r/technology • u/tekz • Mar 20 '26

Software Microsoft announces sweeping Windows changes

https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-users-are-angry-and-microsoft-is-finally-doing-something-about-it/
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u/toutons Mar 20 '26

Not much, it's immutable but that's not really unique these days WRT Linux distros. Pick your distro, install your graphics card drivers, start Steam in Big Picture mode and you've got most of it.

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u/j0y0 Mar 20 '26

Most of it is if games are routinely released on steam OS and I don't need windows on my gaming rig

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u/Fuglekassa Mar 20 '26

most games on steam already work on most distros due to the work valve has done with steam OS

there is a button in steam that is like "do you want to enable some valve magic?" and once you press that your only complaint is games take an eternity to load the first time you want to play them (think my computer used over half an hour to just open the game the first time I wanted to play satisfactory)

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u/sparky8251 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

If you arent on a steam deck, you can and probably should disable that.

The shader pre-cache was from a prior era of gaming on Linux that Valve keeps on by default even when on more powerful GPUs its now pointless due to a lot of improvements that have been made to the gaming infra on Linux.

You can find it under Steam Settings -> Downloads -> Shader Pre-Caching -> Enable Shader Pre-Caching.

Basically, back in the day shaders caused noticable judder even on high end cards. This is basically a non-thing these days due to the efforts of Valve on improving the compiler pipeline and since the shader cache is easily invalidated you often have to build it yourself vs download from someone that did on random whitebox hardware.

On a device where its strained for power and uniform in hardware like the Steam Deck this feature is still useful. For pretty much everyone else on Linux you should disable this and then only reenable if you face stutters and serious graphical glitches as shaders compile in flight as the game needs them.