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.
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.
Yeah, it’s good. Sort of like a survival cookie clicker.
That game ate 60 hours of my life in a week when I first played it
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.
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
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.
Nvidea might be making a big difference there, I’m on AMD and didn’t lose any frames, even in AAA games, when I switched from Windows 10 to Bazzite 42. Haven’t gained any either, but there’s a lot less stutter in menus and faster loading times that still make it feel smoother anyway.
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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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
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
Are you judging him?
yes. I judge it as pretty neat
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 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?
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
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.
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!
Just a hunch, but it’s not performance why peeps are migrating away from windows
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 🫠
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.
Hotkeys related thing that got me is the fact that on almost any DE you can configure your own hotkeys the way you want them, you don’t have to use the ones Microslop thought are good. Using three languages, layout switching was an absolute pain with what hotkeys Windows has to offer.
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!
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
Homelab community will get a lot more activity XD
the windows file explorer and terminal have horrible performance, it’s one of the reasons I’ll never switch back
Year of the Windows desktop here we go!
(credit)
lol. They’re not going to reduce the bloat in their OS.
But they have gaming mode that disables a lot of it
They only spy on you most of the time!
lol, just kidding, that part doesn’t turn off
How do you manually enable it? Otherwise you are spreading lies and bullshit
Press the xbox button, under settings, “enable game mode”.
It’s been a thing for years. How tech illiterate are you?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.
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.
Unless there’s a bottleneck it’s usually Vulkan vs dx.
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
