Windows 11 is a strong motivator. I suspect like many other people, the only reason I was keeping Windows around was gaming. But thanks to Proton and the Steam Deck, the number of games in my library that wonāt run on Linux is vanishingly small. I deleted my Windows partition a few months ago and havenāt looked back.
Install Linux or buy a Mac, fuck Windows.
Mac?! Darwin no, thatās doing the opposite of liberating yourself and it has less gaming than Linux Iād say.
I donāt think āliberatingā your machine is the reason people are just now getting mad at windows.
- āI canāt choose when to update, anymoreā
- āI canāt uninstall all sorts of things, anymoreā
- āI canāt even use my perfectly fine laptop of 6 years old, anymoreā
Itās all about liberation, Iād say.
Donāt buy a Mac. Thatās more limiting than a Windows. But yeah install linux.
More limited, but also less enshittified than Windows.
If you want a good, well-polished experience for certain creative workloads, or even programming, MacOS is great and their Apple Silicon CPUs are excellent.
If you want to do ANY gaming besides WoW (which surprisingly enough has always had great MacOS support) or you canāt stand the lack of configurability, Linux is immediately the superior choice by far.
The whole business model of Apple is to force a hardware upgrade cycle on you and force all your devices to be in that same ecosystem.
I mean, I can see the advantages of it on the short term, but on the longer term having stuff that keeps on working even as always even in older hardware (or you just install new hardware under it and it just recognizes it and keeps on working) is a massive benefit versus a $1500+ bill every two five years and having to migrate your stuff.
I would like to add that if you want to do any real customization of your setup donāt get mac either.
Even though I do hate Apple as a company, they do make great products, they just charge out the ass for them
the number of games in my library that wonāt run on Linux is vanishingly small
at this point, itās pretty much only about Roblox.
ā¦which I donāt want to play, Iām not happy about my nephews playing, but that seems like the only big one which really continues to struggle on Windows.
edit: thatās from my limited POV, as someone who loves gaming but i donāt follow or try out big new titles, Iām pretty much happy with my 30 favs, trying out like 5 new games a year, usually older or indie titles.
Roblox is about the only reason why I canāt switch my kidās computer to Linux, they play almost exclusively that and Minecraft. Once win10 goes EOL, Iāll probably start budgeting to replace my laptop with a new PC and give them the laptop. The old PC will then get Linux and handle 3d printer stuffs
I might be out of date but for a long time my 2 nephews (10 and 13, cousins to each other) have been playing Blox Fruits, which I understand is pretty much a standard āgrindā MMORPG. (Which I donāt necessarily find that bad; having to put a lot of work in a character and seeing it grow slowly and steadily can be a lesson.) I like how they are having fun trying to coordinate and take out a boss together (sometimes dying all the time), but I suppose other games can give that, perhaps even better-looking ones and certainly ones made by less shady companies. (Oh, and actually working on Linux/steam deck)
So I was wondering if there are other games that I could introduce them to, if only to remind them that world outside Roblox exists. I never played any MMORPGās (or pretty much anything multi-player, except Minecraft/Terraria/etc. with the kids) so Iām out of the picture. Iāve only tried few in my life and never stuck for long.
Albion Online seemed child-like enough, albeit a little boring for my taste. One I really enjoyed recently is Path of Exile (and I it looks more than good enough to be hard to resist for a kid), but who knows ā is that safe for 10 to 13 year oldsā¦?
Gaming works pretty damn well as far as Iām concerned, the few that I canāt get to work are irrelevant.
Iām keeping Windows around for workā¦ fuck Autodesk and fuck Dassault. So I am trying to get a VM with GPU pass through to work (had it working once but then I screwed it up and now I canāt seem to get it working again).
Having done the transition some months ago, there is still some stupid shit one has to deal with (especially, but not only, for games NOT from Steam) at times, more than in Windows, but itās all so much better than it was before and by now quite close to the Gaming experience in Windows.
Then on top of that there are all the the longer term peace of mind things versus Windows: upgrading your Linux costs zero, changing your hardware wonāt invalidate your Linux āOEM Licenseā (plus it will probably just boot up as normal with if you just move your SSD to a whole new machine rather than throw you into driver nightmare), games that work in todayās Linux will keep on working in tomorrowās and so on - this is actually massive advantage of Linux versus Windows which is seldom talked about: more often than not, hardware migration with Linux is to just move your SSD to a whole new machine, with all the stuff just the way you like it and all you files, and it just boots with and keeps on working.
(PS: Especially relevant for gamers who have to upgrade due to the increasing demands on hardware from the gaming side of things even though the hardware is fine for everything else they do in that machine, and who would rather that all those other things theyāve installed and kept on using rather than uninstall after āfinishing the gameā, just carry on configured just the way they like it and working just the way theyāve always did, even when they do upgrade the hardware because of games. People who are fine with hardware dedicated to gaming and with replacing the whole thing - hardware and software - for newer games, just get XBoxes or similar consoles, not PCs)
Linux not only saves you from enshittification, keeps control in your hands and preserves your privacy, itās also a reliable and functional long term OS layer for your hardware that doesnāt force hardware upgrades on you.
I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.
Iām Linux user since 2008 and as much as I want to agree with you, I canāt. Even if Mac is much closer to Linux with its BSD roots, I probably would choose Windows over Mac. Why? Because Windows is much more open and less restrictive than OS X. And there is the support and compatibility of Steam games (and games in general) in Windows. The hardware repair ability is terrible on Apple too.
Yes, Microsoft is bad, Windows is bad; so is Apple and OS X. I personally canāt live with the restrictions Apple has.
Literally the only reason I keep Windows around is because modding Skyrim (using MO2, not Vortex) is a nightmare. I use Wabbajack as well, so the idea of installing 500+ mods manually in Vortex doesnāt sound ideal, also since Vortexās conflict management is an absolute nightmare compared to MO2ās.
Same here. If I could get Vortex Mod Manager to work under Wine/Proton, I wouldnāt use Windows at all.
Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex ājust workā for me on my Steam Deck. I didnāt even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.
What games are you using it for? Iāve used Mod Organizer 2 for Skyrim SE and itās worked great on the deck
Really? The last few times Iāve tried (granted it was a year or more ago) I got like 15 FPS on a heavy modlist running on my desktop, which had a GTX 2080 and was running Arch, btw. Trying to get MO2 to launch the Linux version of Skyrim running via Steam/Proton and not the Windows version of Steam running through WINE was a fun mess to deal with. Once all that was handled, then half of the modding programs (xEdit, Nemesis, BodySlide, etcā¦) didnāt work with MO2s virtual FS. It was just way too many layers of abstraction to deal with š¤Æ
