I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don’t care anymore. I’m more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn’t be happier.
I too was dual booting for a while but the last straw was when a windows update erased GRUB a second time. I’ve been on Linux exclusively for 4 years now and I haven’t looked back.
Yeah, definitely the downfall that spans way back to IBM. Thankfully my place gives that choice to folks (Apple and Microsoft both being proprietary but hey one is Unix based).
Every time I have to use a Windows VM for something, I become more and more grateful that I don’t have to use their crap anymore. What got me recently was finding out that you are forced to create an account and be online to even install the latest version!
Technically there are still workarounds like disconnecting from the network or editing the installation sources, but it's still anti-user and worse than in older versions. Win will continue to get worse over time. Look at a freshly installed, default W11 Home consumer desktop for example. What most people probably use. Just open the start menu. It looks like the OS needs an exorcism first, before you can use it. But maybe many people have already become used to things being this bad
Disconnecting the internet no longer works, you’ll need to open a shell and put in a cryptic command to disable the check or use an email address which got banned
Well, you COULD, but very few companies port now due to Apple refusing to update their OpenGL drivers in favor of Metal. Nowadays it’s a bit better, with MoltenVK providing Vulkan support, but you’re still mostly limited to Apple Arcade games and emulators for your gaming needs
MacOS still has horrible support for wine. Linux’s implementation of proton has become so good, that r/wine_gaming essentially has become nothing but MacOS helpdesk tickets now!
I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS
Apple’s GPU cores suck. As much as you can genuinely praise their CPU work (which you can somewhat easily upscale with more cores and more cache), even the most high-end ARM Mac has a GPU that’s just an iPhone GPU with more cores but without any actual high-end features such as raytracing (more of the same limited cores can’t just magically become a raytracing engine). Even Steam Deck’s GPU is capable of raytracing because it’s not an upscaled phone GPU but a downscaled high-end GPU.
I switched to Windows for gaming this year. With advances in Wine/Proton it was super easy; there’s nothing I play that isn’t perfectly convertible to Linux anymore.
Even using an Nvidia card in my desktop seems fine.
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that’s my go to one!
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that’s my go to one!
May I introduce you to crap like Alien Isolation where the porting companies went all-in on Nvidia-exclusive features and the version with higher compatibility is indeed the Windows release.
Steam deck and my desktop. The only thing that would be useful is if I could find a program that would work with excel macros for union business. I basically have always used computers for gaming and browsing.
I’ll read up on it myself, but can virtual box run a windows instance from inside my Linux partition? I’ve never done any virtualization but that would be about the only thing from windows that would be useful. Just so I could use our excel doc to do billhead.
You can run windows in a vm in linux yes, with the caveat specifically for gamers that games with overzealous anti cheat can detect that they are running in a VM.
No need for windows to game anymore, steam/proton, lutrus and wine handle what I need just fine these days. This is more about using Microsoft excel as I have some union business that operates out of an excel file and Google sheets and libreoffice do not play nice with all the macros going on in it. Literally just to run excel.
I joke it runs faster than on bare metal but because you don't use it for everything and can in fact have a fresh install for each program it probably does.
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts. That’s a great question though and one I should explore. When I actually spring for excel/365 I can check out the web version while on Linux and if it doesn’t work, look into setting up a virtualized Windows setup.
Btw, the web versions of MS Office are completely free when opening files on a personal, unpaid OneDrive via the web interface at onedrive.live.com
The web versions are literally the thing that Teams launches when you share and open documents there. Teams and the US’s obsession with Chromebooks at school are probably the driving factors behind improving Office Web. Benefit for non-ChromeOS Linux users is surely just coincidental (kinda like Adobe Express).
One warning, if you use a display over HDMI, then you might have a bad time with Radeon on Linux. I use an LG C2 TV as my monitor, and there is a bug in the driver that forces it to a crappy ycbcr mode that ruins text clarity. I did try all manner of workarounds like hacking up the EDID profile, but I gave up and went back to Windows for now.
It’s a very specific issue, but a showstopper if it affects you
That’s the display advertising a specific function set, not the card, and it has to do with the large panel size and pixel density. If you used a proper monitor I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have that issue.
Ok, then why does the same display work perfectly in windows? The display supports full RGB both 8 and 10 bit uncompressed. There is an open issue for this on the driver gitlab repo.
Don’t monitor shame me please. Also, the pixel density is within 5% of my 27" 1440p monitors.
I got real hyped when the trailer came out, then I managed to mostly forget about it. Now I’m trying desperately to go back to the amnesia stage because I won’t have a chance to play until next week. But at least if the download servers get swamped early on, I won’t notice… 🤷
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