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The only thing holding me back from diving headlong into Linux is gaming support. I've been a windows user since W98. XP was the shit, 7 was rock solid, ten was pretty good, but it seems like Microsoft is dead set on speedrunning enshittification with 11.
Gaming support on Linux is the best it has ever been. Other than select games, nearly everything works now. It's mostly competitive multiplayer games that don't work because it's the kernel anticheat that is the issue. Notably, Call of Duty and Destiny 2 don't work. Halo does 100% work now, which is awesome. But if you mostly play single player games, you are probably totally fine.
True. Gaming is extremely awesome on Linux compared to a few years ago right now, though. Anti-cheat holding you back?
Everything on steam works except modern anti chat games.
If i knew it was this good... Woulda jumped sooner
Er, what's a modern anti chat game
It's a typo, should be anti cheat.
You can chat away to your heart's content.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for example runs Ricochet Anti-Cheat on kernel level which fundamentally contradicts Linux architecture and will never run.
Easy Anti-Cheat is an example where the devs gave in paving the way to a proton addon which allows you to play Apex, for example.
A game where using the in-build chat is a bannable offense.
A modern game with anti cheat software.
No, I'm not big for online gaming, just heard that not all games that work on PC work on Linux, and I'm not sure about the status of various emulators that I use.
Check out Protondb, it's not only for the steamdeck, but (probably) all Linux derivates. You can sync your steam library to see, what works and how well.
Most people will include their distro in the comment details, but it rarely matters because Steam ships pretty much all the dependencies games need, so whether you're on Debian (old packages) or Arch (new packages), the games will be running the same versions of common libraries.
So your distro choice really doesn't matter that much, and if it does, you can use the FlatPak, which includes even more dependencies and is common across distros.
I'm running Windows 10 and Linux Mint on my PC. I booted into Mint earlier this week, and out of my 189 (mostly older) Steam games, 186 work with no tweaks. It's definitely worth looking at :)
I've got a Steam Deck which is essentially a portable Linux machine, and I've been positively surprised by how well every game I throw at it has worked (even the ones that aren't officially verified to work on the Deck). Of course it's an underpowered system compared to desktops, but Proton - the not-emulation system based on Wine - is absolutely terrific, and it can be used on other Linux OSs than just SteamOS. I'd recommend giving Linux a go on a separate partition, you might find that your games run pretty much out of the box as long as you have Proton installed
I regularly watch stuff about Steam Deck on YouTube and they're always emulating just about everything. I don't know anything about the subject but it seems to me it works pretty well on Linux.
https://www.emudeck.com/
Emulation is in a great place on the Deck!
The only games that don't work with a Linux solution are games that the developers have purposely done something that makes it not work.
Check out https://www.protondb.com/ Some games might require a little tinkering. The Vulkan api will win the graphics war because Microsoft hasn't done much with DirectX and DX12 is not doing very well supporting the features it claims it can while being difficult to program. It's only a matter of time before Windows loses it's hold on the desktop. And Microsoft doesn't seem to really care. They make their API for Azure work with Linux.
VR gaming is also shit on Linux. Mostly because it (similarly to Linux gaming in general) adds a layer of complexity and oddness you sometimes need to fix or debug... When you layer these kind of things the issues and complexity tend to multiply.
linux gaming is growing stronger as well
I highly recommend you try Linux gaming, it's still not perfect, but has massively improved in the last few years.
They need to make sure users will have a good reason to upgrade to Windows 12.
They don't need any reasons at all anymore. Microsoft won the PC wars a long time ago and has been able to coast ever since. People will upgrade because Windows is the only thing supporting whatever apps they use in the workplace, because Macs are too expensive, and because Microsoft (for all its flaws) still cares about backwards compatibility.
Just because a new Windows version is available doesn't mean that Windows users will upgrade. My work computer is Windows, but I have still not touched Windows 11 at all to this day. But if the latest Windows is far better than the other available versions, then users and enterprises will likely want to upgrade.
Enterprises will have to upgrade once security support for 10 is dropped. Microsoft can even charge them extra to extend that maintenance window if they wanna squeeze more life out of the OS but it's so crazy expensive that Microsoft clearly has the upper hand here.
Through their OEM deals, you'll have a hard time finding a new computer with anything other than 11, and software developers can only support so many versions of Windows so they'll have to drop older releases to be sure they can keep up with all those new computers people are forced to buy.
No one wanted to upgrade to 10 either, yet here we are. Microsoft knows exactly what they're doing and have no qualms about how insidious it all is.
So true. Just a reminder that alternatives exist the next time someone tries to recommend a Thinkpad or Dell:
You should try it. Keep in mind that Valve has never sold a Steam Deck running Windows, and it's a hit. A lot of folks never even realize that they're gaming on Linux. It's that transparent.
I looked into it a bit, found a version of Fedora called Nobara. I bought a second m.2 drive and installed it. I almost never boot Win 10 anymore. The only gaming issue I have is anti-cheat not supporting it, come on Marauders, you look cool and I want to play. Also, some modding in things like TESV is a journey. Honestly though, simply using my rig feels better, faster, leaner. Gaming is great, Nobara has a setup wizard for my nVidia card as well as my XBox controller. It really isn't hard to switch, I just thought it would be before I tried.
There's bugs and glitches I've had to troubleshoot, but whenever I find myself annoyed, I just think about how many glitches and issues I had with Windows. Nothing is perfect, but Linux gaming is pretty good.