I treat the windows one as a console essentially, not even logged into my password manager or email or anything. It is only for games. Basically an Xbox, with all sorts of normal annoying UX, but it doesn’t matter for all of the ~2 minutes until I can launch a game
Separate linux drive for everything else.
I'll probably pick up a PC at some point, but this has been completely fine.
Hopefully I'll be gone by this point. This is not a world I want to live in. Feels like Bladerunner 2049.
But, I think leased compute has always made the most sense for sporadic users like myself.
It's not perfect, but I anyway had the computer for other reasons and may need it for the other reasons again after which I would need to re-setup anything. Bazite default/w. SteamOS UI install + a minor number of setting changes (1) and a login to steam and it's ready to go again. Can't complain. Just which the SteamOS UI version would also do the same background download+apply of updates the main versions or distros like Fedora Silverblue do.
While not quite yet console experience, for many games it really is not "that" far away. (For some other games very much very far away, don't expect any competitive PvP games or games with real world money related online economy working. To some degree it's not even about anti-cheat not working on Linux. It's about many such games struggling making it work on Windows and having no room to bother with another platform, and dishonest managers potentially using "all Linux fault" as an excuse when the anti-cheating strategy failed on Windows where most of their players where... (happened before))
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(1): Mainly SteamOS UI is made for Handhelds and as such has some bad defaults for more powerful desktops (which likely will change soon). I'm only couch gaming on it, hence close to everything else just stays with default settings. Sure it's not fancy customized Linux or most maximal privacy preserving Linux. But it's in the "good enough" area of settings, privacy and similar, which Windows in many aspects isn't anymore. No fighting windows forcing things down your throat, weather it's Copilot, the nasty way it tries to deceive you into using it's online drive, etc.
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Oh and as minor tip: You can majorly micro optimize kernels, schedulers, drivers etc. If you don't need to, then don't bother. That is where unexpected perf. regressions, issues after updates etc. come in. Like you still find reports about Bazzite being slower then windows due to them having don that in the past and having run into an unexpected perf. regression on some hardware without realizing. I mean it is fun to tinker. But I'm in the "please mostly just work" age by now.
However, the use case under discussion touches on things like handling kernel-level anti-cheat requirements, which is exactly the kind of place where I'd expect you to get in trouble trying to jigger around with virtual machines. Even before that point, I get the general feeling games and game platforms can get tetchy when you're not on Real Recognizable Hardware.
That’s what I’m personally banking on. I think anyone with the resources to bypass these would first just use a rubber hose.
As for Secure Boot, maybe? I haven't thought through how that would help in this context, but my instinct is to ask how you'd do the binding between “I intend to boot Y instead of X” and “only accept the boot signature for Y instead of X”, so that malware can't try to unexpectedly substitute X. It feels like there's probably places for attackers to mess around here unless you're very careful.
You don't need any major resources to exploit systems these days in this manner, especially with AI in the mix.
BIOS is usually a SPI chip. It'd make sense to perhaps tie the write enable line so that it cannot be written to, unless jumpered.
It used to be a thing motherboards did. A BIOS flash enable jumper.
They kept the CMOS reset one, but for some reason got rid of the flash write enable.
If by "DOS" you're specifically referring to shell (COMMAND.COM), then yes, it didn't know or care about the mouse. But MS introduced DOSSHELL (in '88), which had mouse support (along with other later core applications such as EDIT.COM), and of course, there were other thirdparty shells too (like Norton Commander) which also had mouse support.
But if by "DOS" you're specifically referring to the kernel (MSDOS.SYS), then you may be surprised to know that even the Windows kernel (NTOSKRNL.EXE) doesn't know or care about the mouse - this is handled by other bits like mouclass.sys and win32k.sys.
Be the change the market needs to see to adjust development practices.
Valve is doing their part. I get playing on Windows when there are mods, but if you can play a new game vanilla at launch on Linux - do it. It shows demand.
Been dual booting for >20 years now. It's nice that some games work on Linux pretty well these days, and of course I had fun messing with Wine manually to get some stuff to work decades ago. But it really doesn't bother me too much to reboot when switching between gaming and literally anything else.
Apparently you can get a mobo with switchable BIOS config (or was it just a switchable SSD?) so the OS didn't even know that there's a second OS around. If there's no connection of the other OS then MS can't break it [as easily]!
IMO it must be malicious, because otherwise it would be caught with remedial testing. I can't believe MS don't include dual boot setups in their testing.
The functionality is present on my new Lenovo laptop, various generations of HP elite/pro books/desks, old asus mobo and newer cheap gigabyte mobo, 7th gen intel nuc.
This description doesn't really do it justice. ~75% of top 100 games work well out of the box/with minimal tinkering according to https://www.protondb.com/dashboard (it varies a bit based on the rating scale)
Many work perfectly and many work even better than they do on Windows. Valve's work really changed the game over the past few years.
oh man, do I have some really bad news for you:
Having to enable TPM or device integrity or whatever it is on my own computer just to run my own games is just too much power to hand to some garbage corporation that shits on its users. Rubbed me so far the wrong that way that I gave it up. The fact that Win 11 is no longer just an easy and hands-off solution that "just works" but is bloated with dark patterns and "AI" bullshit certainly helped cement the decision.
All I ask is that things I uninstall stay uninstalled -- I got rid of OneDrive and Teams for a reason, stop adding that shit back! -- and that it doesn't shove Edge and Bing down my throat and decide that MS knows better than I do about what I want.
To say nothing of the truly excellent battery life Macs these days get.
That's the only reason to avoid Linux on a laptop these days, IMO.
Pop_os! with the system76 power daemon makes a world of difference on my tiny AMD powered Lenovo ideapad.
But it's so good to see the Windows side catching up to Macs now. So tempted to try out Omarchy on the XPS.
If people had set their family members up with Firefox and Ublock Origin, then the Manifest v2 deprecation wouldn’t have resulted in seniors getting hit with certain scams. Specifically over the period between deprecation and the next visit from tech savvy family members.
Unforgivable btw
Edit - Linux bit’s important too b/c of MS nagscreens that could try to upsell
The only thing I would make sure to do is to have a separate home partition / volume so if you had to blow the underlying OS away after a botched upgrade, it's easily doable.
For the life of me I don't understand why having a separate area for your personal files isn't the default on every OS. Just pick a reasonable size for the OS part (20-30G?) and give the rest to /home
You are right about the Ubuntu upgrades though. Over these years I'd just randomly press update to get out of EoL'd versions when I was around. I think I just went over 4 major versions in a few hours. It just downloaded, installed and restarted without any problems. One outlier was an issue with nvidia driver packages after update, for which I had to consult google.
But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.
I do have a Windows Server 2025 and Win11 VM running for a couple testing issues, but that's about it. That said, there seems to be a few integration issues on Wayland where the RDP client or the VM UI both will not intercept hotkeys like alt-tab, which makes it kind of painful to use the VM effectively.
Even with the rough edges in Cosmic, I'll still take it over the jank they keep addding to Windows.
Why don't you play games that actually work online, instead of giving it up altogether?
Diablo 2/3/4/D2R/PD2, Path of Exile 1/2, Last Epoch, Fall Guys, Age of Empires, Forza, MS Flight Simulator, Quake 3/4/Champions, The Finals, CS2, TF2, Halo Infinite... there's a bunch more I'm missing, but you can certainly game online on Linux.
Desktop rig runs Bazzite and I’ve a Steam Deck. They play most everything in my Steam library with Proton (ymmv, of course). One of the last ones that didn’t work was Assetto Corsa - some kind soul here on hn helped me get it working recently.
I used to dual-boot Win 10 with Bazzite (separate drives), but finally ditched Windows 6 months ago. It can be done; a lot’s changed in the past couple of years.
Other than that, yeah, it's a royal pain in the ass. It's treating the user primarily as an upsell funnel.
I have a spare laptop with Pop OS on it now and I'm really enjoying it. Kind of forget I'm on it sometimes. I'm considering putting it as my OS for my main powerful laptop that I play most of my games on.
I am only reminded when very occasionally someone is around and they see my system running, they ask "What is that?", but most of the time nobody notices or cares.
I installed the Professional edition, disabled a few settings that I don't like the first time I installed it, and haven't had any issue or friction since then.
Meanwhile I'm constantly frustrated at MacOS and obviously you can't do anything on Linux without running into some sort of trouble.
Now, if I search on win11 to start a program (which is what they want you to do), why does auto complete call out to the Internet? Users had had browsers for over two decades, who has asked Microsoft to mix local search, application startup and web search?
As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career. I guess different personalities here, as well.
This is how I launch most of my programs and it has literally never been an issue for me, it always does exactly what I expect, which is to launch the program I have installed locally.
I don't give a fuck if it makes an HTTP call or performs an incantation to the god of search in the background, as long as it just gives me my locally installed software instantly, which it does.
> As it turns out, I really hated on-call my whole career.
Read my bio.
The idea that you could accidentally open a webpage instead of launching a program is a UX embarrassment.
I ended up having to go to Run and type the .msc of device manager - obviously spelled with a shortened version that had to be googled as somehow THAT didn't auto-complete.
Windows 11 needs to be exposed for what it is, a spyware operating system. I had booted into it just to test whether a hardware device was at fault or a USB cable was, then dual-booted back into Linux.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t make it more available. Just let people pay for it. I do not understand why they don’t.
Because Windows LTSC is not sold to home users.
In my opinion, an operating system that sucks the battery out of your laptop is not good enough.
Just one exemple but I think it's pretty straightforward.
Whether hardware decoding works in browsers on Linux depends on the Linux distro, the browser, the hardware, and how the browser is packaged and configured.
It may be disabled by default. X11 backends may in some cases have broader decode support than Wayland backends or vice versa. And at least one popular distro, Fedora, packages video decoding libraries with patent-encumbered codecs disabled, which need to be replaced with libraries from a third-party repo for hardware decoding to work except in the case of applications installed via packaging mechanisms that vendor dependencies like Flatpak.
A 4gb patch probably (let's you use 4gb instead of 2gb for x86 executables).
most times it this tooling which causes issues not the mod itself
For very popular games it's not rare if moddingkit/tooling producer (or contributes) made the tooling work on Linux, but it can be very hit or miss.
but it increasingly more "just works", kinda, somewhat
Honestly, I don't trust game producers enough to grant then kernel access. Do you? Really?