Earlier this week, PCWorld published a roundup of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that does not meet our editorial standards. We’re deeply embarrassed by it, and I personally apologize that the article was published. It should not have been, but we’re keeping the article live (with an editor’s note at the top) so it remains in the public record.
Windows Central published a response detailing its errors. Thanks for keeping us accountable, guys — genuinely. In the same spirit of accountability, I want to explain how this happened, and what we’re doing to ensure a mistake like this never occurs again.
Let’s start by discussing how PCWorld handles translated articles, and then I’ll dive into the issues with the article itself.
Journalistic integrity in this day and age? Hasn’t that been outlawed yet?
I wasn’t sure about that article at the time, but it did inspire me to finally try out bazzite on a spare nvme and I found that a lot of my issues in games went away. Particularly fallout 4, the painfully slow loading screens between map changes are like 70% faster now. So I’m sticking with it for my gaming rig.
I never would have though running games through a translation layer could actually improve performance. Id heard a lot of people say so but I assumed it was just Linux devotees being fanboys. They were absolutely right.
There’s a mod to basically remove loading screens in Fallout 4. It “unlocks the framerate” when load screens are detected, and it functionally eliminates load screens. It’s fucking insane that that’s all the game actually needs. It’s lile Bethesda put a goddamn “wait” command in just to slow the game down.
You are playing it on hardware that’s 10 years newer than the game was designed for. That mod even lists SSD as the primary reason for the advancement, with it not making much difference running on an HDD.
Sounds like a great mod for today’s equipment though.
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You can run DXVK (DirectX -> Vulkan) in Windows, too.
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Antivirus (even Windows Defender with defaults) can massively slow down disk IO in some games. As an example, my Rimworld loading times were over 2X as long with Defender realtime active, and it caused all sorts of hitching.
I’m not trying to dunk on Linux here; it can help a ton, sometimes. Sometimes it is Linux that provides the massive boost.
…But sometimes it’s just about a good default configuration, with linux gaming OSes provide. Windows can be like this too, once it’s stripped down.
Again, not trying to dunk or tout either OS; I use both, though linux mostly. But I think attribution is important. And the assertion that Linux provides a big performance boost is not always true; I’m still stuck on Windows with several games just because (in spite of my best tweaking/modding efforts), they still perform better on Windows in A/B tests.
I get all that, they’re all very good points. I had windows tuned to the best of my abilities, I try to use windows whenever possible at home because I manage windows servers professionally and it’s helpful to get as much hands on time with the platform as I can. But this was such a dramatic difference out of the box that I’m going to stick with it for now at least. I’m not willing to invest the time into tweaking windows to run this well (if I even can) and it’s a dedicated gaming rig so many of the “Linux on the desktop” complaints won’t apply to my use case.
Mostly I’m shocked that getting significantly improved performance when running through a compatibility layer was even possible. I expected proton to be almost as good as native. In this instance it ended up being a huge improvement.
Yeah. Wine/Proton is an incredible achievment. DirectX->Vulkan translation is a miracle by itself.
EDIT: Also, stripping Windows is not daunting. It comes down to:
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Install it fresh.
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Don’t install anything unless something absolutely doesn’t work without it.
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Delete apps you don’t need, like (say) Xbox.
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Tweak the power profile to minimum 0%/maximum 100% CPU, if it isn’t already.
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Run a Windows debloating script.
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Disable realtime AV.
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(Optional) auto-undervolt your GPU with MSI Afterburner’s curve optimizer.
…And that’s about it, really. There’s tons of other Windows performance mysticism, but it’s (mostly) either very situational, or straight up nonsense.
Thanks for the tips but I’m a very experienced windows user, I did all of that immediately after install lol. To put it in perspective, my first step after installing bazzite was to join it to my personal AD domain that lives on my hyper-v cluster. If there’s something I could have done to get this performance on win 11 it would have probably been significantly more complicated and time consuming than any of the basics.
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The developers at a previous job swore that their Windows installation ran faster and better on a virtual machine inside of Linux.
I never tried it myself, but I trust their judgement. They knew what they were doing for sure.
It seems crazy to me for journalists to trust machine/AI translated articles enough to use as a source in their own articles.
I’ve always seen them as things to treat as unreliable, but something to use when there’s no other options available and to get a gist of what it might be about.
If using them as citation I’d need a native speaker to confirm content before being confident enough to include it if I were a journalist.
AI is now the dog you blame for your flatulence.
Next time I shit in my bosses coffee I’ll blame AI. After all he required me to use it more.
“AI made me do it.”
You telling me, they didn’t have anyone with German skills reviewing their translation prior to publication?
Perfect!
See the same people that circle jerked over that article, now try and act like they knew it was fake all along.
we accidentally windows 12
It could happen to you.
Somewhat this mistake makes me think PCWorld is genuinely synced with MS at QA level.
Article did not provide any specific corrections. Is windows 12 subscription only or not?
They basically retracted the article. There’s no windows 12.
