I’m specifically talking about the experience of installing and playing games, not installing the OS. I haven’t had any issues with installing Windows either, but apparently we have a different experience with that part - but even then, installation/configuration of OS happens like once per 5 years so I don’t really care if it takes 15 or 90 minutes. I do agree that Linux is quite easy to set up too, no issues there either.
I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “constantly having to un-fuck Windows”. I just open my PC and open whatever program/game that I was planning to?
But: if installing a new game requires more than pressing install from the service I bought it from due to the choice of my OS, that is the issue that I’m trying to minimize. If one OS is more likely to give me a smoother purchase-to-gameplay experience, I’ll prefer that one.
Basically if 90% of games work equally well on both platforms but 10% require extra tweaking (or literally don’t work) on Linux, I’ll just stick to Windows. Proton is great, but not a perfect answer for everything - but I’m not sure what you mean by “easier than Windows” since I don’t know what could be easier than pressing install.
I guess I’ve just been lucky with my experience overall.
I obviously do use the PC for other stuff too (video editing, browser, music, the usual), but those would work equally fine on Linux - it’s just the gaming part that’s keeping me on Windows, and it’s also the main thing I do on a daily basis.
It’s amazing to me that some company writes some awesome tech that allows users of one OS to run games on another OS that the game was never designed for and they complain because they might have to read protondb.com and copy something into a box in settings and maybe click another checkbox and select proton experimental from a drop-down list. I’ve been on linux as my daily driver at home since 2002-ish. I went years without playing most games (other than some wine experiments and old school rogue-likes), and right now the world has completely changed. If the AAA studios would enable a checkbox, most of their games would work with anti-cheat, but they want too much control of your system. I play games on an older nvidia cpu that work amazingly well. I had no desire to go back to Windows before, let alone now that gaming went from famine to feast in just a few years on linux. Valve has completely changed the linux landscape and has made it much much easier to get rid of Windows for good.
“Unfuck Windows” is not a rarity. Our house has a couple of Windows machines left. The latest Windows 11 fuckup was it deciding to press the Windows key in software at all times. The kernel apparently does this sometimes. The only fixes are to permanently disable the Windows key with a registry edit or to reinstall the OS.
No OS is perfect, but that’s an impressively shitty bug.