this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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PC Gaming

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Uninstall it then. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I've uninstalled it dozens of times. Uninstalling Windows is the real tip.

But gaming....

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

2 years since I’ve built my gaming rig. I’ve booted Windows on it once, and at this point I don’t even have a Windows partition anymore.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm someone that happily advocates Linux for daily use but for gaming.. Some games run great on Linux Steam but there are more than a few that either won't run at all or for some reason (gpu drivers maybe?) run slow as hell when on Windows they run just fine. I 100% prefer to run on Linux but until there's a solution for that I'm stuck dual booting.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The games I play on my hardware tend to perform the same or a little better on Linux.

I’m not saying this is true generally but it is for my relatively small sample.

For reference, I have a recent Radeon GPU. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3 and even Starfield (which I haven’t played in a while because 🥱) all fit this experience.

The open source driver for Nvidia seems to be catching up lately, so hopefully everyone will soon have a prime time on Linux!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Anecdotal: first game I really felt a difference in a bad way (it was worse on linux), was with battlebit Remastered.. it's still very playable but I had weird frame drops on the same hardware. Normally it's the same or better though, so whatever :-)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm currently in the process of (finally) migrating my gaming PC to Linux and through that eradicating the last bit of Windows in my private life.

However, I happen to have a Nvidia card in my PC (GTX 1650 was the only sensible choice since I'm limited to a 250W PSU and it was almost half the price of an RX 6400) and Linux (nobara in my case) isn't exactly making it easy for me, especially since I'd like to have gamescope / the steam deck interface.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I made steam start in Big picture mode on my linux mint HTPC to achieve that interface. Does that not work for you bc of the Nvidia card?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The regular old af Big Picture mode should work fine but it’s ugly and clunky imo. The new steamdeck specific big picture mode (or rather session) doesn’t work. I just get a black screen. That might be fixable but I haven’t dug into that yet. It should be able to work with current drivers. Wouldn’t be as complicated with AMD graphics and I’m looking if I find someone to trade my 1650 with an RX 6400…

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer. I've been full time Linux for a decade and it's never been better for it. There's like two games my friends play that won't run due to anticheat, but lucky for me I don't play those anyway. 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I've had the same machine since 2018 and I've only ever had to uninstall OneDrive once. 🤨

Using 10 or 11?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

If you're using Office365 it tends to auto update and happily forget you don't want to have OneDrive on your machine, so it reinstalls it.

It kinda annoying because OneDrive is a piece of shit in general, but saving directly to SharePoint from Office apps is useful. As with many Microsoft services, OneDrive is just SharePoint in disguise. But I really would like the SharePoint bit without the OneDrive bit.

I also don't like the whole cloud first thing, pushing everything to Microsoft services. But I understand why they did it, for regular dumb users storing shit on a cloud service is probably better than on the computer. I've had multiple co-workers send me Word docs with a list of linked documents (why is this a feature and why do people use it?), which all linked to the local Documents folder. They said they checked all the links before mailing the Word docs, so it must be me who is mistaken.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago (2 children)

When you set up a new PC, OneDrive automatically starts syncing files based on the Microsoft account you sign in with.

I wish that Microsoft’s cloud storage service was opt-in instead of opt-out.

I set up dozens of Windows machines for users every month. There is literally a page during the out of box experience that prompts the user as to whether or not they want their Desktop, Documents, and Pictures mapped to OneDrive.

The person writing the article and anyone else complaining about this are mashing “next” without paying attention and then complaining it wasn’t set up the way they want.

I actually do use OneDrive for those locations, even going so far as to symlink AppData game save locations over to OneDrive so that everything is the same between my laptop and desktop.

I haven’t had the issue the author describes with AC Valhalla or with Rockstar Games Launcher.

After you set up a new device, OneDrive doesn’t automatically download the entirety of its contents. Files are downloaded “on demand” when the system tries to access them, and I bet that’s what caused the stall the author described.

The only inconvenience I’ve ever suffered from having game saves in OneDrive was with Call Of Duty’s Modern Warfare reboot. The settings config file lives in the Documents folder, so each time I launched the game on my Desktop or Laptop I would have to edit the settings to suit that device.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I always have issues with The Sims. Apparently EA uses the Documents folder for a lot of temp files. So every time I play The Sims, I get warnings from OneDrive that thousands of files were recently deleted. Because it’s creating and deleting temp files the entire time you’re playing, which are all automatically trying to sync to OneDrive.

Given, that’s mostly an issue on EA’s side; Whatever programmer thought the Documents folder was a good spot for temp files should be dragged out back and flogged.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Really, this is the games' fault, at least if they were released in the last ten years. That's how long Documents has been a subdirectory of OneDrive by default. If you've built software that can't handle that gracefully and released it since, that's just negligent. It's not like the windows documentation doesn't tell you places that wouldn't have this problem where you can store machine-specific data.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've been complaining about this for years now. Windows even has a library for saved games and some games even used that but for some braindead reason, they just don't anymore (and not many did). My documents folder is useless for documents, which is one of the many reasons I stopped using Windows for anything but gaming.

What's almost as annoying though are games that save to appdata. I have lost so many gamesaves that were hidden in the depths of appdata to windows reinstallations while my documents (and "my games" folder) sits securely on a secondary HDD.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

I hate it when games save in my documents folder. I use my documents folder for important stuff like my documents. Shove it in appdata or steamapps or somewhere reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (5 children)

I can understand how this might be annoying but I’m pretty sure it’s convenient for OneDrive users. Why doesn’t he just disable syncing on that folder? How many times is he changing PC?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I set up a Windows PC for a friend, and he insisted on using his M$ account (bad decision). That caused the Desktop folder (not Downloads, not Documents, just the Desktop) to be stored in OneDrive. So as I tried to load his old PC's Software hive, to extract the windows key, it crashed the PC. No problem, the original hive was still exported on the Desktop. I just rebooted into the boot stick and tried to load the hive there. After searching for the Desktop folder for 30 minutes, I finally located it in the OneDrive folder. And despite it being there, and taking up space, according to dir, it couldn't be accessed, like wtf?

  • Who wants to share the desktop, but not Downloads etc? In contrast to the other user folders, the desktop is filled with program links that won't even work anywhere else.
  • And why not make it accessible in a live boot? Like, it was obviously accessible to some degree, but not readable somehow? Wtf?
[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (5 children)

In contrast to the other user folders, the desktop is filled with program links that won’t even work anywhere else.

As someone who used to work in IT I wish that was the case. The desktop is a catch-all for basically anything that might momentarily enter a user's field of vision.

Application shortcuts, URL shortcuts, broken application and URL shortcuts, PDFs, images, a copy of their child's baby album, a folder that's just called "stuff" where all their actual work is saved, seven different copies of the same recipe for homemade pasta sauce, six empty files named "New Text Document", and a recycle bin full of things too important to delete.

But you can't put anything anywhere else, because they "have a system."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I feel attacked. Only i do clear my recycle bin frequently

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I hate games that use the base Documents directory. So many new subfolders in there. We need a //Games folder instead of /Documents/My Games or whatever it is called nowadays. At least it isn't /My Documents anymore. That damn space was a problem causer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

They use Documents because it’s an easy way to ensure saves don’t persist between users. If you and a sibling both play on the same computer, you don’t necessarily want to be sharing game saves. Since the Documents folder is on a per-user basis, the saves are per-user as well. If they simply saved the games in the Program Files folder, saves would potentially persist across users. And anyone who has had a younger sibling accidentally erase all of their saves knows what a bad idea that is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It also allows them to persist after a reinstall of the game or of Windows itself, as the Documents and media folders are (optionally) not wiped when reformatting via a Windows install. For games that for whatever reason (fuckin' Dark Souls 3) don't have cloud saving this is a boon.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Make it a new personal folder called "Games".
Not the first time MS fiddled with those settings lately.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can decline using OneDrive during installation. And after installation you can uninstall it or just disable the service.

That's it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Article writer: "I can't write an article on that. I know, I'll pretend I've never used a computer before instead!"

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