Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

Gaming. Linux gaming has come a long way (especially thanks to the steam deck) but the vast majority of games are still only released on Windows.

Right, but thanks to Proton that’s just not relevant? Blue Prince, Clair Obscure, Lost Records, The Alters, Doom: The Dark Ages, Oblivion Remastered, South of Midnight… all run just fine on Steam on linux.

If you have older hardware and play older games, Proton often doesn't run those as well as windows on the same hardware. On my laptop (win10/ubuntu dual boot, about 6 years old) windows is significantly faster in every game I have tried. I also had to do a futzy ad-hoc binary search to find a proton version that works with one game (either fallout 3 or fallout new vegas, can't remember which). And proton generally crashes more.

What stops you from dual-booting?

You use Windows for games, and only games. For everything else, you use Linux.

This is a practical setup.

> If you have older hardware

So Windows 11 won't work, will it?

I go one step further. I have a Windows PC primarily for gaming, on its own physical LAN all to itself, that can only talk to the Internet (not any other LANs). I have an almost-identical PC (sans GPU) for Linux Mint, which I do all of my actually important or meaningful work on.

Like you alluded to, I never use the Windows PC for anything else -- nothing even remotely sensitive -- nothing with identification like logging into government websites, no financial activity, etc. It has no access to my e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, contacts, pictures, videos, and so on. While it has Steam on it, I don't buy Steam games on it; I go to Steam's website on my Linux desktop and buy games there, then they show up in my Steam library on the Windows desktop. I do also use it for 3D CAD since I'm still very much in my infancy learning FreeCAD (which will remove that Windows dependency).

It spends the vast majority of its time turned off and if the entire contents of its drives were published publicly I wouldn't lose a minute's sleep over it. I still image the drive every couple months so I can revert to a known-good config should the need arise, as breaking itself for no reason is what Windows is really good at.

Which makes those god-awful prompts to "Finish setting up Windows Backup" every couple of weeks bloody hilarious...

What about steam chat, discord, etc?

As a counterpoint; I've primarily played games that are old or jank as hell to setup in general. Septerra Core, Nox, Diablo 2, various assortments of RPG Maker games across different engines. They all worked perfectly fine and arguably were easier to setup on a modern machine than trying to figure out how to get them working on Windows.

The only game that didn't work out of the box for me was Path of Exile 2.

Every single game you mentioned has some sort of tinker step reported on protondb even though it may be marked platinum. Here’s the one for oblivion:

    DRI_PRIME=1 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command%

Or maybe it’s this one that the next user reported…

    DXIL_SPIRV_CONFIG=wmma_fp8_hack FSR4_UPGRADE=1 game-performance %command%

I personally don’t want to have to do stuff like that to get them to work.

Don't use, don't have.

These are almost always unnecessary. I have 460 games in my Steam library (most of them are popular games, including ones mentioned in the parent comment, not obscure indies) and all of them work great out of the box without command line options. That's a higher success rate than my Windows machine. For example, the latter command is for someone who wants to hack in FSR4 support on 9xxx AMD cards; this is for power users.

They run "just fine" meaning their developers and publishers just tolerate the fact that someone out there may be running them on unsupported OS's, and that too only barely. Many will straight up lock their games out of Linux, let alone support them.

There are very few games that run "better" on Linux, and that too only on specific benchmarks and after a lot of tweaks and hacks. Nvidia is a lost cause, many devices, parts and peripherals don't bother providing Linux driver support, and HDR & VRR have either bog-standard implementations or are straight-up unsupported. There is no way any current nontrivial game runs better out-of-the-box on any Linux distro for a layman than on Windows on most retail "gaming" computers.

That is certainly true, but they usually work fine on Linux thanks to Proton. I'm a big gamer and I've been primarily Linux (for gaming too) for something like 4 years now.

I am using Discord in Firefox for years without any issues. I also created a container for it after containers became a thing.

I use Discord only for programming groups, study groups, etc. Not for games or in-game chatting.

I haven't played most of those games, but I can at least attest that I could run Clair Obscur with no tinkering whatsoever. A lot of times even if some people had to tinker with a game, you will be just fine and not have to tinker.

Having played Doom, Oblivion, Blue Prince, and Clair Obscur on linux, I can tell you that the tinker steps are unnecessary. I have literally just clicked play and didn't need to think about it. This didn't require a bunch of manual setup to get to that point either; I installed Endeavour and it installed the drivers I needed, then I installed Steam as normal and it was like nothing had changed from my Windows install.

People will post their tinker steps for everything. It's often just to disable the steam overlay, or inject their own overlay, or whatever they think gets them an extra 2 fps. It's linux and people love to configure it their way, but honestly steam/proton handles it automatically 99% of the time.

> This is a practical setup.

What if you need to check emails or take care of some other task mid-game?

I'd argue it isn't a practical setup.

Dual-booting means supporting 2 OSes on my personal machine. My personal machine is for doing personal things, not supporting OSes.

I use windows on my main PC because it supports all the games I want to play, and it also supports all the software I want to use. Linux does not. Simple as that, for me.

I also use Linux and Mac at work daily. I prefer to use the right tool for the job.

I will bite. I have this exact setup. And indeed at the very beginning I would mostly use Linux, then I started playing more games on Windows. And that's when the convenience factor makes windows win. Having to reboot to use linux after a gaming session is annoying when I can just open another app in windows and achieve the same result (and don't forget I would have to reboot yet again when it's time to resume play).

This is what stops me from dual-booting. I don't enjoy Windows as much as the next person, but dual booting inevitably requires me to just duplicate logging into services and installing the same programs in both OSes, and then if I don't boot into one of the OSes for a while, I end up having to wait for updates (admittedly this is a much worse problem on Windows, but it's not not a problem for Linux) and any other things that need to happen just so I can use the computer.

More practical would be to use Windows and then use WSL to host Linux applications.

> check emails

I just do it on my phone if needed.

> some other task mid-game

Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related? Then you are stopping to play anyway.

Or want to order something via Amazon? You can do it on the phone. The app or any browser is sufficient.

Not if you care about online gaming. Anti-cheat measures generally don't work well in Proton.

It won't, but since 10 still exists I'm just running that now and will probably do so as long as I can - then maybe I can get a hardware upgrade, do the proton switch, and my games will run about as well as they used to with 10 on my old hardware - with some fiddling naturally.

My point is it isn't a universal truth that everybody currently running 10 can just switch to linux/proton now and it is seamless. Really depends on what you run and your hardware, as with everything linux.

I also hack some games with dll injection and I don't know how I'm going to get that working with proton, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.

> I just do it on my phone if needed.

Do you have your phone by you all the time? Mine is always sitting somewhere, probably charging. On my laptop I just get a notification instantly showing me an email preview without me having to do anything. Having to go check my phone isn't a substitute for that.

> Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related?

Like replying to a message? Going to fetch your phone and type on it is way more painful from than just pressing alt-tab and doing it on the computer.

> Like what? Something taking long, serious, and business/work related?

Do you have nothing long or serious outside of work? I just had to fill out some forms and do some shopping yesterday online for my personal life. That'd have been painful on the phone.

> Then you are stopping to play anyway.

Stopping the app loses your exact state... that's kind of the whole point of pausing the game.

FWIW you have a partial solution here which is to run a VM that boots into the same system that you also dual boot into. It's still inconvenient, but not nearly as bad as having to terminate your app and reboot.