Should just use Linux, tbh.
None of you read the article. His complaint pertains to the Start Menu, which I agree is atrocious. Mine never indexes Steam. If you wanted to compare this to alternatives you’d have to look at Mac’s Spotlight, or the Linux tools dmenu or rofi. Dmenu and rofi kick the shit out of Window’s Start Menu for my use cases. I want you to find my applications, that’s it. The Start Menu consistently jumbles settings, web searches, and shit I don’t want (why does searching User Accounts not bring up User Accounts to the fucken top?) It is comically bad, but its not talking about fucken gaming performance.
Pretty much everything related to the
explorer.exeprocess is needlessly slow on Windows 11. On my work machine, the file explorer will take 2-3 seconds to load after I open it, and that’s with only a C:/ drive (i.e. no network shares to slow it down or anything else).Start menu was separated from explorer.exe since 8 or 10, it’s called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe nowadays. Taskbar is also a separate process since 11. It also means that they can freeze separately
It also means that they can freeze separately
Pretty good summary of Microsoft’s “innovations” the last decade or so
The worst part is that it worked fine on Windows 7. You could hit start > type the first 3-4 letters > enter and be able to open any program or OS setting in under a second. They somehow fucked it up with 8 and still haven’t fixed it over a decade later.
Base windows 8 still had a very performant search, though a bit worse than 7. 8.1 is where it got truly fucked up.
Seriously, searching for anything on your PC is completely useless.
An FYI for Windows users, check out Everything for searching your harddrive. It is insanely fast. Like, search your entire harddrive in real time as you press the letters fast. Compared to the crap Windows has built in, it feels like magic, until you realize that searching a database at fast speeds has been a solved problem for decades and yet Microsoft still continues to struggle because they want to throw in every possible piece of metadata and contents every time you search when most people just want to type a name in.
+1 for everything: literally saves my sanity
WizFile does a good job at it too. It works differently though; WizFile just looks at your partition table of the selected drive/directory. It’s super fast in all aspects but it’s only a single drive/directory at a time. I think Everything is slow to index everything but is super fast when searching and works across multiple drives/directories
WizFile is made by the same people who make WizTree and is essentially the same program, but instead of visually showing you the disk, it allows you to search.
Thought it was abandoned. It’s not but closed source. Just discovered EverythingToolbar. Btw, i use Launchy / TagsSpaces on Windows.
I went back to windows for a few months after running linux as my daily driver for years. It was a jarring experience just how bad the basic user experience was. Everything seemed like an attempt at shoving some kind of advert-ainment down my throw when I was just looking for a basic program or file.
I don’t understand how an advertising system like this is acceptable for buisnesses? Like if I’m a business and providing work machines to my employees, you sure af aren’t going to be making money off my employees, with the machines and electricity I paid for.
It still seems like the “killer app” keeping everyone one Microsoft is Office, and maybe a handful of other proprietary pieces of software.
Enterprise versions can be customised without any of this bullshit.
Yeah…First thing I do in setting up a new Windows PC is install Everything to get instant indexed search.
KFind works great for me. /shrug
The whole ecosystem sucks power and time close to abusive levels though, so adding this…
Fairly often when I right click on an item I get the spinning blue wheel for 20-40 seconds. Open the shell (installed with git) always 40 seconds spinning wheel. I’m using another soft to get around it.
Yeah I fucking timed it and it is most often 40 (!) seconds. Work PC so I havent installed cryptohacker.exe on it or something. Launch any soft and it crawls from the SSD to main memory.
Just saying many problems stem from the inbuilt unsecurity and hence the crazy checks to “protect you”.
Pfff.
Can’t confirm the waiting time.
My Ryzen 7800X3D and nvidia 3070 based PC is snappy and quick to respond (if I am not running anything intensive in the background.
My (i believe) i5 8600 in my work laptop (HP Elitebook 850 G5) is not as fast but once everything is up is usually quite responsive (1-2 chrome windows with multiple tabs, Teams, Outlook, OneNote, 2 different Remote Tools and some other programs I happen to run).I believe you have a slow af or broken SSD that’s slowing you down. Better check with something like CrystalDisk.
I have same CPU and GPU, with C: on an M.2 (Read 7200 MB/s - Write 5700 MB/s) and 32GB DDR5. When I right-click my desktop/wallpaper, I have the blue spinning wheel for 3 or 4 seconds before the menu opens 😬
980 Pro 500GB about 25-30% filled.
All programs are outsourced to my secondary drive.
All games are outsourced to my tertiary driveI run Wallpaper Engine in the back. Even with my backup software running it doesnt load longer than maybe 1sec at best.
Now compressing a 7zip archive will make the CPU sweat and let my system think for maybe a bit more.I’d reformat if I were you. And perhaps you’d enjoy running ReviOS playbook too 😈
Same here, went through multiple upgrades but even when I had a 3700X and a Vega 64 with 32 GB of RAM and a SN550, it was really snappy.
It isn’t start. It’s Window’s search. It’s been shit forever. I can search for the exact file name and still not get it as a result. In the meantime iOS (or Android) can find it before I’ve typed the entire file name in. It’s embarrassing.
Its start, the article is 100% about the design of the new start menu and how it is now designed to distract you.
Indexer was a pain point of Windows since forever. Although there are so much open source tools around doing it better…
I found out that if you download PowerToys one of the toys is a better start menu that runs 4x faster and without the web crap. I use it more than the actual start menu now.
My favorite part is how virtual desktops and switching between them works perfectly on Windows 10, and even on KDE it works well and smooth, but on Windows 11 somehow they made it slower and glitchy. It was probably better when it didn’t even have an animation when switching.
The spotlight-like search from Windows Power toys is far better, they should just make it the default
fucken
Ah. Short for “fuckeng”, but I think they renamed it Balljang a few decades ago.
I thought that was short for “fucking”, but “en” isn’t how we do that.
The CPU speed and ram size is irrelevant in this case, it’s slow because it needs to load ads and sponsored results from internet first
The way I search on all my Windows devices is:
Install PowerToys.
Install Everything
Install Everything extension for PowerToys Search
Change PowerToys Search to open with Windows key and spacebar
Best search experience I’ve ever had on my Windows machines.
I use Flow Launcher with Everything and love it (both installed via Scoop btw)
My guy!
the way i search on my linux machine currently is using dmenu.
It works, it’s fine, does what i tell it to do. If i don’t feel like typing for it i can add a launch keybind with a one liner to my WM environment. I have one for my terminal for example.
Windows 11 exists for the sole purpose of requiring tpm 2.0 in order to boost new PC sales. 10+ year old hardware worked perfectly fine running win 10 and PC manufacturers were steadily losing sales as there was little or no need for organizations to replace what they had. The decision to make that requirement will result in millions of PCs going in the trash.
Yeah, fuck this planet, let’s fill it the land fills with perfectly usable computers because profits!
-Microsoft, probably
windows 11: doesn’t work without tpm 2.0
(some) linux distro: doesn’t work if tpm 2.0 enabled
You can get windows 11 working on non tpm 2.0 systems. It’s a soft requirement that Microsoft enforces with the stock installer but can be bypasses.
You can, but MS disables automatic updates without telling you. I have TPM but my CPU is one generation too old apparently, so they silently disabled updates on my machine and I didn’t realise I was still on 21H2 until a couple of weeks ago and had to manually update it.
The manual update worked and it didn’t warn me about anything or encounter any issues, but that was a massive pain.
No automatic updates? That sounds like a complete win
My cpu is also to old (5960x) but I get automatic updates. There are/were multiple methods to getting windows 11 to work on invalid hardware, maybe some don’t work with auto updates.
Which distro? Now I’m curious.
This is probably hardware-specific, but I installed void linux on my thinkpad x1 last week, and it can’t shutdown or wake up from sleep until I disabled tpm 2.0 from bios. Very weird. Other distros I tried so far didn’t have this problem.
First time I’ve heard about it. Anything similar with different hardware?
Windows 11 does, just not by default. My HP elitedesk 800 G3 server doesn’t have TPM 2.0 and it’s running 11 fine and without a MS account.
Yea with Rufus you can disable those requirements before installing.
When all the innovations are just ads and telemetry, shit is going to slow down.
Interesting, considering I haven’t noticed… and gaming benchmarks have shown a minimal if any difference in gaming performance between Windows, stripped down Windows, and Linux. You’d have to split hairs to find it.
You notice it on old hardware. On my Latitude e6220 (i3 2nd gen) there is a night and day performance difference between windows 10 and Linux.
As someone with Ivy Bridge hardware that has run Windows 10 and Ubuntu… I haven’t.
My 3570k very much enjoyed the switch but it’s retired now. I can’t imagine how it would have handled win11 based on the before/after of other computers I use.
Having installed Win11 on a PC with a 3570K it ran just fine. I don’t really see a difference in performance between 10 and 11 on desktops. I have an old ThinkPad with an i5 6300U and performance on that isn’t amazing, but I’ve never used 10 on it (bought it from the company I work for last year) so I don’t know if it doesn’t like 11 or that’s just how it is.
Ubuntu is heavy for a Linux distro, because it uses the heaviest DE (GNOME), uses the less optimized Snap packages, and perhaps has other Canonical telemetry or something.
If you want better performance, try something with a lightweight DE. I have a laptop running Lubuntu (essentially Ubuntu with LXQt instead of GNOME), and it’s actually quite responsive, at least for basic system functions.
Because if you run anything on the web with a 10 year old CPU, it’s gonna suck due to the huge web browsers accompanying the bloated websites. Even on a well optimized website, the browser overhead is significant on bad hardware, especially regarding the launch time of the browser.
I prefer and use Lubuntu, before going for Mint XFCE, and now Bazzite (because gaming). However, regardless of DE, because I absolutely pack my systems with RAM, the bottleneck is not the memory, it’s the cpu in cases of old systems.
I use artix Linux with hyprland WM. System uses 384mb of ram on idle.
Edit: Even with extreme debloat you can’t get this performance on windows.
I’m sorry but low RAM usage is not good performance, those are not the same.
Also, I’ve read somewhere that all memory not in use is wasted memory. I find that thought really interesting. If an operating system would be able to always maximize RAM usage by loading every peace of software and information it uses or is about to use without using swap or a pagefile it shoud be more responsive I think.
Yes, you are right. But windows load programs Into ram that I don’t even want to use.
In addition to less ram usage thee is also less CPU usage and faster boot time (with HDD).
linux is caching a lot, if there’s enough RAM. you can see it in the output of the “free” command.
however, nothing stops you from moving all the stuff you frequently use to a ramdisk. it’s just uncomfortable copying it over and refreshing it as updates come in. also you may want to persist some files.
personally i have my shader caches on a ramdisk on some of my boxes. the gains are minimal.
however, nothing stops you from moving all the stuff you frequently use to a ramdisk.
mount /dev/vg-ssd/lv-usr /usrBut do it during install or you have to go behind and remove the eclipsed install stuff after.
And don’t do it on systemd-afflicted systems as lennart’s cancer makes that harder because he couldn’t figure out why a /usr directory was useful and he ditched it. Dunning-kruger says what?
/usr was introduced because the original UNIX machine ran out of storage space and they had to mount a second drive.
I just memeory leak and gain infinite performance /s
Windows and Linux both heavily use RAM caching, that is, using Unused RAM as a massive disk cache to improve performance - a lot of Windows processes that are “running” are really idling in RAM and not doing anything unless called on. In a way, they’re “cached”. Because it is a read cache, it can be dismissed immediately to make room when needed.
Almost every problem with Windows running slow out of the box are one of three things:
1: Not enough RAM (stupid super cheap 4-8GB laptops)
2: Not enough storage (stupid super cheap 32-128GB laptops)
3: Installed on a hard drive (install Windows to an SSD, spinny bois are too slow for 2024)
It is true Windows 11 asks for about 5GB RAM, but what else does? Your web browser. The solution is to not be cheap and have at least 16GB RAM, regardless of your OS. You want to have no more than half your RAM used when you’re using your PC. This gives you enough for programs, the disk cache, and room to grow.
Its an old laptop that only has 4 gigs of ram. I think performance is clearly visible when the fan in windows is spinning like crazy playing a YouTube video.
If you don’t play game,I see no reason to need more than 8GB of RAM. My computer is running very quickly with 8GB, even if I am photo editing on one screen while watching videos on the second, with a few softwares and even a VM opened in the background.
But I don’t use Windows.
I have a tablet with 8GB RAM… it feels constrained even though I’m running Mint Xfce with an idle memory usage of ~550MB. You may have grown used to the performance limitations.
Things open instantly when I click, it can’t get snappier. And I use GNOME, which isn’t the lighter solution.
Just install win95 !
Or 3.1 😅
oof an i3 though. modern winOS doesnt like i3’s
i3 is just a class the generation matters a lot a current gen i3 is very fast.
Those were borderline even when new. I warned people that if you wanted hardware that lasted, i3s aren’t going to cut it.
That’s why it’s considered, you know, old?
How is this relevant? If an OS performs better on old hardware, it’s still an indication that it is more optimized.
If the requirement calls for it, don’t run it on under-specced hardware and expect proper responsiveness.
All of this is still irrelevant. If given the same hardware, one OS performs better than another, then one OS is obviously more optimized…
You’re saying a lot of words but it all just boils down to “throw more hardware at the problem”.
Idk man. I have a brand new laptop my work got me and I notice it. Windows is just plain bad now. It’s like I go to save a file and the file browser window opens and I’m stuck sitting there waiting for minutes. It’s like I’m suddenly 10 again when you’d turn on your pc, go make breakfast, come back and hope your PC finished booting. Does it both on my work laptop running 11 and my PC at home running 10.
Your work laptop may have company spyware on it. That will drag down the performance of the system, especially if it is monitoring absolutely everything.
It doesn’t. I bought it with a company credit card and I don’t let IT touch it. I gotta do a lot of stuff in the field so I don’t have time to call IT every time I need to install a software update update.
The File Explorer behavior is something I’ve been noticing lately. I do have a number of cloud accounts connected for work, 2 One Drive, 1 dropbox, with a shit ton of files and folders (most not sync’d locally) and I wonder if File Explorer is looking through those when it opens.
Probably the cloud syncing then. That’s always something that hurts performance. It would take investigating to find out what exactly is doing it.
Note: I’ve used OneDrive, Dropbox, and Nextcloud, and historically, all these services take up a good chunk of resources… Windows, Mac, Linux, you name it. I’ve tried it on them all.
Absolutely something related to Cloud drives and it trying to load something on slow bandwidth connections.
If my network drive at home is not connected windows becomes a slow behemoth. Connect the drive back and dayum it’s fast.
That is not even remotely normal.
Normal enough I deal with it on 2 separate machines. One new and store bought, unmolested by IT lockdown bs, and the other I built and use really just for gaming. Idk man. I just feel like Windows has gotten worse and worse and I’m thinking of hopping back to Linux now that gaming is more accessible on it thanks to Proton, but I can’t completely get away from windows.
From my experience with the Steam Deck, gaming on Linux is more feasible than ever, but still far worse than on Windows, especially any time a game refuses to work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat, even great device, but the OS is by far its biggest weakness, despite Valve’s efforts to hide it as much from the user as possible and address its issues.
The OS is the biggest strength of the steam deck, and it’s a big part of why it’s by far the best gaming handheld.
That happens for me only if my network drives are not properly connected. Windows will absolutely take you on that until it’s connected or times out.
Your only way out is to crash explorer.exe
Yeah, I’m currently upgrading our fleet of Windows 10 PCs at work to 11. I haven’t noticed a significant difference either. Nor at home on my desktop or laptop. I think this guy might be affected by a driver bug or something.
The only time I’ve ever noticed a substantial difference is when enabling Windows’ Virtualization-based security on hardware without support for things like MBEC/GMET.
It’s the UI he’s complaining about.
I disagree - Linux actually tanks GPU performance if you’re VRAM limited. It’s extremely unfortunate, as many games now have atrocious VRAM usage for no particular reason.
If you’re not limited though, you’re absolutely right, the difference is minimal and generally within margin of error. Some CPU bound games are better on Linux though, in a measurable way, specially if you’re running bleeding edge distros.
EDIT: guys I use and love Linux, but we don’t have to downvote me to pretend it’s perfect, how about a DXVK developer confirming what I said.
A good number of games run better on Linux, I bet it will find it obvious on lower specced machines too. I just saw this video today and on Linux, it shows a 10 fps boost for most of the games demonstrated.
Yeah so pretty hard to generalize based on testing one setup. Ask most people with an Nvidia GPU how they like Linux gaming…
I think as long as it isn’t the newest nvidia gpu, I’ve heard they’re generally alright if you use the proprietary and non-free drivers.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3b50Stm8gu4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It was pretty bad in the beginning. I suppose they have improved it.
You could have read what the article was about, though.
This 16-bit looking shit ad that I didn’t ask for and can’t remove unless I choose yes or no was the last straw for me. Baking Language Model AI (Copilot) is nothing I want, just like I didn’t want Cortana, or Edge. Or the dark pattern requests to consider edge. Nor the new Windows setup screen that sometimes occurs after an update which is just a sly way of shoving another option to make Edge my default browser again.
I’ve moved my laptop to Linux around December. Now I’m going to move my gaming PC over to Linux. I’m just done.
Stop using Chrome while you’re at it
Firefox baby.
I’ve haven’t had chrome installed in years.
using linux is such a breath of fresh air anytime I had to use windows on my work laptop
Oh ffs, Windows heard me
Grossssss every single thing listed is a hard no
Update for those in the future: I wiped Windows (after recording my OEM key) and installed Nobara.
It’s amazing Microsoft has mismanaged their OS so badly that even gaming increasingly makes little sense on the platform. Why spend extra money on hardware just to have your performance stripped away by a bloated Windows?
The choice of what you can do and play.
honest to god if I wasn’t a valorant player or looking forward to 2XKO as a fighting game enjoyer I’d likely have made the switch to linux a long time ago, linux stocks are way up (metaphorically speaking) and windows is just like. Fine? I don’t mind windows 11 but I just feel increasingly like I have less reason to be on it.
it could all begin with a dualboot…
Start menu is kinda useless, I mostly use it for my pinned items.
Try to switch desktops with 2 different hi res wallpapers, peak Windows performance.
Allegedly, the windows kernel scheduler was superior to Linux’s CFS scheduler in certain select metrics.
Except it didn’t matter anyway because all of the UWP apps were so crappily made and Microsoft forgot to hire actual devs for their UI so everything lagged and loaded slow.
Oh and it turns out the windows scheduler also handled multi core pretty poorly so people with new hardware suffered performance losses.
And Linux upgraded to the EEVDF scheduler which AFAIK makes it even better than before.
EEVDF?
Earliest eligible virtual deadline first scheduling
Earliest eligible virtual deadline first (EEVDF) is a dynamic priority proportional share scheduling algorithm for soft real-time systems.
In 2023, Peter Zijlstra proposed replacing the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) in the Linux kernel with an EEVDF process scheduler. The aim was to remove the need for CFS “latency nice” patches. The EEVDF scheduler replaced CFS in version 6.6 of the Linux kernel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_eligible_virtual_deadline_first_scheduling?wprov=sfti1#
Jesus that website needs to die, it’s such a rude and petty way to respond to someone. As if asking what some obscure acronym means on a discussion forum is such an outlandish thing.
Yeah god forbid people have to have conversations with one another to learn thing and maybe get a bit of a friendly opinion
Do you prefer this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=thats+just+like+your+opinion+man
This is what I’ve been saying for years. Windows 11 is a big step backwards for performance.
I have a beefy laptop with W11 and a Ryzen 9 5900HX and 32GB RAM and a high end SSD, but the start menu takes up to a full second to open, the File manager takes 2-3 seconds to open and 1 second to “work on” the directory I entered, task manager takes like 5 seconds now, and sometimes my CPU randomly spikes to 80+ degrees C while the desktop is idle.
On Ubuntu (not known for being lightweight, quite the contrary in the Linux world), there is extremely minimal lag and basic system functions are near instant. I’d use it more if the WiFi was more reliable (my average packet loss is 39% in some frequently visited areas where Windows doesn’t struggle at all)
Also, for work I used a W10 desktop with a i7-8700K CPU and random SSD, and nothing in the OS lagged or was unresponsive. File manager was nearly instant, even when the system was hit with significant load elsewhere.
At work I have your standard corporate Dell laptop running Microsoft 365. I run Linux in a VM to do my work and it’s pretty funny how responsive it is compared with the host OS running on the actual hardware. Funny in a sad way, really.
And this is still on windows 10, not even updated to 11 yet.
Win10 is the same these days.
When it launched it was lauded for having similar system requirements to Win7, and was easier to run than 8/8.1, but it just got more and more bloated over time as MS transitioned from a “sell Windows for a profit” business model to a “sell Windows for a profit and collect as much personal information and show as many ads as we can get away with for profit” business model.
Imagine what Microsoft could be achieving if they actually gave the slightest shit about actually improving their product? Windows could be amazing. But it isn’t.
Windows 10 got a new kernel that was unquestionably better than the previous ones. This meant that even though it was a step backwards in some ways from Windows 7 (and 8 isn’t even worth mention), it was capable of better performance.
I’ve asked a few times if anyone can give any good reasons for switching to 11 from 10 other than “it’s newer” or “ms is sunsetting win10” and have yet to see a compelling response. Virtual desktop support is the best answer so far, but I had that on Windows 20 years ago with litestep (I think that’s what it was called, it was an alternate desktop program).
It seems that Microsoft has just decided that they are going to throw their market dominance and reputation (which for some reason is good in the business and government world) around rather than offer good products.
uhm, i believe win 11 has a better scheduler. It schedules more efficiently. That’s the one argument i’ve heard in favor of win11.
I think that it’s scheduler is better for those Intel bigLittle CPUs
that could be it. I never asked, the person that relayed that says it was significant enough for win11 to run faster than win10 for them. No idea how much i trust them on that one though.
My mother in law’s laptop was getting slower and slower and finally went BSOD with a memory error. She was going to toss it but I suggested trying Ubuntu first because all she did was in a web browser anyway . Installed. Ran fine. For 6 more years.
What are the lightweight Linux distributions?
There are multiple tiers of lightweight.
“Middleweight”: Something like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or anything with KDE or XFCE, or MATE
More lightweight: Lubuntu, anything with LXQt
Super lightweight: AntiX, something with Trinity Desktop Environment or just a window manager instead of a full desktop environment
Most lightweight: Just a command line with no GUI (barebones Arch maybe?)
Compared to windows 11 all of them are
if you really want to hit minimalist in terms of linux environments, WMs are the way to go. They strip all the fluff from a DE and only give you the bare essentials. Everything else is something you bring, which honestly, not as big of a problem as you would think.
I would love to swap to Linux if I could play all my games without having to dual boot etc. Steam have done wonders with the proton compatability on steamdeck so there is hope but a lot of my hardware also requires software that is windows only too.
It might be a stupid comment I’m no Linux expert, but looking forward to the steamOS coming out for PC.
For me I just gave up the games that don’t work on Linux. I didn’t have any windows only software I was bound to tho
So do I, this has resulted in my not careing about pretty much only anti-cheat games, which I already didn’t care about…
Legitimately haven’t encountered anything else that just doesn’t work barring the odd really old game that doesn’t even work on windows anymore anyway
Also went this way, now stick almost exclusively to indie titles and everything is just better
I’ve been running Nobara for about a month now and really like it. It’s a gaming focused distro put together by Glorious Eggroll, and it’s set up to make Linux desktop gaming as easy as possible. A few of my more demanding games drop a few frames, but for the most part things run just as well or better in Linux.
It’s worth a shot.
I’ll check it out, thanks
There’s not much in SteamOS that isn’t available to the rest of the ecosystem.
The biggest thing stopping me from making the switch is that I make music in Ableton and have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on plugins and programs that will only work on windows. Including Ableton itself.
Never looked into this. Do VSTs not work on Linux ? Not withstanding the host ( ableton) of course . What about bitwig ?
Not natively but they do through Reaper For Linux. However, dongles do not. That could still be a big problem.
this is one of the reasons i just sort of inherently refuse to pay for software unless it’s explicitly multi-platform. And even then i still probably wouldn’t
I was Linux gaming for 4 months (broke an update during a busy time and panicked to windows). And the games I was playing were perfectly fine however mods to the games weren’t supported no matter how hard I tried. Devil May Cry was my main problem
the biggest modding problem i had on linux was GTAV .net mods, those i only got working once, and then they proceeded to never work again.
steamOS coming out for PC.
This is unfortunately unlikely. Valve controls the hardware of the Steam Deck, which in all of its variants is functionally the same platform with the same hardware in it, versus the near-inifite number of hardware combinations any random user could have in their PC. This means they can tailor it specifically to work perfectly with the platform it runs on. It won’t work that way on J. Random Gamer’s PC. The hardware support would be a nightmare and require a ridiculous amount of manpower to maintain.
Remember that hardware support is already the major weakness of Linux in all of its guises, and this is true even for massive distributions like Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu with tons of people working on them. Drink every time you’re scrolling one of these threads and someone says something to the effect of, “I would use Linux on desktop if my [ wifi / video card / printer / sleep and suspend / Bluetooth / VR headset / etc. ] would actually work right.”
I’d doubt Valve would be willing to kick that beehive just for the karma points, or whatever. That’s not to say that enterprising hackers have not already figured out how to install SteamOS on devices it’s not meant to run on, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work right with all (or most) of them.
if steamOS 3 is open source it could very well be a situation of community PRs being pushed through to add support to these things. We’ve seen that already with SteamOS on other handhelds, like the rog ally, and friends, though that might be a community fork of it, steam is weird with releases so.
You should try it. I’ve had very little issue, and if anything slightly fewer issues. I don’t need to worry about updating my drivers anymore, for example. They just come with the kernel. Almost every game has worked besides one multiplayer game because of anti-cheat (The Finals), but that’s since been updated and it’s fine.
Games is the only thing keeping me on win 😕
give linux a try! install a recent distro (fedora for exemple, especially if you have a pc with nvidia and optimus) and for exemple : Lutris : it is a breeze to use and play everything I own on gog com and steam so far edit: misspelled lutris
How’s vr support?
I don’t have vr yet, so I don’t know
Me too. Some development companies refuse to support it period or their games are unavailable to stream due to licensing etc., and that is the only reason I dual boot now. I would ditch it in a heartbeat otherwise.
You should check the compatibility of your most important games on Protondb.com. Your other windows software might work on WINE, too.
I have a 7950X, a pile of RAM, and an unfairly expensive RTX 4000-series GPU. The cursor occasionally hitches for ~400ms whenever doing things like opening task manager or resuming from the lock screen, so that checks out unfortunately.
Don’t worry, while you are waiting for Windows to react to your input, you can enjoy watching some ads in the near future! :-)
Very nice, should be a top level post so nobody misses it! :-)
It’s incredible how the startup performance of EventViewer is as bad as it was 15 years ago…
Yeah. When your software is as slow as it was fifteen years ago, on modern hardware, there is no defense.
I’ve never understood that one. I understand even less now that I’ve written a Powershell script for remote troubleshooting at work. It started simple, but now it gathers tons of information, a lot of which is from the logs. On some machines it takes literal seconds to search and pull all of the log information. I could run this script probably 15 times in the time it takes to even launch Event Viewer.
