Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job. Maybe, as an option or optional add-on, but not the way MS does it.

I use 10 now, as locked down and 'fixed' as I was able to make it (custom ISO via NTLite with a bunch of crap removed and some fixes steamrolled in), but really I look forward to ditching it altogether - which is a shame. For all the MS hate in the OSS community, I always thought Windows did a lot of stuff well (when it was good at least).

The telemetry, changing things for the sake of changing things and forced crap constantly being added is enough. I'm so in love with awesomewm at this point, and the fact that I can customize and program every part of my UI, allowing me to have something absolutely perfect and tailor made.

>I don't want anything, any type of news being pushed by my OS. It simply isn't it's job.

Yes, it is. The job of a proprietary OS is whatever that company says it is. If it's shoveling annoying ads to users, that's its job, and having annoying ads is a very sensible thing in a proprietary OS since the company is driven by profit, and they can make more profit by including lots of annoying ads. If you don't like the product your vendor has sold you, then you should choose a different vendor. A Free OS that doesn't come from a company with a profit motive won't have this same problem.

The whole "just go elsewhere" idea doesn't really work in a total monopoly like Microsoft has on desktop OSes for some use cases.

There is not, and has never been an alternative to windows for all use cases. Most notably: a gaming rig (One of few remaining use cases for stationary home PCs these days, so perhaps the most relevant for the idea of the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop). If you want to reply that Linux is a perfectly usable OS for a gaming rig these days then please reconsider. It's just not.

I actually don't understand how Microsoft reasons around these things. There is zero way that these news links actually "pay for themselves" in income vs customer alienation. There must be something else to it.

Sure there are still cases where you can't switch, but the gap is ever closing and is already very very narrow. Proton covers most games, and WINE covers most windows software, and plenty of big software has native versions for multiple OSes.

I think if more people tried Rather than just assuming they would probably be pleasantly surprised.

I think its' perfectly fine in many games. In others there is a performance penalty of several percent, a slower fix rate for OS specific bugs, or graphics drivers lagging several weeks or even months behind the Windows release specific for the game.

That seems to be very much the exception. In many other cases Linux gives significantly better performance and less issues.

Linux is very much a viable gaming platform these days, and Windows only has a minimal advantage in that area.

It's a lot better than it used to be, but it's still far from great. Especially with anything non-steam or anything that uses one of the newer Anticheats (which are basically rootkits).

Here's the top of the list of 2022 most sold PC games (US chart):

#1 Most sold 2022 (CoD MW2): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1938090

#2 Most sold 2022 (Elden ring): Sort of (Steam deck apparently great, Desktop less than pefect) https://www.protondb.com/app/1245620

#3 Most sold 2022 (Madden NFL 23): Barely. No online play and worse perf https://www.protondb.com/app/1760250

And so on and so forth. But if we give a little more time it could be better. So look at 2021 most sold PC games instead

#1 Most sold 2021 (Apex Legends): Yes. Fixed in 2022 with official anticheat support 3 years after release. https://www.protondb.com/app/1172470

#2 Most sold 2021 (BF 2042): Nope https://www.protondb.com/app/1517290

#3 Most sold 2021 (CS:GO): Works (Although some of the user reports look really painful). https://www.protondb.com/app/730

Looking at protondb the number of titles that get a "Platinum" rating meaning they work out great of the box without tweaking, is extremely low. (proton/steamdeck isn't the only way of running Linux games of course).

Right, but that's a very very tiny handful of titles. It's not surprising that the biggest AAA title games might have issues or DRM nonsense, but that's a small handful of games.

I disagree it's 'far from great', I'd say it's only slightly short of Windows support. There's a reason Steam thought it made sense to use it as a base after all.

As for CSGO I have better performance under Linux than I do on Windows, and many other users support the same.

By number of copies sold or hours played even just those six are a huge chunk of "PC gaming". Including say the top 15 of the last 3 years, you can pretty much call all the rest of PC gaming a long tail roundoff error in terms of copies sold or hours played. It doen't really matter if for these 45 titles there are 4500 titles that work perfectly on Linux.