Windows is now the OS that fucks with me and causes grief, since moving to cachyos the experience has been so bloody blissful it's not funny. I can, amazingly, just come home and launch a game and play the game and not deal with bullshit like taking 30 minutes to install some random update. Nothing randomly breaks. Nothing updates unless I let it. Nothing randomly pops up asking me to do some bullshit I'm not interested in for a result I don't care about. etc.
1. Amd HDMI 2.1 fiasco and adapter workarounds -> debugged the adapter compared to the displayport spec pdf, emailed the company, got a firmware update, patched my kernel. Fixed! This one is going away for good with FRL support upstream soon.
2. Game stops responding to controller input after playing for a bit. Debugged, turns out the service for doing something fancy with shaders has shared fate with the steam input process. It launches a zillion threads and OOMs from virtual memory exhaustion which takes out steam input; fixed by adding a wrapper script for steam that reduces thread stack sizes to the windows default size.
3. Xbox elite series 2 controller back buttons not supported in 2.4ghz wireless mode; reverse engineered the USB packets, contributed support to out of tree xone driver.
4. Flydigi controller software not supported on Linux; find random GitHub project that reversed their hidraw protocol. It's got bugs, so fix them and use it.
5. Terrible banding in Silksong. Set up gamescope to apply dithering; this breaks steam input, figure out all sorts of incantations with LD_PRELOAD
But all of these are very much off the beaten path problems, lots of people have fun with normal controllers, no VRR, etc. My steam deck has been just perfect with zero effort, and I assume that's because I'm not treating the system configuration like a puzzle game.
I occasionally have to right click a game and enable the compatibility in the settings - that's just a single checkbox. Steam handles the management of pulling whatever the most recent version of Proton-GE is for me and everything pretty much works. There's a setting in Steam itself that you can set a default compatibility tool.
The only games that do shaders preload are Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter World/Wilds, and even those are quick and can be canceled if I cared to. Even modding is fairly straightforward using something like r2Modman for Steam games or Prism Launcher for Minecraft.
If that's too hard for some people then I bet they also don't run adblockers, which means I've written them off as actually knowing how to use a computer at the most basic level.
I'm waiting for that to go away before I consider the jump. I figure there'll be enough people sick of that behaviour it'll get sorted.
Windows can be just as bad, I'm quite happy to restrict my games choice a bit to run them on a console that someone else makes work.
My friends and I play Halo Infinite sometimes and I've had some performance issues with it on Linux so I've always booted into my Windows 11 partition to play it. It's about as vanilla Windows 11 install as it gets.
But over the last few months it has been crashing all the time. It started happening very frequently - like once every ~30 min. It was a vanilla install. Basically just the game and graphics drivers. And everything was up to date.
I started playing it on Linux and now it just works. There's still a weird performance problem, but I can live with that because it's at least stable.