Linux Has Better Windows Compatibility Than Vista

Several readers have written to tell us about one users rant in which he tells the story of being so frustrated with gaming on Windows Vista that he tried comparing gaming on Vista to that on Linux using Wine, with surprising results. "This post is clearly a bit biased. What shocked me though was how easy it was to find games that didn't run under Vista but did in Linux by using Wine or DOSBox. I'm not a huge gamer, so I don't have a huge collection of games to try out, but even still with just a few hours of frustrating work, I have been able to show that not only is Linux a reasonable alternative to Vista for gaming (XP is still king though), but also that Linux handles application failures more gracefully than Vista. Every game but Blackthorne crashed my Vista box, this didn't happen a single time under Linux."

Comments

hardly a good test

[leomekenkamp]

So this guy takes a whopping 5 games (out of thousands, and most quite obscure) and concludes that system BLA is better than system XYZ. Article mod: -1, Flamebait.

Not a wine problem -- check your graphics drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wine by itself can't lock the system.
The usual cause of this is proprietary graphics drivers getting out of sync with the kernel.
If you're using nvidia drivers, try reinstalling them.

vista gaming

[TheSpengo]

In my experience, gaming in Vista caused noticeable performance hits in every game I tried. I lost a 5-ish fps in oblivion, and up to 40 or more in source engine games. I haven't tried in awhile so I don't know if it's gotten any better but that was one of the main reasons for me switching back to XP. I have not tried any of the latest games such as cod4 or crysis in vista. I also did not try the most recent source engine games in orange box which allegedly use DX10 to help speed up some of the stuff vista slowed down. As for gaming in linux, that's something I don't do much because I prefer to get the max performance I can and wine/cedega just don't quite cut it. I do, however, use linux for just about everything else. :)

Re:vista gaming

[Computershack]

In my experience, gaming in Vista caused noticeable performance hits in every game I tried. I lost a 5-ish fps in oblivion, and up to 40 or more in source engine games. I haven't tried in awhile so I don't know if it's gotten any better but that was one of the main reasons for me switching back to XP. And in 2001, gamers were saying exactly the same about XP as they reverted back to Win98. In 2010, the same will be said about Windows 7 as people revert to Vista, seriously.

Four games

[RonnyJ]

Is a test that includes only 4 non-working games really a good indication of compatibility, and worthy of coverage on Slashdot? I certainly haven't had a problem with gaming on Vista, although I'm aware there's a few issues here and there.

I also did a search for one of the games listed - Darwinia - first two results on Google gave me a link to an update for Vista on the official site/forum. If he's using that (which he hasn't said either way) and still having lockups, I'd have thought there's some other issue there.

Re:And yet...

[baadger]

Windows XP came out in August of 2001, it is only 6 and a half years old.

Bad comparison, ignorant author

[Osty]

This is a pretty poor "comparison". The author makes some dodgy statements (Aero uses more CPU? not on my PC, where dwm.exe, the Desktop Window Manager that manages Aero Glass, averages around 0-2% CPU at any given time), links to some questionable sources (an article about how Vista Beta 2 sucks for gaming? Beta 2 is over a year and a half old), claiming to have used Vista for "over a year" yet having started with Beta 1 (there was no "Beta 1", but a series of CTPs, or Community Technology Previews, over two years ago and went straight to Beta 2 in May 2006 after the "feature complete" February 2006 CTP that could be considered "Beta 1"), and then finishes off by choosing a poor set of games to compare.

Since this article is all about the games, how about we look at those?

• Soldat works just fine with Vista, if you take the time to make it work. Why do you have to "make" it work? Because the Soldat installer is broken for Vista. It installs into c:\soldat by default, which is not a good idea for non-admin users (apparently it can't read the game textures from there when running as non-admin. If it installed into %programfiles% as it should, things may work better but I'd have to test that by forcing an install into %programfiles%. As it is, to get Soldat working you have to run it as admin (right-click the shortcut, choose "Run as Administrator"). That will fix the lack of graphics issue the author complained about. I didn't suffer any lockups.
• I haven't played Darwinia, but I have played DefCon and Uplink on my Vista box (from the same developers) and it works perfectly. That doesn't mean Darwinia doesn't have problems, but I find it highly suspect that one game would break on Vista when all others from that developer work perfectly.
• I don't have Blackthorne, but I've played a number of games in DOSBox that work perfectly fine in Vista, with audio. If he's getting an audio error, either it's a problem with Blackthorne itself or with his DOSBox configuration. He confirmed that by seeing the same error in Linux. My guess is this was simple user error, being unable to properly run DOSBox. If he can't figure that out, there are plenty of frontends (I like D-Fend even though it's been "dead" for two years) that he can use to abstract that away.
• I just fired up Civ IV to prove it works on Vista and it ran just fine even, though I was already running patch 1.61 (I haven't played Civ IV for probably a year now, yet I was still fully patched. Why wasn't the author?). The original run of Civ IV (which I'm using, and apparently the author is using as well) had a disc printing problem. The second disc was incorrectly labelled "Play", and you're supposed to use the "Install" disk in order to play. If the author is truly as big of a Civ fan as he claims ("When you mess with Civilization, its personal." and "I'd have a better time playing with a steaming pool of diarrhea."), he would've already known this. I didn't suffer any lockups.

That's 3 for 4 working perfectly in Vista for me (I'd call it 4 for 4 if I could replace Darwinia with DefCon), effectively debunking this article with my own set of empirical data.

For posterity, I'm testing on a 2.5 year old Dell laptop with a 1.73GHz Pentium M CPU and an ATI x300 GPU, running on 2GB of RAM and running Vista Ultimate since launch. I'm not a huge PC gamer, but then neither is the author so it's a fair comparison. These days, about the only game I play on this laptop is Galactic Civilizations II, which again works flawlessly under Vista.

Also, I'm not getting into performance here because a) I don't really care to do benchmarking -- if a game works well enough for me to play, that's good enough for me, and b) my machine is a laptop, and an old one at that, so it wouldn't really be a fair comparison to the latest and greatest laptops and desktops of today.

Re:Bad comparison, ignorant author

[Osty]

Out of curiosity, why are you running Vista on your older laptop?

Because I can? Because it works? Because the laptop runs it quite well and saves me money not having to buy a new laptop (probably in the cards for this year if I get any more dead pixels in the LCD or if my battery starts dying, though)? The laptop is not dual-core, though I did upgrade to 2GB of RAM and a 7200RPM hard drive (did that back with XP just as a general hardware refresh, not in prep for Vista). Functionality-wise, Aero Glass works perfectly and is properly accelerated on my x300 to keep load off of the CPU (Dell doesn't keep up with the Vista drivers for my laptop anymore, so I have to hack the latest drivers from ATI instead. Note that while the hack tool claims you need to turn off UAC in order to run it, you really only need to run the tool with admin privileges for it to work; yet another case of amateur software developers not "getting it"). The laptop sleeps and resumes properly with Vista like it never did with XP (always had to hibernate, or risk not coming out of sleep at all). I like to play around with writing gadgets for the Sidebar, which isn't available in XP. I would swear that I even get better battery life in Vista than in XP, being able to eek out nearly 3.5 hours of battery life on my 2.5 year old battery that should be hitting its half-life (my last laptop's battery took a nose-dive around year 2), where I was lucky to run for 3 hours in XP with the exact same battery. And I have all of the "expensive" things (Aero, indexing, system restore, etc) running without any impact to performance or battery life, though I don't really know how that's possible :). I even did an upgrade (not a clean install), which is typically a terrible thing to do! Sometimes I think I have a magic Vista installation, since my net experience has been extremely positive where everybody else seems to have a worse experience compared to XP. I get the feeling that my laptop (Dell Inspiron 9300 from 2005) was a popular model with the Windows developers, and may have gotten more focus than other makes and models. Otherwise I can't explain how such an old machine (albeit upgraded) could run Vista so perfectly when so many people claim so many problems with much newer hardware.

So, is it the novelty for you? or does it actually do something better than the OS you were presumably using before you switched?

To be honest, it started out as novelty but now that I've used it for a year and with SP1 on the horizon (next week?), I can't honestly see myself ever going back to XP. What few compatibility issues I've run into have been easily solved either with software updates or by using a different app (I admit that's not always possible, but so far it has been for me). Everything else as mentioned above has been better in Vista than XP, so why would I go back?

(For the record, I'm not a fanboy. I run Linux as well, just not on this machine. See my sig for proof.)

Re:Not a wine problem -- check your graphics drive

[baadger]

Bullshit.

The NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver is rarely the cause of X or kernel hangs and crashes. In 2 years of using NVIDIA drivers on bleeding edge vanilla mainline kernels i've only had to wait for a new release *once* and *never* had a kernel panic that resulted from it.

Re:And yet...

[Facegarden]

I agree! I'm really surprised that this guy couldn't get these games to work, because every small issue i've had with software in vista (which is pretty rare, though more common than XP obviously), i just fiddle with compatibility mode or admin mode, and i can make it work. Sure, it's not always intuitive (if you normally click on a shortcut to open a program, you'll have to find the actual .exe to change compatibility settings... a task i know my mother could never do), but it's really not that big of a deal... Vista problems? WTF? -Taylor

Re:Vista works really well with games

[Nimey]

Quite right. There was a DX3 and a DX5, though. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX#History

Re:And yet...

[Macthorpe]

In fact, let's just put this whole story to bed now.

Darwinia on Vista x64.
Soldat on Vista x64.
Civilization 4 on Vista x64.
Blackthorne on Vista x64 in DOSBox.

TFA is verifiably false, and the title is misleading.

Re:And yet...

[ratboy666]

I am *certainly* not qualified to comment -- I have never used Vista.

But, I am interested in one thing; what criteria do you use when selecting an OS? That I am curious about.

1 - It just came installed
2 - I have an investment in applications
3 - I evaluated it (on performance/cost/other factors)
4 - I trust the vendor
5 - It is the platform needed for a desired application
6 - It is the platform I suspect I need for a future application

or some other reason?