Today, I switched the last of my Windows machines to Linux: my gaming PC. I’ve been using Linux on servers for many years but was a bit apprehensive for gaming.
Turns out it just… works. Just installed steam and turned proton on, have zero performance or other issues. I’m using Ubuntu 25.04 for the 6.14 kernels NT emulation performance tweaks. Aside from there not being a catalyst driver for it and so I can’t undervolt my card everything is great.
Fr try reinstalling Windows on a laptop and watch, helplessly, as the installation medium comes with zero drivers. Multi-billion dollar company my ass…
Installing linux: step 1: install linux. (If distro eithout nvidia drivers, step 2: run 3 commands in console or use discover)
Installing windows: step 1: install windows. Step 2:activate windows, step 3: install drivers for every piece of hardware attatched to your pc, step 4 use cmd, regedit and/or sketchy download to debloat windows
Step 5. Watch it reboot overnight and download even more useless bloat
Oh and step 7: Spend 10 minutes quitting, restarting discord and then restarting your pc to fix innumerable and common audio bugs caused by terrible windows drivers.
Oh yeah, and every restart takes 10 minutes of “preparing updates”
Or quit out of your game to restart and install updates.
By installing drivers do you mean: search the manufacturers website online, navigate through all the scam website to try to find the legit one, dig through the website to find your hardware, download a random executable file, execute it, select next next next, no I don’t want to install mcafee, next, install.
To its credit (of which there is little), Windows can handle most things these days just fine without externally obtained drivers. Gradually improving since 7 onwards. The only sore spots really are proper gfx drivers and printers. 10 and beyond will also gracefully handle being drive-swapped into completely different hardware.
If it’s a reinstall, activation is automatic for OEM licences.
Step 4, yes, what a shitshow. Way too many hoops and hurdles to go through just to get a functional OS without the bloat and guff.
“just fine” is not what gamers want, besides sometimes new drivers offer sizeable boosts to stability and framerates.
the last few times step 4 ended badly, all of the debloat tools i found did a bit too much
Installing windows step 4 if you’re playing games not off the main stores, install:
Use Wine and Proton instead,
I did not count it since steam does it automatically usually.
Just one, no? Usually the installation instructions will tell you which package to install for your GPU.
like an hour and a half superslow install, cachyos was so fast I thought it was an error
Both Microsoft and Nvidia are multi-trillion dollar companies.