this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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i tried using windows for a week when i was without my own laptop and had to borrow the loved one's spare gaming rig. even just living in firefox, i hate windows with the fire of a thousand suns. and this was a relatively well behaved win10.
much like vampirism, daily driving Linux makes exposure to windows feel like turning to ash in the rays of an uncaring but aggressively annoying sun (the sun is also siphoning your data)
My wife uses windows and sometimes I dual boot it to play games with her.
She laughs at how rapidly I transform into a raging boomer but I forgive her for she does not know.
Linux has problems but windows is just fucked up. The moment you want to do anything outside the lines it becomes an utter horror show. no univeral interface (I'm stupid, you can tell by my posts, so I just learn CLI and do everything that way), no nice consistent model like "everything is a file", no scripting language everything respects. It's insane and baffling.
I know Microsoft has brilliant people working for them so windows is inexplicable
Windows is the best desktop OS for accessibility across the board. Consistent UX, broad app support, better tooling. Not true for every use case, but incredibly broad adoption by disabled users for good reason.
(Also the best compromise between usable business desktop, & IT controls. Linux is not a reasonable desktop environment for most workplaces, and macs inexplicably lack enterprise tooling.)
In other words, like every OS, excellent for some use cases, terrible for others.
the least infuriating way I’ve found to use windows is in a gaming VM with a dedicated GPU where if windows decides it needs to update, reboot, or crash my actual work in Linux won’t be impacted
increasingly, running games and apps in straight Proton is a better option in general though. both options give me slightly better performance than raw windows, cause the gaming VM has very good compatibility due to it mimicking reference hardware, and Proton implements the windows API on top of a higher performance kernel with none of the shit parts of windows slowing it down
and all it costs you is your sanity
I just really want to be able to play racing sims in Proton without them breaking. That seems to be one of the last frontiers for me to give up Windows entirely.
if you’d like I can dig up the tutorials I used to set up the gaming VM I use — it’s very durable (under NixOS) with maybe one breakage in the ~3 years I’ve been using it, it uses a dedicated graphics card so performance is excellent, and there’s a number of ways to attach input devices and audio so that latency isn’t an issue
The problem tends to be more that the games I want to play aren't particularly playable under Proton to begin with; Assetto Corsa's listed as Silver under ProtonDB. That and I've got to use third-party drivers for my Logitech wheel to get working force feedback, which I can do, but it's a faff I'd rather do without.
That said, I'll be looking to build a new PC soon when the newly-announced AMD cards come out, so I'll probably look more into getting things working properly then.