Windows 8 Release Preview is Ready

[cyclobs]

On top of that, we're getting pretty close to achieving 3D accelerated graphics (we have already got them but last i heard it still needed a lot of work) in VM machines on Linux. So soon enough we'll be able to play windows games naively on Linux from a windows VM.

It's not really native if you're running it in a virtual machine, though, is it? You're still stuck with an emulation layer which will hamper performance.

It would make life easier for those gamers who prefer to run Linux, but Windows will still have a substantial performance edge unless the games are coded to run natively in 'nix.

By native i mean in full screen mode running using Linux resources. Not native Linux binary's. Currently the 3D drivers turn all Directx calls into openGL calls. works quite well for wine. in most cases wine runs windows games better then windows.

and that performance difference you talk about might only be 2 or 3 frames.. Linux doesn't require 4GB of ram to run unlike some things...

But then with stream and source engine coming to linux some time soon in the future we may not even need to visualise other then playing older games which Linux can do better emulating windows anyway.

[caitsith01]

I do agree with just about everything you've said but Linux is not very far away from the home market at all IMO. After a reasonable hiatus I've just tried the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release on my laptop and its VERY tight. There's always going to be a learning curve but its reached a point where its more idiot-proof than Windows IMO.

To throw in an anecdote here, I wish I could agree with you but it simply isn't true.

I've recently had a titanic struggle to get Ubuntu 11.10 running nicely on a little home server I bought.

Problems so far:

- Massive issues with USB wifi dongle (which was listed as working well with Linux on the semi official Linux wifi site, which I why I bought it), eventually solved by creating a file with a particular name in a particular location and inserting something along the lines of "HW_encrypt=false" into it. Answer found by Google by pure chance in relation to a similar problem someone was having.

- Set up computer with one monitor. Plugged into another with lower native resolution. Linux fails to detect the new monitor and defaults to the resolution of the old one = blank screen. Solved by plugging in original monitor then kludging together an allegedly deprecated X conf file to force a lower resolution. Answer found via cobbling together random other answers to similar issues.

- Bridging between network interfaces where one is wifi and one is wired is, as far as I can tell, marginally harder than the Manhattan Project. In Windows this takes one click.

- Internet connection sharing via configuration files involves something akin to rewriting the network drivers in binary, as far as I can tell.

- Having a real nightmare with HDD standby. I want the system to spin down idle hard disks. However since 10.04 something has broken/changed/"improved" in hdparm (which isn't, incidentally, installed by default) and it now doesn't obey timed spindown settings. No fix at the moment.

- Building and automatically mounting and monitoring the health of a RAID array: a terrifying journey of discovery through secret command line executables and config scripts.

Etc. etc. etc.

So while it has its advantages, there are numerous aspects of Linux which are fundamentally unfriendly and require idiotic amounts of low level tinkering to fix.

By comparison my last 10 or so Windows 7 installs have required no intervention from me at all during install beyond telling the installer where I am and what login details I want. Plugged into an internet connected router, Windows is now excellent at "just working it out".

[Snootle]

Well Win 8 is awful but at least Win7 is supported until 2020.

I am keen to see how Valve is getting along with Linux though.

[diamondd]

I do agree with just about everything you've said but Linux is not very far away from the home market at all IMO. After a reasonable hiatus I've just tried the new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release on my laptop and its VERY tight. There's always going to be a learning curve but its reached a point where its more idiot-proof than Windows IMO.

To throw in an anecdote here, I wish I could agree with you but it simply isn't true.

I've recently had a titanic struggle to get Ubuntu 11.10 running nicely on a little home server I bought.

Problems so far:

- Massive issues with USB wifi dongle (which was listed as working well with Linux on the semi official Linux wifi site, which I why I bought it), eventually solved by creating a file with a particular name in a particular location and inserting something along the lines of "HW_encrypt=false" into it. Answer found by Google by pure chance in relation to a similar problem someone was having.

- Set up computer with one monitor. Plugged into another with lower native resolution. Linux fails to detect the new monitor and defaults to the resolution of the old one = blank screen. Solved by plugging in original monitor then kludging together an allegedly deprecated X conf file to force a lower resolution. Answer found via cobbling together random other answers to similar issues.

- Bridging between network interfaces where one is wifi and one is wired is, as far as I can tell, marginally harder than the Manhattan Project. In Windows this takes one click.

- Internet connection sharing via configuration files involves something akin to rewriting the network drivers in binary, as far as I can tell.

- Having a real nightmare with HDD standby. I want the system to spin down idle hard disks. However since 10.04 something has broken/changed/"improved" in hdparm (which isn't, incidentally, installed by default) and it now doesn't obey timed spindown settings. No fix at the moment.

- Building and automatically mounting and monitoring the health of a RAID array: a terrifying journey of discovery through secret command line executables and config scripts.

Etc. etc. etc.

So while it has its advantages, there are numerous aspects of Linux which are fundamentally unfriendly and require idiotic amounts of low level tinkering to fix.

By comparison my last 10 or so Windows 7 installs have required no intervention from me at all during install beyond telling the installer where I am and what login details I want. Plugged into an internet connected router, Windows is now excellent at "just working it out".

setting up Ubuntu as a server is a completely different story, although it should still be easier than you're making out. I've set up Ubuntu servers without much difficulty in the past, although I've never tried to configure RAID arrays.

one word of advice would be to steer clear of anything other than the LTS releases. Ubuntu's release cycle is retarded and most of the releases are completely bugged. I've had my fair share of Linux issues in the past but I did clearly state that it was my experience with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS specifically I was referring to and honestly it has been flawless.

my laptop's wireless card used to be a **** to get working, the video outputs, webcam, media keys, etc have never worked before and boom, all perfect straight out of the box on 12.04. You may be having trouble with the more advanced functionality on an old semi-stable version of Ubuntu but that doesn't make my statement false.

[Bek]

in most cases wine runs windows games better then windows.

I highly doubt that. How many games are on the WINE platinum list exactly? The few games I've run through wine have never been on par with Windows. Additionally there are lots of issues with drivers, particularly AMD who don't support nix as well as nvidia.

Also afaik 3d accel through VM = lol no? Unless that's changed somehow. Disappointingly even if all the games I wanted could work in linux, the programs I use would still require windows, so these would have to be ported too. Realistically I don't see myself ever being able to use linux as a main OS, except perhaps on a laptop. However I can't even use linux on my current laptop because 1) AMD drivers don't work (haven't tried the open source drivers) which means I have to use the intel sandy bridge chip for graphics, and I can't switch between that and the dedicated gpu and 2) battery life is half that of windows (at least it reports half that, tried ubutnu 12.04 lts and mint 13 cinnamon running live, haven't compared actual power usage / time yet). I've tried one or two fixes, nothing extreme yet but I don't see it being fixable. Or worth the effort because of issue 1.

[caitsith01]

it should still be easier than you're making out

I'm not "making out" anything, just listing things which have been a big headache to configure. This is 11.10 desktop, which was the most popular current Linux release around just before the most recent Ubuntu LTS. I'm no newbie, either, I was using Red Hat in the 1990s.

And you are sort of making my point - Linux is partly not ready for desktop users because there are a million versions with varying levels of compatibility with hardware, features, etc. and because of the nature of the community, no official or accepted "right" way to choose or configure it.

Linux Mint seems to be a good direction - but even that has similar issues (I could give you a list like the one above of the problems I had trying to use the latest version of Mint to do what I needed).

[diamondd]

yeah I don't think anyone is trying to argue that Linux is a perfectly viable option for everyone to jump to if they don't want to get Windows 8, but its definitely not the ugly **** child of an "ideal" OS it once was and for many applications is extremely useable.

in all honestly I can't even imagine not having a Windows machine in my life (lol) but at the same time I've been absolutely loving the new Ubuntu and gnome-shell on my laptop.

in fact, if someone brought the gnome-shell functionality over as a wrapper to my Windows creature comforts I'd be a very happy man.

the main thing I find though is for every one-click solution to a problem there might be in Windows there's another one that requires plenty of hoop-jumping and never quite gets me where I want to be anyway.

^I didn't mean you were making anything up, point is plenty of people don't have any issues at all and I think an unfortunate combination of hardware/your configuration is probably just as much at fault as any inadequacies of Linux. Linux powers servers the world over, it works better than anything else but it does take some configuring. Lets not forget that Ubuntu isn't really designed to be a server anyway, sure it provides the functionality but the main goal is to target the kind of people who are buying macbooks by the tonne these days. You might have more luck using a tool which better suits the job at hand.