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 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.
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
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.
Year of the Windows desktop here we go!
(credit)
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
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 they do on SteamOS 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?
Year of the Windows desktop here we go!
(credit)
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.
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.
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 because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.
Unless there’s a bottleneck it’s usually Vulkan vs dx.
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
Yeah, when you’re not trying to support random crap compiled for winxp you can leave out a lot of cruft
What’s my easiest distro route to get straight to gaming with an RTX 4070ti plus a Vive VR?
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.
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
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.
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.
Just a hunch, but it’s not performance why peeps are migrating away from windows
I migrated because I was frustrated with having to constantly fix problems caused by forced updates. I didn’t expect the benefit of my computer being WAY faster.
My biggest “wow” was when I could hit the super key and have the start menu open immediately instead of waiting 4 minutes for it to load in and another 20 minutes to take my search input and give me back results from Bing.
Sorry you didn’t like Bing, but now we have set Edge as your default browser, you’ll love it. Also Teams is now installed on your PC, surprise!
The performance boost is just the icing on the cake
Windows could run twice as fast and I still wouldn’t switch back to it.
Good news if you’re on a nvidia gpu then 🫠
It was for a time, when linux+Proton started outperforming Windows, in recent games, a few years ago.
But yeah, now… well Microsoft just seems very determined to actively destroy everything it maintains or touches.
Nobody is going to say what the real problem is unless they want to get fired
They can’t. The people working on complaints are in a different department. And departments don’t communicate at Microsoft.
That’s an understatement
Just 1 more AI data centre?
Lightly squeezes AI bubble a few times
“Yeah, there’s room for one more.”
Can’t wait to see how the fediverse grows when all these datacenters have to liquidate their stock for dirt cheap
lol. They’re not going to reduce the bloat in their OS.
But they have gaming mode that disables a lot of it
How do you manually enable it? Otherwise you are spreading lies and bullshit
They only spy on you most of the time!
lol, just kidding, that part doesn’t turn off
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?
For gaming, Microsoft views steamOS as the benchmark, and is working to optimize the platform so that steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable. Within the next year or two, it believes that Windows will be able to truly compete head-to-head with steamOS in gaming performance on identical hardware due to foundational changes that are being made to the platform in the coming months.
Do “foundational changes” mean they will play games on WSL hoping the “hyperV, WSL(inux), proton, game, WSLg (Wayland)” chain will have less slowdown than the “Windows, game, directX” route?
At least if they do it performance will stay on par with SteamOS as long as hyperV doesn’t bloat too much.
Competition is good and the more Windows tries to meet this promise, the more Linux gets exposure.
Doubt.
In two years the race will likely be over already.
Woo competition doing its thing!
It also legitimizes it as a viable option for gaming. We already know this, but the general masses are going to start looking at Linux vs Microsoft the same way folks look at PlayStation vs Xbox.
I bet you’re still giving them too much credit and most won’t know the difference between a steam deck and all the windows-based clones that popped up when business saw that people wanted something like that so made more corporate versions. A non-trivial portion of them will try one of the shitty clones and decide based on that that the steam deck is garbage.
lol
Never change, Lemmy
not really… microslop will always be trash and will always demand that you own nothing, and it’s all their data
Oh absolutely. But MS reacting to pressure from competition still benefits the poor souls who have to use it and shows that we need more people to switch away to encourage more improvements.
Nah they’ll just do anti-competive shit to make Steam worse.
They’ll copy Steam’s source code, patent it, and then sue Steam for infringement.
How do you imagine they patent a fork of Linux?
They already tried patent trolling for over a decade before they gave up… (Look up “Microsoft Novell-Suse patent trolling”)
Some bullshit to do with vibe coding a copy, then make some important new feature and patent that. Then require all new games on windows to support that. Some bullshit like that. Make direct 13 as incompatible with translations to vulkan as possible.
I wouldn’t put it past them to try…
And that’s perfectly fine and legal because patents are ‘first to file’
Because their legal system is captured by people who don’t give a fuck about what’s right and who see “competition” as something that needs to be squashed rather than encouraged.
Yeah 😥
Hate this place.
