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.
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:
Install it fresh.
Don’t install anything unless something absolutely doesn’t work without it.
Delete apps you don’t need, like (say) Xbox.
Tweak the power profile to minimum 0%/maximum 100% CPU, if it isn’t already.
Run a Windows debloating script.
Disable realtime AV.
(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.