This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
If you absolutely must use windows
Download the Pro ISO from windows.
Use MicroWin to create an iso without tpm requirements and with offline installation
Use MAS and use only the Enterprise edition. You might need to upgrade to Professional first.
Then use WindowsDebloater to tailor it to your liking.
Unfortunately that requires a full reinstall, I wish there was a way to upgrade from 10 pro to 10 enterprise.
Is Windows Enterprise LTSC a good idea?
As good as it gets, if you can't get around using Windows.
Nope.
Yes
Maybe
Please elaborate
It's fine. It's mostly crap-ware free, and it's more stable than other versions. It's Long-Term-Stable-Channel, it's used by corporate, so it doesn't change frequently. It still gets security updates but not the latest BS, like Recall, and on-by-default Bitlocker. It also doesn'tt require a MS account during setup.
System latency, weird USB drivers that don't play nice with my audio deck, video drivers won't be kept up to date and compatible soon for gaming cards as it's meant for commercial applications. Also fuck windows.
I finally switched to Linux for my daily driver and gaming PC. It was easy.
So honestly, which percentage of your game collection runs on Linux? Because I've looked into doing this just a few months ago, and unless the industry had some kind of mass exodus, less than 10% of my games run on Linux, and that's a generous estimate.
Not defending Windows or anything, this is just my experience.
Honestly I have a ridiculous pile o' games like a lot of us do, and I've yet to find something (that's not VR) that I cannot play .
For reference I'm running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with a 30 series Nvidia card. Wayland, two monitors, main is 144hz ultrawide 3440 x 1440, another is 1080p 60hz.
First off there's a few programs out there to get you "Glorious Eggroll" versions of Proton which add even more stuff Valve can't distribute in their versions.
This beautiful software right here looks about right: https://davidotek.github.io/protonup-qt/
Steam works fantastically. Heck, Proton works better than native Linux builds sometimes! Deck playability is an even bigger mark of quality.
Even EA's silly launcher works. I got Titanfall 2 and that Sims 2 Ultimate they gave away ages ago working like butter.
I also love actually owning my games, so I use Heroic Launcher for GoG titles.
Oh! I even have CD games or old .EXEs windows would refuse to even install anymore! Don't worry, Linux has got this. I use Bottles to have separate environments for those games to install to and run. Majority of the time it works great but this is where things can get iffy. But hey, Windows wouldn't run them at all!
Wanna know what made me switch? Vermintide 2 kept giving me BSODs in Windows 10 with some super vague error code that made me think "Oh crap, please don't tell me my GPU is dying."
Nope! Linux ran it with zero probs once I fixed some small quirk to make their dumb little launcher work.
Cherry on top? All my RGB stuff works with Open RGB or my recently retired Corsair keyboard works with "CKB Next".
The community has made incredible strides. My Win10 partition only exists because it has Windows Mixed Reality, which they're abandoning. But not to fear, the Monado project is making HUGE improvements.
Give it a shot. I think you'll be surprised. :)
At this point it's pretty much only the competitive games with kernel level anti-cheat that don't work on Linux because of their kernel level anti-cheat.
But then again, if 90% of the games you play are competitive games that require kernel level anti-cheat, you should probably consider expanding your gaming experience lol
Would "Steam Deck compatibility" be a good proxy, at least for Steam games?
Yep! 👍
idk where you looked, protondb.com is a good database for this stuff, from your later reply insurgency sandstorm and hund showdown are both "gold" rated, they should be okay
but the thing is ... you could just try for yourself, for free
I had just looked at the publisher's system requirements on Steam, since my experience with Wine from over a decade ago was a dead end. I've learned a lot from this thread, though, and it seems things have improved dramatically.
it seems things have improved dramatically.
Like maxo said, things are definitely waaaaaaaay better than 10 years ago.
I'd say roughly 80% of my windows only games run as good as on windows, and probably 25-30% of my full library (not just what runs in proton) runs better in Linux with proton/wine than they do in win11.
Mostly what doesn't work is stuff with kernel level anticheat.
It did. I recently downloaded steam on Ubuntu and you don't need to install any 3rd party stuff yourself. It's available as compatibility toggle in steam. Sometimes you need to configure different version of Proton for games to work and they are slower to start. But they run fast and I didn't experienced much bugs. It's amazing, now after end of win10 I can ditch windows completely, as this and photoshop was the only reason I still have win10 installed.
I just made the switch this weekend. I have not had a single incompatibility yet. I have seen an oddity here and there in Helldivers 2, but nothing crazy.
Oddity 1: In normal windows play async issues sometimes happen where a player steps on a mine in the other person's client but not their own. They continue to play because their client doesn't mark them dead. To the other person, they appear as a person missing some number of body parts (sometimes just a floating torso). We call this torso mode.
Since switching to linux I have not seen my friend go torso mode a single time. He still sees me go torso mode.
Oddity 2: The artillery rounds are color coded for what each of them does. Since switching to linux they only appear silver for whatever reason. It's a nonissue, I just read them when I walk next to them. If anyone asks my character is colorblind.
One additional note:
If you install steam with a flatpak, you're going to have to tangle with the permissions related to a flatpak. Once you add directory permissions for an additional directory via flatseal (for example, if you want a library on each of your harddrives), you won't have to touch it again and it's great.
Maybe these issues are significant to you, maybe they aren't. Ultimately, god I love my system starting up in just a few seconds. And having true control over it.
Its a fairly safe bet that your offline games won't have much trouble, from my experience.
What kind of games do you play? Unless a game has anticheat, it is pretty much guaranteed to run on Linux.
i have an older desktop with 10, it doesn't have tpm, but there is a slot, i could get one and upgrade but also i mostly use linux on it
but i still feel like i'm going to lose something and it stresses me out a bit
What's MS's plan after this? Everyone I know that uses Windows/M365 hate it more with every passing day and is looking to leave.
I really don't want to be in tech support in 2029 when they kill off old outlook. There will be blood on that day.
No one (meaning less than 1% of people) will leave windows (sadly).
People are lazy as shit and rather swipe their credit cards and buy something new with windows than to even give Linux a chance.
99% of people really don't give a shit about privacy or freedom when it comes to computers. Microsoft could slap handcuffs on them and point a camera at their screen (yes MS is already spying with telemetry, but try expaining that to a regular person) and they'd still use windows.
I switched to outlook in browser only because their native windows software is so terrible. Wish I could leave that shit OS entirely.
Sounds like you live in an echo chamber. Windows is still by far the most popular computer operating system, and it’s not even close. There’s no sign of people moving away from Windows en-masse. Windows 11 adoption has been massive.
I work at a national IT support company talking to hundreds of windows users every week, and the general sentiment is that Windows 11 is unnecessary, new outlook is literally the Antichrist and people are sick of being charged more and more every year for crap they don't want or need.
Just l8ke I still see 2012R2 servers in the wild, Windows 10 isn't going away anytime soon.
Sounds like you live in a contrarian chamber. People really do hate the "new Outlook" (basically it's just Hotmail) and Windows 11 adoption has been slower than for most other versions of Windows. The requirements often mean needing to buy a new computer which a lot of people can't afford, especially if prices go up because of tariff nonsense.
There will be a lot of people still running on out of support Windows 10 systems at the end of the year.
New outlook is a steaming pile. Classic Outlook has some very handy features and unless Evolution pulls its finger out, I will continue to use classic Outlook. Hell, I used Outlook 2010 until last year.
It met my needs.
