Technology

I’m about a week off coming back to Windows from Linux.

Some things that chased me off:

• Alan Wake 2 used too new of GPU features
• Once after playing a game, my cursor was just gone—not invisible, just not there. Only keyboard.
• A few times after quitting games, something was broken about the desktop experience and I had to reboot the machine to get things working again
• Discord crashed any time the machine went to sleep (or woke up? Hard to tell which)
• Several games only worked if I manually put in Proton launch options
• No support for DLSS framegen
• Cyberpunk had to be given a fake driver version to support ray reconstruction
• No support for GamePass games still, which is how I’d been playing Starfield and Lies if P, and planning on Cities: Skylines 2.
• No native support for middle-click scrolling without pasting (I don’t count editing low-level X config files)
• [edit] Also Lords if the Fallen thought I was using a modified game and wouldn’t let me online—solo play only, thanks to EAC

I keep feeling like Linux is just a year or two away from being good enough for common folks to switch over, and I guess if all you need if Firefox, it’s probably there. But the experience is just so subtly, but consistently, bad year after year.

For reference, I was on Pop!_OS (whatever their latest stable was, I think based on Ubuntu 22?). I had read that Pop!_OS was one of the better distorts for games.