Also while Apples software quality has definitely diminished over the years, Windows in the same period has utterly CRATERED. Like I get along fine with 11 for my gaming PC but with every single update one feature or another becomes notably broken.
My job gave me an expensive high-specced laptop with Windows on it. This is the first time I am stuck using Windows daily. It's W10. With Windows Defender and a bunch of windows, it starts to slowly become unusable. Today, it blue screened for me just fixing again (and again and again) the bluetooth headphones never gets automatically switched to when I turn them on. Forget about having Visual Studio open on it for an extended period of time.
Meanwhile, my 7-year old laptop with Fedora on it I type this is wonderfully snappy and stable. I started to get tempted to actually switch back to a Mac just to get some predictability and stability, but I have avoided macs for years. (And - never having to deal with constant line ending issues)
All I hear from other co-workers is how their perfectly specced laptops lag with Windows. It's freaking Stockholm Syndrome here!
oof I re-read this comment. I would only switch to the mac because the company didn't setup any of the required security rigamarole to run on their internal network, but otherwise, nah. I dropped that years ago - expensive, disposable machines to run emacs, a terminal and a browser ...
Might be, still I no longer feel like baby sitting Linux on laptops as I used to, yes I had another go at it just last year I know how well it works, and I will never pay the Apple tax outside assigned work laptops.
Windows is indeed an execrable shitshow. Every aspect of it assaults the user with incompetence or outright hostility.
First is the endless badgering to log in, LOG IN, LOGGGG INNNNN with an asinine Microsoft account. If you can tolerate that and actually get the OS running, you're wading through a wonderland of UI regressions and defects.
The default hiding and disabling of options is infuriating. Try showing content from your Windows computer on a TV, for example. You plug your HDMI cable in, and you can select the TV as an external monitor in a reasonably logical manner. Great.
But wait... the sound is still coming from the laptop speakers. So you go to Sound in the system settings. Click on the drop-down for available devices. NOPE; the only device is the laptop speakers.
So you start hunting through "advanced settings" or some such BS. And buried in there you find the TV, detected all along, but DISABLED BY DEFAULT. WHY??? Not auto-selecting it for output is one thing, but why is it DISABLED and HIDDEN?
This is the kind of shit I have to talk my parents through over the phone so they can watch their PBS subscription on their TV. The sheer stupidity of today's Windows UI isn't just annoying, but it's demoralizing to everyday people who blame THEMSELVES for not being "computer-savvy" or slow learners. NO; it's Microsoft's monumental design incompetence and user-hostile behavior.
Microsoft doesn't get the relentless excoriation it deserves for its miserable user experience. There's no excuse for it.
I can't say I've ever had HDMI audio mystery-disabled when I try and use it, that's for sure a new one for me. That said the entire audio stack is an utter fucking nightmare. Selecting sound devices usually works, unless the game/software you're using either isn't set up to know about it, or isn't being told by Windows, either or. Then of course there's the fun game you play having two HDMI displays where Windows will constantly re-enable one you've disabled because it doesn't have any fucking speakers on it.
Win 11 must have some sort of contextual HDMI audio switching where it figures out exactly where you want your audio to go and then does the opposite. Because my Win 11 work laptop loves to re-enable HDMI audio and make it the active audio connection despite the fact that neither of my monitors have built in speakers.
Fedora atomic distributions in general are great. I recommend Bluefin-dx over Bazzite (they’re both GNOME-based Fedora Atomic from the same group— universal blue) for developers, because it’s really easy to install the packages that Bazzite gives you, and it comes pre-installed with Docker.
Yep Bazzite is great. But the difference between them is mostly just the packages installed. To me it’s easier to install the gaming related packages from Bazzite onto Bluefin.
I have a problem with Docker sockets while installing onto Bazzite, and didn’t care enough to look further into it.
Is it comparable to gaming on Windows? Last time I tried the performance wasn't as good for some games (Deadlock) and it took ages to compile shader (it takes 30 seconds on Windows with the same specs)
I saw long shader compile times for at least one game last month, might have been Deadlock. I have a Radeon RX 7600 & Ryzen 9 7900X3D for reference.
There is mention on the arch wiki about enabling multi-threaded compiles, but also I have read you perhaps dont even need to precompile them now and possibly get better performance as the JIT compiles via a different vulkan framework (VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library).
I disabled pre-caching (which effects the compile too afaict) and never noticed any stuttering, possibly past some level of compute it's inconsequential. I also noticed that sometimes the launcher would say "pre-compiling" but actually be downloading the cache which was a lot slower on my internet.
Certainly on my (very) old intel system with a GTX1060, Sekiro would try to recompile shaders every launch, pegging my system at 99% and running for an hour. I just started skipping it and never really felt it was an issue, Sekiro still ran fine.
