I love PCs. I do, really. But sometimes, you hear something that makes you cringe. Hard.

Misconceptions about PCs are fairly common with people that are trying to build them and usually make the rounds because someone decided to be annoying about it, then others had the same localized issue, turning it into an overblown misconception.

I’m here to clear them up.

“Linux sucks in general”

Any type of office work can be done easily in any Linux distro, plus, you don’t have to pay anything and most distros come with LibreOffice preinstalled, so you don’t need anything else but that.

Usability is much better and if you have something like KDE installed, you’ll be right at home.

“Gaming on Linux sucks/bad/etc”

It’s true that playing games on Linux used to suck but now it’s much better than before, thanks to DXVK, Valve and Proton, and some other things. You need to keep in mind that you’ll be able to get decent performance from it if you:

• have a decent PC, built with parts from 2016 and beyond or so;
• have an AMD GPU;
• are playing a singleplayer game, usually better performance will come from an older generation game;
• are playing a multiplayer game that says it is compatible with Linux or Steam Deck.

Usually emulation works better on Linux, so those older consoles can work fine using it. Up to you, of course.

Mind you, you’ll find some issues but it’s not gonna be like in 2012, where stuff straight up didn’t work, and once it did, it was half the performance.

“Windows sucks”

While is true that it feels that Microsoft wants to ruin Windows, once you remove most of its annoyances, it’ll work normally. The UI/UX has been downgraded in Windows 11 but you can revert it with applications like ExplorerPatcher and the like so it’s not much an issue. They are trying to enforce MS accounts on anyone but people can still bypass those so…

“Windows IoT LTSC is more performant than regular Windows”

It’s still Windows, just less apps that we call ‘bloat’ preinstalled. All telemetry options, the ones that track you and such that people always rave about turning off, come enabled in IoT LTSC versions too. In Windows 10 versions as well (and even Windows 7 had that turned on by default).

If you wanna do that, I won’t stop you, just know that you’ll get less functionality because LTSC versions are for long term support, meaning it gets less updates which might be good when Windows doesn’t annoy you with its updates, but you miss out on both critical fixes and enhancements down the line, and also some features are can be somewhat difficult to reenable.

If you’re a LTSC user and never had issues, and keeps blaming MS for putting stuff into Windows, congrats, you have the same experience as I do when I debloat Windows 11 and use ExplorerPatcher. Quite literally the same.

If you wanna use Windows, bite the bullet, get the normal consumer versions and debloat it.

If you want to have something like a home lab system or maybe a NAS, I’d recommend getting the LTSC version and disabling its tracking, as Windows Server comes with features that you won’t use at all.

“AMD GPU Drivers suck”

While it was true that AMD driver shenanigans was real for quite some time, it’s no longer the case. RDNA2 launched with good drivers on Windows and they only got better overtime. And using Linux? It’s a delight, really good and stable drivers.

Compare to Nvidia that just this year alone patched RTX 50 like 10 times in 6 months, and one month had 4 hotfixes, that broke something else everytime. And the less we talk about the Linux drivers, the better.

“Just move to PC gaming”

I hear this a lot from PC gamers that ‘found’ how much better it is. Is it though? Every person I had to help build their computers were in pain during the whole process.

For the most part, computers are finicky and can go bad if you look at them wrongly. It’s pretty wild actually. Saying ‘just move to PC gaming’ sounds like coping, if I’m honest, just do what you like. You’ll have to spend money anyways.

The advent of using mods doesn’t change the fact that some games require mods to actually work properly. Until recently, GTA4 and Saints Row 2 were largely unplayable on PC, and GTA4 can still pack a punch with its lighting and detail shadows.

And again, the issue here is that a PS2 or PS3 game will always work on a PS2 or PS3, but games on PCs are extremely finicky, some of them requiring multiple mods to make it work as intended. It’s not fun. Plug-and-play might only be for stuff like USB devices.

Closing Words

Hope this clears some stuff out for you. I hate when false information keeps being spread around, mostly because people have their agendas. If anything, my own agenda to make sure you’re informed and do the proper thing.

Just remember that nothing is like how it seems. Computers are included in that idea.