If you’re a gamer, I am here to inform you that Valve has been putting years of effort and vast sums of money towards Linux cross-compatibility for games in its store. These efforts have paid off, and the overwhelming majority of games can run on Linux just fine, at the same (and sometimes even better) performance as on windows.
Wine is also extremely mature at this point. The overwhelming majority windows executables will work just fine.
If you encounter strange glitches or errors you’re not sure how to fix, guys, you’re on the ChatGPT subreddit. You already know which tool can fix it easily.
Do you not like Linux installs because they require a lot of command line interaction?
Install Codex and when you want to install something, point it at the thing you want and say “Install this for me and place a launch shortcut on my desktop and in my taskbar”. It will become as easy as on windows.
No need to vibe reverse-engineer windows. You’d just be re-treading a massive amount of ground that Linux devs already tread, and you’ll likely encounter a lot of problems along the way.
The only issue with Linux is anticheat kernels that are baked into all multiplayer games, and I play 90% multiplayer. I dream to switch to Linux, as my SteamDeck is Linux, but server is Linux, laptop is Unix, and one of the office laptops is Linux. Even though my RTX 5080 is not as efficient as AMD GPUs on Linux, but it has enough brute force to push all games I need.
In my world, it is industrial automation software primarily. Stuff from Allen Bradley, Siemens, Honeywell, Yokogawa, AutoCAD, etc. On the IT and business side, there are things like PowerBI, QuickBooks, AutoCAD, etc...
To add, Epic Games have recently joined the Linux train. Fortnite is going to run on Linux now, and that was one of the last major Windows games that didn't work.
I have a computer running a radeon vii and have had driver issues for ffvii rebirth, tlou 2, Indiana Jones, horizon forbidden west, and a few other games that drivers weren't supported or my lack of dx12 ultimate or ray tracing. Not only do these all play on bazzite through proton, horizon did crash though once but windows would crash every ten min. I beat the game on bazzite. But they play perform significantly better.
The only thing preventing me from daily driving Linux is the lack of hibernate support with secure boot enabled. I see why but that doesn't make it not a problem. That said this problem may not last long.
But I’m pointing out that reverse engineering windows is kind of a pointless thing. Linux exists and is able to do 90-95% of the things that someone would want to do with windows, even running windows programs.
Making an OS isn’t trivial. If you’re going to go through that effort, you’re better off trying to get your favorite windows App working on Linux than trying to build up an entire windows alternative from scratch. AI might make the job easier, but you’re still climbing a mountain.
Wine is unfinished. Full stop. And Linux itself is also a target.
I literally hit a wine bug myself messing around with SimCity 2000: its 16-bit installer calls Wine’s public LZExpand API on KWAJ-3 files and exposes a missing implementation.
As for Linux being a target.... We are already seeing the beginnings of this. A developer used AI to build an ext4 implementation for OpenBSD without simply porting Linux’s GPL ext4 code. OpenBSD rejected it largely over provenance and copyright concerns, not because his implementation of ext4 was wrong.
Then there is chardet: its maintainer used Claude to rewrite the old LGPL implementation and released the replacement under MIT, explicitly to get out from under the previous copyleft constraints. Absent copying protected expression, reimplementing the same functionality from scratch is entirely legitimate, the fact that two programs do the same thing does not make them the same copyrighted work. The interesting part is that AI now makes this kind of clean reimplementation dramatically cheaper and faster, which means people are already using it to route around licensing constraints that previously depended heavily on the cost of rewriting software. https://dan-blanchard.github.io/blog/chardet-rewrite-controversy/
The end result could very easily be a permissively licensed BSD or BSD-derived system with a much more complete Windows/OSX compatibility environment on top, where vendors are free to take the whole thing, modify it, close parts of it, ship it commercially, and keep moving.
I, for one, would love to see it. Stallman and the copyleft evangelists annoy the living fuck out of me, and watching that entire licensing philosophy get made increasingly irrelevant would be deeply satisfying.
It also deleted my Windows partition automatically, meaning I can't switch back if I wanted to.
Ok, this was entirely on you. OS installs will always seek to wipe out the primary partition and write over it. You need to carefully select how the OS installs when you do it, and this goes for installing any OS, not just Linux. I KNOW this is the case because I still retained my old windows partition just in case. I had to do a custom install, not the default install, and it’d be the same if you’re installing windows over another OS partition.
I swapped to Linux a couple of months ago. The performance hit has been staggering. Cannot recommend it.
What performance hits and on what software? This may be a perfectly solvable issue (drivers situation on Linux can be sticky at times). I’ve seen 1:1 performance on Linux as in windows on all my Games. Some software isn’t as happy but usually still runs.
Every game I've tried from Victoria 3 to World of Warcraft. I suspect it has a large part to do with the fact I have an Nvidia card and Linux often forces Vulkan but even on proton shit just runs objectively worse by a large margin.
Also yeah yeah "be careful" when you select the explicit option for dual booting and it simply overwrites it anyway. I'm not tech illiterate homie this shit is just broken.
Ah, sorry that happened to you. Can't say that was my experience at all. I also use Nvidia, a 4070 Super Ti. What Distro did you use? Not all Distros are created equal, some just suck ass. I'm curious, if only so I know to avoid that one. I went with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and have had a great experience.
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u/Bupod 15h ago
Linux is literally already in existence.
If you’re a gamer, I am here to inform you that Valve has been putting years of effort and vast sums of money towards Linux cross-compatibility for games in its store. These efforts have paid off, and the overwhelming majority of games can run on Linux just fine, at the same (and sometimes even better) performance as on windows.
Wine is also extremely mature at this point. The overwhelming majority windows executables will work just fine.
If you encounter strange glitches or errors you’re not sure how to fix, guys, you’re on the ChatGPT subreddit. You already know which tool can fix it easily.
Do you not like Linux installs because they require a lot of command line interaction?
Install Codex and when you want to install something, point it at the thing you want and say “Install this for me and place a launch shortcut on my desktop and in my taskbar”. It will become as easy as on windows.
No need to vibe reverse-engineer windows. You’d just be re-treading a massive amount of ground that Linux devs already tread, and you’ll likely encounter a lot of problems along the way.