Eh? I don’t get BSODs because my compositor simply crashes (requiring a system restart, as the compositor will crash again if restarted) or my graphics driver hangs. Can’t remember the last time I bluescreened on Windows except for when I was testing an unstable RAM overclock.
I won’t say Linux gaming is better than Windows, but I will say it’s good enough that I don’t miss Windows at all even after a few years.
It’s highly specific to your setup and the game/software. Most games aren’t a problem. Just the occasional random issue, like in WoW certain locations insta-crash my graphics driver.
My setup is pretty clean hardware wise (Zen 3, matched RAM, stable/no overclocking, 6800xt), mainline mesa drivers, only thing that’s really unstable is wlroots-git / sway-git. Which is sometimes the problem, and other times it’s mesa. I also have 3x 1440p monitors, 240/120/120Hz, so if there’s any throughput-related bug I’ll probably run into it. Being on Arch I’ll probably also run into bugs related to updates in dynamically linked libraries fairly early, sometimes before they’re fixed.
I do. Last Monday between 8-11am. But on a school PC. 64-bit Windows 10 Pro doesn’t seem to play well with slow ancient 80GB HDD, ancient entry-level single-core CPU and 1GiB of RAM leaving just 45MiB free when nothing else than task manager was open.
Can’t blame Windows here though. It couldn’t even run Linux Mint XFCE (crashed after opening Firefox).
This week I “upgraded” it to Windows 7 SP1. Yes, it’s connected to internet. But don’t worry, we also have Windows XP machines connected to internet.
Just a funny note: One of the requirements from these computers is that they run the newest version of Cisco Packet Tracer… which requires 4GB of free RAM. Yeah, sure.
ancient 80GB HDD, ancient entry-level single-core CPU and 1GiB of RAM
It couldn’t even run Linux Mint XFCE (crashed after opening Firefox)
So the biggest limitation for literally anything will be memory. 1GiB is less than anything other than an Ubuntu server VM will handle
Pro editions of Windows 10 have memory compression which combined with paging will allow it to barely function, but Windows 7 and later will absolutely chug on a single core processor, with 10 basically being unusable due to heavy background processes.
On Linux it appears you have to really do some heavy customization to get memory compression to work, but you can use zram-config to setup a compressed swap file, so it will be slightly less bad. I suspect this is probably the easiest path to having this computer be capable of loading Firefox and a GUI.
With all of that said, an 80GB HDD is going to be incredibly slow even by hard drive standards, and a single core processor is going to be missing so many modern instruction sets that everything will be slow as molasses but even worse, it’ll be unreliably slow because certain things that rely on those instructions will chug as it churns through it the hard way, but then other things will zip by normally.
This PC sounds like an excercise in refusing to let the dead die, which while an entertaining challenge, eventually the only solution will be to make it place for running period-correct software
Eh? I don’t get BSODs because my compositor simply crashes (requiring a system restart, as the compositor will crash again if restarted) or my graphics driver hangs. Can’t remember the last time I bluescreened on Windows except for when I was testing an unstable RAM overclock.
I won’t say Linux gaming is better than Windows, but I will say it’s good enough that I don’t miss Windows at all even after a few years.
Hm, weird! I never experiences crashes, except if I leave my pc on for days on end
It’s highly specific to your setup and the game/software. Most games aren’t a problem. Just the occasional random issue, like in WoW certain locations insta-crash my graphics driver.
That’s so odd. Yea, I do agree it’s the setup. Lots of people mix ram sticks, weird drivers, etc.
My setup is pretty clean hardware wise (Zen 3, matched RAM, stable/no overclocking, 6800xt), mainline mesa drivers, only thing that’s really unstable is wlroots-git / sway-git. Which is sometimes the problem, and other times it’s mesa. I also have 3x 1440p monitors, 240/120/120Hz, so if there’s any throughput-related bug I’ll probably run into it. Being on Arch I’ll probably also run into bugs related to updates in dynamically linked libraries fairly early, sometimes before they’re fixed.
I also run arch and xfce4, having more than 1 monitor fucks with my refresh rates. Also, your setup sounds pretty nice
I do. Last Monday between 8-11am. But on a school PC. 64-bit Windows 10 Pro doesn’t seem to play well with slow ancient 80GB HDD, ancient entry-level single-core CPU and 1GiB of RAM leaving just 45MiB free when nothing else than task manager was open.
Can’t blame Windows here though. It couldn’t even run Linux Mint XFCE (crashed after opening Firefox). This week I “upgraded” it to Windows 7 SP1. Yes, it’s connected to internet. But don’t worry, we also have Windows XP machines connected to internet.
Just a funny note: One of the requirements from these computers is that they run the newest version of Cisco Packet Tracer… which requires 4GB of free RAM. Yeah, sure.
So the biggest limitation for literally anything will be memory. 1GiB is less than anything other than an Ubuntu server VM will handle
Pro editions of Windows 10 have memory compression which combined with paging will allow it to barely function, but Windows 7 and later will absolutely chug on a single core processor, with 10 basically being unusable due to heavy background processes.
On Linux it appears you have to really do some heavy customization to get memory compression to work, but you can use
zram-configto setup a compressed swap file, so it will be slightly less bad. I suspect this is probably the easiest path to having this computer be capable of loading Firefox and a GUI.With all of that said, an 80GB HDD is going to be incredibly slow even by hard drive standards, and a single core processor is going to be missing so many modern instruction sets that everything will be slow as molasses but even worse, it’ll be unreliably slow because certain things that rely on those instructions will chug as it churns through it the hard way, but then other things will zip by normally.
This PC sounds like an excercise in refusing to let the dead die, which while an entertaining challenge, eventually the only solution will be to make it place for running period-correct software