand how this works, I guess? If your screen is 60Hz, you're drawing four frames for every one that ends up getting displayed. You won't even see the other three, right? If you can't see the frames, what difference does what's in them make?

[E] Answered my own question elsewhere: the difference is the "freshness" of the frame. Higher frame rates mean the frame you do end up seeing was produced more recently than the last frame you actually saw

[layer8]

Also, your input gets registered faster (happens earlier) in the game world.

[try_the_bass]

I don't think I understand this part.

Why does the rate at which frames are rendered (by the GPU?) relate to the speed at which input is registered?

[E] Ah, I think another comment [1] up in a different branch of this thread answered this for me

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794453

[PeaceTed]

An aside based on what you have mentioned. What the heck happened to Windows file manager? I mean it used to be that Windows was rock solid while Linux variants had various parsing performance/stability issues. Now it feels like it is the complete opposite.

In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.

[Zekio]

if you haven't enabled the checkbox starting explorer in a new process which isn't super easy to find, it will basically be one process running most of the windows ui, which means when they write shoddy code, the ui tends to hang

[muststopmyths]

They rewrote Explorer for Windows 11, in the process fucking it up completely.

There is a regkey to go back to the Windows 10 explorer, but you'd have to google that.

[cedws]

Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.

[bigyabai]

You can trivially sandbox your Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak. Using an app like Flatseal, you can then configure Steam to only have access to a designated drive with next to no further contact to your PC. You can individually disable access to networking, audio, D-Bus, USB devices, Bluetooth, shared memory and even the GPU itself if you're really freaked out. No command line needed.

That being said, I just run Steam natively on NixOS and have never seen any issues. The biggest RCEs I'm worried about are Ring 0 anticheat nuking my desktop like CloudStrike.

[chrneu]

>Steam installation with pretty much zero performance overhead, if you install it through Flatpak.

In reality that isn't true. Flatpak steam runs like poo for a lot of people. Really, flatpak should be avoided if there are other installation methods, in general.

[WD-42]

Flatpak works fine for me on Arch. I use it mainly to avoid needing 32bit libs installed. Once steam goes 64 I’ll go native.

[brians]

There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!

[groundzeros2015]

You might like XFCE which to me is basically windows XP. It’s available in Debian install or as Xubuntu.

[flanked-evergl]

I used XFCE for years and liked it but it was so buggy and unmaintained. I recently switched to KDE and I am very satisfied with it.

[groundzeros2015]

Interesting. I haven’t ran into bugs but I also haven’t tried KDE.

[flanked-evergl]

I had the panels crashing a lot, and the desktop switcher was always bugged with multiple screens.

[bcrosby95]

People oversell how much windows just works. It only does so because it comes pre installed. I regularly reinstall my wife's and it's always more of a pain in the ass than Linux.

[DanielHB]

Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too.

How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080.

Those are the last 2 issues keeping my home desktop on windows-land

[dormento]

> Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too.

Seems like you can just keep using the Battle.net account on GNU/Linux. You just add the Battle.net installer as a "non-steam game" (bottom left of the games list). Then, you start it, add your account, install the game and it "just works". I used it on the steam deck to play D4 beta and D2R on my CachyOS desktop.

> How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080.

My battle-hardened 1060GTX served me for years. I recently upgraded my whole rig from Debian + Intel + Nvidia to full AMD and the RX9070XT works very well, with the caveat that I had to switch to a newer kernel on CachyOS to support it. That was 4 months ago and the situation now should be resolved, so you can prob use any old normie distro.

[DanielHB]

Thanks for the tips! I will try when I have some time.

Any chance of triggering anticheat on battlenet if I do this? Like does Blizzard has an official stance on it?

[Saris]

You can also add external games to launch via steam too, so you might be able to do it without transferring.

[ffsm8]

Does HDR work though?

[yxhuvud]

If using a modern variant of Wayland and if the app supports it: yes. Both, especially the latter are pretty big buts.

[paulbgd]

On Wayland+gnome/plasma I’ve had great luck with games, Firefox is almost there with some bugginess, and video playing apps that use mpv like plex work great. It’s definitely not perfect and you may dive into configuring per app flags to make them utilize hdr, but the easy stuff generally works

[formerly_proven]

Barely works on windows too, though

[luxuryballs]

me just realizing that React start menu thing I saw last week was not a joke… o.O