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Comment by futuraperdita | Hacker News Reader

> I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”

This comment literally asks him to go check to see if his games work with Linux, and that he needs specific hardware for that compatibility to be meaningfully successful. The alternative is he just uses Windows and plays his games. It's exactly the type of "extra steps" that he wants to avoid.

I use Linux systems daily, and every now and then I'll go FOSS-zealot enough to go rip my Thinkpad back out of the closet and port everything over. Then, I'm no longer interoperable with any part of society that isn't involved in a fringe movement of the Linux laptop, and then go back, somewhat disappointingly, to my MacBook Pro.

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Unfortunately that is the standard behaviour every time some of us complain about Linux Desktop.

Just because we complain doesn't mean we are Linux newbies.

Many of us do use Linux at work, have been there since early days, myself kernel 1.0.9, do have multiple UNIX variants experience, what we lack is the willingness to keep doing the same over and over again on our free time.

Yet, a single complaint and there comes the same answer as back in the Usenet days.

It's standard behavior for a reason; gaming on Windows blows. It was user-hostile in the DOS era, user-hostile in the Steam Machine era, and it's user hostile today.

Go look at the reviews of the Xbox handhelds - every single one always mentions how bad the OS is. Windows is no longer a selling point outside the hyper-obsessive purist niche that is waning with the proliferation of hardware-based cheats. Gaming-based hardware is getting docked points for not running Linux as a standard, Windows 11 is a liability.

Complain until the cows come home, really. It just makes you look that much dumber next to the 8-year-olds installing and playing Metroidvanias on their Steam Deck.

Those 8 year olds are enjoying Proton, and will be very sad teenagers when Microsoft decides it has been enough.

You don't really need to check any more. Games just work, unless it's a competitive multiplayer FPS with kernel anticheat. In theory you should check but I've not run into any issues for years now.

It takes like 2 seconds to check if a game is supported. How is that different from checking the recommended system requirements.

And if the game isn’t supported? What then? Not buy it? Buy another PC and use windows for that?

Last time I tried a dual boot UEFI system with windows and Linux on separate drives, I spent three weeks trawling message boards for half answers from DenverCoder9 only to give up.

> Not buy it?

That is a solid option but alas voting with your wallet can be difficult (social reasons etc.) The only thing that needs Windows for me is Valorant. Everything else runs on bazite.

> UEFI system with windows and Linux

That is weird. Were you trying to have some selection with grub?

Just having two drives and selecting a boot device in the Bios/Uefi of the MB has worked stable for at least four years with this configuration. Make your default Linux or Windows and only use the MB for one-time boots of the other one.

Last year I made the dumb decision to buy a Gigabyte Brix without really researching Linux support, after several months of trying to make its UEFI recognising Linux partitions on M2 drives instead of external USB it ended up on the recycling centre, as I eventually damaged the motherboard.

Should have known better.

> Should have known better.

Better than what, modifying your UEFI to forcibly recognize your GPT? Once you reach that point you should know that you're heading towards paperweight territory.

Bother myself with the usual endless hours tracking computers that are supposed to work with Linux, noting serial numbers down to be sure what exact models to buy and the kind of stuff I was doing back in 2000's, when I cared.

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