In yet another move against user freedom, Microsoft has implemented a technical control to prevent users from opening links that Microsoft wants to open in its Edge browser, in the browser of...
In yet another move against user freedom, Microsoft has implemented a technical control to prevent users from opening links that Microsoft wants to open in its Edge browser, in the browser of their choice instead.
Something changed between Windows 11 builds 22483 and 22494 (both Windows Insider Preview builds.) [...] You can no longer bypass Microsoft Edge using apps like EdgeDeflector.
EdgeDeflector is an app that intercepts microsoft-edge:// links — found throughout the Windows 10 and 11 shells and other Microsoft apps — and redirects them to regular https:// links that open in your default web browser. Microsoft uses these links instead of regular web links to force users to open them in its Microsoft Edge web browser. When opened, Edge will aggressively push the user to set it as the default web browser. Edge will even “declutter” your browser settings, as Microsoft calls it, and unpin competitors from the taskbar and replace the pinned apps with Edge.
Oh man. The backlash Apple got back in the day for putting that U2 album into everyone's library was pretty massive. I can only imagine what response stuff like this gets when it hits the...
Oh man. The backlash Apple got back in the day for putting that U2 album into everyone's library was pretty massive. I can only imagine what response stuff like this gets when it hits the mainstream tech sites and such
I don't know if it will get that much steam? I think people's first reaction is to assume this affects http:// or https:// links which AFAIK it does not. It's still scummy but how often are you...
I don't know if it will get that much steam? I think people's first reaction is to assume this affects http:// or https:// links which AFAIK it does not. It's still scummy but how often are you even getting web links from the Windows shell? Clicking on help links and support pages?
It's pretty constant in the interface, even on Win10 - anywhere you need to modify an aspect of your Microsoft account, read documentation on what an option does, look at details about an item in...
It's pretty constant in the interface, even on Win10 - anywhere you need to modify an aspect of your Microsoft account, read documentation on what an option does, look at details about an item in the Microsoft Store, or even (depending on the way you deal with them) update a driver, you get punted into Edge.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's a bizarre decision and yet another reason to avoid Windows. I just think for the average Windows user those aren't going to be daily use cases so the friction for...
I mean don't get me wrong, it's a bizarre decision and yet another reason to avoid Windows. I just think for the average Windows user those aren't going to be daily use cases so the friction for them that is introduced by this change is going to be small.
10 is 'good enough' for me. With 11, I can't even move the taskbar, shrink it or place my brightness shortcut on the taskbar. I don't know what they're thinking with the dumbing down of 11. It's...
10 is 'good enough' for me. With 11, I can't even move the taskbar, shrink it or place my brightness shortcut on the taskbar. I don't know what they're thinking with the dumbing down of 11. It's the only "upgrade" after using Windows for 25 years where I downgraded back to previous.
even disregarding all the downsides, it just looks ugly. continuing the tradition of making sure windows after 7 never having a consistent, or even good, theme for system components i can make fun...
even disregarding all the downsides, it just looks ugly. continuing the tradition of making sure windows after 7 never having a consistent, or even good, theme for system components
i can make fun of kde, the biggest desktop to have "lacking" look and feel by default imo, for all i want (haha oversized panel clock, haha too many borders, haha ugly alignment), but if i were forced to choose between the two on gunpoint, kde would be my choice (maybe after when they fix their papercuts on wayland on amd) considering the complete mess the windows 11 look and feel is
back when windows 10 released, i actually upgraded day one. i still remember modifying my system to get the GWX thing early, the same thing the rest of the world was doing all it can to remove, and stayed up until ~3am to make sure it installed properly on my old 5400rpm hard drive
now, even for things i need windows for (i have a vm with gpu passthrough should i need it), i am not looking forward to the five years or so of the support period ending (though i pirate ltsc anyway, maybe that would be supported for more)
If I don't play anything with anti-cheat protection, is there any reason not to switch now? I'm curious how Proton performance compares to native windows these days. If the perf is close...
If I don't play anything with anti-cheat protection, is there any reason not to switch now? I'm curious how Proton performance compares to native windows these days. If the perf is close enough/high enough on current gen hardware then maybe I'll just migrate to Linux...
If you have any "must have" games, check their reports on ProtonDB. It's definitely a bit of YMMV situation if there are particular games that you definitely can't do without. On the other hand,...
If you have any "must have" games, check their reports on ProtonDB. It's definitely a bit of YMMV situation if there are particular games that you definitely can't do without.
On the other hand, if you're more just interested in games in general, Proton makes thousands of games run nearly flawlessly, so there's plenty of choice for stuff that works. I don't really miss the ones that won't, because there's always dozens of other things I could be playing instead, so I just play those.
I mostly play indie single-player games and have been running Linux full-time now for two years, and I'm thrilled with how well it works. There's zero setup. You just install the game in Steam and click Play. I'd say there's about a 75% chance that a given game will run without effort, and that's slowly going up over time as they improve Proton. From what I gather, they're really going in on it to prepare for the Steam Deck, so I expect to see huge leaps forward soon.
this comment is mainly focused on windows games running via wine/proton. native games will be very great experiences most of the time, but exceptions apply where using windows builds under wine...
this comment is mainly focused on windows games running via wine/proton. native games will be very great experiences most of the time, but exceptions apply where using windows builds under wine might work better (hl1 recreation "black mesa" is a good example)
DX9/10/11 translation is pretty high performance if your graphics hardware supports vulkan. DX12 is also claimed to be pretty high performance with vulkan, but i don't have any personal experience with that so i can't confirm it. opengl and vulkan are basically "free" as linux drivers have native support for them
games not working at all are mainly results of four things (exceptions may apply)
multiplayer anticheat (which seems like not a big deal to you)
singleplayer copy protection (most work fine, but new methods might need a few weeks to get working)
windows media foundation (you might get working with some winetricks or whatnot, but valve was working on a "just works" workaround involving server side re-encoding the last time i heard anything about it)
new games might need a few weeks to get working, popular ones will be heavily worked on (some alternate wine/proton builds like gloriouseggroll's or tkglitch's versions might get them working before)
if the games you play are primarily on steam, you won't need to tweak too much as steam does all the wine stuff in the background with their proton fork of wine. though i'd still recommend looking stuff up on https://www.protondb.com/ before switching
aside from gaming, check your other software for support too. the papercuts and clunky software can be worked around or learned, but incompatible software might be a dealbreaker
Yeah I almost exclusively play singleplayer games via steam. There are maybe...4 games I have outside of steam, or which use anti-cheat that I care about? And I don't mind if I have to keep those...
Yeah I almost exclusively play singleplayer games via steam. There are maybe...4 games I have outside of steam, or which use anti-cheat that I care about? And I don't mind if I have to keep those on a secondary partition because I'll probably need that for some of the engineering software I use anyways. But it's not something I would want to rely on often for gaming purposes.
I have an RTX 3070 for my GPU so I should be able to play the latest Vulkan or DX12 games, but bringing up different versions of DX makes me wonder about a couple things:
How is the performance for older games anyways? I've been playing modded Morrowind in my free time lately and it already gets kinda choppy at times. It's fine for the most part, but I'm not sure how I'd feel if it got noticeably worse.
How is the support for things like DLSS and Raytracing under Linux/Proton? Or even VR for that matter? I know from watching LTT that NVIDIAs drivers seem to leave something to be desired and/or be difficult to use, but I'm not sure how that affects these features.
EDIT:
Also the big thing that worries me about Linux is multi-screen support. I have three screens and Luke from LTT struggled with two, so advice would be appreciated on that front.
For what it's worth, I use two monitors plus a laptop screen with both Pop OS and Kubuntu and have no issues beyond the normal "it's weird to have two large 1080p screens and one tiny 1080p screen...
Also the big thing that worries me about Linux is multi-screen support.
For what it's worth, I use two monitors plus a laptop screen with both Pop OS and Kubuntu and have no issues beyond the normal "it's weird to have two large 1080p screens and one tiny 1080p screen next to each other" thing.
How is the performance for older games anyways? I've been playing modded Morrowind in my free time lately and it already gets kinda choppy at times. It's fine for the most part, but I'm not sure how I'd feel if it got noticeably worse.
Morrowind's bottleneck is not going to be the way it talks to the GPU (DX version, Proton, etc) - it was designed for a much slower GPU and CPU-GPU communication speed.
I know from watching LTT that NVIDIAs drivers seem to leave something to be desired and/or be difficult to use
This is one reason I recommend Pop!_OS from System76, as you can download an installer that has all the nvidia drivers set up for you.
yep, that'll work, though nvidia drivers on some distributions can be more of a hassle, pop as recommended by mtset has an iso with them pre-installed, which is probably the easiest way to get...
I have an RTX 3070 for my GPU so I should be able to play the latest Vulkan or DX12 games
yep, that'll work, though nvidia drivers on some distributions can be more of a hassle, pop as recommended by mtset has an iso with them pre-installed, which is probably the easiest way to get them working
How is the performance for older games anyways?
I don't know specifically about Morrowind, but older games should mean that your hardware being new enough will probably offset any performance issues graphics API translation could imply. For compatibility, Wine should have pretty good compatibility, though I personally don't have much experience with them so I cannot comment on it.
How is the support for things like DLSS and Raytracing under Linux/Proton?
DLSS seems to be experimental, but available, if my quick search is accurate. Ray tracing should work though. I can't comment on it though, I have a slightly older AMD gpu.
Or even VR for that matter?
Depends on your headset. I know Valve ones (or any other ones that work with SteamVR) "work", though I don't know how well they do, as I don't have any desktop VR hardware either.
I know from watching LTT that NVIDIAs drivers seem to leave something to be desired and/or be difficult to use, but I'm not sure how that affects these features.
The main thing with Nvidia is the installation and updates possibly being headaches, but once you get them working it should be pretty smooth sailing.
Also the big thing that worries me about Linux is multi-screen support. I have three screens and Luke from LTT struggled with two, so advice would be appreciated on that front.
It seems to work. It'll work best if your monitors are the same DPI (not the exact value, but mainly about needing scaling or not) and framerate.
I use a 75hz Freesync 1080 monitor as my main, with a 60hz "regular" 1080 monitor on my right, and it works perfectly on sway (Wayland). Nvidia drivers support Wayland in a very limited capacity so far (it's coming soon!), but once they do I expect a vast majority of monitor setups to just work.
That said, with Nvidia, X.org will most likely be the best choice for you (and in fact, the default for Nvidia), which might need a bit more fiddling to get "interesting" setups like mine working (particularly, the different framerates), but for the "best case" i mentioned above, X.org should just work.
My monitors are 1080p to the left and right and one 4k monitor in the middle, all at 60hz. So there might be some problems for the moment. I guess if Wayland works better with Nvidia in the future...
My monitors are 1080p to the left and right and one 4k monitor in the middle, all at 60hz. So there might be some problems for the moment. I guess if Wayland works better with Nvidia in the future it will be alright though, and I probably wouldn't be making the jump just yet anyways.
I do feel like I have to ask what coming soon™ looks like in the Linux world though. Is this something that will be fleshed out in a couple years? Or are we talking more like a few months? It's really hard to gauge statements like this without any real experience in the Linux community.
This is another reason to go with Pop. It uses a recent version of GNOME, which has supposed for something called fractional scaling (some monitors have icons, text, etc at different sizes which...
My monitors are 1080p to the left and right and one 4k monitor in the middle, all at 60hz. So there might be some problems for the moment.
This is another reason to go with Pop. It uses a recent version of GNOME, which has supposed for something called fractional scaling (some monitors have icons, text, etc at different sizes which are not integer multiples of the sizes on other monitors) which is what you want to make this a nice use case. And, I should stress, you don't need to know about fractional scaling - just to use an OS that supports it.
I guess if Wayland works better with Nvidia in the future it will be alright though, and I probably wouldn't be making the jump just yet anyways.
I wouldn't worry about it, honestly. There are very, very few things that don't work with X, and again if you use the Pop OS Nvidia installer it should Just Work.
I do feel like I have to ask what coming soon™ looks like in the Linux world though. Is this something that will be fleshed out in a couple years?
Normally, coming soon means coming soon - people tend to pitch in and help when they want stuff. Unfortunately Nvidia is a private company that does everything closed-source, so... This particular thing isn't on Linux time, it's on Nvidia time.
GNOME should make it "just work", though if you don't like GNOME and want to switch to something else, you might get some problems. I don't have any need for scaling so I don't know where you...
My monitors are 1080p to the left and right and one 4k monitor in the middle, all at 60hz. So there might be some problems for the moment.
GNOME should make it "just work", though if you don't like GNOME and want to switch to something else, you might get some problems. I don't have any need for scaling so I don't know where you might encounter problems, but I've heard on the internet that some scaled stuff might look "blurry", esp. when using fractional scaling (1.5x or so) instead of integer (2x)
I do feel like I have to ask what coming soon™ looks like in the Linux world though
For this particular thing, people are just waiting for a driver release from Nvidia. The last pieces of support on driver side was claimed to be implemented ~2 months ago on an unreleased (?) driver version.
After that, the problem will be on the desktops themselves to work around the quirks of Nvidia's driver. the wlroots project that the desktop I use (sway) is based on, has announced they will not work around these quirks, but I know that the popular desktops (GNOME, KDE, etc.) all have reasons to support Nvidia.
(Support needed by desktops because Wayland isn't actually as single thing like Xorg but at least 4 different implementations agreeing on a standard but that is more technical detail than needed for this)
So, if I were to estimate, probably mid-2022 at the very latest assuming Nvidia doesn't do anything unexpected
For other things, it really differs and there probably are a few "coming soon"s that haven't come soon, but that depends on a lot of stuff so there isn't a concrete "Yes, they deliver on their promises, or No, don't expect that soon"
I've been playing Morrowind with about 180 mods using OpenMW on my Debian machine and I get about 45fps on my 1070/i5. In terms of multi monitor support I run three screens but I only use one for...
I've been playing Morrowind with about 180 mods using OpenMW on my Debian machine and I get about 45fps on my 1070/i5.
In terms of multi monitor support I run three screens but I only use one for games.
Performance is there, absolutely, though I haven't compared in absolute numbers. I haven't tried using origin or Uplay games, but steam works flawlessly on 95% of my games. I have a dualboot...
Performance is there, absolutely, though I haven't compared in absolute numbers. I haven't tried using origin or Uplay games, but steam works flawlessly on 95% of my games. I have a dualboot system just in case, which I last used 60 days ago.
Go give it a try. Manjaro is working well for me, simple to set up (but then again I'm an experienced linux user by now). Pop is another good alternative from what I can tell, as should be any mainstream "batteries included" distro I guess. And after the other thread, I kinda wanna try Nix, but for different reasons.
I do want to say that Pop is my go-to pick for 99.9% of people, and would be my pick for @SunSpotter. All the distros you mention are great but Pop is the slickest and has good, totally painless...
I do want to say that Pop is my go-to pick for 99.9% of people, and would be my pick for @SunSpotter. All the distros you mention are great but Pop is the slickest and has good, totally painless Nvidia drivers.
In my experience Proton is a little finicky but it's better than the old Wine days of running Steam itself in Wine and then praying that the default Wine config works with each game. It's all down...
In my experience Proton is a little finicky but it's better than the old Wine days of running Steam itself in Wine and then praying that the default Wine config works with each game. It's all down to each individual game. A good number actually have native Linux support as well.
As you might have gathered from the recent post about Mr. Tech Tips' attempt at gaming on Linux you'll need to be motivated to get everything working. You can get lucky - or you can spend hours getting audio working. I would also be very careful about interacting with parts of the system that are foreign to you. I learned how not to bork a Linux install through years of trial by fire. The guard rails are better now than before but it's certainly not going to be a hassle-free experience.
I would caveat this with, if you are in the market for a new computer, you can have a completely hassle-free experience by purchasing a System76 Thelio desktop or any one of their or StarLabs'...
I would caveat this with, if you are in the market for a new computer, you can have a completely hassle-free experience by purchasing a System76 Thelio desktop or any one of their or StarLabs' excellent laptops. I reviewed the Thelio r1 on my blog.
I've used both for ages. Only reason I kept a PC was to do some gaming, but nowadays I tend to play on my Xbox and mostly use my Mac for music production and work. Audio interface stuff is miles...
I've used both for ages. Only reason I kept a PC was to do some gaming, but nowadays I tend to play on my Xbox and mostly use my Mac for music production and work.
Audio interface stuff is miles better on Mac and that's what currently matters most for me.
Hoping it will be for me as well. Unknowingly made the mistake of purchasing a VR headset that only works with Windows, if not for that I would have at least tried to make the switch already.
Hoping it will be for me as well. Unknowingly made the mistake of purchasing a VR headset that only works with Windows, if not for that I would have at least tried to make the switch already.
In other recent news, MS got some bad press when Firefox hit the store because Firefox was far from being the first result. Some of this I can believe is coincidence but now I'm starting to...
In other recent news, MS got some bad press when Firefox hit the store because Firefox was far from being the first result. Some of this I can believe is coincidence but now I'm starting to believe it could be some sort of corporate malice. Maybe I'm too naive in that it took so long to believe such a thing.
that one feels like incompetence to me. the microsoft store had, through it's entire existence, so many scams and "guide" apps that it definitely feels like they have "num of apps" as their...
that one feels like incompetence to me. the microsoft store had, through it's entire existence, so many scams and "guide" apps that it definitely feels like they have "num of apps" as their biggest marketing stat, instead of, yknow, quality
to be fair, MS is not alone, google play also has a similar issue, it's just that their search algorithms work well enough for the common cases to bring the real apps on top, but you start scrolling down, it gets weird
i don't have any experience with apple's store, but f-droid is definitely the best store i've used EVEN with it's current lackluster search, though the requirements it has from apps definitely shows on the low number of available apps, particularly for more "advanced" things phones can do
I'm sure this is especially true of the Windows store, but I feel like every single app store (apple's included) has this problem and does absolutely nothing about it. Even Xbox and Switches have...
the microsoft store had, through it's entire existence, so many scams and "guide" apps that it definitely feels like they have "num of apps" as their biggest marketing stat, instead of, yknow, quality
I'm sure this is especially true of the Windows store, but I feel like every single app store (apple's included) has this problem and does absolutely nothing about it. Even Xbox and Switches have this problem. If what you're after isn't super popular or explicitly searched for, the stores tend to be almost unusable because of the number of garbage present.
They know regulation takes years, during which I imagine they hope to recapture some of the browser market. They might also be banking on the hesitance of US antitrust regulation in recent years....
They know regulation takes years, during which I imagine they hope to recapture some of the browser market.
They might also be banking on the hesitance of US antitrust regulation in recent years. I wonder how they plan to handle the EU though...
I think they expect another such lawsuit can be averted with sufficient lobbying, and that the risk of antitrust action is outweighed by the ad and data revenue they'll accrue.
I think they expect another such lawsuit can be averted with sufficient lobbying, and that the risk of antitrust action is outweighed by the ad and data revenue they'll accrue.
In yet another move against user freedom, Microsoft has implemented a technical control to prevent users from opening links that Microsoft wants to open in its Edge browser, in the browser of their choice instead.
Do you want anti-trust action, Microsoft? Because that's how you get anti-trust action.
Oh man. The backlash Apple got back in the day for putting that U2 album into everyone's library was pretty massive. I can only imagine what response stuff like this gets when it hits the mainstream tech sites and such
I don't know if it will get that much steam? I think people's first reaction is to assume this affects http:// or https:// links which AFAIK it does not. It's still scummy but how often are you even getting web links from the Windows shell? Clicking on help links and support pages?
It's pretty constant in the interface, even on Win10 - anywhere you need to modify an aspect of your Microsoft account, read documentation on what an option does, look at details about an item in the Microsoft Store, or even (depending on the way you deal with them) update a driver, you get punted into Edge.
I mean don't get me wrong, it's a bizarre decision and yet another reason to avoid Windows. I just think for the average Windows user those aren't going to be daily use cases so the friction for them that is introduced by this change is going to be small.
No argument there, absolutely. I don't think this will ruin anyone's life, it's just immoral and deeply annoying.
If it causes significant numbers of users to change their default browser, it only has to cause sufficient friction once.
Looks like 10 is going to be my last windows.
10 is 'good enough' for me. With 11, I can't even move the taskbar, shrink it or place my brightness shortcut on the taskbar. I don't know what they're thinking with the dumbing down of 11. It's the only "upgrade" after using Windows for 25 years where I downgraded back to previous.
Wait, really?? That sucks, my home theater PC needs to have the taskbar on the right side for ergonomics... I guess it's on 10 forever!
even disregarding all the downsides, it just looks ugly. continuing the tradition of making sure windows after 7 never having a consistent, or even good, theme for system components
i can make fun of kde, the biggest desktop to have "lacking" look and feel by default imo, for all i want (haha oversized panel clock, haha too many borders, haha ugly alignment), but if i were forced to choose between the two on gunpoint, kde would be my choice (maybe after when they fix their papercuts on wayland on amd) considering the complete mess the windows 11 look and feel is
back when windows 10 released, i actually upgraded day one. i still remember modifying my system to get the GWX thing early, the same thing the rest of the world was doing all it can to remove, and stayed up until ~3am to make sure it installed properly on my old 5400rpm hard drive
now, even for things i need windows for (i have a vm with gpu passthrough should i need it), i am not looking forward to the five years or so of the support period ending (though i pirate ltsc anyway, maybe that would be supported for more)
As soon as we get that proton anticheat I’m off to Linux land.
If I don't play anything with anti-cheat protection, is there any reason not to switch now? I'm curious how Proton performance compares to native windows these days. If the perf is close enough/high enough on current gen hardware then maybe I'll just migrate to Linux...
If you have any "must have" games, check their reports on ProtonDB. It's definitely a bit of YMMV situation if there are particular games that you definitely can't do without.
On the other hand, if you're more just interested in games in general, Proton makes thousands of games run nearly flawlessly, so there's plenty of choice for stuff that works. I don't really miss the ones that won't, because there's always dozens of other things I could be playing instead, so I just play those.
I mostly play indie single-player games and have been running Linux full-time now for two years, and I'm thrilled with how well it works. There's zero setup. You just install the game in Steam and click Play. I'd say there's about a 75% chance that a given game will run without effort, and that's slowly going up over time as they improve Proton. From what I gather, they're really going in on it to prepare for the Steam Deck, so I expect to see huge leaps forward soon.
this comment is mainly focused on windows games running via wine/proton. native games will be very great experiences most of the time, but exceptions apply where using windows builds under wine might work better (hl1 recreation "black mesa" is a good example)
DX9/10/11 translation is pretty high performance if your graphics hardware supports vulkan. DX12 is also claimed to be pretty high performance with vulkan, but i don't have any personal experience with that so i can't confirm it. opengl and vulkan are basically "free" as linux drivers have native support for them
games not working at all are mainly results of four things (exceptions may apply)
if the games you play are primarily on steam, you won't need to tweak too much as steam does all the wine stuff in the background with their proton fork of wine. though i'd still recommend looking stuff up on https://www.protondb.com/ before switching
if the games you want to use don't use steam, https://lutris.net/ is also an interesting way to get them running, and "epic games" can be used via https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher
aside from gaming, check your other software for support too. the papercuts and clunky software can be worked around or learned, but incompatible software might be a dealbreaker
Yeah I almost exclusively play singleplayer games via steam. There are maybe...4 games I have outside of steam, or which use anti-cheat that I care about? And I don't mind if I have to keep those on a secondary partition because I'll probably need that for some of the engineering software I use anyways. But it's not something I would want to rely on often for gaming purposes.
I have an RTX 3070 for my GPU so I should be able to play the latest Vulkan or DX12 games, but bringing up different versions of DX makes me wonder about a couple things:
How is the performance for older games anyways? I've been playing modded Morrowind in my free time lately and it already gets kinda choppy at times. It's fine for the most part, but I'm not sure how I'd feel if it got noticeably worse.
How is the support for things like DLSS and Raytracing under Linux/Proton? Or even VR for that matter? I know from watching LTT that NVIDIAs drivers seem to leave something to be desired and/or be difficult to use, but I'm not sure how that affects these features.
EDIT:
Also the big thing that worries me about Linux is multi-screen support. I have three screens and Luke from LTT struggled with two, so advice would be appreciated on that front.
For what it's worth, I use two monitors plus a laptop screen with both Pop OS and Kubuntu and have no issues beyond the normal "it's weird to have two large 1080p screens and one tiny 1080p screen next to each other" thing.
Morrowind's bottleneck is not going to be the way it talks to the GPU (DX version, Proton, etc) - it was designed for a much slower GPU and CPU-GPU communication speed.
This is one reason I recommend Pop!_OS from System76, as you can download an installer that has all the nvidia drivers set up for you.
yep, that'll work, though nvidia drivers on some distributions can be more of a hassle, pop as recommended by mtset has an iso with them pre-installed, which is probably the easiest way to get them working
I don't know specifically about Morrowind, but older games should mean that your hardware being new enough will probably offset any performance issues graphics API translation could imply. For compatibility, Wine should have pretty good compatibility, though I personally don't have much experience with them so I cannot comment on it.
DLSS seems to be experimental, but available, if my quick search is accurate. Ray tracing should work though. I can't comment on it though, I have a slightly older AMD gpu.
Depends on your headset. I know Valve ones (or any other ones that work with SteamVR) "work", though I don't know how well they do, as I don't have any desktop VR hardware either.
The main thing with Nvidia is the installation and updates possibly being headaches, but once you get them working it should be pretty smooth sailing.
It seems to work. It'll work best if your monitors are the same DPI (not the exact value, but mainly about needing scaling or not) and framerate.
I use a 75hz Freesync 1080 monitor as my main, with a 60hz "regular" 1080 monitor on my right, and it works perfectly on sway (Wayland). Nvidia drivers support Wayland in a very limited capacity so far (it's coming soon!), but once they do I expect a vast majority of monitor setups to just work.
That said, with Nvidia, X.org will most likely be the best choice for you (and in fact, the default for Nvidia), which might need a bit more fiddling to get "interesting" setups like mine working (particularly, the different framerates), but for the "best case" i mentioned above, X.org should just work.
My monitors are 1080p to the left and right and one 4k monitor in the middle, all at 60hz. So there might be some problems for the moment. I guess if Wayland works better with Nvidia in the future it will be alright though, and I probably wouldn't be making the jump just yet anyways.
I do feel like I have to ask what coming soon™ looks like in the Linux world though. Is this something that will be fleshed out in a couple years? Or are we talking more like a few months? It's really hard to gauge statements like this without any real experience in the Linux community.
This is another reason to go with Pop. It uses a recent version of GNOME, which has supposed for something called fractional scaling (some monitors have icons, text, etc at different sizes which are not integer multiples of the sizes on other monitors) which is what you want to make this a nice use case. And, I should stress, you don't need to know about fractional scaling - just to use an OS that supports it.
I wouldn't worry about it, honestly. There are very, very few things that don't work with X, and again if you use the Pop OS Nvidia installer it should Just Work.
Normally, coming soon means coming soon - people tend to pitch in and help when they want stuff. Unfortunately Nvidia is a private company that does everything closed-source, so... This particular thing isn't on Linux time, it's on Nvidia time.
GNOME should make it "just work", though if you don't like GNOME and want to switch to something else, you might get some problems. I don't have any need for scaling so I don't know where you might encounter problems, but I've heard on the internet that some scaled stuff might look "blurry", esp. when using fractional scaling (1.5x or so) instead of integer (2x)
For this particular thing, people are just waiting for a driver release from Nvidia. The last pieces of support on driver side was claimed to be implemented ~2 months ago on an unreleased (?) driver version.
After that, the problem will be on the desktops themselves to work around the quirks of Nvidia's driver. the wlroots project that the desktop I use (sway) is based on, has announced they will not work around these quirks, but I know that the popular desktops (GNOME, KDE, etc.) all have reasons to support Nvidia.
(Support needed by desktops because Wayland isn't actually as single thing like Xorg but at least 4 different implementations agreeing on a standard but that is more technical detail than needed for this)
So, if I were to estimate, probably mid-2022 at the very latest assuming Nvidia doesn't do anything unexpected
For other things, it really differs and there probably are a few "coming soon"s that haven't come soon, but that depends on a lot of stuff so there isn't a concrete "Yes, they deliver on their promises, or No, don't expect that soon"
I've been playing Morrowind with about 180 mods using OpenMW on my Debian machine and I get about 45fps on my 1070/i5.
In terms of multi monitor support I run three screens but I only use one for games.
Nice! I was also wondering how modded games performed, but it seems like that settles that question.
Performance is there, absolutely, though I haven't compared in absolute numbers. I haven't tried using origin or Uplay games, but steam works flawlessly on 95% of my games. I have a dualboot system just in case, which I last used 60 days ago.
Go give it a try. Manjaro is working well for me, simple to set up (but then again I'm an experienced linux user by now). Pop is another good alternative from what I can tell, as should be any mainstream "batteries included" distro I guess. And after the other thread, I kinda wanna try Nix, but for different reasons.
I do want to say that Pop is my go-to pick for 99.9% of people, and would be my pick for @SunSpotter. All the distros you mention are great but Pop is the slickest and has good, totally painless Nvidia drivers.
In my experience Proton is a little finicky but it's better than the old Wine days of running Steam itself in Wine and then praying that the default Wine config works with each game. It's all down to each individual game. A good number actually have native Linux support as well.
As you might have gathered from the recent post about Mr. Tech Tips' attempt at gaming on Linux you'll need to be motivated to get everything working. You can get lucky - or you can spend hours getting audio working. I would also be very careful about interacting with parts of the system that are foreign to you. I learned how not to bork a Linux install through years of trial by fire. The guard rails are better now than before but it's certainly not going to be a hassle-free experience.
I would caveat this with, if you are in the market for a new computer, you can have a completely hassle-free experience by purchasing a System76 Thelio desktop or any one of their or StarLabs' excellent laptops. I reviewed the Thelio r1 on my blog.
My PC told me it would not qualify for W11 and promptly started BSODing every boot. I'm typing this on my new Macbook.
How have you been finding the change in OS so far?
I've used both for ages. Only reason I kept a PC was to do some gaming, but nowadays I tend to play on my Xbox and mostly use my Mac for music production and work.
Audio interface stuff is miles better on Mac and that's what currently matters most for me.
Hoping it will be for me as well. Unknowingly made the mistake of purchasing a VR headset that only works with Windows, if not for that I would have at least tried to make the switch already.
In other recent news, MS got some bad press when Firefox hit the store because Firefox was far from being the first result. Some of this I can believe is coincidence but now I'm starting to believe it could be some sort of corporate malice. Maybe I'm too naive in that it took so long to believe such a thing.
that one feels like incompetence to me. the microsoft store had, through it's entire existence, so many scams and "guide" apps that it definitely feels like they have "num of apps" as their biggest marketing stat, instead of, yknow, quality
to be fair, MS is not alone, google play also has a similar issue, it's just that their search algorithms work well enough for the common cases to bring the real apps on top, but you start scrolling down, it gets weird
i don't have any experience with apple's store, but f-droid is definitely the best store i've used EVEN with it's current lackluster search, though the requirements it has from apps definitely shows on the low number of available apps, particularly for more "advanced" things phones can do
I'm sure this is especially true of the Windows store, but I feel like every single app store (apple's included) has this problem and does absolutely nothing about it. Even Xbox and Switches have this problem. If what you're after isn't super popular or explicitly searched for, the stores tend to be almost unusable because of the number of garbage present.
Have they forgotten United States v. Microsoft Corp.?
They know regulation takes years, during which I imagine they hope to recapture some of the browser market.
They might also be banking on the hesitance of US antitrust regulation in recent years. I wonder how they plan to handle the EU though...
I think they expect another such lawsuit can be averted with sufficient lobbying, and that the risk of antitrust action is outweighed by the ad and data revenue they'll accrue.