I’m helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because “Linux can’t play games” despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.
2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can’t even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.
Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.
I was going to say… If it takes you literally 1.5 days to simply install and after 2 days you can’t even launch Steam? I’m sorry, but you have extraordinarily fucked up. Whatever the fuck is happening there is not on Windows. OP, I would love to understand what you were seeing or what was happening. And I also wonder if you are using an actual Windows OS image, or what you tinkered with or ran scripts on to maybe “clean Windows up”. Unfortunately so many of those scripts are also fucking notorious for breaking some Windows functionality, like the Xbox games and what not.
Don’t get me wrong. Windows is becoming worse and worse in both features and performance (AI powered file recommendations in my start menu? get the fuck outta here). But I’m sorry, this complaint in the OP is not it.
I’m sympathetic to a Windows install taking days (I’ve been there), but you’re right that it’s not Windows’ fault. It’s always some 10 year-old hardware with dodgy or no-longer-supported drivers. Maybe you could make an argument that it’s partly Windows’ fault because they push driver support onto the hardware vendors, rather than use Linux’ model of having the kernel developers maintain them.
That’s fair. I guess when they mentioned they were building a PC I assumed it was relatively recent hardware. But I’ve been there when you can’t get or find drivers, or Windows tells you the old drivers aren’t compatible with newer OS’ and things like that.
Well I’ve been there, only I gave up after an hour and went full Linux.
I was trying install windows on an oldish laptop, 5 years old at the time. Network drivers didn’t work out if the box, and the drivers from inte manufacturer’s didn’t work.
Before that attempt, I was able to get the WiFi working through windows driver manager, after connecting via Ethernet. However, for some reason that wasn’t working anymore.
There was probably a way to get the drivers working, but it is obviously above the abilities of a normal user.
I was already transitioning to Linux anyway, and that was my “windows machine”.
That laptop in particular had a lot of driver issues on windows.
On linux everything worked perfectly out of the box, even on arch linux using the install script.
Of course that was a niche case, and the same could happen on linux.
When something doesn’t work on windows, people blame micro$oft. On linux people blame the user, aka “skill issue”, or hardware manufacturers for not supporting Linux.
In my case I blame dell; and thank the Linux and distros maintainers for making my life easier, and chipset makers for providing the base open source drivers