Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux
(himthe.dev)1859 points by bobsterlobster 4 days ago
1859 points by bobsterlobster 4 days ago
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
So much this. People like to moan about "oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming". More games run on GNU / Linux than any gaming console. There are simply too many games that do run to give a second thought about the ones that don't, and it's been that way for years.
The giant bugbear in this conversation is always multiplayer. That's because almost all of the big players in that space currently favor rootkits in the form of overly invasive anti-cheat, which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
If you don't play PvP specifically, the rest of the library is significantly more open to you. Personally I have always favored single player experiences and indie games from smaller studios, and for the most part those run great.
It's unfortunate but at the same time if enough people switch to Linux then they'll be forced to change their ways.
So if you can go without those games or don't play MMOs that is rootkits then switch to force their hand.
Besides, them installing a rootkit on your machine is not an acceptable practice anyways. It's a major security issue. Sometimes we need to make a stand. Everyone has a line, where's yours?
> which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
It's more that there's no sensible way they could do it even if they wanted to. Emulating the Windows kernel internals is well beyond the scope of what WINE is trying to do, and even if they did do it, there would be no way for the anticheat vendors to tell the difference between the AC module being sandboxed for compatibility versus sandboxed as a bypass technique. Trying to subvert the AC in any way is just begging to get banned, even if it's for beingn reasons.
As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.
There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?
> ...which the Linux wrappers (mostly the wine project) refuse to support for security reasons.
I mean, several of the major anticheats can be configured to work just fine on Linux. [0] It's up to the game dev whether or not it's permitted. So, yeah, unless the game is one where its dev makes huge blog posts about how "advanced" its anti-cheat is (like Valorant or the very latest CoD/Battlefield games) it's quite likely that multiplayer games will work just fine on Linux.
And if they don't, and the faulty game is a new purchase on Steam, then ask for a refund and tell them that the game doesn't work with your OS. Easy, peasy.
[0] I have 100% solid, personal knowledge that Easy Anti Cheat can work on Linux. On Linux, I play THE FINALS, Elden Ring, and a couple of other EAC-"protected" games without any troubles. I have perhaps-unreliable memories that at least one of the games I play uses Denuvo, which is only sometimes used as anti-cheat but does use many of the same techniques as kernel-mode anticheat.
Vote with your wallet, as the saying goes. If you quit paying money for the privilege of installing a rootkit, maybe they'll stop selling rootkits.
Lot of wallets are voting for AC, sadly. Sometimes the tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
The greatest PvP game, DOTA, works on Linux, and once you get hooked on that you'll never want to play another PvP game.
> oh game XYZ doesn't run so it's not reasonable for gaming
People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
I haven't fully switched over yet because the games the combo of the hardware I have + the games I play regularly, still give me issues vs. Windows. Getting them to run isn't the problem, but I haven't been able to solve miscellaneous crashes, lag, lower frame rates, etc.
My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
> People tend to generalize, but what they probably mean is "it's not reasonable for gaming for the games I play.
This. The corollary is also that people take the such quips way too literally.
I, personally, don't play that many games, and those that I do play tend to run faster on Linux (with an AMD GPU, which I bought specifically to avoid nvidia headaches).
But I still game on Windows. Why? Because I still have a Windows box, "because Linux is not reasonable for photo editing". I actually daily drive Linux, but I can't be assed to move from Lightroom and photoshop, so I still keep a windows pc under my desk. I just play games on it because it's much beefier than my 5 yo ryzen U laptop, and since I don't interact with that box all that much, I didn't feel like partitioning my smallish drive for no tangible benefit. My laptop is more than enough for all my other needs.
Ok, if you want to be stubborn about it then leave Windows on a partition and only start it when you want to play that one game. Problem solved.
In many ways, moving to Linux is like starting to live on your own. Your mommy might be a better cook than you, but is that a good enough reason to keep living in your parents' basement?
Over the last year or so, nVidia support for the 3+ series of hardware has gotten pretty stable.
With that said, I'm probably going to grab and AMD or Intel card once my 3060 becomes too much of a pain to continue using. It's a little ridiculous that the 5060 gives very little reason for my to update my 5 year old video card.
I only update my rig ever 8-10 years. Saves money though I tend to then play the older games, which is OK for me. I've had a 3080 for 3 years and it still feels like a new card.
Again, all these games are available on console (mostly) so the excuse to not support Linux is conscious. Those ARE Linux machines. Essentially. (Yeah yeah, they have their own tool chain and rendering) but if they are using Vulkan, DX12, DX11, and a window - it can run on Linux.
I've gamed since 1979 and have used nVidia on Linux since the early 2000's...without issue.
There have certainly been issues (I've been on Linux with mostly nvidia GPUs since 2004) but it's almost always been caused by the module being outside the kernel, and a kernel update breaking compatibility sometimes, understandably. This has always been fixed quickly on nvidias end though. And early Wayland issues and the current DX12 -> Vulkan translation performance issues in more recent times.
But overall I've also had a mostly stable experience during that time. New hardware is supported mostly at release. Not always supporting all the latest features straight away mind you, but still. Meanwhile I seem to hear about issues with support for Intel and AMD cards at release frequently in comparison.
> My next PC upgrade will probably be getting rid of my Nvidia 1660 super and getting something AMD for less headaches.
Then you'll have AMD headaches. NVidia is the only accelerated graphics card fully supported on Linux.
You only get acceleration in AMD if you use their binary-only drivers and they only support cards for about a year.
I run both operating systems. But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't. This is especially true if you play games with friends.
> But I have to say it either runs the game you want to play or it doesn't
Can you elaborate on this?
For example, it was convoluted getting StarCraft 2 to run. Then it did eventually work, though it felt ever so slightly laggy.
Anno 1800 ran though it occasionally slowed way down, occasionally crashed, and multiplayer never worked.
Hogwart's Legacy ran but crashed, and ran massively slower / lower quality settings than on the same hardware but in Windows.
All of those were not binary "runs / doesn't".
They don't mean all games thru all times, they mean "the latest $70 release" that still can have problem if it is multiplayer DRM/anticheat ridden one.
I haven't booted windows in months but there is definitely some caveats for gamers
On the other hand, those who find contemporary game development trends distasteful might find much to like about the fruits of the Debian Games Team's work on game-data-packager.
https://game-data-packager.debian.net/available.html
The games on that list have native ports that can be integrated into the Debian environment just by installing packages, and the game data packages can be automatically generated from each game's official install media.
Basically all games work, except some multiplayer games with kernel anticheat. You can look up the status of games here:
And specifically the state of multiplayer games with anticheat here (which is a much less favorable % of working games):
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I personally wouldn't install any kernel anticheat on a computer that I intend to use for anything important, so I would personally refuse to install the incompatible games even if I was using windows.
From Steam’s 2025 top X charts (https://store.steampowered.com/charts/bestofyear/2025?tab=3)
11/12 top selling new releases (the exception is battlefield 6, because the anticheat blocks Linux)
9/12 top selling (COD, BF6 and Apex block Linux)
11/12 most played (Apex blocks Linux)
So if you’re into competitive ranked games (especially fps), you might face problems due to anti cheat blocks, but practically everything else works
Most of the games I play would work fine, but it’s the damn anti cheat and multiplayer games that forces Windows down my throat, and I’m not happy about it. I only use my gaming rig for gaming so I have no other requirements, which kind of makes it even worse.
I’m not disagreeing, it’s just how certain very popular games operate nowadays. I would never play them on a computer I used for anything but gaming.
Well I used to game a lot when I was younger.
Initially I hated that Linux was so niche in 2005 or so.
Meanwhile now, I don't have time for games anyway. I still think gaming should be better on Linux, but I don't miss Windows anymore either (though I have it as secondary operating system on another computer; I just don't really care about it, it could die tomorrow and I would not miss it one iota).
Games are more and more consolidating towards services, so it really only takes one game for the lions share of gamers. You can bet GTA V is a big draw away from Linux and that GTA VI will eventually be the same when it hits PC.
As for me, I'm still stuck for professional reasons. I do intend to develop natively on Linux when time comes to make my own game.
The only pain point I've found is VR. I've bounced off trying to get it working multiple times with the best results getting about 10% functional (video working on one or two games, input broken on all).
That said, I haven't tried getting the same kit working on windows so I can't say if it's any better.
I ran into the issue where I didn't know that you can tell Steam to always prefer NATIVE LINUX programs over everything over Proton. This was causing a ton of issues with VR, I havent gone back to try it yet though, havent found the time.
I have owned the index for a few years, running it on ubuntu/mint. It is a pain. But VR is a pain generally. I go months without using the thing. Then when i do use it some bit of software has been updated and i inevitably have to spend an hour getting it to work correctly again. Honestly, VR on linux feels like using windows again.
VR is bad because nobody cares much about it. The hardware is clunky, the market tiny, and costs great. As the hardware improves it will get more attention from the FOSS community and so too will the overall experiance.
Does a game "run on Linux" when it has 100% feature parity? 90%? 80%? What are you willing to cut? Some performance? A few graphical effects? Multiplayer?
When you look at the details, Linux gaming is not as good as it might seem.
But I'm still gaming on Linux!
What you sacrifice in feature parity, you gain in user freedom and principle. To me, that is a worthwhile tradeoff. Especially since it's really not that much different at this point. You're not sacrificing much in most cases now. It's really quite remarkable.
Age of Empires II is very popular but doesn't have multiplayer support on Linux.
You and most of the other people in this thread clearly do not understand what's going on here. I and everyone else you're griping about do not give a shit about Slop Spoogers 7 from 1998 running great on Linux, we care about the games that we play with our friends being playable.
https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount
This is what matters, on Windows every single one of these is Native. Switching to Linux will be painful at best until every single one is at least Gold if not Platinum or Native.
There it is, the classic “just change what you enjoy then!!”. Linux will take off when the community stops trying to force new users to conform to the Linux way of life and instead respect that other people have other needs and wants that are valid, and not a moment before.
While I agree it's unreasonable, it's also kind of a chicken and an egg thing. These things won't change until Linux becomes big enough to ignore. I'm not sure what the solution is though, as I don't think it's realistic to make people give up what they enjoy to get there. That's not gonna happen. But Valve has at least made a dent with the Steamdeck and Proton in general, and maybe more with the upcoming Steam Machine. Devs actively target the Steamdeck nowadays for games where it makes sense, so it is taken into consideration at a whole new level compared to years past.
Not much else to do. You either convert people, convert the companies to support Linux, or convert the government into cracking down on whatever makes it difficult for Linux to be supported. The latter is highly unlikely, and the 2nd only cares if people shift their habits.
So there's only one channel left.
I've been using Fedora+KDE for over a decade, Windows 8 was last version of Windows I had installed at home, and we all know what a squarified mess that was.
Gnome is fine, but it's just not for me.
For everyone on here that complains about Windows requiring an 'online' account, MacOS does as well, but the perception is different. MacOS, just kind of quietly does it, with no ceremony, but Windows does a Ballmer-esque right-in-your-face demand. I couldn't possibly comment on Windows 11 as I've yet to use it, but Win10 felt a lot worse than Windows 7 which was probably the last high water mark for Windows after Windows 2000.
Plasma 6 is really polished and simple. I think anyone familiar with windows would be able to grab and run with it immediately.
No hate for anyone that likes other desktop environments, I as a long time windows user just really appreciate how familiar KDE feels.
The familiarity is great but the thing that really draws me to Plasma over Gnome is that the KDE developers seem to have an attitude of just implementing the features people want even if it's not perfect yet. Gnome is polished, but it's missing so many basic configuration options out of the box.
It's kind of funny because when I first got into linux it was practically the opposite story. Back in the day of KDE 2 or 3 and Gnome 2, KDE was the slow one to bring in features while Gnome felt like the wild wild west.
Now it seems like Gnome has gone down a practically walled garden path which I don't love. Last I tried it, I wanted to launch an app focused and in full screen on startup. The gnome response for that was basically "You're not allowed to do that".
At least on the latest Sequoia, there has been no hard requirement for an online account. They nudge you towards it, but you can decline and continue. As far as I can remember, macOS has never required an online account to set up a Mac.
You might need it for the App Store if anything, but even then... You don't need the app store for installing software. Mac is at its peak currently, though the new glass UI stuff is a little over the top for me. I miss the old simpler UI. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually.
The Mac 100% does not require you to sign in to an Apple Account to use it. You can go about with a local account only just fine and you can easily do it right from the OOBE setup UI — no tricks involved whatsoever.
I only use KDE, though it has weird instability from time to time. They just changed which gcc version I'm on so I am not sure if I've noticed the same instability or not. Overall though KDE is the perfect DE for me.
It isn't. There's no such thing in macOS. Local and iCloud accounts are not necessarily linked, never been.
> if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.
Agree 1000% and recently Steam Community Support pissed me off so I am now looking into GOG (I have my first GOG game now and playing it), Epic and Luna. In fact, the GOG game I got was free through Luna ironically. Even more ironic, the excellent Heroic game launcher lets you mark the game to show up in Steam, then when you start steam run it from there and it uses the config settings from Heroic but you can use screenshots, etc. in Steam.
The gaming landscape on Linux is great, except for those companies that refuse to support anti-cheat.
I run Kubuntu btw (and Ubuntu since 2006).
PS I keep Snap disabled.
While you _can_ use their launcher, you don't _have_ to. Once you buy the game, you can just download the installer and run it to install on your box. If you want you can save the install package somewhere if you think you'll enjoy the game for years to come and don't want to be dependent on GOG.
I also found out that they have quite a few fairly recent games. Maybe not the top-10 big budget (however they partner with RedProject so they do have Cyberpunk) but they have plenty of solid indy games from 2015 - 2020, and some more recent.
That's a good point about downloading it. The game I got was Fallout 3. I'd played Fallout 4, 76 and New Vegas and am finding 3 to be fun too. Probably won't get the older isometric (?) Fallout games, I prefer first person.
This was me in 2005. I cant believe people say that M$ started to suck in 2025. It always did.
Microsoft had realyl good engineers and talent. Microsoft internally has gone to shit. They hire an army of H1B's and all the talent has left. Shell of a company on the Windows side that anyone working with them can see. It started a couple years ago, but it's really gone off the deepend and will just get worse. I say this as a windows expert and someone who thinks linux is crap.
>This was me in 2005.
Ha, same. Windows XP for me had a horrible habit of booting into a blue screen randomly after updating video card drivers (happened with both ATI and Nvidia). Trying to do a repair install wouldn't work. The only option was a full reinstall.
Installation from the disk took an hour. Then (if you were going about this the legal way) you'd have to call the microsoft number to register your install, but be on hold for another 30 minutes. Then it was multiple hours of install your favorite video player, reboot. Install video codecs, reboot. Install firefox, reboot. Apply all of your registry tweaks, reboot. Install all your games from CD-ROM, more rebooting. And multiple hours of that.
I moved to linux back in 2006 or so and never looked back. Documented part of the journey here https://net153.net/ubuntu_vs_debian.html
I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue. Then it was running games. Linux changed for me around 2013+ when I would install it on my laptops and get a heck of a performance boost. Heck those laptops still turn on to this day. Windows just bloats all hardware.
Been on / off Linux for the desktop since about the same time. Recurring theme across my AMD and NVIDIA gpus. Support has always sucked!
Over the years it felt like a game of whack a mole finding the right combination of driver versions, open or closed source. R9 390 owners back in the day will understand... Fast forward to now, the same problems keep occurring albeit better off then they were.
> I started using Linux in like 2007 but the GPU was always an issue.
Were you running Nvidia hardware? I've been running Linux since like 2000-ish, have always run ATi/AMD hardware on my desktop machines, and (aside from overheat issues brought on by the undersized replacement fan attached with bread ties to that one board) haven't had troubles. On the other hand, I don't suspend my desktop or servers to RAM or disk, so maybe that has intermittently or always been broken... I'd never know.
I've only had Intel hardware in my laptops, and I can't remember ever having trouble suspending those to RAM or disk.
It's been an unfortunate re-occurring issue for me as well. Recent hardware is much better about this, and I too have seen the performance bumps at the cost of software compatibility. I feel like if Adobe brought their CC suite to Linux I'd have no reason to ever use Windows outside the random game that _needs_ it.
Yes, but it took some time before the suck became so bad too many people started to notice, and those people weren’t tech people.
Most people had never even heard of Linux. It has taken a lot of very bad things on Windows for it to get to this point. It’s classic frog in a slowly heating up pot territory.
>Most people had never even heard of Linux.
My experience is that people fear linux, rather than not knowing. I am the lonely Linux user since c. 2005, and people see half my screen is always a console, the other half a browser. So they fear linux is for console wizards, not for regular users. Nothing will convince them otherwise, even when they are 100% of the time using online webapps. I have some coworkers using browser + VS code + WSL2 all the time, but they don't switch because they fear the console-to-config-everything instead of Control Panel.
> Steam and Proton work perfectly
I am a hardcore DayZ player. DayZ does not work on Proton[0]. I cannot use Linux as my main gaming platform. Battlefield 6 does not work. Latest Call of Duty does not work. You can talk about voting with your wallet, but when millions of people are buying the game, your one non-vote means nothing.
So either you punish yourself and refuse to play with friends, or you punish yourself and install windows. It’s a damned situation regardless of your choice
[0] point me to as many compatibility databases as you want, the game will not start on my vanilla Ubuntu build
This is really just a subset of competitive shooters. Arc Raiders, The Finals, Hunt Showdown, Halo Infinite all play fine.
I have a Windows drive for Battlefield but I stopped booting into it after interest in the game waned.
Playing on console is also an option. Most games allow you to alternate between keyboard/mouse and controller. Discord works fine, and every game is cross-play.
That’s Fortnite and while you can pass, I don’t want to pass.. I want to play it!
Yeah, yay works until it doesn't anymore, because the pacman library dependency it uses was updated but yay was not... and then you need to recompile yay manually. I mean, I'll still use it (or rather paru, which works basically the same way), but it's very annoying, when it happens every few months.
You can download a precompiled yay/paru from their Github pages btw.
That's assuming you do system upgrades through paru/yay. However, you may not want to upgrade the packages you've obtained from the AUR and so you upgrade using pacman. That may cause the updated libalpm to become incompatible with the installed yay/paru.
Assume they mean having to recompile the AUR package they were trying to install using yay.
If users mental model is mostly "yay is like pacman but can also install packages from AUR the same way" wihout thinking deeper about the difference then I think it using it is very risky and that you should just stick to pacman + git/makepkg. Only consider helpers once that's become second nature and routine. Telling people to "just yay install" is doing them a disservice. An upgrade breaking the system isn't even that bad compared to getting infected with malware due to an old package you were using being orphaned and hijacked to spread malware or getting a bad copycat version due to a typo.
I think EndeavourOS is doing users a disservice if they provide sth like yay preinstalled and ready to use out of the box. It isn't installing packages from a shared repo: It's downloading code from arbitrary locations and running it on your machine in order to produce a package. Being able to read and understand shell script (PKGBUILD) is kind of a prerequisite to using it safely.
I switched my gaming laptop over to CachyOS (which is more or less "Arch with some good defaults for gaming and a curated runtime environment") because I literally couldn't play Stellaris on my $1800, year-old gaming laptop without regular hard crashes that locked up the entire system and required a hold-the-power-button-down hard reboot. This is apparently a rare but known issue on the Paradox forums, affecting many of their games, and it seems to be due to some problem with the 24h2 windows update on some machines, but there's no clear resolution. Eventually I got mad enough to just pave my entire gaming laptop and switch wholly over to Cachyos.
Since switching, I have not experienced a single problem with Stellaris, even running larger galaxies in longer games with more mods. I haven't had any compatibility issues or bugs or anything with my other games either. It was so painless that I switched my desktop over as well, and I no longer have a windows device. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how many games support Linux now.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
They largely have now, archinstall.
It's still text based/TUI but it's pretty simple and intuitive, anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
Came here to say this. Archinstall rocks.
Regarding why Arch doesn't "invest" in a graphical installer, it's worth mentioning that Arch's installation image has a different design philosophy than most installation media.
The image is a fully functional arch environment that copies the entirety of its contents to RAM on boot, giving you special installation opportunities such as the ability to install Arch to the same flash drive that booted the installer. Having no graphical dependencies lets this image remain small enough to pull this off, as well as allowing for fully remote installations over SSH out of the box, since archinstall is a TUI.
I don't believe there are any serious technical obstacles to providing a graphical installer in something like an initramfs environment. Many distros do provide graphical installation mechanisms using PXE, which loads the kernel and installer-initramfs over the network (and is similar in the sense that it won't touch local storage unless you tell it to)
I don't have a way to quickly around to check, but I thought the arch install media used squashfs? In which case I wouldn't have thought it was safe to blow away the backing store.
> anyone already familiar with installing a Linux distro (especially any sort of -server variant) will be comfortable with the archinstall script.
To be fair, thats not _generally_ the audience we tend to think about when we talk about the enshittification of Windows. We're usually talking regular consumers / computer users and "gamers" the latter of which is a wide range of people that can fend for themselves with instructions to people that cannot.
Fair enough, but I wouldn't generally direct that audience to vanilla arch linux as "gamers first distro" anyway.
I'd direct them to something like Bazzite (Immutable), or CachyOS for staying arch-based but providing a GUI installer and tools, Endeavor OS, even Fedora, etc.
Agreed. I know in some circles it's a meme, but if the Steam Gaming Console actually makes a debut any time soon, I think we'll see more of a jump from the "Gamer" crowd away from Windows. My (some say naive) hope is that it will make game devs try to design games that aren't only locked in on Windows and have more Proton support.
It's really a (good IMHO) sign of the times that us old hats have to remind ourselves that most new comers to Linux today aren't necessarily adept at installing another OS, let alone using the command line. The first time I installed Arch was maybe four years ago, but the very first dual boot setup I made was between Win 3.1 and OS/2 2.1 in 1993 when I was 10, and I've been playing with Linux since the mid-late 90s. When I first installed Arch the "hard way" I said to myself--"I don't understand why it has this reputation... this is all stuff I've done before countless times." Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out the distribution graph of Linux knowledge and how to engage with different skill levels.
I agree. I also think that not everyone (I couldn't say if this is generational, I see this among peers sometimes too) has the same appetite for problem solving. People hit a problem or a wall and say "So I tried X and now I see Y. I dont know what to do" and then they just sit there. The reason that LMGTFY and RTFM come off as "elitist" is because people are frustrated by others' willingness to just "stop trying" whenever they hit a road block.
Not that this is going to matter to you because you've left Windows behind, but I refuse to buy License Keys any more and I try to steer people away from buying "Gray Keys" to avoid the ridiculous costs. Using the MS Activation Scripts[0] is the much better go-to.
[0] - https://massgrave.dev/
Given the push to monetize user data it seems Microsoft is demphasizing their focus on key piracy. I bought a computer with a 55" touch screen. The company selling it said it was a Windows 11 computer. The computer was a 14 year old Intel CPU/Mobo that was never designed to run Windows 11. The company selling it had hacked Windows to run on this old computer. They didn't have a license key. I report it to Microsoft and crickets. The company ghosted me on the issue. In 2003, with XP in it's prime, they were cracking down hard on piracy... now it's part of the business model...
Absolutely. I would also think that the amount of money "lost" on license keys specifically on the "regular consumer" side pales in comparison to the data that they get once you're on their operating system. How many non-power users bother with disabling telemetry and other data that MS collects through their operating system? How many people bother configuring a Local Account? All of that is probably worth way more than a ~$200 license key.
On the business side, businesses make it a focus to be in compliance with licensing agreements so they still see whatever oodles of money from companies that have fleets of computers that run Windows.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
There's still a lot of utility to doing things the hard way. I do suggest people that want to actually learn Linux install Arch and live in the terminal. You learn a lot very fast because you're forced to. But it's not for everyone and that's totally okay too. That's the beauty of Linux after all. That's the beauty of computing. You can't build a product for everyone but you can build an environment that can become what anyone needs.
But I'll second your point. I've been on Endeavour on my main machine for about 3-4 years now and only had one problem where I just got a mismatch in a new kernel and new Nvidia driver so I couldn't load the desktop. Easy rollback (from the cache) and a day or two later the issue was solved so I could upgrade without a problem. Took no more than 10 minutes to solve and that's the worst problem I've had the entire time. I will also give the advice that if you have an Nvidia card give your boot partition like 5GB instead of 1GB
I don't think it is because they can't do it or that they want to be a base for other distros. They simply let the user choose what the user wants. And if you don't know what you want then you learn it.
I switched to arch 15 years ago to learn Linux. And it is by far the best way to understand it.
Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
> Having used Arch I can easily maintain almost any distro out there, but it doesn't work the other way around.
I'd also like to tell any Linux newbies, the Arch Wiki is your best friend. It doesn't matter if you're using Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever. The Arch Wiki is still usually the second place I go to for when I need help. The first is the man pages (while there's some bad documentation out there it is quite surprising how well most man pages are written. Linux really has shown me the power and importance of writing good documentation)
[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]
I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.
In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/
I've used Ubuntu since 2006 and started using Kubuntu (I prefer KDE) about 2 years ago. Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) are very solid for gaming. It puzzles me how often I see highly customized distros like Bazzite and CachyOS touted for gaming after looking into some of the wild tweaks those distros do; it's amazing to me that they run at all.
PS I keep Snap disabled.
What wild customisations are you talking about?
As someone who used Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch) exclusively from 2010 and recently moved to bazzite, I only see positives from the switch.
Most of my usecases work OOTB, and for everything else I use a container workflow. I like that there are fewer ways to mess up upgrades. I like that flatpaks are well integrated.
Fedora Silverblue user here. Lutris (from flatpak) can play GoG games fine (*).
(*): Apparently achievement support even on single player games requires the gamestore client (GoG client in my case) and Lutris doesn't support that yet. Am old enough to not care :p
>idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Because in reality, you should be able to use the wiki for installing. Because if you can't, you might not be able to use the wiki to support yourself in the future.
The issue most people have with slapping some paint on arch then riding the coat tails is the eternal September effect. Arch community prefers folks who try to help themselves _first_ and reading an install wiki is a good indicator you're going to do that.
> (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro)
Trust me it was far more involved of a process 10 years ago, and that's why people liked it.
The modern install process is paired down to something like 10 steps. Start the ISO, configure your partitions, mount your root and boot, and use the delightful arch-chroot tool to enter and install in those partitions. Set up your user, configure your boot manager, exit the chroot, reboot, remove the install media, and boot into your bare bones system.
The install ISO has all the networking drivers and other tools you may need to bootstrap your new install, you just need to remember to do it. It's obviously not for total newbies but it's no gentoo, lfs, or even old arch.
My first distro was Slackware, which I setup all myself. I just don't see any true value in what could be a simple GUI.
I've had graphical installs inexplicably lock up or silently fail before, so it could be nice on a minimal system.
Personally, I get joy out of setting up a new machine exactly how I want. I haven't broken an arch install bad enough to require re-installing in almost 10 years so its rare I'm actually installing it anyway. If I want a system up quick I'll pick another distro.
Yeah, my last arch install was my last. It was fun to rice my system and setting up everything from scratch 4 or 5 times taught me a lot about operating systems and computers. Ultimately my setup is not significantly different than any other distro, it's just that I installed the packages and did configs myself. I'll be fine with a minimally riced system, if I ever even need to install an OS again.
> I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account
You quit without even trying.
Windows 10 and 11 can have all local accounts by using RUFUS to create the install media. And if your PC comes with Windows already installed, there are still commands - even with 25H2 - that allow you to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement during setup and configure a local account.
And this is with both Home and Pro.
It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again.
> It's the same amount of effort to install Linux and never have to question who the owner of your computer is again.
In many ways, Linux is a complete paradigm change away from what is familiar and known in Windows, requiring a complete re-training from top to bottom.
Modifying the OOBE to bypass Microsoft Account requirement and permit a local account is a pebble in the road compared to the alpine pass that is switching to Linux.
And just installing Linux isn’t the issue. Learning from scratch an entire OS that behaves and is structurally very differently than Windows, and requires hundreds of hours to get equally as comfortable and knowledgeable in, is the issue.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Linux. But to say it’s “the same amount” is deeply disingenuous and borderline anti-reality.
> I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it
I love my Arch installs to death, but I feel like I'm the oddball out about the mess that is AUR. The main repositories have a lot of things but I always end up getting pushed to AUR and then it just feels like I bolted on a hack rather than pacman/the arch base just supporting AUR more like a different package source normally.
There was some 3D printer slicer software I needed that wouldnt run, when I finally figured out why it had to do with GLIBC being out of date. I have used Debian since like 2008, and Ubuntu since the mid 2010s so I am accustomed to doing PPA's and what not, but something in me broke and I wanted to finally try something more bleeding edge. I nearly went for Fedora but the version I wanted to try didn't even boot (I don't like to waste any time with command line incantations anymore) so I looked up EndeavourOS I don't remember how I found it, I think a friend said someone they knew used it (turns out they dont LOL) so I gave it a shot.
I had bad experiences with Arch before because of Manjaro, but in hindsight, I think the main issues I had were more to do with how Pacman can get insanely nuanced. When you update packages you have to know what you're doing, it will update all weird, its not like Debian or Ubuntu upgrades where it installs / uninstalls what you do and don't need unless you tell it to be that nuanced.
Long term stability is less important for gaming computers than having the most cutting edge (and theoretically highest performance) drivers. That's why the community leans so heavily towards arch.
Probably same reason most folks who are capable of running Linux don't stay on Ubuntu, etc.
Folks capable of running linux pick the best distro for the job at hand. They are tools, there is no progression like you're implying.
My homeserver is Ubuntu, my gaming PC is Arch.
My spare PC runs Win10. Was able to install it without internet and thus get an offline account.
Since they stopped full updates for it, it's a lot less annoying. Almost all the nags were at reboot time, usually triggered by the update giving it a new thing to nag about. Only thing now is it'll ask me once a month about either OneDrive or Win11, which is bad but tolerable.
I'm currently on Pop, but have an install of Cachy ready once I have some time and a stable connection. My main gripe of Pop (other than the COSMIC issues) was mostly audio issues with how they set up PipeWire and regressions with some releases. Do you find Arch to be a bit less of a headache when dealing with drivers?
I just got a new work laptop: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon gen13. It's gorgeous: weighs a bit over 900 grams, has an amazing matte OLED screen, Intel Lunar Lake that sips power (1-2W idle) and is fast enough to compile Rust if needed, amazing keyboard, touchpad is great but I just use the trackpoint, everything works from the box on Linux (they even deliver it with either Fedora or Ubuntu, but I installed CachyOS).
Suspend: works always. Battery life: great, the whole day. Wifi: works always, connects fast, works fast.
The build quality is really nice, especially the carbon fiber body that doesn't feel so cold/hot to touch.
Dell, HP and Lenovo have been phenomenally resilient for us, going back more than 2 decades.
If I am understanding correctly, you were using Windows without a licence? I think that's more the problem here, as Windows does provide a way to have offline accounts, you just didn't want to pay for it.
Pacman -syyu
One command. That's why I won't use arch. This one command will fuck your system up, but only if you wait to long in-between doing it.
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.
ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.
Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to have:
* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption
* The limine bootloader
* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks
* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved
* sway with my custom ruby based bar
* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0
If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.
Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.
It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.
Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.
But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.
With the absurd price of RAM and flash storage (and still-fairly-high price of video cards) now is quite a bad time to purchase a new computer.
Having said that, I'm not the OP, but I currently have a Radeon 9070 (non-XT), and previously had a Radeon 5700 XT. Both work great.
> gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig,
If you are spending 2000 for a gaming rig, a pro windows is like $200. Makes no sense.
Also, Apple is no better than Windows, so your post doesn't make sense.
The meme was “I use Arch, BTW,” but I think it has mostly died as enough people have pointed out that Arch isn’t really hard-mode Linux or something. It is a barebones start but
1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
Eventually I switched to Ubuntu for some reason, it has given me more headaches than Arch.
> 1) very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
Having very frequent updates to bleeding edge software versions, often requiring manual intervention is not "stable". An arch upgrade may, without warning, replace your config files and update software to versions incompatible with the previous.
That's fine if you're continuously maintaining the system, maybe even fun. But it's not stable. Other distributions are perfectly capable of updating themselves without ever requiring human intervention.
> 2) the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
As well as requiring you to be comfortable with the the linux command line as well as have plenty of time. My mom has basic literacy, she can't install ArchLinux.
ArchLinux is great but it's not a beginner-friendly operating system in the same way that Fedora/LinuxMint/OpenSUSE/Pop!_OS/Ubuntu/ElementOS are.
> very stable due to rolling-release producing small changes
Can you elaborate on the chain of thought here? The small changes at high frequency means that something is nearly constantly in a <CHANGED> state, quite opposite from stable. Rolling release typically means that updates are not really snapshotted, therefore unless one does pull updates constantly they risk pulling a set of incompatible updates. Again, quite different from stable.
>the skill barrier to getting a full system is “basic literacy, to read the wiki”
if GenZ knew how to read they would be very disappointed right now
in the age of tablets and tiktok, basic literacy is quite a big ask
You spent $2000 on a new machine but wouldn’t shell out another $20-30 for a windows pro key? You’re willing to burn a bunch of time fiddling with getting a completely new operating system setup, but you’re not willing to spend a few minutes fiddling with setting up an offline windows account?
I get that maybe that was the final straw or something, but come on, “I switched to Linux because I didn’t want to take an hour to set up Windows” really sounds like you never really wanted Windows in the first place, you were just looking for an excuse.
The main difference, in my opinion, is that to set up Linux one doesn't need to work around the expected behaviours of the OS.
And why would anyone put so much effort into making Windows usable now, when there is not knowing what Microsoft will do next?
> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro
Because Arch maintainers are a bunch of elitist gatekeepers that don't accept any level of knowledge that is lower than theirs. You can see that through every forum interaction generally and any discussion about the installation process specifically.
Arch is great btw. It could be greater, if all maintainers would quit.
This was me in 2022 or 2023. I have posted on HN about my shift a few times. I gave up with Windows 10 because you needed Windows Pro in order to make an "offline" account, I spent $2000+ for a gaming rig, and I couldn't add new users, one program told me to use the other program which brought me back to the original program... I had to go out of my way, buy a license just to make it work. I just went and installed Linux finally. I was on POP_OS! for a good year, but been on Arch Linux for one year plus now.
I know its a "meme" to talk about how great Arch is, but when you want the latest of something, Arch has it. I use EndeavourOS since it had a nicer simpler installer (idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro) and if you just use "yay" you don't run into Pacman woes.
Alternatively, I'm only buying Macs as well, but for my gaming rigs, straight to Arch. Steam and Proton work perfectly, if you don't sell your games on Steam or in a way I can run them on Linux I am not buying or playing them.