Foxlet

Yes! ISA only remains on industrial motherboards at this point so it's not exactly supported, but PCI cards can be used on a PCIe system using a PCI-to-PCIe riser cable (can be found on sites like eBay or Aliexpress), and of course on special motherboards with PCIe + PCI slots. For example, here's an NVIDIA card passed through to 86box:

Hi, 86box contributor here! A few notes about the project that might've been missed in the video: Serial passthrough is WIP, but has been finally implemented and partially working, with some bugs to iron out 86box already supports mounting any folder as a Virtual ISO directly from the Media menu Support for Linux and macOS (plus native Apple M1/M2 support) is available, particularly handy for ARM64 systems There is a special build of 86box for Linux that supports VFIO, so you can pass through physical sound cards, network cards, hard disks, or classic GPUs over to the emulated PC

Even with the upcoming 5.15, the new ntfs3 driver will help substantially with accessing their existing game libraries off a secondary partition, so there's always a tangible benefit to being on the newer version of Kernel.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Void Linux, but it would make sense for having a more stable/tested package set due to its single repository layout (community packages are committed directly), while still being bleeding-edge enough to handle modern Linux gaming properly, all while not having the meme status of Arch. KDE Plasma is pretty much the easiest DE choice for someone coming solely from Windows.

Turns out dual-booting Windows 11 and Linux from a single partition is indeed possible.

The driver supports native Unix permissions and those are preserved properly in the filesystem. Windows itself sees root-owned files as held by TrustedInstaller, which handles all non-administrator files as well. Case sensitivity and file links are shared across both systems.

Background With the upcoming release of Linux Kernel 5.15, a new filesystem driver is included known as ntfs3. This driver was contributed by Paragon Software based on their commercial efforts, and includes full read/write support as well as NTFS and Unix permissions support. More details can be found in the following: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ntfs3.html https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs3-driver-faq/ So what's this about? Given that the new NTFS driver is now a native part of the kernel, I've decided to (as a proof of concept) add a preliminary kernel (with ntfs3) as well as boot support to a modified version of the Void Linux installer... and it works! Officially no distro supports installing Linux on an NTFS disk out of the box yet, but conceptually it should be possible for users to transition from Windows to Linux without formatting or moving any data by using this method. More information to come soon!

Summary After Valve's promises of anti-cheat support in SteamOS, individual vendors are beginning to publish Linux-compatible versions of their anti-cheat solutions, starting with Epic's Easy Anti-Cheat. The latest version of EAC is supported under native Linux as well as through the Proton and Wine compatibility layers, although the process for enabling it is opt-in for each game developer. Quotes My thoughts Anti-cheat has historically been one of the major pain points for many gamers trying to switch over to Linux; this essentially removes a blocker that prevented many popular multiplayer games from running on the platform. Given Valve's recent announcement of the Steam Deck being Linux-based, this also opens the path towards 100% game compatibility on their end. Sources https://www.windowscentral.com/epic-games-makes-easy-anti-cheat-available-linux-paving-way-steam-deck https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/news/epic-online-services-launches-anti-cheat-support-for-linux-mac-and-steam-deck (original press release)

To clarify, the vendor reason is speculation based mainly based on Intel EOLing 7th gen CPUs and related chipsets at the end of 2020, leaving it in extended support, with 8th gen and higher remaining as the only active products in their existing product stack (matching Microsoft's compatibility list). https://www.anandtech.com/show/14968/intel-to-discontinue-nearly-all-desktop-kaby-lake-cpus Certain older motherboards also lack support for Kernel DMA Protection, which is a new requirement for Windows 11, and was introduced around the launch of 8th gen systems.

Probably a combination of vendors no longer supporting these older CPU products, and Windows's Device Attestation (for the TPM) and Kernel DMA Protection (for older chipsets). Microsoft goes more into detail about the TPM and Device Attestation in https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/06/25/windows-11-enables-security-by-design-from-the-chip-to-the-cloud

The reason that 7th gen/Zen 1 CPUs and under are considered incompatible is mainly because the upstream vendors (Intel and AMD) no longer support these older CPUs with firmware updates. Microsoft is just taking advantage of the opportunity to eliminate them from the roster by following the vendor's direction.

Microsoft explicitly mentioned that Insider Preview builds would be exempt from needing to meet all the system requirements (this also applies to hypervisors), and users will be required to return to Windows 10 once 11 hits General Availability. In effect this new hard floor is only for the RTM version.

You may want to update this post as the Compatibility webpage for Windows 11 has been updated today; the old hard floor (that mentioned TPM 1.2) has been removed. Microsoft explicitly says that TPM 2.0 will be required and CPUs outside of the compatibility lists are not supported, putting the new hard floor in line with the results of the PC Health Checker (which was also updated today to point out incompatible CPUs). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compatibility/windows-11/ CPU Compatibility Lists: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-amd-processors https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors

This might fit better on ChannelSuperFun, but acquiring a full-size water slide ($180,000) and other waterpark equipment off AliExpress... because economies of scale allow for that apparently. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33022449706.html

Ironically, with an LGA115x cooler (like the Intel Stock cooler). The die guard should protect against chipping the APU.