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Comment by drnick1 | Hacker News Reader

The best way to debloat Windows is to switch to Linux. I think that GNOME3 is now more polished than either Windows or Mac, and 95% of Windows games just run out of the box through Proton.

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Proton is getting there but even so, it doesn't make Linux+Proton a drop-in replacement for people who have used Windows all their lives.

For people with more technical background, who are enthusiasts about computers and software - sure. For a lot of casual users who need things to 'just work' the way they always have, asking them to swap to an entirely new OS is nonsense.

I'm considering it myself but even with years of experience on Linux I'm still cautious because of a lot of edge cases where something I use now wouldn't work or wouldn't work well in Linux.

While the 95% figure is possibly correct when considering all games since the beginning of Windows, the remaining 5% includes most modern multiplayer games.

This isn't remotely true, it only really includes AAA "competitive" games. My solution here is to do without them; I would have probably bought BF6 had it supported Linux, but now that there are thousands of other games that work perfectly on Linux, it's a very minor loss. With Linux quickly becoming too big to ignore, sooner or later game studios will simply no longer be able to ignore that market. For now, it's only a few %, but it's growing, and still represents millions of sales. When lost revenue will exceed the cost of developing a compatible anti-cheat, Linux will be suddenly supported.

I would've expected this kind of inane take on Reddit or X, not here. Or on SO where somebody asks "How do I do X?" and is told "X sucks, you want to use Y".

Not inane at all, just your phrasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

This is not about "X sucks", but the very first questions from an engineering perspective should be whY? What do you want to accomplish? Is X actually a good approach towards Y?

If it turns out that trying to shoehorn X into kinda accomplishing Y is very hard work, then suggesting to use X2 instead is a perfectly sensible suggestion.

If you have a hard constraint that you must use X, even if it does not fit well to Y, fair enough. Then you add that as a reply or state it in the beginning.

IMO Gnome is one of the worst DEs out there, its so ugly and unfriendly to use, everything is hidden and hard to find.

I can’t take this advice too seriously if you really think GNOME3 is more polished than Windows or macOS. Both of the latter have gotten worse over the years undoubtedly but GNOME3 is fundamentally flawed and bad.

Care to elaborate on what makes GNOME "fundamentally flawed and bad?" I used to dual boot, and every time I was running Windows I thought the UI was terrible compared to GNOME. Windows has a very inconsistent UI these days, partly because Microsoft keeps changing the most visible parts of it, but completely ignores system utilities that still use XP-era icons.

The author has done a great job at highlighting some of the more egregious parts here: https://woltman.com/gnome-bad/

Yes and no. No, because sometimes Windows cannot be reasonably substituted, to no fault to the user. The usual suspects, multiplayer games, some software, when you need complete interoperability, etc.

By the way, that 95% is lower actually. If you count ProtonDB's Plat + Gold for the top 1000 played games on Steam, it's 81%. For plat+gold+silver, it's 89%.

Source: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

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