I'm not fond of crediting Valve exclusively for this gaming utopia since it was a massive team effort from a wide variety of developers, but it was clear that a powerful player was always necessary to crack Microsoft's monopoly.
Yeah, Proton is built from many puzzle pieces. Massive kudos to Valve where credit is due for assembling those bits (and for contributing patches / code back at the upstream projects), but the various projects (WINE, DXVK, etc) on which Proton was built deserve their credit as well for sure. No way Valve would have built all that is Proton entirely from scratch (at least certainly not in the time-frame they were working with).
(Shameless plug time! I'm building an app to make UEVR on Linux easier to use: https://github.com/LorenDB/kaon)
I'm now in the pickle where the older threadripper that was dual boot won't make the jump to Windows 11 - so that might be the end of windows for me.
He glosses over this but I suspect that is almost all the newer multiplayer games that are popular.
I was gaming on Linux from about 2020 to this year. I went back to Windows for gaming. It was either constant faffing or there was always at least one game that doesn't work that well. I don't want to spend an hour or messing with various launch options in Steam.
Performance is often claimed to be better on Linux than Windows. However it is highly dependant on the distro, kernel, GPU, game and whether you have particular magic settings configured. I am sure it is faster if you are running bazzite or one of the other gaming focused distros, but I run Debian on pretty much everything. So I just decided to use Linux for serious stuff and Windows for gaming.
Don't get me wrong it is loads better than it was, which was pretty much non-existent. But it will be fairly niche for quite a while yet.
I use a pretty quirky setup on Linux and I find something that doesn't work properly out of the box maybe once every 2 years. I play a lot of popular multiplayer games with friends, but none of the billion dollar AAA blockbusters.
Well you are talking about a beta. The entire point is to get it out to some of the public to get feedback before final release. Secure boot is probably a requirement for the anti-cheat. IIRC it is a requirement for Windows 11 and Windows 10 is EOL soon.
Changing how the partitions work is just dangerous and you should backup before you try converting it.
That doesn't seem to be an indictment of Windows IMO.
> I use a pretty quirky setup on Linux and I find something that doesn't work properly out of the box maybe once every 2 years. I play a lot of popular multiplayer games with friends, but none of the billion dollar AAA blockbusters.
That hasn't been my experience at all. The point that I was making that it is super variable depending on the distro, GPU, game, launcher.
I am not distro-hopping to solve problems (I'd learned that didn't work almost two decades ago).
I just don't want to deal with it tbh. Rebooting into Windows takes less time that faffing with launch options.
No it doesn't. I honestly not sure what people are doing when they claim this. I have to do a reinstall every 5 years.
I do use chocolatey as package manager. I do run the debloat script that removes most of the annoyances.
I typically install the follow WSL, MSYS2, Steam, GoG, Podman or Docker, Brave, Thunderbird, Emulators, Python, Go and .NET. With choco this is a oneliner, do some chores in the house and then sign in to everything.
It maybe few hours max, every few years. It isn't as onerous as you are suggesting.
> It only takes it deciding to overwrite your bootloader a single time to become an annoying time sink.
It won't do this randomly like you are suggesting. It does it when doing a full reinstall. It won't do it when you are doing a PC refresh.
I've had fix this recently. It isn't super difficult if you've done before. Windows will just overwrite the EFI partition. The process to fix is to boot live-cd, then chroot into the Linux install, use blkid / lsblk to confirm the GPT partitions label that would changed, update fstab, rerun update-grub2 and you are done.
It can be a time sink. But Linux itself is generally a massive time sink.
Yes it can take upto an hour. If you look on protondb for a particular game you can find there are several different suggestions for launch options.
Some of the times these work, sometimes they don't. Once You've faffed around with these options and relaunching a game a few times 30 minute to an hour is quickly gone.