This is really intriguing, but am I reading the instructions correctly? Call me dumb, but I don’t know how to reinstall Win10 Home; I don’t have a recovery CD or anything like that. I’d also need to back up everything first… which would be a pain…
I’ve used it for VR, which is the only thing I keep Windows for. It’s pretty good however I’d say having experience with Linux is a good idea, I definitely wouldn’t treat it as a drop-in silver bullet for Windows minimalism (if such a thing exists).
By the sounds of it you’re inexperienced with OS-hopping, so if you’re going to start looking for things like this just do it properly and give Linux a go. You’ll learn so much more and get a much nicer experience at the end, then if you decide you still need Windows then go and use someone else’s computer to make a USB. I wouldn’t bother trying to make one on Linux, it hardly ever works in my experience.
For clarity, I now just debloat vanilla Windows 11 with Chris Titus’ tool. Still only used for VR and Game Dev.
If you go with Atlas, just know you’re putting your whole system into the hands of a team smaller than most Linux distros that’s doing more work than all of them, so I doubt Atlas is going to be around for much longer. Whereas something like Debian, Mint or Pop! is here to stay.
There’s also far less chance of your system breaking if you go with Linux. Really in this situation there is absolutely zero reason to not go the extra mile and hop to desktop freedom.
This is really cool and I’m glad it exists for those stuck on Windows for certain games. That said, I’d still highly encourage anyone interested to give Linux a shot. I ran it as my daily driver for years about a decade ago, but finally switched back to Windows because I was spending too much time trying to get my games to work. I finally got fed up with Windows 11 and moved back last year. Holy hell has gaming on Linux come a long way with Proton. Everything I’ve thrown at it has worked flawlessly, and runs at least as fast as they did on Windows.
That said, I get that not everyone wants such a paradigm shift or to learn a new tech just to play their games. In the interim of not running Linux on my desktop, I still worked with Linux servers and used the Windows Linux Subsystem, so I get that I’m a little biased in how easy the switch was. You can find distros that are very beginner-friendly, however, or even specifically gaming-oriented.
But yeah, for those stuck on Windows due to games with pervasive anti-cheat or whatever, I get that AtlasOS could be a gamechanger.
Thank you for coming to me Ted Talk.
I admin linux systems all day at work, and in my spare time on my home lab rackmount setup that lives in the spare bathroom, and I say that to make clear that I’m extremely comfortable with Linux. I got a gaming laptop recently and loaded Ubuntu onto it, and was very underwhelmed with the gaming performance on it. My SteamDeck ran many of the games better, and there were a bunch issues with the OS not being able to keep the integrated graphics card vs the discrete one straight (e.g. switching the load order on reboot, making games constantly try to run on the integrated card), that just made me eventually give up and put Win11 on it. At this point, I’d love for Valve to release a “SteamLap” gaming system, because clearly Linux needs that tight control over the hardware config to get games working well.