I’ve run out of devices to put Linux on, so maybe I’ll create some VMs today
Native Windows CS2 dust2 benchmark gives me 120fps over the native Bazzite Linux (fedora 43) CS2 - 180fps. Running proton CS2 gives me 100fps.
Wish more games had native Linux ports.
For my lazy fellas on mobile: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/what-is-windows-k2-everything-you-need-to-know-saving-windows-11
I dont even check if a game will work anymore on Linux, it always does. Last one was Planet Crafter which was a really good game. The entire planet is changing as you terraform it which is very fun to see.
That game ate 60 hours of my life in a week when I first played it
Perhaps they are talking handhelds, specifically?
Look. I am the biggest, most shameless CachyOS fanboy you will find. It’s like 90% of my desktop time, has been for years.
But I’ve benchmarked a few games on Windows and Linux, Proton and native, sparsely, and Windows still has an advantage, sometimes. Cyberpunk 2077 was the biggest outlier for Proton (eg faster on Windows, enough to visibly affect settings I can manage on my 3090).
And many native ports are still truly awful. Often where performance equates to simulation time, like modded Stellaris or Rimworld.
Mind you, that’s not always the case. Proton is faster in many games, and (for example) anything Java like Minecraft or Starsector are just hilariously faster on Linux.
The caveats:
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My Windows 11 is neutered to hell. It’s a barren wasteland. Even Defender is disabled.
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I’m running Nvidia.
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Some of my testing is aging now.
Still, I am a Linux shill, and think the headline is a bit dramatic. Stripped Windows is still faster in plenty of realistic scenarios.
Since they’re referencing SteamOS, they’re probably talking about stock mobile systems, where the overhead from that mountain of background junk in Windows is much more painful.
Yes but … Windows is not stripped Windows. The real Windows is a spyware hell installed by your laptop vendor. Barely usable.
Good point. My laptop is dualbooting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 22) and its faster to:
start Linux, login, start quemu, start Windows VM in quemu, login in windows in the VM, shutdown windows in the VM gracefully, exit quemu, shutdown Linux gracefully
than
boot windows natively, login and wait till it is responsive enough to do anything with it.See, my Windows partition starts instantly. TBH its faster than linux, which takes an extra second to initialize SDDM, and then network connectivity.
…Perhaps because its so neutered. It’s not really a fair comparison, as Windows is a narrow-focus OS for me, a tool for running things, to the point I don’t trust it for anything security sensitive.
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my favourite thing about linux/open source: It’s often one person in their garage writing this code (or at least started that way), and it’s more often than not better than the closed source alternatives. Booyeah!
Microsoft is doing this ONLY because they finally recognized that Linux surpassed them flying on the one thing they were king: games
Microsoft doesn’t give a single shit about end users, never had. It always had the goal of becoming the dominant ayer, then get a monopoly, and then doing absolutely nothing anymore until users complain too much. This has been their work ethos since it’s inception and if you believe otherwise I have a bridge to sell you.
An abstraction layer that reverse-engineers the Windows GPU and kernel syscalls and runs on a completely different operating system does better than the native platform after a decade or so of volunteer labor, and a few years of a couple paid devs.
How embarassed would you be if this happened to something you spent 40 years building?
Microsoft is deep into the vibe coding now, but even before that it was cheap devs who could write somewhat functional code but had little concept of optimization, amidst a sprawling bloated OS that has only grown fatter over time.
The mentality of RAM and storage are cheap has suddenly come to a screeching halt but it’s taking to take them a long time to find talent that can actually fix the mess they’ve already built, especially as they try to grab more AI crap into every nook and cranny of their product line.
Linux gaming went from good luck to Windows is taking notes. That’s a pretty wild timeline.
And it all started with a guy wanting to see sexy android ass on Linux
So we can also say indirectly that Steam Deck wouldn’t have happened without the horniness of Yoko Taro who created that android ass in the first place.
What a chain of causality that is
Year of the Windows desktop here we go!
(credit)
No please, continue shooting yourself in the foot.
People begged for performance debloating for more than a decade but you’re only interested now because Proton outperforms Windows.
I would be asking for a multi million dollar salary as an NT kernel engineer to undo all the crappary intentionally introduced in every update ever since Windows 8.
What’s my easiest distro route to get straight to gaming with an RTX 4070ti plus a Vive VR?
There is none. VR is a fools errand on Linux. You can maybe get something to technically run, but with missing features, worse performance, and even then only some VR will even attempt to launch to that broken state.
I have a Windows VM for VR gaming. Dual boot also works. For all non-VR gaming, Linux is pretty much flawless nowadays.
Which Distro? Pick one that has existed for at least 10 years, with the desktop environment your like the look and feel of most, and most popular and well supported from that.
We have a Vive and it works pretty okay actually, aside from SteamVR being janky.
Hopefully they fix the SteamVR jank with the upcoming Steam Frame, though!
– Frost
I have a very similar setup (Vive + 4070) working under Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The only special workaround was to install Steam natively, downloading directly from Valve instead of using the Snap provided by Canonical. Aside from that, everything worked immediately right out of the box.
I’d say something Arch based will be the easiest on account of it having so many users. For VR, check out the Linux VR Adventures wiki, and the Matrix community attached to it.
NVidia kind of sucks. I’d expect that to be the biggest wrinkle.
CachyOS would be my recommendation; it has options to get a kernel with the closed-source drivers automatically during install, iirc. I bought an AMD card, so I have no direct experience, but I’d expect the least friction with it, even compared to Bazzite or other gaming-focused distributions.
Yeah. Being Arch based it’s flexible, and I’ve heard it’s got a good setup. A friend has a bit of a rough time with the default kernel but you have options.
VR will automatically be a bit janky. The smoothest out of the box VR experience at the moment is WiVRn coupled with an Android VR headset, like a Quest or a Pico. Requires a good router though.
If someone’s looking to get into VR on Linux, I’d wait for Valve’s headset to come out. No idea if it’ll be any good or not, but the Quest is arse. I absolutely hate mine.
Reject Fedora nonsense. Go Arch, use CachyOS. Seriously, I only ever had issues with Fedora and Fedora based distros. And besides, Red Hat is slowly turning to shit. You heard it from me first. In 5 to 10 years most people will put Red Hat on the same level as Canonical.
I second CachyOS. I don’t even consider myself an advanced Linux user and it’s been a relatively painless transition from Windows gaming.
Plugged in a second SSD m.2 into my motherboard, installed off a USB, and an hour later I was goofing around with some friends on our weekly Satisfactory run like nothing changed.
If it’s the first time trying it just follow along with a YouTube guide, ezpz.
Outside of Valve hardware certainly Bazzite or Nobara. Not sure about Vive VR support in general though, but if it exists those distros are the most likely to work with it with minimum of issues.
CachyOS or Nobara if you want the option to tinker down the line
Bazzite if you don’t want to do any tinkering ever
Lol it’s true
It’s wild that they recognized that software compiled for their own operating system goes faster through an interpreter on a different operating system
“With things like instant file search!” Omg I can’t, what a joke of an OS.
The company views a third party app called File Pilot as benchmark for these [file search] improvements
That app is still in beta and was launched one year ago.
They’re comparing the search from the native shell (where they could directly query the NTFS table like Everything does and get instant results), native to their OS with 40 years of experience with some unknown newcomer still in beta???
Its funny because Valve doesn’t need SteamOS to compete with Windows. They made it to enable playing more games, so you buy more games. If MS matches performance with Windows, Valve still wins, because its just another avenue for people to buy more games. They don’t care what OS you do it on. But MS does care, because they need you on Windows to eat up your data. Which also means they’re at a disadvantage in competing on performance as well, because they need your games to play as well as on SteanOS while also enabling all their bullshit background services and telemetry.
Gaming aside, it’s incredible how bad Windows Explorer performs compared to e.g. Dolphin. It’s performance got even worse with Windows 11, but at least it finally has tabs now
Is that Dolphin on Linux or Windows?
They are talking about the file explorer Dolphin, which is available on Linux and Windows.
But it is a core app for the KDE desktop environment, so it is primarily optimized for Linux.
I haven’t actually tried Dolphin on Windows, not sure how usable it is
It’s from KDE so usually Linux
Edit: …realising there’s also Dolphin Emulator and now I’m also confused lol but still feel they’re talking about KDE file manager vs Win Explorer
I was also talking about KDE dolphin.
https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows
See also
Some games have better performance running under wine on Linux than natively on Windows.
On the flip side, I couldn’t get Linux native Jackbox to run because the devs failed to update it to support something (Wayland maybe, IDK was troubleshooting mid Xmas party).
Ended up installing the Windows version in Proton.
That’s a story old as Linux. Native shit stops working. Thankfully wine/Proton is there to keep it functional
Hm. I wonder if still will become a problem in the future if we get more Linux native games. We shit on Windows for not playing old games when wine can, but if a game stops functioning moving from x11 to Wayland (or some other dependency) will there be people there to care enough to fix it? Although I would assume it would be an easier fix for Linux than Windows for when it does.
It won’t. You have so many options. Just install the old libraries, use a chroot, use docker. Probably automate all this with Lutris or similar.
Once 32bit libraries are gone, only wine with the recently added WoW64 will be able to run old games ot of the box. Old native titles made for 32bit Linux will require installing all the 32 bit libs again, assuming they’ll be even available for your distro
Which is no issue w Since you can even still run old 16-bit games on linux. Maybe someone will start packaging convenient library collections at some point.
Many games ship with dependencies statically linked into the binary. Those won’t even have the problem apart from maybe glibc.
Edit: 16-bit still works. For 8-bit there are emulators.
it will always be a problem with native games.
I think it was about 5 years ago, the Terraria team Linux dev left. Something happened that stopped the Linux build launching, and the native version was not playable until they got a new Linux dev in the team. Proton version worked flawlessly with more stable framerate.
As far as I know the native Undertale build is still unplayable. If it is working now, well it wasn’t for about 6 years.
I see people get excited about native game builds, that’s great but unless it’s a very dedicated team that will update the game constantly it seems to be is no use.
I feel like the issue could be solved with a flatpak-like solution.
Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.
Yeah, when you’re not trying to support random crap compiled for winxp you can leave out a lot of cruft
Well the funny bit is winxp games and software run through wine quite well lol
I always wonder whether that’s because it’s doing less… like some graphics feature that isn’t supported might just no-op in Wine.
Windows 11/10 does some stuff that isn’t in the feature scope of wine/proton, namely on the security front (KDP, HVCI, ACG), which has a measurable performance impact. Whether you want to call that bloat or not is up to you.
Nah. I mean, there might be some stuff like that, but nowadays, I’d be surprised if feature parity wasn’t 1:1 (or even better, with some open source drivers having features that are removed from official windows drivers…).
The underlying OS is pure garbage, that’s mostly it. Windows will start chugging everywhere with even moderate FS activity: running a background, single-threaded backup process will sometimes make it impossible to click in another window or open a new application. Driver API is not great, you have to jump through hoops to do basic stuff. There are many ways to do the exact same thing, each being more or less efficient than the other. Audio API is so bad, an audio device failing will sometime cause ohter, unrelated, non-audio application to spontaneously combust.
And so on and so on.
On the other hand, the Linux compatibility layer that proton provides do add some overhead in places, but surprisingly, it’s not that much overhead. And it’s not that common (basically, the code runs natively until specific instructions that requires special handling).
Obviously, when you have a better operating base, and very little extra overhead, software tends to run smoother.
And all that is not taking into account optimisation to Linux system themselves; there’s been a lot of improvement in technical stuff for graphic drivers (especially on AMD side, but not exclusively), the kernel itself can get improvement in its handling of IO and memory, the whole thing is more flexible, etc.
It’s usually because of all the other bloat running on Windows. Just various background processes on Windows will eat up like 10G of RAM just idling, where most desktop Linux distros I’ve used will use 2-5G idling. Having a few extra gigs of RAM available can make a noticeable difference.
I feel like system calls in the Linux kernel are just more efficient/faster than system calls in Windows. Windows system calls have decades worth of compatibility layers all cobbled together for business reasons, whereas I don’t think the Linux kernel suffers from that same problem.
And that’s not even mentioning the multiple layers of absolute voodoo black magic wizardry that is Vulkan (Linux graphics API) and DXVK (a translation later that translates DirectX calls to Vulkan calls). Those are some absolutely incredible pieces of software, and deserve a ton of the credit as well.
I don’t really think Linux is faster because it just injects noops sometimes though lol. You’d definitely be able to notice if part of the graphics pipeline was just… skipping enough steps to make a noticeable performance difference lol
Just one small correction for that - Vulkan is universal, not tied to any platform.
It’s because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.
What if they find out that people went to CachyOS for even more performance?
Cachy uses a lot of unstable patches. I wouldn’t recommend it just for benefit of bunch more frames.
So far it has been the most stable distro I’ve run, since moving to Linux full time three years ago, i think they are doing something right, idn 🤷
Agreed. The only major challenges I’ve had with CachyOS are from my Windows VM or from not realizing that Docker containers are the best option for server-type things, like the controller for my WiFi mesh network. Once I stopped trying (and failing) to run that from the AUR, it’s been smooth sailing.
But most people would just buy the dedicated mesh network controller, and the only reason I need a Windows VM is for SharePoint integration in Explorer, which is a fairly specialized requirement. Even as a power user, I almost exclusively use the web apps for O365 just so I don’t need to use Windows.
Apparently, earlier in CachyOS’s history, there were more issues, but I don’t think that’s at all true anymore. I tried installing a more “standard”/conservative choice, Debian on my wife’s and friend’s laptops, and it’s been way harder. I should have just stuck with “unstable” CachyOS, and it would have been much more stable. Turns out things usually get better with newer patches. Who knew?
I was there early in CachyOS’s history, and it was still great. The only huge issues I can remember (that wasn’t totally self inflicted) are upstream Nvidia problems, and some ambiguous manual package installs/uninstalls when some stuff was shuffled and renamed. But the later just taught me to watch the update log, as I should.
That, and I keep an LTS kernel around whenever something minor breaks. Which their setup makes totally painless.
I agree with others. CachyOS is the most stable Linux distro I’ve ever used, to the point where my laptop and desktop installs are years old now. It’s also that Linux desktop, overall, is in a good place, but still.
