Linux vs. Windows

[CottonTexas]

@Stevo_ , I admit that I had to find out what SSH even was, and the MS Store is kinda' useless to me as far as I can tell.

I was able to swing by a buddy's house and play around with some games on Mint, and the results were a bit mixed. We don't play the exact same games, but the common problems were that too many character spawns would cause huge lagging, and (not that this would affect me much, but) there was absolutely no network support for P+P games - never tried PvP games, but neither of us are into that anyway.

Hats-off to all the Arch-Magicians, but once I get my machine together, I'll try Mickey-Mousing around with Mint, but I'm a bit discouraged after seeing first-hand the performance of Linux gaming - I'm still going to give it a try though, & we'll see how it goes.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

What's wrong with Linux gaming ? Plenty of Linux native games nowadays ans they run juste as fine as on Windows

 

[CottonTexas]

What's wrong with Linux gaming ? Plenty of Linux native games nowadays ans they run juste as fine as on Windows

Since I can't speak from first-hand experience on 99% of this topic, I'll only refer to what I was able to play around with over the past weekend. The Win-native games that I've played with each have their idiosyncrasies, but mostly it was real-time load-lagging that made the unplayable games unplayable. I'm sure that these are non-issues for native Linux games, but I really can't think of a game that I play that isn't a windoze game: Skyrim, Oblivion (actually played very well on Linux), Fallout 4, GTA-V & SanAndreas, Farming & Mechanic Simulators, & The Sims 2 (which is my craptop-friendly game when I just can't play the rest). Would love to add Kingdom Come: Deliverance to the list, but until I finish building my machine, I can't play the games I've got, so...

The real problem is the catch-22: Rust pulled native Linux support in July 2018, because (I believe it was) less than 2% of their player base was running Linux, and it was marked as a waste of time to maintain (as well as Linux users allegedly being abusive towards game devs LINKY). This is undoubtedly what will keep other games from being released natively, and thus fewer people might be willing to switch to Linux because there is not much game support for it. So Linux won't get more games because the OS isn't popular enough, and the OS isn't popular enough because it doesn't get more games.

I'm going to go the Linux rout first, and if I just can't live with the results, I'll go ahead & junk-punch myself buy a copy of Win10 LTSC.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

The real problem is the catch-22: Rust pulled native Linux support in July 2018, because (I believe it was) less than 2% of their player base was running Linux, and it was marked as a waste of time to maintain (as well as Linux users allegedly being abusive towards game devs LINKY).

I know the feeling as it's been the same with Project Cars (promised Linux support never came out) and The Banner Saga (which had Linux support at first and lost it for no reason).

That aside, most of my game library is Linux native, but I don't play AAA games.

 

[Stevo_]

@Stevo_ , I admit that I had to find out what SSH even was, and the MS Store is kinda' useless to me as far as I can tell.

I was able to swing by a buddy's house and play around with some games on Mint, and the results were a bit mixed. We don't play the exact same games, but the common problems were that too many character spawns would cause huge lagging, and (not that this would affect me much, but) there was absolutely no network support for P+P games - never tried PvP games, but neither of us are into that anyway.

Hats-off to all the Arch-Magicians, but once I get my machine together, I'll try Mickey-Mousing around with Mint, but I'm a bit discouraged after seeing first-hand the performance of Linux gaming - I'm still going to give it a try though, & we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, the MS Store was a just in case type install could be possibly be convenient for some productivity apps. It may get deleted at some point, but I'm still setting things up.

The SSH is only an issue if I have to restart a vncserver remotely, which doesn't happen too often, so I'll deal with that when I have to.

I don't do any Linux gaming but did install Steam and tried a couple of games more to test out 2400G support, uninstalled the games though Steam still there.

You might want to look at some of the gaming oriented distros rather than Mint that come setup with all the W(H)ine, Lutris and Steam stuff. With Ubuntu trying to nix 32-bit support some of this stuff might get even worse going forward.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

if you really need ssh on Windows, you can use Cmder (which also adds Git support) or good old putty.

 

[CottonTexas]

...
You might want to look at some of the gaming oriented distros rather than Mint that come setup with all the W(H)ine, Lutris and Steam stuff. With Ubuntu trying to nix 32-bit support some of this stuff might get even worse going forward.

A while back I tried SteamOS, but it was in no way intended to be used as a desktop (which is downright shameful of Steam ). POP!_OS seems to be a popular choice, and modern drivers seem to be no problem there, but Mint is still one (if not the) most popular of distros. I've considered Debian-based Mint, but Steam recommends Ubuntu, and I figure Ub-based Mint would probably be close enough. At some point Ubuntu changed the front-end, and I absolutely hated it, so I switched to Mint way back when, and never regretted it. Manjaro is Arch-based, so ...just no

 

[bledha]

Just my 2 cents for the OP, since almost exactly one year ago I installed Pop alongside my Windows 10 partition and have been seeing just how I approach the system naturally.

At first, I used Pop all the time, I must say - I love the OS, and I love System76 designed systems in general. Still, after a few months, I started just booting to Windows simply because I found myself more comfortable there. I was being lazy. At work I started using a Mac, and so I was forced out my my comfort zone again - since I am OS agnostic, I don't really care what my go to is other than whatever helps me get work done the fastest. This made me reconsider the pretty UI of Pop again, with the functionalities of Linux and Gnome.

After using Mac OS, Windows 10 and also Pop OS for work and play, I can say that Pop is a fine stand in for an everyday OS, and also, that it runs Steam and the games I have tried on it very well! (I run an old i5 and a 1060 6GB).

 

[Stevo_]

Manjaro is Arch-based, so ...just no

I really wanted to like Manjaro but worst thing to me the full rolling release meant 500mb to over 1gb download if I didn't fire it up everyday, got old real quick.

 

[CC Ricers]

Haha well I'm a Manjaro user and I enjoy it. It's the first major distro that I stuck to. Despite being Arch based I found it a breeze to maintain. When it came to upgrading my computer past Intel Skylake, Windows 7 got too finicky and didn't spend much time to deal with the process of upgrading to Win10 so I gave Linux another whirl.

First of all tiled window managers are something I never knew I needed but it makes my workflow so good. And Linux gaming is miles ahead than it was even 5 years ago. Better compatibility layers and product support thanks to Lutris, Proton and DXVK. The most unstable game I regularly play is Overwatch- it still locks up the computer on occasion but that's the only game that's really given me problems on Linux. While you can touch anything on Linux and break it, you can figure out exactly how it broke since nothing's a black box on this OS.

 

[CottonTexas]

@bledha, Thanks for the input. Honest feedback from real-world use is invaluable.

I really wanted to like Manjaro but worst thing to me the full rolling release meant 500mb to over 1gb download if I didn't fire it up everyday, got old real quick.

I remember reading about the bleeding-edge updates of Manjaro, and since I'm building a system for off-grid use, this translates to a lot of data transferred from the ether via cellular service which is less than ideal. I know that Manjaro was switching places with Mint for a long time as the most popular distro, but to be 100% honest, I read "Arch-based" and ran away because I'm too afraid of accidentally turning my PC into a frog.

BTW, my win-tin machine did it again - Ya know, that thing where you tell it not to update, and set all the settings to "limited band-width", but it updates anyway. Not even joking, THIS JUST HAPPENED. ?

@CC Ricers, Do you by any chance play any of the games I mentioned in post #23? One of the things I noticed is that a couple of windoze games defaulted to the highest graphical settings, and couldn't have their resolution reduced even through terminal magic - which I thought was totally weird since Linux usually lets you adjust anything & everything - even if it breaks stuff.

This seems to be turning into more of a "what distro" thread, but I'm okay with it if the mods are, and if I need to start a new thread, that's cool too.

 

[confusis]

I only use TempleOS.


ignore the trolling

 

[CottonTexas]

The way I heard it, all the hard-core gamers run TempleOS.

 

[CottonTexas]

So, the latest update came this morning when a client called, & asked me to look at Document-PU36_Space_Modulator in my e-mail, so I booted up & guess what... Windows was installing updates. After I told the caller that Bill Gates had something more urgent for me, and I'd have to get back to them, I checked everything over, and I was wondering if I've missed something that will keep this from happening again, or am I just stuck having to deal with this (P)OS doing whatever it likes?

I did notice that the "Set as metered connection" toggle had been turned off, though not by me. I'm not sure if that's from this most recent update, or the one on 14JAN, as I failed to double-check last time, but either way, this doesn't seem to be working.

Updates paused for as long as possible.

Everything toggled off, and a promise from Windoze that I'll have to deal with this again in 35 days. I'm not sure what I'm missing, but if anyone can tell me how to keep updates from being a thing in my life (preferably for years), then please let me know, because at this point I'm willing to try almost anything.
*END RANT* Cotton

 

[Questl]

sudo ufw enable get that firewall up and reboot).

and with a flash, I began downloading "that firewall up and reboot"
signs I have spent too much time in console

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

The way I heard it, all the hard-core gamers run TempleOS.

Real men wear this....

 

[XcPNehVYlE4A3C]

Theres a few guides and scripts online for how to remove or stop windows spying and updating components. Make a bootable clone of your OS disk first if you're scared of messing up.

You should also run a router-level block list or pi-hole with all the windows spying and updating ip's, that way YOU can decide when you want to update.

Whatever you do, do NOT send them 300$ as a reward for their terrible behaviour.

 

[CottonTexas]

...

Whatever you do, do NOT send them 300$ as a reward for their terrible behaviour.

This sounds like solid advice here. Good point man.

 

[CottonTexas]

Fixed it!

Yeah, when my internet bill came in, and after I picked myself up off the floor, I knew I had to do something, and a $300 OS isn't it. Going to be using Mint for now on the ole' craptop computer. The Sims 2 should run on a potato, so that'll be my first real test is getting that to run on the new OS. Will be keeping an eye on internet traffic, and will note any remarkable changes in bandwidth consumption. Cheers, Cotton

 

[Stevo_]

Goto https://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ and download for both platforms. You can add MS Ops to your hosts file. A great way to block anything without software, it redirects the list IPs to your local 127.0.0.1 address