Good news if you're on a nvidia gpu then 🫠

My biggest "wow" was when I could hit the super key and have the start menu open immediately instead of waiting 4 minutes for it to load in and another 20 minutes to take my search input and give me back results from Bing.

They can't. The people working on complaints are in a different department. And departments don't communicate at Microsoft.

Just 1 more AI data centre?

So we can also say indirectly that Steam Deck wouldn't have happened without the horniness of Yoko Taro who created that android ass in the first place.

What a chain of causality that is

If anything has been a driver of human ingenuity, it's the horny

Are you judging him?

I need the lore

Wait what lol

Doubt.

i bet the "foundational changes" are all vibecoded

Do "foundational changes" mean they will play games on WSL hoping the "hyperV, WSL(inux), proton, game, WSLg (Wayland)" chain will have less slowdown than the "Windows, game, directX" route?

At least if they do it performance will stay on par with SteamOS as long as hyperV doesn't bloat too much.

Competition is good and the more Windows tries to meet this promise, the more Linux gets exposure.

In two years the race will likely be over already.

Valve also needed to break its dependency on Windows, in case MS decides to go down the walled garden route like Apple. MS making the windows store the only supported way to install apps and games would be devastating for Valve.

Besides the data collection angle, Microsoft wants gamers on Windows instead of Linux so that there's at least a chance they'll buy games from the Microsoft Store.

The company views a third party app called File Pilot as benchmark for these [file search] improvements

That app is still in beta and was launched one year ago.

They're comparing the search from the native shell (where they could directly query the NTFS table like Everything does and get instant results), native to their OS with 40 years of experience with some unknown newcomer still in beta???

Right now they are:

it's patch Tuesday!!!!!!1!1!!!! We MUST release immediately an update or the users will revolt!!

But Sir, preliminary testing says that it has a 80% bricking chance with full data loss, can we postpone it?

PUSH. IT. NOW. Force the install and make sure to reboot all the computers during the working hours, bonus if you force close all the opened apps without saving

They arent going to improve the quality they've just added the ability to do the patches via hotpatch and not require a restart. Still gonna be same quality of slop

That's a story old as Linux. Native shit stops working. Thankfully wine/Proton is there to keep it functional

Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.

Nah. I mean, there might be some stuff like that, but nowadays, I'd be surprised if feature parity wasn't 1:1 (or even better, with some open source drivers having features that are removed from official windows drivers…).

The underlying OS is pure garbage, that's mostly it. Windows will start chugging everywhere with even moderate FS activity: running a background, single-threaded backup process will sometimes make it impossible to click in another window or open a new application. Driver API is not great, you have to jump through hoops to do basic stuff. There are many ways to do the exact same thing, each being more or less efficient than the other. Audio API is so bad, an audio device failing will sometime cause ohter, unrelated, non-audio application to spontaneously combust.

And so on and so on.

On the other hand, the Linux compatibility layer that proton provides do add some overhead in places, but surprisingly, it's not that much overhead. And it's not that common (basically, the code runs natively until specific instructions that requires special handling).

Obviously, when you have a better operating base, and very little extra overhead, software tends to run smoother.

And all that is not taking into account optimisation to Linux system themselves; there's been a lot of improvement in technical stuff for graphic drivers (especially on AMD side, but not exclusively), the kernel itself can get improvement in its handling of IO and memory, the whole thing is more flexible, etc.

It's because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.

It's usually because of all the other bloat running on Windows. Just various background processes on Windows will eat up like 10G of RAM just idling, where most desktop Linux distros I've used will use 2-5G idling. Having a few extra gigs of RAM available can make a noticeable difference.

I feel like system calls in the Linux kernel are just more efficient/faster than system calls in Windows. Windows system calls have decades worth of compatibility layers all cobbled together for business reasons, whereas I don't think the Linux kernel suffers from that same problem.

And that's not even mentioning the multiple layers of absolute voodoo black magic wizardry that is Vulkan (Linux graphics API) and DXVK (a translation later that translates DirectX calls to Vulkan calls). Those are some absolutely incredible pieces of software, and deserve a ton of the credit as well.

I don't really think Linux is faster because it just injects noops sometimes though lol. You'd definitely be able to notice if part of the graphics pipeline was just... skipping enough steps to make a noticeable performance difference lol

Edit: correction

Unless there's a bottleneck it's usually Vulkan vs dx.

Windows 11/10 does some stuff that isn't in the feature scope of wine/proton, namely on the security front (KDP, HVCI, ACG), which has a measurable performance impact. Whether you want to call that bloat or not is up to you.

let's pump those numbers up on steam hardware survey. although they might not count VMs

Unrelated but the ventoy usb I keep on me really helped me today after a ram stick decided to die and corrupt my system along with it

Cachy is great