This would have been cool 10 years ago, but nowadays it feels more like rearranging the chairs on a sinking ship. Windows is becoming more and more locked down, with increasing difficulty to disable the bundled bloatware. And every new update runs the risk of completely undoing all these customizations. Not to mention the MS legal team could pull the rug at any second. All this effort would be better spent on a Linux gaming distro such as SteamOS.
Yes please. The Linux space needs some modernization too with a lot of applications, like Steam, segfaulting on 10-bit color, breaking at shebangs like #!/bin/bash, or some shared lib hell—and that's not even crossing the mess that is Windows-kernel-based anti-cheat systems.
Effort ? That repo consists of a few Windows Registry tweaks and some bundled 3rd party installers. Not exactly ground breaking engineering that could have been better deployed to improve SteamOS/Linux....
I actually feel like Windows has made massive steps forward with 11. I say this as someone who works on Windows some of the time but hasn't had to daily-drive it for a while.
The bloatware is minimal, mostly removable without adverse impacts and the UI has improved markedly. Windows 11's support for TPM root of trust is a great step forward, and the settings screens actually feel very logically laid out now.
Winget, while not anything revolutionary if you're coming from Linux or even Mac/homebrew, is decent - and fills out a big missing piece for technical users that have missed this functionality.
I don't see it as a sinking ship at all, but maybe I'm being really naive (and I mean that sincerely).
Oh fuck no it hasn't. The UI is actually what's stopping me from upgrading to Win11.
Win11 is trying to be macOS with its UI, and that's a bug, not a feature, because I fucking hate everything about macOS's UI.
I hate multiple windows from a program coalescing into a single icon on the task bar. I hate the task bar not including text from windows. I hate that I can't have a task bar on multiple monitors. And I just generally hate how flat everything looks. What I hate most of all, is that Microsoft has decided to go the Apple way and disallow you from choosing what you want it to look like. There are no options to make it look like it used to.
IMO, Windows UI peaked with Win2K. When I used Win7, I used the classic theme. I use Win10 now, and use WindowBlinds to skin it to look like Win2K.
I mean, and I’m just putting this out there, don’t you feel a little bit like at least some of that is your own preferences?
The one thing you’ve called out that I can’t refute is that the option to customise it to the win2k look has been taken away, but I imagine it gets harder to maintain the further they move from those metaphors (e.g. you already needed to use WindowBlinds on 10).
I really like the new UI. The window snapping is far better than it’s been previously. It takes quite a bit from macOS, but I think they’ve left the worst parts of macOS out like the horrific monstrosity of a settings screen and the janky mess of a permissions system.
> I mean, and I’m just putting this out there, don’t you feel a little bit like at least some of that is your own preferences?
Certainly.
The problem I have though is that one of the reasons I use Windows is because it's not Mac.
Really, the only reason I'm still on Windows is because I'm a gamer and many multiplayer games don't work in Linux because the anti-cheat software isn't compatible. But the changes in Win11 make me stick with Win10, which is a shame because the current gen of Intel CPUs use two types of cores, and the Thread Director technology isn't going to be ported to Win10, so I'm either stuck with my i9-9900K or I switch to AMD.
I get where you're coming from, and if it's primarily a gaming machine it might not be something you care about, but there's a bunch of reasons why someone might prefer Windows 11 to a Linux system (I say this adoring Linux - so none of this is intended as criticism).
On W11 you have TPM/ROT, centralised app signing (that you can enable/disable as you prefer), DirectX 12 (I realise this wouldn't matter if everything was on Vulkan, but it's not).
Proton is great, and Linux has only gotten more user-friendly over time, but there's still some touch points that are either stubbornly still not addressed or just won't be addressed because they're antithetical to FOSS (again, TPM and central signing authorities).
Side note: A central signing authority would be really helpful in the Linux world, maybe run/funded by a consortium of Linux-using orgs (Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Red Hat). I'm surprised this hasn't been attempted already as it would be protective of those organisations massive cloud investments, too.
It should be noted some of those weaknesses still apply to W11 and macOS even now. I would think WASM (coupled with a minimal runtime like Wasmer) might provide a means to deal with this issue by signing the packaged sandbox and everything in it rather than worry about the internals of the language and what it loads (in that it can't load/touch anything outside the sandbox boundary anyway).
I feel like I already explained why. It goes against Microsoft's business trajectory. Most gamers don't care at all about privacy or ads. The ones who do have most likely already made the switch to Linux.
I find it hard to believe you actually know much about what you are saying. Gaming on linux is a limited, poorly performing, second class citizen experience at best. And the support when you run into an issues falls on death ears. Feel free to look at steam, filter by OS, note that when you remove windows from your selection the majority of top rate popular games all fall away.
It is far easier to limit your ad experience, and have a dedicated windows gaming machine than it is to switch to linux for gaming.
Those only count the games that have native Linux versions. Most games are also playable through the Proton compatibility layer. You can see which games on ProtonDB. For example, the Witcher 3 is listed as Windows-only on steam, yet has a Platinum rating on ProtonDB, which means it works fine on Linux out of the box. Funny enough, the Witcher 3 is also Steam Deck certified.
Sorry to ruin your attempt at a jab, but I've posted proton links in of the few responses here. It is fair to say there are far fewer games that are platinum than gold on proton.
And something working and something being supported are vastly different.
And this may come to a shock to you but many people who want to play games don't want to tweak setting to make that work on a unsupported operating system.
This isn't a case for can you do it, this is based around the vast majority of games work fine on Linux, I don't think the average gamer would include making game specific tweaks as fine.
What bubble do you live in? There are a lot of games that don't work well in Linux in addition to a lot of other issues with using Linux for gaming in general.
For instance: VR on Linux is still a shit show, with only one company kinda supporting it and not doing a very good job of it at that.
The pro-privacy, power user bubble, obviously. The one company that supports VR on Linux you're mentioning is Valve, which lets you use their headsets in any OS with no fuss. They fully support Linux, so I don't really know what you're talking about there. The Occulus line on the other hand, requires a Facebook account and tracks your data constantly. Obviously the overlap of Linux gamers and people fine with the Occulus ToS are pretty small. Conversely, the overlap of Windows users and privacy-conscious people who are knowledgeable enough to modify their OS is also very small.
It may surprise you how many people use Linux and have a Facebook account or an iPhone. You seem to have conflated a standard Linux user with a staunch privacy advocate. There did used to be a strong corrlation, but as lack of privacy becomes more normal, and young people grow up in that world, that lessens significantly.
Even if you accept that only some models of Vive and Index really work...
> They fully support Linux
No power management for base stations, the Index camera doesn't work, asynchronous reprojection causes issues, no automatic audio switching, and a host of other little issues.
The contention was that the gamers who care about privacy and ads have moved on from Windows, I am saying this is not true. Even if you care about privacy and ads you might care more about actually being able to play certain games.
The vast majority of Windows games work perfectly fine on Linux nowadays. The only major exception is anti-cheat, but even that is starting to change. Even 343 is working to bring the Halo
Master Chief collection to Linux by moving to EAC’s linux offering (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/09/343-working-on-halo-th...)
With the incredible success of the Steam Deck, PC game publishers would be stupid to ignore it.
VR isn’t there yet, but VR isn’t a massive industry anyways. And besides, Valve is the PC VR company. Anyone predicting that VR is never going to work well on Linux is being foolish. As soon as Valve decides to allocate resources to Linux VR, the problem will be solved. And they have every incentive to do so, since they’re clearly all in on Linux gaming.
>>The vast majority of Windows games work perfectly fine on Linux nowadays.
Sorry man, this is false, most games have anti-cheat that simply won't work with linux out of the box, you may get titles a year later (early depending on sales performance) and the ones you get rarely work perfectly out of the box.
The only place the "vast majority" statement may hold is if you count the endless amounts of simplistic/indie games, and do not consider the highly rated, highest selling titles.
The steam deck surely is helping, can't argue against that, as is SteamOS in general, but we are far far away from parity between the operating systems.
Actually I play almost exclusively single player games myself, but even those games typically start with DRM protection that makes Linux difficult at times, Denuvo finally has their native support sorted without significant degradation of performance.
And as for the games you listed I would not say they work great on linux, they require tweaking, adjustments, driver updates, switching to experimental builds, etc..
I am not saying gaming isn't possible on linux, I'm saying it isn't as easy, and the results are not on par out of the box with windows. And the things you have to do getting it working are going to typically be provided by game developer support, but by community members figuring it out, and then that having to trickle out to forums and the like.
ProtonDB would typically agree, you can look at the games you listed and see that many of them require specific adjustments to get decent frame rates, avoiding lag spikes, etc...
Now, given the option of having a gaming partition that runs windows and is only used for gaming, or trying to force the games to work on linux. What do you think the majority of gamers would rather even those who are privacy minded.
I'm hoping in the next 5 years are so that this will change, and that windows looses its grip on this market, but currently I don't see many people switching their platforms over what windows is doing.
> Most games aren't multi-player? I could only wish
I believe so. I couldn't find statistics but going by the new releases on Steam and seeing the pre-existing releases, most games on Steam are single player games.
Like even now, you can check the games released in 2022 and see how many of them are multiplayer.
I think you're misinterpreting. It's not Windows itself that's sinking, it's the customizability of Windows. As people who care about user control switch to other OS's, the demand for custom Windows drops. Even gamers may simply dual-boot or own two setups if they want customization or privacy — you don't need much in terms of an OS to simply start a full-screen video game.
By contrast, XP was very customizable. I used to like BBLean.
This is a list of games (by default sorted by popularity) and their compatibility with Linux. Some games work great, but there are major games like PUBG and Destiny 2 that don't work at all. Some major games like Apex Legends require tweaking to work.
If you're a hardcore gamer, then you need Windows because the games need Windows.
Though this may slowly change over time since Valve put out the Steam Deck which runs Linux.
NVidia and AMD usually design their GPUs together with Microsoft, OpenGL and Vulkan then play catchup with extension spaghetti until some subset of it gets available as standard feature.
DirectX isn't much better with regard to the extension spaghetti. At the very least when you see a OpenGL or Vulkan version you can be assured that w/e that version includes is supported. With DX you can have something claim DX12 support but in reality it only actually supports some variation of DX10 or 11 through the feature level nonsense.
Is this totally true? Vulkan supposedly derives from AMD’s Mantle API. Yes Vulkan and OpenGL have extensions in between major releases, but is that worse?
Yes, coding against extensions means multiple code paths, hardly any different than using multiple APIs when the semantics from multiple vendors don't match 1:1.
In addition to graphics libraries, a lot of anti-cheat is still windows only. Many gamers hate anti-cheat, but by popularity many top games require it.
Microsoft is likely to tie future games in to being Games Pass exclusives, as well as using Microsoft Pluton and TPM chips to use remote attestation in DRM and anti-cheat - so you can't replace your OS or bootloader and still play, etc. (like anti-jailbreak checks on phones).
