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Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

engadget.com

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Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#41

Post by raxxorraxor »

neglesaks wrote: post #38
jsheard wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main blocker for me is still the Nvidia drivers, with Xorg itself having deal-breaker limitations that are never going to get fixed and Wayland on NV still not being quite there yet. Yeah it would be smoother sailing with an AMD card but that's a pretty big caveat when Nvidia has 78% of the market per the Steam survey.

Agreed. I've always found the nvidia drivers to be a pain in the neck and a source of system instability in Linux systems and have actively avoided nvidia hardware.

Historically better compatibility of nvidia and amd hardware for Linux was changing quite often.

I believe it to be hugely neglectful for hardware vendors to not invest here. The windows drivers suites is awful as well and I believe it to be vastly neglectful that they don't provide drivers for as many systems as possible. Somebody is sleeping in those orgs as they certainly would have the resources.

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#42

Post by pndy »

gkhartman wrote: post #23
jcmontx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it actually any good for gaming?

I've been playing Baldurs Gate, and Guidwars 2 without issue. I originally started out on endeavorOS which lasted a while, but eventually needed the stability of PopOS since I have dev work on the same machine. Pop has a version that ships with Nvidia proprietary drivers which made things easier (RTX 4080). Only thing missing for me is HDR support. I'm very happy to give that up to avoid Windows.

> Guidwars 2

I had to replace gpu because nvidia did something at some point to the drivers and I couldn't load Shattered Observatory and few other places without crashing, no matter whether I launch the game by Lutris or Steam

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#43

Post by sierra1011 »

neglesaks wrote: post #37

Microsoft is emulating the Meta business model now: The customers are the product....

Key difference being that Meta products are free for consumers, while Windows licensing is very much not free.

Microsoft are just attempting a classic double-dip; pay for Windows and also get the ads endemic to digital life! What's not to love...

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#44

Post by navjack27 »

Alupis wrote: post #29
gkhartman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing Baldurs Gate, and Guidwars 2 without issue. I originally started out on endeavorOS which lasted a while, but eventually needed the stability of PopOS since I have dev work on the same machine. Pop has a version that ships with Nvidia proprietary drivers which made things easier (RTX 4080). Only thing missing for me is HDR support. I'm very happy to give that up to avoid Windows.

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based). The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet contai…

I was unable to use silver blue on my comet lake based laptop with a Nvidia Optimus secondary card. Once I finally got nvidia's proprietary drivers installed and I tried using parsec to remote to my windows desktop using hardware decoding for video I was getting 80 milliseconds decode time as opposed to 8 milliseconds on software decoding.

I gave up on Linux and reinstalled windows 11 and everything's working perfectly without a hitch.

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#45

Post by gkhartman »

pndy wrote: post #42
gkhartman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been playing Baldurs Gate, and Guidwars 2 without issue. I originally started out on endeavorOS which lasted a while, but eventually needed the stability of PopOS since I have dev work on the same machine. Pop has a version that ships with Nvidia proprietary drivers which made things easier (RTX 4080). Only thing missing for me is HDR support. I'm very happy to give that up to avoid Windows.

> Guidwars 2 I had to replace gpu because nvidia did something at some point to the drivers and I couldn't load Shattered Observatory and few other places without crashing, no matter whether I launch the game by Lutris or Steam

Yeah, I had a few driver versions cause issues. I'm usually able to get around it by switching proton versions. Sometimes the experimental version works when others don't. There was a driver version a month or so back that broke gw2, but it seemed to be fixed by next driver release.

I think about picking up a cheaper amd card for those unstable periods when Nvidia can't seem to get it right. I know its nowhere near the top of there todo list, but really wish they'd give more attention to the Linux driver.

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#46

Post by capitainenemo »

datagrimx wrote: post #36
capitainenemo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which game? Have you checked Proton (or Wine) compatibility?

PUBG. No Proton/Wine support.

Ah. Gotcha. Yeah, odds are high it's got some anti-cheat/anti-copy with deep hooks into the windows kernel. Not uncommon with FPS. That makes emulation tricky.

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#47

Post by capitainenemo »

heyoni wrote: post #34
capitainenemo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which game? Have you checked Proton (or Wine) compatibility?

Has to be a competitive fps. I’m in the same camp, I boot into windows for call of duty.

I mean... call of duty is a hell of a lot of games, so no idea which one you play. Most of them are pretty old so modern hardware should easily handle it. I don't care for first-person shooters so no idea what the actual situation is there (competitive fps is ambiguous - you could mean competitive first person shooters tend to have anti-cheat that requires windows, or that you feel that frames per second is not competitive on linux). I do know that proton seems to perform very well for me in other games on the linux living room gaming system and the steam deck (Xorg for both). Valve claims in general outperforms windows for similar hardware. But I suppose it could depend on your graphics card and drivers.

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#48

Post by Alupis »

navjack27 wrote: post #44
Alupis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based). The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet contai…

I was unable to use silver blue on my comet lake based laptop with a Nvidia Optimus secondary card. Once I finally got nvidia's proprietary drivers installed and I tried using parsec to remote to my windows desktop using hardware decoding for video I was getting 80 milliseconds decode time as opposed to 8 milliseconds on software decoding. I gave up on Linux and reinstalled windows 11 and everything's working perfect…

I'd wager this had little or nothing to do with SilverBlue itself, and more had to do with your configuration. Did you experience this issue on another distro too?

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#49

Post by tracker1 »

MBCook wrote: post #30
tracker1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were actual internet ads in Insiders builds a couple years ago... that is when I switched.

Didn’t that accidentally get turned on for some insiders? I seem to remember articles about that.

Yeah... I was one that definitely saw then. Pissed me off anyone even considered, let alone implemented such a thing.

I've only booted into my Windows drive twice since.. and now it's been so long that I'll have to reinstall to use it since it's too far out of date now.

I've been perfectly content with Linux.

Re: Windows 11 now comes with its own adware

#50

Post by tracker1 »

deeter72 wrote: post #40
tracker1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly agreed. Though WSL+Docker do make Windows more tolerable for work chores. It was literally an ad in the start menu search that got me to start using Linux full time. (Insiders a couple years ago).

I use WSL for work as well and in my opnion it fits Microsoft's classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" paradigm. WSL basically prevents most from requesting from the IT dept, A full blown Linux desktop/Laptop because they will simply say "you want Linux? here have WSL, it is 100% Linux", Which it is really not, WSL's idiosyncrasies from a true Linux Desktop drives me nuts at times.

The issue has more often been about the security tools and monitoring for Windows, along with account federation. These tend to be more broadly available and polished on Windows and Mac.

I'd prefer a full Linux workstation, but if it's locked down like some Windows I've experienced, I'm not sure it's materially better.

Right now I'm working in a remote, secured, locked down Windows VM... Without WSL or Docker. That sucks a lot.

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