So it’s time again to reload the operating system on my gaming machine, and the question that I had to answer was what operating system I was going to run this time around.
The options are to stick with Windows 11, or move over to some flavour of Linux for my operating system. This specific machine is primarly a gaming machine these days since anything of importance has been moved over to the MacBook Pro that I’m typing this on now. And because I’m going to be gaming on the thing more than anything else that drives me back into running a version of Windows.
I know that gaming on Linux has come a very long way in the last few years with what Valve is doing, but every time that I try to run games on a Linux machine I wind up having to deal with fiddly bits and problems – all things that can be overcome, but all are things that I shouldn’t have to overcome at all.
The gaming machine is essentially a toy for me. I want to sit down in front of it, click an icon and enjoy a couple of hours of distraction from my day to day. I work with Linux a fair bit at work, and run multiple systems running various editions of Linux at home for various reasons and in the places where I have it running it’s solid. Gaming though is not quite there and Windows isn’t quite bad enough to force the switch for me right now.
Will this change later? Possibly.
Microsoft is saying the right things about cleaning up a lot of my objections about the operating system in the last few weeks, but those are just words and we will have to see if their actions actually pan out.
For now though, it’s a install of Windows. The question is what one?
Well it’s some flavour of Windows 11 since Windows 10 is out of support and while using the LTSC/LTSB or IOT version might seem like a interesting idea to avoid some of the bloat getting licensing for those versions isn’t always easy for a home user, and I’ve seen a few oddities with those versions of Windows when trying to use them for general purpose use. Again, nothing horrid, but I don’t really want to be chasing down problems so Windows 11 Pro it will be.
And it’s Windows 11 Pro mainly because that’s what I have a license for, the non-pro edition would have worked just as well for gaming but it is nice to be able to remote desktop into the machine when I’m away from home. The othe added bonus is that you can start turning off some of the annoying Microsoft Account prompts as well as turning off some of the cloud content that is generally a headache to deal with.
Another thing to consider is that I can go from bare metal to a working OS on the Windows side of things fiarly quickly. Over the years I have had to build a number of scripts and other tools to speed up deployments. With Winget and a few other powershell commands I can get the software that I need on a Windows machine by running two commands. On a linux box I haven’t spent enough time to have that level of automation built so setting up a machine on that platform will take me longer. It’s also going to involve a lot more tinkering for something that does just work on a Windows device.
And really these days I’m all about making things simple.
There are enough places where I can’t get away with that and have to go through all sorts of mess to keep things secure, locked down, and safe. A gaming machine that’s going to have no critical data on it should just be something that I can play with.