When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution.
Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process.
With Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work.
Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.
WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.
If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.
I can tell that if POSIX subsystem in Windows NT was actually a good enough UNIX experience, I would never bothered with those Slackware 2.0 install disks.
And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.
The original POSIX subsystem was just there so MS could say that it exists (and pass DoD requirements).
It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).
Indeed, and that is why if I wanted to do university work at home instead of fighting for a place at one DG/UX terminal at the campus, I had to find something else.
I am aware it got much better later on, but given the way it was introduced, the mess with third party integrations, as Microsoft always outsourced the development effort (MKS, Interix,..), it never got people to care about afterwards.
Realistically anyone who cared would be using something like Cygwin (and the original UNIX server market segment evaporated due to Linux and had zero interest in migrating to NT in that form--some did migrate due to application layer benefits like .NET but not for the same workloads.)
There is an alternative universe where Windows NT POSIX is really as it should have been in first place, and Linux never takes off as there is no need for it.
As there is another alternative one where Microsoft doesn't sell Xenix and keeps pushing for it, as Bill Gates was actually a big fan of.
Obviously we'll never know, but I seriously doubt that parallel universe would've had a chance to materialize. Not the least due to "free as in beer" aspect of Linux whilst web/Apache was growing at the pace it did. All proprietary unices are basically dead. Sun was likely the sole company that had the best attitude to live alongside open source, but they also proved it wasn't a good enough business post bubble burst. NT and Darwin remain alive due to their desktop use, not server.
IBM z/OS is officially a Unix-a very weird Unix which uses EBCDIC-but it passed the test suite (an old but still valid version, which makes it somewhat outdated) and IBM paid the fee to The Open Group, so officially it is a Unix. (Although somewhat outdated, they recently added a partial emulation of the Linux namespace syscalls-clone/unshare/etc-in order to port K8S to z/OS; but that’s not part of the Unix standard.)
If Microsoft had wanted, Windows could have officially been Unix too-they could have licensed the test suite, run it under their POSIX/SFU/SUA subsystem, fixed the failures, paid the fee-and then Windows would be a Unix. They never did-not (as far as I’m aware) for any technical reason, simply because as a matter of business strategy, they decided not to invest in this.
With Microsoft having either Windows NT with proper UNIX support, or real UNIX with Xenix, there would be no need for Linux, regardless of it being free beer.
Whatever computer people would be getting at the local shopping mall computer store already had UNIX support.
Lets also not forget that UNIX and C won over the competing on timesharing OSes, exactly because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it in first place, there was no Linux on those days, and had AT&T not sued BSD, hardly anyone would have paid attention to Linux, yet another what-if.
NT underlies the majority of M365 and many of the major Azure services. Most F500s in the US will have at the very least an Active Directory deployment, if not other ancillary services.
IIS and SQL Server (Win) boxes are fairly typical, still.
I am not suggesting NT is dead on servers at all. I am positing it would be dead had it not been for owning the majority of desktops. Those use cases are primarily driven as an ancillary service to Windows desktop[1], and where they have wider applicability, like .NET and SQL Server, have been progressively unleashed from Windows. The realm of standalone server products were bulldozed by Linux; NT wouldn't have stood a chance either.
[1]: In fact, Active Directory was specifically targeted by EU antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
For all large corps, users sit at 1990s-style desktop computers that run Win10/11 and use Microsoft Office, including Outlook that connects to an Exchange server running on Windows Server. I'm not here to defend Microsoft operating systems (I much prefer Linux), but they are so deeply embedded. It might be decades before that changes at large corps.
That was true once, but not true now. On-prem Exchange is rapidly being squashed by Microsoft in favor of 365. The direction of travel for the Outlook client is clearly towards web (I note anecdotally that the Mac client, always a poor relation to Windows, is so laughably clunky that the Mac users I know forgo it in favor of the web client.) If the service is in the 365 cloud and the client is a web browser, who needs Windows for this discussion? We might end up in a future of terminals again for the worker bees and 'real' computers only for the people who need Excel and Word and for whom the web versions dont cut it
I don't think it is fair to brush it off under "same bucket; doesn't count." The syscalls are still different and there's quite a bit of nuance. I mean the lines you're drawing are out of superficial convenience and quite arbitrary. In fact, I'd argue macOS/Darwin/XNU are really Mach at their core (virtual memory subsystem, process management and IPC) and BSD syscalls are simply an emulated service on Mach, which is quite different from traditional UNIX. The fact that as a user you think of macOS much more similar to Linux is not really reflective of what happens under the hood. Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
> Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.
I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.
The essential problem was that critical Windows APIs like CreateProcess and the NTFS file system were far too slow to be used in UNIX-like ways. If you tried to run git or build things in WSL1 - a key use case - it was way slower than doing so on native or VM Linux.
Performance was one problem, but imho the biggest was that MMAP semantics were inherited from the NT side and made a lot of applications crash (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).
They didn't prioritize it until fixing at a late stage, barely before WSL 2 came out. Sometimes i do wonder if they made a premature decision to move to WSL2 since there was quite a lot of basic applications/runtimes that were crashing due to this fix lacking (Naturally a lot of other new Linux API's like io_uring probably would have made it an api chasing treadmill that they just wanted to circumvent).
> (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).
I thought you could do it using ntdll functions, no?
Good to know, still the obscureness of this function or semantics led WSL1 to be incompatible for a long time (Also skimming this article touches upon some 0-sized mappings being an issue?).
Regardless this led WSL1 to have fatal incompatibilities for a long time, iirc basic stuff like the rpm system or something similarly fundamental for some distros/languages relied on it. And once WSL2 existed people just seems to have gone over.
Win32 APIs like CreateProcess suck because they have to spend so much time setting up the stuff that allows Win32's application model to mimic that of 16-bit Windows, which was coopreratively multitasked. The NT kernel is much faster at creating processes when it doesn't need to worry about that stuff.
As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.
Hm. I used Git on WSL1 for many years, with medium sized repos hosted on a Windows drive, and it worked great. When I moved to WSL2 Git became a whole lot slower - it now takes about 5-8 secs to execute 'git status' where before it was instant.
Windows actually created a new process type for this: Pico processes[1]. This allows WSL1 to perform quite a bit better than Cygwin on something like Windows XP.
I know -- I was super excited to see WSL1 and wished it worked. NT when started was the OS/2 personality and back at that time was excited to see NT as the OS to end all OSes (by running them all as a personality).
But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.
But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).
One thing that I notice nobody mention about VMWare on Windows is what about the issues with "Virtualization Based Security"? If you have this enabled VMWare uses "Windows Hypervisor Platform" which I think is also tied in with Hyper-V for running VMs through VMware making them noticeably worse and more unstable especially when dealing with USB devices. During the installer, you'll be warned of this too if memory serves correct. Cons are you cannot use WSL2 and reduced security. How much in reality does it reduce security I'm not exactly sure but I wish it wasn't like this or there was a better workaround for VMware on Windows. VBS feature is enabled by default on all Windows 11 and I think most later releases of Windows 10.
The Windows Hypervisor does suck in terms of an actual virtualization features, but it does reduce security significantly by disabling it. It’s a big front line defense against memory attacks.
The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.
People like to talk like GPL is evil, but it's underpinning more of the world than many people see.
And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).
I wouldn’t call the GPL “evil”, but I do think it’s more unrealistic given current western economics and mooching practices. Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.
> Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.
While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.
Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).
For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.
On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.
So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.
Despite the FSF's word games with "copyleft", the GNU GPL, Creative Commons, and F/OSS licenses rely on legal copyright protections in order to work. It's the copyright holder who reserves the right to license the software by those terms.
Closed source is protected in other ways besides copyright. Trade secrets, confidentiality, NDA, proprietary ownership, obfuscation, and in the case of hardware, big globs of epoxy and other countermeasures to ensure nobody can get in and reverse-engineer it.
Sure, but consider that some people might not be able to just make that choice in any given context.
I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).
So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.
Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.
The obvious answer: you can't. I work in constrained environment with an IT department that provides the hardware and (most of) the software I develop on. I agree with all the WSL cheering here, it integrates almost seamlessly.
But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).
That's another sound option, but as a person who doesn't like Homebrew and stuffing /usr/local with tons of things, a lightweight Linux VM becomes mandatory after some point on macOS, too.
Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.
I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.
Current macos is going the windows direction with some architecture choice (default uninstallable software, settings panel mess, meaningless updates,…)
> I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.
However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.
For anyone curious (as I was) the basic difference is that WSL1 implemented the Linux syscall table directly whereas WSL2 actually runs Linux on top of some virtual drivers (hypervisor).
WSL 2 runs a full Linux kernel under Hyper-V. There are some out-of-tree or staging drivers included in Microsoft's Linux kernel derivative and they publish their kernel sources at https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.
I had the same experience. Even installing linux is easier for me now. And with new spyware features of windows, there is really no incentive to use it
I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess?
My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing.
Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.
Definitely not for me. Was in Windows between 95 and XP, never looked back. Same for my first programming languages, glad I am not stuck still doing PHP and Java.
Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.
I’m actually going long on Windows now after learning about how the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, whereas Windows is a “hybrid” microkernel design. It explains so much about some program behavior in Linux (eg crashing Gnome would often cause kernel panics) that you don’t see at all on Windows.
Yeah, the spyware is annoying and stupid. But once you strip it out (it can be removed/blocked), Windows 11 is absolutely rock solid.
For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.
Businesses would. The problem with that is you have decision makers in said businesses who don't know any better, so Microsoft-all-the-things gets pushed down the line. Offices are all trapped on Windows 10/11 and using Teams/Outlook with Exchange/Entra/Azure chugging along in all its misconfigured glory. Heck, half the MSPs I work side-by-side with seem to only offer support on Windows machines.
It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home.
Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried.
Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.
I would be very happy with Windows 7 on manufacturing side - lots of CNCs that are still in use and supported by manufacturers are still on Windows 98.
I worked at a neighborhood IT shop during the height of COVID and we’d see XP laptops all the time that were used as offline/airgapped controllers for things like CNC mills.
The higher up have such a hardon for Microsoft, I think it could actually be used as a bridge across the Atlantic ocean. We've already spent years migrating shit off of microsoft platforms onto the newest and latest microsoft platforms.
I left some room for myself with "a good reason" :)
When company is forcing you to use something out of inertia, then it's probably not for a good reason.
Actually regarding the "global scale" – I'm not really sure it's true, I think MS has influence mostly in US. Many EU and Asian companies I worked with were using OSX/Linux.
Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux.
I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it.
And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.
They're "trapped" because there is no answer to the Exchange/Outlook combo for business purposes and it's very inexpensive for the value it provides. There are of course alternatives to Teams until you pair Teams with SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot/Exchange/3rd party market.
> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.
Well, this is true throughout IT, even those who went to college for a CS or IT-based degrees. People want to make money, and IT has been a safe haven so far to do so.
> They're "trapped" because there is no answer to the Exchange/Outlook combo for business purposes and it's very inexpensive for the value it provides. There are of course alternatives to Teams until you pair Teams with SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot/Exchange/3rd party market.
Yep, it's mostly this. Especially for businesses under 300 users, you get Exchange, EntraID, Defender EDR, InTune(MDM) + the Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot all integrated for $22/user/month. For a little extra you get a half way decent PBX for VoIP too.
If you tried to piece all that together yourself with different services, then integrate them to the same level, it's going to cost a hell of a lot more than that.
Microsoft is smart too, as none of that requires Windows either. Even of these companies switched to Linux or macOS en masse, they'd still be using Microsoft.
Plus, there's still no competitor to Excel for business types. We might be able to use Google Sheets to great effectiveness, but the finance department at the behemoths can't. The world runs on Excel, like it or not.
> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.
This is true for all fields not just tech/IT. Competent windows sysadmin work nowadays isn't all that different from macOS endpoints or Linux. Everything can be scripted/automated with PowerShell, or just using the Graph API for 365 stuff. You can effectively manage a windows environment and never touch a GUI if you don't want to.
Microsoft usually isn't the best at anything, but what they excel at is being "good enough" and checking boxes.
For larger orgs and enterprises, it is Active Directory/Entra. That is the true Microsoft killer app and lock-in driver. There is no comparable Linux solution that I am aware of.
You're saying it like there is no alternative and you can't just open and edit same excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")
The commands you mentioned seem irrelevant here. I never use any advanced features, i.e. those not available in LibreOffice or incompatible with MS Word, and I don't know anybody who does.
Can you give me an example of such advanced features? I really don't understand what outstanding feature did they pack in this "Excel" which has no alternative?
If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.
There are complex reports that every European-regulated finance entity needs to submit to their regulator. They are always complicated, but they are only sometimes well-specified. The formats evolve over time.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
The problem is not the "advanced features" within Excel but how they are used. If an excel sheet is basically just a front for a visual basic Programm it doesn't easily open anywhere.
As Google's JavaScript API also doesn't work in open office and whatever else they all have in extra layers.
However i am not sure when and why I encountered such a software last time, but my dad is a Visual Basic guy and has done a lot of these weird sheets for internal business stuff.
VBA is the famous example, but Power Query deserves a shout out. I use it to make tables that pull their data from other tables with custom transformation logic.
Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.
LibreOffice still doesn't have tables! Not to mention the new(ish) functions in Excel, like LET and LAMBDA.
Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.
The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.
Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.
Power Pivot is one I encounter on the regular, you can't even use it on Excel for Mac, Windows or Bust
CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters
PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web
A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz
You didn't really mention any real feature besides Visual Basic, which clearly has alternatives in other spreadsheet apps. You have to run your VBA through converter script, and the fix incompatibilities in your macros but again, for a Visual Basic guy it is trivial... The rest of the things you mentioned is a good old `rsync` repacked.
But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)
I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.
>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
> I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.
Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
SharePoint/OneDrive Lists can be directly edited in Excel. The Power platform can directly access/manipulate/transform Excel files in the cloud or on-prem via the Power BI Gateway.
You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.
So you do all this work, retrain other users, spend a not-so-trivial amount of time and money and risk breaking stuff, all for not paying $22 monthly per user?
I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.
Not only is it about lack of features on the open source side, it's about workflow.
Sure Photoshop and Gimp both edit pictures, but the workflow is so different that professional users of Photoshop aren't going to switch just because it's FOSS.
The market is getting more diverse (mobile, steam deck alikes, laptops, consoles, etc), but i guess if you want to quickly earn the most money on your (huge) development investment, you better try and take the biggest piece of the pie first.
Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have plenty games in my Steam libary that could run perfectly under many platforms. And most AAA games heavily drop in price after a few months, Nintendo being the sole exception.
AAA and AAAA games became (expensive) gateways to microtransaction based money extraction application, in my opinion.
I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions.
If we're talking FPS, give me any Half-Life (and Portal) title and I'm good. Gameplay first, unique art direction, good story, and a well built universe which is almost palpable with lore.
If we're talking RTS, C&C series, Dune Emperor, Supreme Commander and StarCraft is enough.
I have arm Mac and it's the most painful machine you can own as someone who likes games... Supreme Commander FAF I miss the most, unfortunately unplayable online due to floating-point calculation differences between ARM and x64 which are apparently untranslatable.
I have more than 2000 games on Steam and i love my Steam Deck which i got for pretty cheap. It's a very fun game system and you can tinker a lot with it. Upgrading (bigger disk capacity) is very easy.
Just bought Black Mesa for two bucks. Works almost flawlessly. Ten year old game , but much fun to be had. Most games i buy on the very very cheap. Bought Skyrim couple of weeks ago for five bucks.
Sure, i click on the free thursday game on the Epic Games store, but i hate that interface with great passion.
I was excited about it too, even just having a tmux and using it for grepping and file copying. Then after a year or two on windows, my computer started slowing down. Tale as old as time. I'm not surprised, and some of the issues aren't ms' fault, but nevertheless I see CPU spikes to 100 with several browser tabs open, or the drawing tablet driver goes to 100% cpu usage even though I never even use it. The UX shouldn't degrade like a mechanical system.
Curious, if you don't mind answering, do you mainly uses Ubuntu or Nixos, and which one do you liked more ATM?
Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak?
What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.
I try to use debian, since it's a bit older (read: stable) than ubunutu and I've found that if something compiles and runs on debian it'll run on ubunutu and others but the inverse is not true.
I quite like CachyOS currently. I see no performance penalty (but I also have only a 75 Hz monitor and I haven't tested VR games all that much yet). Currently I'm playing through Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on ultra with no issues.
CachyOS provides packages for Steam, handles nvidia drivers for you and they even provide their own builds of proton and wine, allegedly compiled with flags for modern hardware + some patches (not sure how much they help though - before Cachy I used Pop OS and also had no problems with performance).
Cachy is based on Arch though, so unless you're ready for your system to potentially break with an update - maybe used something more stable (again - I quite liked Pop OS, it was extremely stable for me)
I've been using Arch for 1-3 years now, as far as I can remember the only time that my system "break" was caused by pacman lock got stuck somehow. Aside of that it's pretty stable in general.
> I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.
I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.
If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to half the frame rate.
But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.
I think actually Linux has come a long way and recently I actually dual booted fedora with windows and fedora was easily my main choice unless gaming.. unfortunately when updating from 41 to 42 there was clearly an issue with the GPU not having drivers for acceleration or cuda, updating the drivers bricked the OS immediately and while I could recover, I spent hours and hours on this and could never get the GPU drivers installed again without bricking it.. ultimately I realised how at mercy of drivers Linux is. I hope though that in the next few years things improve as windows is dismal to work on these days
I just had a problem with Windows and Nvidia drivers/CUDA not working properly on a two year old Windows 11 install. I had to reinstall the operating system after days of troubleshooting and attempting different things to get it operational again. It can happen on there as well.
Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781
There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.
There is more nuance to the anti-cheat systems supporting Linux argument than "it supports it but they won't use it". Turning on Linux support does weaken the security posture of the anti-cheat system, so it's not simply a decision of "it works with Linux, but they won't do it". It is moreso a question of whether the security posture changes for the game with this platform support enabled meet the business requirements. It's not a surprise that games with high MTX revenue do not turn this on, as I imagine this would be the biggest concern with this weaker security posture.
One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.
I'm not familiar with what new changes Valve has been working on in the anti-cheat space but historically most major anti-cheat systems, such as Easy Anti-Cheat, already have long included a server-side anti-cheat component. The catch rate (and overall accuracy) with both is just always going to be higher than only going with one approach.
I think you're hitting on ideal vs. constrained wants (or, at least, that's how I've always referred to them). That is: what they want to be able to allow in itself vs. what they want to allow given the trade-offs with other wants.
E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.
Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
It's been waffling back and forth but always had a "gold" rating even when I verified it was broken. I haven't tried recently (haven't really played video games in years), but there's a comment from 5 days ago saying it's broken again.
At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust.
Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.
I worked on this problem for a bit. What's going on is the game relies on the OS-provided C runtime libraries ("msvcrt"-style things) to do its math. Wine's implementation of these libraries does not match Windows's perfectly. If all players are using the same implementation, then they will agree, and there are no problems, so people think it is working. But if a player on Wine tries to play against a player on Windows, they will fall out of sync because the math errors eventually add up.
That was as far as I was able to take it. Another much more skilled dev at CW dug in a lot deeper and wrote a blog post about it[1], but as far as I know the problem remains unsolved.
Oh interesting, I always wondered what the underlying issue was and why downloading some obscure looking dll solves it.
For a practical solution, just using the Windows dlls seems to work fine. Without AoE2:DE goes out of sync immediately, with I've played hour long games.
I remember it being interesting to work on. It's been years, but if I remember right, there is some way to convince the game to dump a log of unit positions during a multiplayer match, possibly as part of its desync handling. I enabled that on both Win & Linux hosts, ran a match between the machines until they desynced, and diff'd the game's own logs, then confirmed from the Wine logs that the faulty values were coming from CRT-related math functions. It's always fun when you get to use a game's own debug utils to track down a problem.
Anyway it'd be great if the game devs included their own math libraries instead of relying on the OS's. That would fix the problem quite nicely.
It's been several months since I played but getting ucrtbase.dll always worked for me and it was the only thing I ever had to do for the game. You need to redownload it after every update because it gets wiped though.
Oos can till happen, but as you said it can also happen on Windows, hard to blame Wine for that.
Since gold means "works as good as Windows with workarounds" I think that's a correct rating.
I can only testify to oos being common in the Mac version of the original game, and I've heard it happening in the og Windows game. In DE under Windows, I've never seen it happen, so I'd be concerned if you're still seeing it occasionally.
Also, "gold" should mean that it works by default, not that you have to patch in a DLL. The only place the site even says "playable with tweaks" is in a tooltip if you hover over the gold symbol, right above a separate list of details that doesn't mention tweaks. I didn't even know until now.
We can argue all day over what a rating means, but if it would work without a tweak I'd say it should be rated platinum. (The only other thing I know is missing is Xbox live login, but I don't really care about that)
Yeah there's a lot of random issues with the different games. In case user experience is the main goal, I always recommend going with the main supported ways, which in this case would be Windows 11. I personally try things first on my Linux, but I always keep a backup Windows just in case.
Overwatch is the big one - lots of random issues with it. But basically any game with Denuvo DRM is extremely high risk, resulting in either a ban or the game not running at all.
Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful.
One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)
When I ran a two month experiment, Hogwart's Legacy and Anno 1800.
The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues.
The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out.
Isn’t pop_os shipping ancient components at this point due to their hate brained idea to try and create their own de and pinning their next release to it?
i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.
i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again.
then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again.
then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again.
now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
It's the other way around. You can do very few productive things with Windows other than software development. Almost all other professional software assume Windows.
> gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.
I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features.
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
A fair comment, but the argument I'd make against that is a lot of those creative tools are moving to the web. I personally work for Figma, and have seen that first hand. UI/UX design was entirely OSX/Windows centric for the last 40 years, and now it's platform agnostic. Even video editors are just at the nacent stage of looking at the web as an editor surface.
Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling software that's meant to stay static for the lifetime of the mill - that's not going anywhere.
No, it's definitely a win for Linux. I get it. I've dabbled in software minimalism. I love native dev. I know the web "sucks." But the range of mainstream software available for Linux has exploded now that software is moving to the web (including Electron) and I can't see how that's a bad thing from the perspective of a Linux user. Of course I'd rather open a web browser to run an app than change my entire operating system to run an app.
By using non-free software, you're compromising on politics that don't really affect anything directly - not unless great many others suddenly embrace the ideas behind Free Software.
The compromise of using SaaS in the cloud in lieu of regular, native software, is affecting both you and society directly.
Yeah, I really like my Mac, but third-party software isn't its strong suit. It's hilarious how often Apple will wholesale break like half the software in existence.
How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?
Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.
Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.
Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.
Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.
Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!
It depends, a lot (I use Bluefin, so I'll grab that one as an example)
Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)
More or less everything
- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)
- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)
- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway
- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)
- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)
For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything
Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.
Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.
It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.
I'd trade half my GPU performance for the NVIDIA drivers not freezing my system on wake-up. The new half-open ones arguably made it worse, it consistently freezes now.
If you're using DisplayPort, try switching to HDMI. (Really.) For me it made the freezes much shorter. It's a bug in their driver related to the connected monitor(s).
I had switched back to Windows after years of issues with Linux drivers, I needed a new PC, and I needed CUDA for college and tinkering.
Now, it's been barely a couple of months since I reinstalled Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks since I found out the latest release runs even worse, so this is new to me. I don't plan to use Windows at home ever again, so I could sell my GPU and buy AMD, but so far I'm simply disappointed.
Ugh, that sucks. It makes sense. I'm somewhat optimistic that as the open-sourcing effort continues, more and more of NVIDIA's driver stack will be open-source and it will see significant improvements, too.
I'm using 4070 Ti with open kernel module on Wayland.
It's MOSTLY painless. Some GNOME extensions seem to randomly hang everything on startup (I'm currently investigating which ones, I believe Dash to Dock and/or Unite are to blame) and there's a weird issue with VR when streaming via ALVR: SteamVR launches, but games crash unless I disable the second monitor (no such issues with WiVRn, so not entirely sure if it's a driver problem or not)
Besides that in my daily driving I saw no other issues.
Been using Nvidia+Wayland for years now, even on an optimus laptop.
I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues.
Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.
I feel I'm in the same boat. For several months I've been thinking my GPU was on its way out (it's a pretty old 2080 now). My desktop freezes randomly. I can log into it remotely but all the usb devices stop working and the screen goes blank. l took a good look at the logs and noticed a bunch of pageflip timeouts followed by usb disconnections. I later discovered the Nvidia forums seem to have many recent complaints (with similar logs) especially around their latest drivers and Plasma + Wayland compatibility.
StarCraft 2 definitely works on Linux, with a relatively simple act of adding it to Steam as a non-Steam title, and then letting the Proton layer do its thing.
And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows.
Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.
Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process.
With Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work.
Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.