I guess it depends on what that ‘something’ is.
My box used to be like this (mostly Nvidia issues), but its been relatively well behaved. And now my Windows install has become a pain with UWP apps, printers, and LAN drives, specifically, that I’ve just given up trying to resolve TBH. Not to speak of some programming stuff.
Both OSes are tools that make specific things easier.
So many folks seem to be the opposite of me…
Linux just works now. Shit with my printer, device drivers, LAN things, stuff like like is like wrestling an animal on Windows for some reason, and… just works with KDE. It’s like they’ve swapped places.
Random Windows apps works better in wine than they do in actual windows, sometimes. With no fuss: I double click and they launch, that’s it.
Don’t even get me started on security.
But Linux is (mostly) not performant for gaming, at least not on Nvidia. It’s… fine, but I’m not going to take a 10%+ hit, sometimes much more severe, and poorer support for HDR, frame limiters, mod tools and such when I can just boot neutered Windows instead.
So I’m not getting away from Windows in the near future, but to frank, I don’t understand why more folks (who get past the admittedly tall hurdle of learning about partitioning and installing an OS) don’t dual boot, or seek to use certain poorly supported Linux native apps when double clicking exes mostly just works.
But my point is you don’t have to pick and choose. And there’s no commitment. You can have your cake and eat it, and send the cake back if you don’t like it.
It doesn’t work with some projects, unfortunately.
Ugh yes I hate the import system too. I have to look it up every time and still don’t understand it, and it’s a hair away from messing up existing projects to the point where sometimes it does.
I want to love uv, but:
It breaks some random compiled C packages. I ran into this the other day, and the associated issue on the package was basically “shrug we see it’s breaking, this dev is doing some weird shit”
I’d prefer to use the optimized/patched build of Python CachyOS provides (and the optimized Python compiled system packages), though this is largely OCD.
It’s not optimal for some PyTorch stuff, which is its own little ecosystem nightmare
It’s so ridiculous that many projects don’t even support pip+venv (much less system python packages. shivers). They literally check if that’s what you’re trying and pre-emptively fail.
Some projects become impossible to run in any combination because some dependency (looking at you, sentencepiece) no longer works outside a narrow set of circumstances, unless you hand build some obscure github PR, disable all the dependency checks and cross your fingers and hope the wheel builds.
And I’m sorry, but I don’t have 200GB of space, tons of spare RAM, and an intricate docker passthrough setup for every random python project. I just have like four different 3rd party managers (conda/mamba, uv, poetry… what’s the other one? Ugh)
Yeah.
I mean, npm deserves some healthy fear/skepticism, but everything is relative.
It’s kind of crazy how problematic pip is, though. There are enormous ecosystems like conda, poetry, arguably Docker all built around “pip not working right.”
I see so many people want to install vllm or something with like a 95% crash and burn rate if they aren’t already proficient with Docker, complete with the spare disk space to basically ship a whole other machine.
Meanwhile, massively complex Rust or Go or whatever packages… just work. With the native tooling, for me.
To be clear, I like Python, and I believe many issues can be smoothed with time (like improving its JIT and maybe encouraging more typing in codebases). But pip and its ecosystem are forever cursed.
A lot of the engagement was absolutely manufactured and bot driven, kinda like the Cracker Barrel thing.
VSCodium, or some similar VSCode build/derivative.
I know, I know, but the critical mass is just so useful. As a random example, there are specific extensions to support game modding in Paradox scripting language, or Rimworld XML. Nothing else has so many random niches filled.
It’s fast with big files (faster than anything I’ve tried other than ‘specialized’ log readers and such), it’s a fast search, it’s got good git support, it’s got support for sudo file editing…
RockPaperShotgun is my go-to, but I also tend to use ‘sorting’ features in stores and stuff.
For instance, on steam, you can filter by tags you like, like ‘co-op’ or ‘base building’ or whatever, then sort by review score to float the best to the top. And sometimes there are external sites like GamePasta (for Gamepass) with similar features for other platforms:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/
I may have better advice if there’s a certain ‘type’ of game you like. For instance, do you prefer coop with mates or an SO or something? Do you like RTSes or sandbox games or what?
You literally named a bunch of old games that absolutely have modern alternatives. From indie ‘retro’ RTS games to Mass Effect (or more dramatic MGS) feeling RPGs/shooters that flew under the radar to great and original puzzle games in the vein of Portal. Have you ever played the Talos Principle or Antichamber, for instance?
Discoverability is a huge issue, because there are so many games. AAAs do skew towards generic MTX junk, but the other side of that is their marketing sucks up finite attention.
I’m sorry, but gamers are so entitled.
We’re flooded with an incredible back catalog and a sea of gems, yet the sentiment is “small devs are fine” is totally ignorant of how, literally the vast majority of the time per the article, these small devs barely make ends meet on their genuinely good passion project.
Or they generalize that all games are junk because they haven’t even made a bare minimum attempt to shop around the sea of excellently organized stores and review sites/databases the industry has, like they expect absolute perfection in a personal TikTok/YouTube feed directed at them, then turn around and complain about paying a few bucks for an indie after dropping $600 on a GPU.
…There really are too many games because it’s so many passion projects now, and that’s… fine. It’s a lot better than the cinema situation now, for example, where indie makers are getting squeezed so hard.
But I still don’t like the entitled culture that hurts the discoverability of these smaller games and feeds the AAA slop conveyer belts.
Not really.
It may be “feel good nice” if you make a few bucks to a few hundred good reviews on a passion project, but it’s not enough to help you eat and pay rent.
And making a game is a pretty massive time sink. Not to belittle other artists, but the bare minimum time/financial investment for one game is higher than, say, a digital art portfolio or an album.
I hate to be rude, but there are literally thousands of great games cheaply accessible to you.
They aren’t gonna be spoon fed to your eyeballs; you have to shop and dig.
This is interesting because theres not a ton of direct Windows vs. linux game benchmarking, and now there’s about to be. GN churns though a lot of hardware and testing.
And excellent, because being linux, drawing attention to issues increases the chances of them getting fixed, whereas that is hardly the case for Windows.
Arch (with KDE I presume?) + Bazzite is not bad either. There’s a lot of handwaving over they should have chosen this or that distro, but they’re both very popular in the gaming space, so I feel that’s fairly representative of many distros.
I’d recommend Cromite. For desktop and Android, it’s awesome.
DDG browser if you want multi device sync.
I find that Chromium derivates do perform much better as long as a Wayland+Nvidia combo isn’t freaking them out.
It’s usually not a huge deal on fast desktops though.
Their browser, I mean.
You can still use Google search in DDG browser. TBH I feel much safer with that than the other way around.
What I meant is there are tons of alternatives to Google-branded Chrome, that are basically Chrome underneath but at least stripped out. Including ones with browser sync across devices.
I am using DuckDuckGo for mobile/desktop sync at the moment. But mostly Cromite (or Firefox) on desktop, and only because Cromite sadly isnt available on iOS.
It’s not a wash anymore though, it’s not even close. Plain Chrome tracks you so much it definitely eats CPU doing so, no matter how many extensions you install.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure working Nvidia on wayland is a very recent thing.
Honestly I just boot from my (AMD) IGP for linux, which is better for compute anyway.