alt Hacker NewsOne thing that's lovely about Linux is this kind of analysis is not only possible, but meaningful. These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.
I recently switched to Linux after years on Windows desktop, mostly because the KDE Plasma desktop feels snappier than Windows 11. Also the feeling that if something isn't working right I can probably tinker and improve it. It's been really nice. If you haven't tried Linux desktops in awhile give Bazzite a whirl: it's a Fedora customized for gaming. Even if you don't game it's an easy way to get a very functional Linux desktop in no time at all.
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Some things do indeed improve, but some other things require a massive effort that no hobbyist or small company can make happen.
This is most obvious in places where a lot of coordination is required, for example in supporting proper color correction throughout all applications, or decent support for advanced printer functions.
There are many incremental changes, but we often get stuck in local minima for years.
Still, I personally like that one can (relatively) easily watch what happens under the hood. It's not entirely clear to me why Windows and MacOS must remain closed source.
> results will get reported back
Even better, most of the tech stack is open source and contributions are welcome!
>give Bazzite a whirl
I never really understood Bazzite's immutable fs thing. Can one install standard dev stuff (i.e. compilers, ides, etc) easily under bazzite?
This use case is the main reason why I lean towards maybe using cachyos
This kind of thing is certainly possible under Windows - you can basically patch any kernel API call, replace any COM object instantiation, install filter drivers that intercept any request to and from a device, replace userland DLLs with your own.
It's really scary what you can do, to the point that I often asked myself 'why allow this?' - seeing as hits on certain APIs took me to blackhat forums and articles about writing exploits.
I think it depends who it is making noise. There are some famous Oculus-era stories about John Carmack tracing display latency issues and then writing lengthy screeds to Samsung engineers to get them to give him lower level access.
I bet if someone like him made enough noise, people at MS would pay attention.
Not Microsoft but Battlenonsense investigations on latency did get Nvidia to create reflex.
> These results will get reported back to the graphics software authors and the distribution packagers and the ecosystem will improve. There's no sense with Microsoft that kind of improvement is possible.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft could turn a knob and get telemetry data from millions of devices, and feed that back to the software graphics authors.
Certainly both Intel (https://www.techpowerup.com/312122/psa-intel-graphics-driver...) and Nvidia (https://nateshoffner.com/blog/2017/05/disable-nvidia-telemet...) collect such data themselves (opt-in in both cases, so they may not get much data from the most hard-core gamers)