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Comment by sgjohnson | Hacker News Reader

Or you run it because you don't want all the bloat that Windows comes with by default...

My gaming PC runs Windows 11 LTSC.

Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight. My experience with Win 10 LTSC was not terribly faster than Windows 10 Home, and night-and-day slower compared to a GNOME or KDE setup.

I suppose it's a fair play if you're contractually obligated to play Riot-published games or something, but... man. I've had better performance playing games on DXVK since 2016. Windows is a heavy hog.

It's not about performance. It's about not having Candy Crush Saga ads in the Start menu.

Just install using the "English (World)" locale.

This was sufficient justification for me

I don't follow what's going on here. I'm running current Windows 11 Pro, licenses purchased from one of the markets for under AUD$50, and turned off all the standard annoyances via setting toggles and never see an ad or weather report etc.

Systems are snappy on 6th gen i7 laptops.

Or get an edition that doesn't have all of that to begin with, and is supported for 10 years so you don't have to worry about updates mysteriously resetting the annoyance settings that you've disabled, or randomly breaking stuff.

> I'm running current Windows 11 Pro, licenses purchased from one of the markets for under AUD$50

You've probably wasted the 50 bucks. A valid product key a license does not make. Those cheap keys are usually ones for OEM licensing. If that is the case, you do not have a license.

> Using LTSC to avoid bloat is like removing the chairs and radio from your car to reduce weight.

LOL, I don't think that's how you meant it, but 100% agreed those are some of the first things to go when you wanna have fun in a car.

Windows LTSC is an amazing experience compared to vanilla windows, it's actually a decent OS that you can more or less control and you don't have to spend a weekend debloating and figuing out how to rip out cortana and ads and all the other garbage.

I considered that on my new gaming PC, but I installed Arch and it plays every game that I care about just fine.

I have a dedicated Windows 11 gaming laptop and I'm about at my breaking point of putting another drive in it to test out the games that I care about on Linux. Windows was tolerable to use just for gaming, but the hoops that you have to go through to do some things in Windows are ridiculous. Removing the Game Bar (and stopping Windows from bugging you about it afterwards) is way more difficult than it should be. Also the driver update ping-pong that happens with my Intel video card is maddening. I'll have the driver fully updated and functional, then Windows Update periodically decides to downgrade it to one that's ~2 years old (which breaks stuff.)

If you're using steam, the ProtonDB website [1] has a feature where you can easily hook it up to your Steam account and get a full accounting of your entire collection on one screen.

I don't want to overpromise anything, but ProtonDB is if anything conservative; I find things working better than expected more often than I am disappointed by a listing now. Games with heavy anti-cheat for online multiplayer are often not a good bet, and really old stuff is sometimes not very well supported (although even so, surprisingly well), but Linux gaming quietly snuck up when nobody was looking and one step at a time has become something where I fairly casually just expect games to work in Linux now, without me having to do much more than poke Steam to use Proton manually sometimes.

[1]: https://www.protondb.com/

Single GPU passthrough my solution to any game that requires kernel level anticheat (lmao, no, you're not getting it on my Linux box, silly malware game devs) or does not run under Proton.

Run Linux on the host system all the time, run Windows in a VM only when necessary, and give Windows a GPU only when necessary.

Sounds great! Which VM can do that?

Linux KVM. I recommend the following guide if you want an opinionated (positive) take on it: https://github.com/martinopiaggi/Single-GPU-Passthrough-for-...

So I assume you have two GPUs, one less powerful for the Linux desktop, and a more powerful one for gaming?

Can you switch more powerful GPU between passthrough and playing native Linux games without a wayland/x11 restart?

I actually do have two GPUs in my machine, but that wasn't my initial plan when I built this machine. I use the iGPU in my CPU to display my desktop and use my dGPU for Steam under Linux. When I want to run Windows I can unhook the dGPU from Linux, pass it through to Windows, and then both my Linux graphical session and Windows run at the same time. If you have a single GPU then the act of unbinding from Linux it to pass it through to a VM terminates your Linux graphical session (everything not under that graphical session keeps running) until you exit the VM and rebind the GPU to Linux.

As for the second part - yes. Typically you want to export the environment variable DRI_PRIME and set it to the index of the card you want to use to render and it will be displayed on the currently active display card.

The steps might be slightly different if you're using an nVidia card - both of my GPUs are AMD.

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