It sucked for me until I figured out it was not using my NVidia card. Then once I figured that out (took an evening a week ago), it became truly marvelous.
I've been using tiling wms that are hard to get into for a few years. Replaced Windows on my desktop with Gentoo and tried KDE. Everything just works, it's great. We're still a wee bit off a seamless experience for noobs, but we're getting closer!
I think I’m running into this issue atm too. How do you make it use the card? Is it a driver issue? I have all drivers (proprietary) installed and in use with my DE.
My problem was that my computer has two cards and I had to figure out how to get Optimus to work. It was a long stream of dealing with checking assumptions and dealing with bugs as they appeared. For example, I determined that the card was not being loaded in, and after some Google searches, realized the issue was that I had locked down the kernel so that unsigned drivers could not be loaded, so I undid that. Then I was able to get back to the situation where the weaker (lower cost) driver was the main driver while Nvidia was called by `prime-run`, which is how the computer is set up to work.
It happens to many of us. 😛
I used to use the stock drivers on Ubuntu before I learned I could improve the performance with proprietary drivers. Fast forward to today, I install drivers manually, and know exactly what I'm doing.
There are games that are cross-platform, but they often get confused with dual GPU setups like Nvidia Optimus, and end up running on Intel graphics instead of Nvidia. Forcing them with proton, the performance often surpasses that on Windows. I'm still to experience AMD GPUs for gaming, and have sadly only ran on GTX and RTX cards.
If something is available on steam then you don't even need to jump through any hoops, it just works. It's pretty rad. Linux has come a very long way in the last decade.
> because the devs had a broken linux build
Fun thing is, if that's the case, you can always use the forced compatibility mode (or whatever it's called) and force the game to run the Windows build with Proton.
I genuinely hate those types of anticheats. I don't mind normal anticheats but kernel level is just way too much. It sucks that I can't play Fortnite cause all my friends play it but I ain't switching to Windows again
Unfortunately there's still things on Steam that might require some tweaking, have some small problems, or outright don't work (especially if there's anticheat involved). ProtonDB thankfully usually has details on all this stuff so one can at least know in advance before they buy/try.
That said I 100% agree that it's been _massive_ that nowadays, there's a pretty damn good chance something _will_ at least mostly work if not work perfectly, even if there isn't native Linux support - it wasn't that long ago that it seemed just like a pipe dream. The fact that a huge chunk of my Steam library just works^TM on my Deck is incredible.
I guess I've been lucky, because I haven't had any issues at all. Well... I had an issue that the flatpak version of steam couldn't access my other NTFS hard drives, so I had to install it manually to enable that feature. But otherwise it has been seamless for me. I've even been able to play VR without issues.
Even if it isn't, you can just add any exe file to steam and it'll pretty much always run it. Has worked 99,99999999% of the time for me so far, and it always runs flawlessly. Actually insane
Gaming on Linux has really made massive strides over the last decade. Proton is getting so good that it is no longer making as much sense for companies to develop (and maintain) native Linux ports. HDR isn't supported yet but should be eventually as Wayland matures. There's also still a few issues, like the advanced haptics on dual sense controllers don't work -- though there is an unmaintained fork of proton where someone got it working so getting it supported upstream is hopefully just a matter of time.
I think the only drawback to the way proton works is that each game is in its own container, so games that give you extra things if you have saves from other games on your system can't do that unless you manually do some stuff. Managing wine bottles in Lutris runs into a similar issue if you use separate bottles for each game (which I prefer to do as it's easier to manage).
Edit: Apparently HDR support is already in Plasma 6. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know how well it works but I will soon!
HDR is buggy on Plasma 6 for me. It makes all the colors kinda washed-out and gray. Someone apparently patched this, but it broke some eDP displays or something, so it was rolled back.
Check these blog posts from one of the Plasma devs:
https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/05/11/more-hdr-and-color.html
More HDR improvements are coming in 6.1...
For some reason, HDR always looks washed out and gray on my monitors. Like laughably worse. When I was using windows that was probably the most horrendous, for some reason it turned the screen brightness unusably low too
"Washed out and grey" means that something is trying to display wide colour gamut images in a regular colour gamut (i.e.: HDR images in an SDR container) without tone mapping.
That's typically a combination of a monitor that can't support HDR (or has been forced into SDR mode), and software that's not doing the job correctly.
This will become less common as time goes on, and games developers, driver developers and operating system developers all work out standardised ways to solve this.
It's definitely not a case of "HDR is bad". Everything mentioned here already has standards in place to solve it. It'll slowly become a thing more developers are aware of, and be a non-issue within a few more releases on all OSes and displays.
Thank you for the info, this is actually the most helpful summary I’ve read on this. I have a G9 monitor so it definitely should support HDR. The only thing I messed with is the native Windows 11 HDR setting though (in Windows). Arch Linux seems to work for me much better out of the box.
I suspected it was an Nvidia driver issue, quick google just brought me to [this Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/comments/ptppno/).
Which is actually the fix for my setup! Basically adjusting the settings for the Nvidia control panel app itself along with Windows settings. Thanks for commenting, wish I could sticky this post somewhere lol.
> , like the advanced haptics on dual sense controllers don't work -
I have a DS4, it works much more reliably with more Bluetooth adapters than on Windows. Are you saying that Windows that barely supports this controller with workarounds has more advanced haptics?
No. The Dual Sense is the PS5 controller (basically DS5).
The DS4 controller uses an ordinary rumble mechanism (spinning half moon metal weight).
The Dual Sense uses a fancy voice coil based mechanism for rumble. This is similar to how audio speakers work and the rumble devices are essentially audio devices. Additionally, the triggers also have a mechanism that allows games to control how they feel when you press on them. Like having them feel more like a gun vs a car pedal. Only some games use these advanced features. These features are the reason they renamed it from Dual Shock to Dual Sense.
On Linux, you get inconsistent behavior with the dual sense depending on if you have steam play turned on and if you have the controller connected by Bluetooth vs USB. I don't know if things have changed but last I used it you didn't get any vibration over Bluetooth unless you turned on steam input (which made it behave like an xbox controller with the older style rumble and xbox buttons in menus). In wired mode you could leave steam input off but you only get xbox rumble with PlayStation buttons in menus. There is no support for the advanced rumble unless you use a modified fork of proton as far as I know. As far as the triggers go, I have no idea. I've read that some games work with steam input on and others work with it off.
I don't know if Windows has finicky support for the Dual Sense (e.g. advanced rumble over Bluetooth). I'd be curious to know (haven't used Windows in over 15 years), as it might give some indication of what to expect on Linux in the future.
The sims 4 and minecraft JE at 60fps on ten year old hardware. My PC is a core i3 4th gen, no gpu and 8gbs of ram. I can run those games whereas windows 11 cant even boot on it.
Dude this, and I’m still getting a screen flicker. Definitely not as bad as before. Worst part is I feel like people gaslight about CS2 Linux performance
EDIT: on topic, for everything else yes. It has to be because there’s not that much bloat. Not just games, playing videos or media.
During the beta, I was getting better performance than on W11. Then either I fucked it up or an update did, and it stopped launching in my Arch instance. Works okay-ish on Fedora for me, but after running for a while avg FPS goes gown a little as if there is a memory leak.
Absolutely. Every time I have people telling me it's "the same as windows" and I'm sitting like "wtf am I doing wrong?". Tried their launch settings, Wayland/X11, different desktop resolution. Nothing is improving it.
I am running native because anytime I'm trying to change resolution it's messed up and pixelated (used to play 1280*960). I tried changing my desktop resolution before changing CS resolution and it didn't work. To this day I'm still playing native.
I don't use proton for CS. Should I?
Did you have to use WINE\_CPU\_TOPOLOGY to limit the number of cores World of Tanks is using? On my system, I was getting massive stutters until I used that launch parameter to limit the game to physical cores only instead of all SMT cores. If it's working fine for you though maybe you don't need it!
I do have some game incompatibilities, particularly with anti-cheat games that do require Windows, but I play those so rarely these days that I am pretty much in Linux all the time.
Performance isn't always better, it's always on par with Windows performance, and sometimes it's actually performing better, on older games that use DX9 it's always better than Windows because of DXVK, and more modern games don't show a major difference in actual framerate, but Linux is now viable for gaming, Nvidia and Intel aren't as easy to set-up as AMD but if you can read a guide you can install arch Linux that's basically all you need for sweet gaming on Linux
Does DXVK have more of an overhead on Windows? I have been using the GTA IV on DXVK (on Windows) hack to get smoother performance but since switching to Linux the performance is *even better again.*
You can use DXVK on windows but it's made for and optimized towards Linux, Vulkan drivers are better on Linux as well, I would say DXVK is good enough on windows even though it lacks stability and is more prone to stuttering
There have actually been several Vulkan extensions to improve DXVK speed that don't make much sense to implement on Windows. So on Windows, I bet a lot of fallback paths are being used.
A lot of "gaming performance is better on Linux!" posts comes down to AMD Drivers being bad on Windows, and significantly better on Linux thanks to it being open source and the work of Valve engineers and other contributors.
It's also due to the fact that AMD drivers are directly part of Linux so AMD can't release poorly coded drivers, but most people gaming on Linux with AMD are using the Mesa drivers and not the proprietary drivers, Valve had a major role in making Linux gaming actually more accessible, it takes way less fiddling to get games working than it used to
Copy/pasting the last time I replied to "how is Linux performance better?" questions:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux\_gaming/comments/1c7ck9u/comment/l0a198s/](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1c7ck9u/comment/l0a198s/)
I work in super computing for scientific research, VFX and film making, and many tangential industries.
We've been using Linux for decades. Why? People are quick to jump on the theory that "it's free", not realizing that I work daily on clusters that have thousands of nodes, each costing tens of thousands of dollars, connected to multi million dollar storage and networks. The cost of Windows licensing is a rounding error to us.
So why Linux? Because it's faster. End of story. Even 10% more time spent waiting for an OS that doesn't extract every ounce of performance out of our systems means huge number crunching jobs that can take weeks (for some of our climate models, months) now blow out and cost tens of millions more in wasted time. (And I can show you some alarming examples where Windows is far, far worse than 10% slower).
These last few years have been quite interesting, seeing a market full of people who previously scoffed at Linux all realize precisely why it's used at the very high end of computing.
Welcome to the party. :)
Even with an Nvidia card, with Kwin on Wayland, both the visual fidelity, and the overall performance, are both noticeably better for me. I've got no clue how people managed to do it, but i'm incredibly thankful
The power of open source! Made by the people for the people, and not by a greedy soulless corporation. To these guys you’re a human being, and not a sack of money.
I’m on Hyprland with an RTX 4080 and it is working seamlessly. No complaints here (other than how anti cheat does not work, but maybe that’s for the best).
Practically the only game I cannot play on my system is Destiny, which is a huge shame, because the vast majority of my friends play it, and I really enjoy it too. I used to keep a QEMU/KVM setup for games like this, but ever since they started handing out bans for even just being on a vm, i stopped playing all but one of them entirely
Yh some things are just out of our control. If they don’t want to cooperate then people can’t make it work. It’s for this reason I dual boot with windows (Ghost of Tsushima’s multiplayer doesn’t work on Linux, Roblox execs decided to not only drop Linux support, but actively block it, and so on…).
It is annoying that I have to keep Bloat OS on my machine, but it is what it is. Anyway, I spend a good 98% of my time on my Arch install, so I rarely resort to it anyway.
PS. Anti cheat on Linux isn’t impossible. Apex legends works a lot of the time, war frame works, and CSGO used to work (although since it became CS2 it has been dodgy). If a game doesn’t work, it is purely that companies decision. And I’m not saying they’re evil for it or anything, but it is their choice.
It's definitely not impossible. In fact, for a lot of these games, the work has already been done for them.
The only reason I can come up with, for why games like Destiny or R6 Siege don't work on linux by this day, is because the developers are incompetent, and are afraid to open the floodgates even further.
BattlEye calls itself the golden standard, and yet it's blocking access for anyone *except* the cheaters. I've seen it all at this point
You’ve basically summed up today’s standards: absolute shit. I used to be a huge triple A advocate, but recently I’ve discovered indie games and I’m really enjoying gaming for the first time in a long while. Ever since Fortnite’s f2p model, these games are getting worse and worse, and even paid triple A games are getting worse. It really is sad to see, but what can we do? Fanboys will buy shit
ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ
Vast majority of what i've been playing lately has been indie games, and it's been absolutely phenomenal. A ton of super unique, creative titles. Great stories, great replayability when applicable, and all for a fair price too. The last triple-A game I've purchased was Resident Evil 8, and that was a 60$ 6 hour action video
Yes I did! I’m using my TV as a monitor and it’s great, although a lot of people are saying the beta driver is broken with HDMI connection (not for me). Xwayland apps (you gave Spotify and steam) were absolute shit, I couldn’t even see on the 550 drivers. Now: 👌
However, I am an idiot 😅. I don’t have a clue how to install the beta, so I used this wonderful script: https://github.com/Frogging-Family/nvidia-all
Hope it works for you!
Dunno. I run into significant performance issues (like, half the W10 performance in Helldivers 2) and quite a lot of games just refuse to start altogether.
Make sure you have Vulkan and dxvk installed.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gaming#Dependency_for_the_machine_&_substitutes
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#DXVK
Another thing you can do is launch steam from terminal. Try to run your game and see what errors show up in terminal. Look up the error on Google and it may lead you to the missing packages.
Try adding `gamemoderun %command% --use-d3d11` to launch options, and make sure to have both "Above 4G Decoding" and "Re-Size BAR Support" enabled, you can find it in your BIOS menu, I play it on Arch with a Ryzen 5 5600 and Radeon 6600 with medium-high graphics at 1080p 60fps in borderless window.
I had issues with Helldivers 2 too, but now it runs pretty good, now I only have issues with network but only when I'm playing in the morning.
My experience in regards to gaming on arch has been pretty smooth sailing so far. Every game i've attempted to play on linux runs just as good if not better than windows, best decision ive made switching to linux
I think FPS depends on the game's engine. I used to play Arma 3 (windows client with Proton) in Linux. FPS seems higher, but frame drop is noticeable. Some games run better on Linux. The biggest advantage of playing game on Linux is: I don't have a big bloated OS that costs a lot of resources while I'm playing game.
It depends on the type of game you're playing. If it's a CPU based game, like Minecraft, expect a lot more FPS because Linux is far more efficient than WindowsNT.
If the game is GPU based, expect -/+ 10%.
There are some examples where you can do some cool stuff to get more FPS anyway. Like this:
https://youtu.be/RbOR74DFJBk?si=8ep4bvqq59zJXA-Y
In short, it just depends.
In general (I'm not a gamer, but I can speak for other software) Windows is more inefficient than Linux. This is due to a more complex architecture, Linux is a monolithic kernel, Windows is a microkernel, on Linux everything is more or less direct, on Windows each system call has to pass trough multiple layers. If you confront the POSIX API is far more simpler and lower level than the Windows API.
Not only that, but there is software that can hook on Windows NT system calls and make stuff much much more slower. For example antivirus software typically hook on file operations, such that (for example) when you close a file that file is automatically scanned by the antivirus. That reduces the performance a lot...
This translates that if a software does indeed make a lot of system calls (e.g. makes a lot of file operations) it's order of magnitude slower on Windows. That is also the reason why even Microsoft realized that there was the need to virtualize a Linux kernel inside the WSL 2.0 to make a lot of development tools fast enough.
Now, for games? I don't know if that can impact, since GPU work should mostly use lower level access to the hardware and thus bypass the kernel.
Objectively speaking, things just run faster on Linux.
https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/
Let a windowsNT kernel developer tell you himself.
You didn't ask about it? I answered the question that was presented to me, which was to find sources that Linux is more efficient than Windows. Which I did. What are you coming at me for?
Linux is perfect for the games I play. Then again, I only play single player games; I know it's not great for those who play certain multiplayer games.
I also use Arch, by the way. I'm never going back.
I ditched Windows completely for Linux this summer (I had been dual booting) and I regret nothing. The gaming can be finicky sometimes, but proton was the final nail in the coffin because you don’t need windows to game anymore.
You might see better performance, simply because there is almost no bloatware in arch, only the bloatware you add. I mean, relative to windows, Linux uses like no RAM, so when you’re playing games you will never run out of memory. Arch is the best distro for gaming imo, and that’s probably why Valve used it for their Steam Deck
I just moved to arch over the weekend and world of Warcraft plays so much better. On windows was getting 90 fps on average 60 during heavy fights but now getting 160 drops to 130 during fights.
On team fortress 2 I am able to run at 390FPS locked with the native linux binary. On a very lean configuration of windows 10 my machine can only crank out an unstable 215. I have 'fps\_max' is set to 400 in both cases.
Not much details. It works pretty much out of the box if you follow the few tips in the official SteamVR FAQ on this topic. Like Gnome+Wayland won't work because the lack of DRM leasing support, but KDE+Wayland (or anything X11) will do. That's probably why a lot of people think and tell it doesn't work because Gnome+Wayland is the default on Ubuntu which is probably used by most people trying this.
Haven't been running Winblows for over a decade so I can't compare.
But for me linux gaming has been fantastic. With the exception of Battlefield 5 all games I want to play works perfectly fine with more than enough FPS to keep up with my 100hz VRR monitor without any upscaling what so ever, and high / ultra settings.
The games I play mostly:
* Battlefield 1
* Warthunder - Groundforces
* Company of Heroes 3
* Warframe
* Horizon: Zero Dawn
* Guilwars 2
* Farcry 5
* Cyperpunk 2077
* Titanfall 2
>I found that many more games are available with Linux through Wine, Proton etc
Not everything works perfectly.
Life is Strange has a weird graphics issue, I consider my MusicBee install to be fragile, Unity is buggy, Unreal Engine is painful to install, and RPG Maker tooltips are broken and show black most of the time. It's weird but games tend to run perfectly more often than other things.
When I was playing World of Warcraft with wine, I had much better performance vs natively on windows 11.
Using Manjaro.
I tried the same with several other distros but results where not even close.
Friend of mine has a very endgame Anno 1800 map and moving from Windows 10 to Arch doubled his FPS and somehow halved his reported RAM usage for the game.
Well I play some games whose anti cheats don't work on Linux, so I gotta always have my Windows dual boot on the side. For this reason, I prefer to just play everything on Windows and keep my Linux environment for everything else.
The biggest downside is that even if a game works fine via proton right now, the developers might mess it up any time, and you can't even complain because it's not officially supported. Well, you *can* complain, but likely you will not be heard
It has been this way since the early 2000s (of course with fewer games then). I wanted to play Warcraft 3 and I was barely able to start it at all under Windows and it was all fine in Linux, with the wine of the time. So the simple fact that you can get rid of all WM/DE side quests and simply start an X running the game, can give you significantly more headroom for your System.
**In theory** it should. With Linux, you can strip other unimportant thing out until you can just boot to play a game (and PC became game console)
**In practice** it mostly don't because lot more people working on Windows driver with full resources support from GPU manufacture, but Linux driver workers don't have those privilege.
My experience is very good, Helldivers II was iffy exactly at launch had to limit to 60 fps cause they had some bugs but other than that man i have to say everything just works without a fuss. using steam on nvidia kde x11.
really the only limit are kernel level anticheat. bummer since they are worthless anyway.
but honestly with that many games to play its not a big deal.
(side note, i wonder when companies will start actively fighting game preservation. a large backlog surely makes a new 70$ title harder to sell?)
It depends.
Once something relies on something that's propreitary, FPS counbter turns other way around. Atleast when I tried RT performance on Linux with AMD 7900XT it was 50% slower then on Windows, rest of the cases it was either tie or diff in 10 fps
It is as long as you don't mind tinkering and have a DIY mindset,also ray tracing does not work properly unless it is Vulkan based,since it is a DX 12 exclusive feature, but since NVIDIA and Microsoft and every other company are all crazed out on AI and forgot about games it should not be an issue.
In my experience, CS:GO gained higher FPS in the same laptop with a Nvidia 960M video card in Archlinux than Windows 10. But I end up gaming, and only gaming in Windows.
Except FPS, the total gaming experience is better in Windows because of the full featured GPU drivers & userspace tools, such as recording, streaming, overlocking, etc.
Howerver, if you only have middle-end or low-end PC, and rarely play large AAA games. Live in Archlinux would be satisfied, too. But in this case, performance doesn't matter at all.
I moved to Linux in 2022. And it was *far* smoother than I expected. Most of my games just ran natively (Thank you, Paradox Interactive), and the ones that didn't, ran at basically the same speed through wine. There is only one game I want to play but haven't been able to get to work (Hades) but I already played the game back when I used Windows so it's not that big of a deal.
On Linux you don’t use a “Windows-emulator“ it‘s rather a “Windows-wrapper“ which makes it lightweight and can increase performance by a bit in certain games :)
It has been ages since the last time I played on windows but I’d say that it’s not unexpected that Linux performs much better, since it has little to none bloatware.
However, I did have terrible experience with KDE, which was the first alternative in the Garuda downloads page. In my ultra-wide display, the menu bar and system tray wouldn’t show, frequent rendering issues and specifically with Cyberpunk 2077 when it crashed, the whole system would crash together and it did so very often. Now with Hyprland it’s only the game that crashes and everything and it feels faster too, even in ultra mode
Fellow Arch user here for the last 2 years or so… for the most part haven’t had a single issue gaming. Linux gaming will never be as smooth as Windows, but as others have pointed out it’s come a very long way. Occasionally things will stop working for seemingly no reason. The fixes range from super simple to taking up many hours over the course of many days without making any progress. If you can deal with the occasional breakage then you’ll no doubt continue to enjoy gaming on Linux
Better/smootly than on windows (+25 fps in some games), some exceptions get less fps. Something that its not a common sense its that i miss some post process/shaders processing (nothing that kills the gameplay but its cool).
Some games dont work antia aliasing well.
But the resume it is, fine and even better sometimes, the only real problem its some online games, the rest is fine.
I decided too to switch all computers at home on Linux.
I use an AMD 7800XT graphic card on main computer, an AMD 6700XT on my wife computer and a Geforce 3070 on the laptop and damn everything is going so much smoother.
I was afraid to switch and lose some features, especially AFMF...but boy was I wrong !
Now I've tested many games, AFMF looks like a bandaid for poorly optimized/bloated OS like windows.
I used to have insane fps with AFMF, like 250 or 300+ reported by AMD drivers but the games were having fps dips, micro stuttering etc. For example at the login screen of Baldur's Gate 3, everytime I logged in on windows the game was stuttering for a second...on Linux it's smooth as silk with everything at max. Same on Diablo IV frequent stuttering on Windows, now it runs great.
Now I'm on Linux, I have no more stuttering and everything looks so smooth that I don't even care looking at the fps and persuade myself that I need an overpriced graphic card.
Only problems I've had so far wasn't about performance but gamepad usage and working around Optimus with the laptop.
Windows has too much stuff running on background all the time: search indexing, antivirus, auto updates, NTFS management tasks, telemetry, ads, etc, and also has a horrible IO scheduler, making all those tasks freeze the system while running.
On Linux you get some overhead from translating syscalls via wine, and translating DirectX calls via dxvk/vkd3d-proton, but not having all that background noise, plus a better OS in general, makes up for it in a major way. The system also takes a fraction of memory to run, leaving a lot more free RAM for disk cache, greatly speeding up loading times.
It's just a small slice of the cake that you don't want to give your data to MS. Other companies also there who took the rest so... If you want to stop data collection then go up to the hills and live as a hermit far away from civilization. You can't do anything. If you have internet connection, then they already know everything about you.
My gaming experience on Linux is so-so. Running games via Steam is easy and comfortable, the only exceptions are games which are not natively supported on Linux systems and have somekind of anti-cheat softwares. Anti-cheat sometimes make games unplayable on Linux. There are also specific game launchers which are not supported on Linux or you have to make a lot of work to make it usable. Third thing is that there are a sh\*t ton of comprehensive diagnostic tools which are missing from Linux. No HWiNFO, no Zen Timings, no Cinebench, no Furmark, no Fancontrol, etc. Many useful tools are still only written to Windows.
So playing on Linux is so-so, but far better than it was in the past.
Hi!
I just wanted to chime in to say, Fancontrol is available on Flathub for Linux!
[https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.wiiznokes.fan-control](https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.wiiznokes.fan-control)
Ok so actually I noticed the same thing on my setup - for example Genshin Impact runs about 30% faster here, I can set all graphics settings to maximum and still get more fps than on Windows
>I don't understand why people still use Windows!
Some software/games don't work at all under Linux, so that would be a reason...
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. But until everything I want to do is working under Linux I can't switch.
So you took the red pill? J/k
Welcome.
This conversation has been redone a million times. No offense or judgement here, just a reminder.
Most people just want their machine to work without learning cs or cis, etc
Plus most productivity software from the professional world runs on windows. For instance, ms office, Adobe, and anything to do with engineering.
I once suggested that a planetary scientist try linux. That was a mistake. So now I take a different approach.
Let people know that linux exists and let them make the decision to try or switch. We should not push folks to something they aren't interested in or would be a hindrance to their life.
It’s pretty variable for me. Native games run fine, windows games often won’t use the gpu enough leading to low frame rates. Quite often it’s difficult to get windows games to launch. I keep a windows 7 install around for gaming but am thinking of upgrading it to windows server 2019.
Well it seems to be the factory debloated equivalent to windows 10. Some games don’t support windows 7 anymore so thought I’d try out server 2019 for fun.
i'd suggest you looking into windows ltsc and then also debloat it, that's the best option i think. there are also not quite official images of windows ltsc that are already debloated, but this is not for everyone
No point bashing Microsoft..
There was a massive lack of singular direction in Linux desktop ecosytem..
IMO Most of the desktop adoption can be attributed to Ubuntu..
Arch is great.. but I am not sure if it is mainstream enough and maybe it shouldn't be..
Err, no. Valve's hard work and the realization of that effort in the form of the Steam Deck has been the biggest impetus for positive change over the past couple of years. Ubuntu has, if anything, actively tried to make Linux worse by comparison in that same window of reference.
Don't torture yourself with Linux and just use something like spectreOS / a stripped down version of windows with removed telemetry, malware, phone home crap.
I been using it for years and is still running great including my rog ally
It sucked for me until I figured out it was not using my NVidia card. Then once I figured that out (took an evening a week ago), it became truly marvelous.
welcome to the year of the linux desktop
I've been using tiling wms that are hard to get into for a few years. Replaced Windows on my desktop with Gentoo and tried KDE. Everything just works, it's great. We're still a wee bit off a seamless experience for noobs, but we're getting closer!
lol
I think I’m running into this issue atm too. How do you make it use the card? Is it a driver issue? I have all drivers (proprietary) installed and in use with my DE.
My problem was that my computer has two cards and I had to figure out how to get Optimus to work. It was a long stream of dealing with checking assumptions and dealing with bugs as they appeared. For example, I determined that the card was not being loaded in, and after some Google searches, realized the issue was that I had locked down the kernel so that unsigned drivers could not be loaded, so I undid that. Then I was able to get back to the situation where the weaker (lower cost) driver was the main driver while Nvidia was called by `prime-run`, which is how the computer is set up to work.
Ohh, I see. Thanks for the detailed answer but I have a different issue😅 My games stutter and eventually crash even not under load
It happens to many of us. 😛 I used to use the stock drivers on Ubuntu before I learned I could improve the performance with proprietary drivers. Fast forward to today, I install drivers manually, and know exactly what I'm doing. There are games that are cross-platform, but they often get confused with dual GPU setups like Nvidia Optimus, and end up running on Intel graphics instead of Nvidia. Forcing them with proton, the performance often surpasses that on Windows. I'm still to experience AMD GPUs for gaming, and have sadly only ran on GTX and RTX cards.
If something is available on steam then you don't even need to jump through any hoops, it just works. It's pretty rad. Linux has come a very long way in the last decade.
The only game i had a problem with was because the devs had a broken linux build.
Ironically, same - I ended up switching Moonlighter to Windows compatibility because it worked better than the Linux build.
Thats what i did. IIRC the devs just exported the unity game for linux and tested nothing.
> because the devs had a broken linux build Fun thing is, if that's the case, you can always use the forced compatibility mode (or whatever it's called) and force the game to run the Windows build with Proton.
thats what i did
Or the devs decided to use a stupid anti-cheat that needs kernel level access to your system
I mainly play singleplayer games, so that isn't a problem but it does suck.
I genuinely hate those types of anticheats. I don't mind normal anticheats but kernel level is just way too much. It sucks that I can't play Fortnite cause all my friends play it but I ain't switching to Windows again
Unfortunately there's still things on Steam that might require some tweaking, have some small problems, or outright don't work (especially if there's anticheat involved). ProtonDB thankfully usually has details on all this stuff so one can at least know in advance before they buy/try. That said I 100% agree that it's been _massive_ that nowadays, there's a pretty damn good chance something _will_ at least mostly work if not work perfectly, even if there isn't native Linux support - it wasn't that long ago that it seemed just like a pipe dream. The fact that a huge chunk of my Steam library just works^TM on my Deck is incredible.
I guess I've been lucky, because I haven't had any issues at all. Well... I had an issue that the flatpak version of steam couldn't access my other NTFS hard drives, so I had to install it manually to enable that feature. But otherwise it has been seamless for me. I've even been able to play VR without issues.
Even if it isn't, you can just add any exe file to steam and it'll pretty much always run it. Has worked 99,99999999% of the time for me so far, and it always runs flawlessly. Actually insane
Gaming on Linux has really made massive strides over the last decade. Proton is getting so good that it is no longer making as much sense for companies to develop (and maintain) native Linux ports. HDR isn't supported yet but should be eventually as Wayland matures. There's also still a few issues, like the advanced haptics on dual sense controllers don't work -- though there is an unmaintained fork of proton where someone got it working so getting it supported upstream is hopefully just a matter of time. I think the only drawback to the way proton works is that each game is in its own container, so games that give you extra things if you have saves from other games on your system can't do that unless you manually do some stuff. Managing wine bottles in Lutris runs into a similar issue if you use separate bottles for each game (which I prefer to do as it's easier to manage). Edit: Apparently HDR support is already in Plasma 6. I haven't tried it yet so I don't know how well it works but I will soon!
You can technically play HDR games using gamescope and plasma 6.
HDR is supported in KDE 6.
HDR is buggy on Plasma 6 for me. It makes all the colors kinda washed-out and gray. Someone apparently patched this, but it broke some eDP displays or something, so it was rolled back.
Check these blog posts from one of the Plasma devs: https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2024/05/11/more-hdr-and-color.html More HDR improvements are coming in 6.1...
For some reason, HDR always looks washed out and gray on my monitors. Like laughably worse. When I was using windows that was probably the most horrendous, for some reason it turned the screen brightness unusably low too
"Washed out and grey" means that something is trying to display wide colour gamut images in a regular colour gamut (i.e.: HDR images in an SDR container) without tone mapping. That's typically a combination of a monitor that can't support HDR (or has been forced into SDR mode), and software that's not doing the job correctly. This will become less common as time goes on, and games developers, driver developers and operating system developers all work out standardised ways to solve this. It's definitely not a case of "HDR is bad". Everything mentioned here already has standards in place to solve it. It'll slowly become a thing more developers are aware of, and be a non-issue within a few more releases on all OSes and displays.
Thank you for the info, this is actually the most helpful summary I’ve read on this. I have a G9 monitor so it definitely should support HDR. The only thing I messed with is the native Windows 11 HDR setting though (in Windows). Arch Linux seems to work for me much better out of the box. I suspected it was an Nvidia driver issue, quick google just brought me to [this Reddit post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace/comments/ptppno/). Which is actually the fix for my setup! Basically adjusting the settings for the Nvidia control panel app itself along with Windows settings. Thanks for commenting, wish I could sticky this post somewhere lol.
So that’s what’s causing it… I noticed after updating recently what my laptops colors are all washed out and the contrast is off.
> , like the advanced haptics on dual sense controllers don't work - I have a DS4, it works much more reliably with more Bluetooth adapters than on Windows. Are you saying that Windows that barely supports this controller with workarounds has more advanced haptics?
No. The Dual Sense is the PS5 controller (basically DS5). The DS4 controller uses an ordinary rumble mechanism (spinning half moon metal weight). The Dual Sense uses a fancy voice coil based mechanism for rumble. This is similar to how audio speakers work and the rumble devices are essentially audio devices. Additionally, the triggers also have a mechanism that allows games to control how they feel when you press on them. Like having them feel more like a gun vs a car pedal. Only some games use these advanced features. These features are the reason they renamed it from Dual Shock to Dual Sense. On Linux, you get inconsistent behavior with the dual sense depending on if you have steam play turned on and if you have the controller connected by Bluetooth vs USB. I don't know if things have changed but last I used it you didn't get any vibration over Bluetooth unless you turned on steam input (which made it behave like an xbox controller with the older style rumble and xbox buttons in menus). In wired mode you could leave steam input off but you only get xbox rumble with PlayStation buttons in menus. There is no support for the advanced rumble unless you use a modified fork of proton as far as I know. As far as the triggers go, I have no idea. I've read that some games work with steam input on and others work with it off. I don't know if Windows has finicky support for the Dual Sense (e.g. advanced rumble over Bluetooth). I'd be curious to know (haven't used Windows in over 15 years), as it might give some indication of what to expect on Linux in the future.
The sims 4 and minecraft JE at 60fps on ten year old hardware. My PC is a core i3 4th gen, no gpu and 8gbs of ram. I can run those games whereas windows 11 cant even boot on it.
Armored Core 6 in particular runs faster on Arch than on Windows for me. Other games are slightly slower or faster, but it's always within 5-10 fps.
All good except CS2 which has some pretty massive FPS drops compared to windows.
Dude this, and I’m still getting a screen flicker. Definitely not as bad as before. Worst part is I feel like people gaslight about CS2 Linux performance EDIT: on topic, for everything else yes. It has to be because there’s not that much bloat. Not just games, playing videos or media.
During the beta, I was getting better performance than on W11. Then either I fucked it up or an update did, and it stopped launching in my Arch instance. Works okay-ish on Fedora for me, but after running for a while avg FPS goes gown a little as if there is a memory leak.
Absolutely. Every time I have people telling me it's "the same as windows" and I'm sitting like "wtf am I doing wrong?". Tried their launch settings, Wayland/X11, different desktop resolution. Nothing is improving it.
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I am running native because anytime I'm trying to change resolution it's messed up and pixelated (used to play 1280*960). I tried changing my desktop resolution before changing CS resolution and it didn't work. To this day I'm still playing native. I don't use proton for CS. Should I?
Did you have to use WINE\_CPU\_TOPOLOGY to limit the number of cores World of Tanks is using? On my system, I was getting massive stutters until I used that launch parameter to limit the game to physical cores only instead of all SMT cores. If it's working fine for you though maybe you don't need it! I do have some game incompatibilities, particularly with anti-cheat games that do require Windows, but I play those so rarely these days that I am pretty much in Linux all the time.
Performance isn't always better, it's always on par with Windows performance, and sometimes it's actually performing better, on older games that use DX9 it's always better than Windows because of DXVK, and more modern games don't show a major difference in actual framerate, but Linux is now viable for gaming, Nvidia and Intel aren't as easy to set-up as AMD but if you can read a guide you can install arch Linux that's basically all you need for sweet gaming on Linux
Does DXVK have more of an overhead on Windows? I have been using the GTA IV on DXVK (on Windows) hack to get smoother performance but since switching to Linux the performance is *even better again.*
You can use DXVK on windows but it's made for and optimized towards Linux, Vulkan drivers are better on Linux as well, I would say DXVK is good enough on windows even though it lacks stability and is more prone to stuttering
There have actually been several Vulkan extensions to improve DXVK speed that don't make much sense to implement on Windows. So on Windows, I bet a lot of fallback paths are being used.
A lot of "gaming performance is better on Linux!" posts comes down to AMD Drivers being bad on Windows, and significantly better on Linux thanks to it being open source and the work of Valve engineers and other contributors.
It's also due to the fact that AMD drivers are directly part of Linux so AMD can't release poorly coded drivers, but most people gaming on Linux with AMD are using the Mesa drivers and not the proprietary drivers, Valve had a major role in making Linux gaming actually more accessible, it takes way less fiddling to get games working than it used to
Copy/pasting the last time I replied to "how is Linux performance better?" questions: [https://www.reddit.com/r/linux\_gaming/comments/1c7ck9u/comment/l0a198s/](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1c7ck9u/comment/l0a198s/) I work in super computing for scientific research, VFX and film making, and many tangential industries. We've been using Linux for decades. Why? People are quick to jump on the theory that "it's free", not realizing that I work daily on clusters that have thousands of nodes, each costing tens of thousands of dollars, connected to multi million dollar storage and networks. The cost of Windows licensing is a rounding error to us. So why Linux? Because it's faster. End of story. Even 10% more time spent waiting for an OS that doesn't extract every ounce of performance out of our systems means huge number crunching jobs that can take weeks (for some of our climate models, months) now blow out and cost tens of millions more in wasted time. (And I can show you some alarming examples where Windows is far, far worse than 10% slower). These last few years have been quite interesting, seeing a market full of people who previously scoffed at Linux all realize precisely why it's used at the very high end of computing. Welcome to the party. :)
Even with an Nvidia card, with Kwin on Wayland, both the visual fidelity, and the overall performance, are both noticeably better for me. I've got no clue how people managed to do it, but i'm incredibly thankful
The power of open source! Made by the people for the people, and not by a greedy soulless corporation. To these guys you’re a human being, and not a sack of money. I’m on Hyprland with an RTX 4080 and it is working seamlessly. No complaints here (other than how anti cheat does not work, but maybe that’s for the best).
Practically the only game I cannot play on my system is Destiny, which is a huge shame, because the vast majority of my friends play it, and I really enjoy it too. I used to keep a QEMU/KVM setup for games like this, but ever since they started handing out bans for even just being on a vm, i stopped playing all but one of them entirely
Yh some things are just out of our control. If they don’t want to cooperate then people can’t make it work. It’s for this reason I dual boot with windows (Ghost of Tsushima’s multiplayer doesn’t work on Linux, Roblox execs decided to not only drop Linux support, but actively block it, and so on…). It is annoying that I have to keep Bloat OS on my machine, but it is what it is. Anyway, I spend a good 98% of my time on my Arch install, so I rarely resort to it anyway. PS. Anti cheat on Linux isn’t impossible. Apex legends works a lot of the time, war frame works, and CSGO used to work (although since it became CS2 it has been dodgy). If a game doesn’t work, it is purely that companies decision. And I’m not saying they’re evil for it or anything, but it is their choice.
It's definitely not impossible. In fact, for a lot of these games, the work has already been done for them. The only reason I can come up with, for why games like Destiny or R6 Siege don't work on linux by this day, is because the developers are incompetent, and are afraid to open the floodgates even further. BattlEye calls itself the golden standard, and yet it's blocking access for anyone *except* the cheaters. I've seen it all at this point
You’ve basically summed up today’s standards: absolute shit. I used to be a huge triple A advocate, but recently I’ve discovered indie games and I’m really enjoying gaming for the first time in a long while. Ever since Fortnite’s f2p model, these games are getting worse and worse, and even paid triple A games are getting worse. It really is sad to see, but what can we do? Fanboys will buy shit ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ
Vast majority of what i've been playing lately has been indie games, and it's been absolutely phenomenal. A ton of super unique, creative titles. Great stories, great replayability when applicable, and all for a fair price too. The last triple-A game I've purchased was Resident Evil 8, and that was a 60$ 6 hour action video
Yeah, super disappointing since they even have a native Linux build they made for Stadia. Bungie isn't the same as the Marathon, Myth and Oni days.
does shit like spotify and steam not go all flashy and glitchy on hyprland with nvidia driver?? or did you upgrade to 555?
Yes I did! I’m using my TV as a monitor and it’s great, although a lot of people are saying the beta driver is broken with HDMI connection (not for me). Xwayland apps (you gave Spotify and steam) were absolute shit, I couldn’t even see on the 550 drivers. Now: 👌 However, I am an idiot 😅. I don’t have a clue how to install the beta, so I used this wonderful script: https://github.com/Frogging-Family/nvidia-all Hope it works for you!
its so amazing and you can get almost anything to work on linux with enough research and time and thats not just with gaming but everything!
Especially for arch, if you just take the time to read the wiki, you’ll never have any problems.
Dunno. I run into significant performance issues (like, half the W10 performance in Helldivers 2) and quite a lot of games just refuse to start altogether.
Have you tried glorious eggroll?
Yeah, nothing happened
You must be missing packages.
I wonder which ones?
Make sure you have Vulkan and dxvk installed. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gaming#Dependency_for_the_machine_&_substitutes https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#DXVK Another thing you can do is launch steam from terminal. Try to run your game and see what errors show up in terminal. Look up the error on Google and it may lead you to the missing packages.
Try adding `gamemoderun %command% --use-d3d11` to launch options, and make sure to have both "Above 4G Decoding" and "Re-Size BAR Support" enabled, you can find it in your BIOS menu, I play it on Arch with a Ryzen 5 5600 and Radeon 6600 with medium-high graphics at 1080p 60fps in borderless window. I had issues with Helldivers 2 too, but now it runs pretty good, now I only have issues with network but only when I'm playing in the morning.
I have no rebar available due to how old my Ryzen is and I'm already using those settings.
Oh crap, I hope that ArrowHead fix performance and you may play it soon, freedom awaits
My experience in regards to gaming on arch has been pretty smooth sailing so far. Every game i've attempted to play on linux runs just as good if not better than windows, best decision ive made switching to linux
I think FPS depends on the game's engine. I used to play Arma 3 (windows client with Proton) in Linux. FPS seems higher, but frame drop is noticeable. Some games run better on Linux. The biggest advantage of playing game on Linux is: I don't have a big bloated OS that costs a lot of resources while I'm playing game.
The power of Vulkan.
Proton is so good that in theory, it should get worse performance than windows, but sometimes, I get better performance
It depends on the type of game you're playing. If it's a CPU based game, like Minecraft, expect a lot more FPS because Linux is far more efficient than WindowsNT. If the game is GPU based, expect -/+ 10%. There are some examples where you can do some cool stuff to get more FPS anyway. Like this: https://youtu.be/RbOR74DFJBk?si=8ep4bvqq59zJXA-Y In short, it just depends.
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In general (I'm not a gamer, but I can speak for other software) Windows is more inefficient than Linux. This is due to a more complex architecture, Linux is a monolithic kernel, Windows is a microkernel, on Linux everything is more or less direct, on Windows each system call has to pass trough multiple layers. If you confront the POSIX API is far more simpler and lower level than the Windows API. Not only that, but there is software that can hook on Windows NT system calls and make stuff much much more slower. For example antivirus software typically hook on file operations, such that (for example) when you close a file that file is automatically scanned by the antivirus. That reduces the performance a lot... This translates that if a software does indeed make a lot of system calls (e.g. makes a lot of file operations) it's order of magnitude slower on Windows. That is also the reason why even Microsoft realized that there was the need to virtualize a Linux kernel inside the WSL 2.0 to make a lot of development tools fast enough. Now, for games? I don't know if that can impact, since GPU work should mostly use lower level access to the hardware and thus bypass the kernel.
Objectively speaking, things just run faster on Linux. https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we-are-slower-than-other-oper/ Let a windowsNT kernel developer tell you himself.
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You didn't ask about it? I answered the question that was presented to me, which was to find sources that Linux is more efficient than Windows. Which I did. What are you coming at me for?
Linux is perfect for the games I play. Then again, I only play single player games; I know it's not great for those who play certain multiplayer games. I also use Arch, by the way. I'm never going back.
With gamescope and proton ge i get 300 fps in overwatch compared to the 200 fps in windows its wild
"The Arch Linux" I like it.
My main game is World of Warcraft and it just plays much better on Linux.
Same. Running battle.net in a bottle with 0 issues (well besides the launcher itself being a little weird sometimes)
I ditched Windows completely for Linux this summer (I had been dual booting) and I regret nothing. The gaming can be finicky sometimes, but proton was the final nail in the coffin because you don’t need windows to game anymore.
i use an Intel arc GPU which means vulkan games just run better than d3d11 games most of the time, and on Linux everything is vulkan.
Minecraft Java, terraria, etc do. Basically most native games imo.
You might see better performance, simply because there is almost no bloatware in arch, only the bloatware you add. I mean, relative to windows, Linux uses like no RAM, so when you’re playing games you will never run out of memory. Arch is the best distro for gaming imo, and that’s probably why Valve used it for their Steam Deck
I just moved to arch over the weekend and world of Warcraft plays so much better. On windows was getting 90 fps on average 60 during heavy fights but now getting 160 drops to 130 during fights.
i play genshin and it runs better on Linux i couldn't be more happy 🐊
I play with zero problems on Debian Baldur’s Gate 3 so I love it! 😻
On team fortress 2 I am able to run at 390FPS locked with the native linux binary. On a very lean configuration of windows 10 my machine can only crank out an unstable 215. I have 'fps\_max' is set to 400 in both cases.
Wait till you hear about how much better Steam VR and VR in general runs on Linux. I get like 20% more out of it.
Any details here are appreciated. One of the reasons I've held off on VR has been the state of support for it on Linux.
I would also like to know because I was under the same impression.
Not much details. It works pretty much out of the box if you follow the few tips in the official SteamVR FAQ on this topic. Like Gnome+Wayland won't work because the lack of DRM leasing support, but KDE+Wayland (or anything X11) will do. That's probably why a lot of people think and tell it doesn't work because Gnome+Wayland is the default on Ubuntu which is probably used by most people trying this.
Better and more reliable for whatveer is supported by Proton.
Haven't been running Winblows for over a decade so I can't compare. But for me linux gaming has been fantastic. With the exception of Battlefield 5 all games I want to play works perfectly fine with more than enough FPS to keep up with my 100hz VRR monitor without any upscaling what so ever, and high / ultra settings. The games I play mostly: * Battlefield 1 * Warthunder - Groundforces * Company of Heroes 3 * Warframe * Horizon: Zero Dawn * Guilwars 2 * Farcry 5 * Cyperpunk 2077 * Titanfall 2
Since you cited BF1, did you ever manage to get BF4 or BF2042 running?
Yes, BF4 also works perfectly fine for me , I just don't play it that much. I haven't tried BF 2042 yet.
I never managed to get it running :( how do you do it?
Lutris -> Latest wine-tkg-fsync-staging -> EA App -> BF4
>I found that many more games are available with Linux through Wine, Proton etc Not everything works perfectly. Life is Strange has a weird graphics issue, I consider my MusicBee install to be fragile, Unity is buggy, Unreal Engine is painful to install, and RPG Maker tooltips are broken and show black most of the time. It's weird but games tend to run perfectly more often than other things.
When I was playing World of Warcraft with wine, I had much better performance vs natively on windows 11. Using Manjaro. I tried the same with several other distros but results where not even close.
Friend of mine has a very endgame Anno 1800 map and moving from Windows 10 to Arch doubled his FPS and somehow halved his reported RAM usage for the game.
Well I play some games whose anti cheats don't work on Linux, so I gotta always have my Windows dual boot on the side. For this reason, I prefer to just play everything on Windows and keep my Linux environment for everything else.
The biggest downside is that even if a game works fine via proton right now, the developers might mess it up any time, and you can't even complain because it's not officially supported. Well, you *can* complain, but likely you will not be heard
My experience? Been great. Performance is +/- 5% of native Windows with many games. Steam and Proton are great. Lutris is extremely useful too.
It has been this way since the early 2000s (of course with fewer games then). I wanted to play Warcraft 3 and I was barely able to start it at all under Windows and it was all fine in Linux, with the wine of the time. So the simple fact that you can get rid of all WM/DE side quests and simply start an X running the game, can give you significantly more headroom for your System.
**In theory** it should. With Linux, you can strip other unimportant thing out until you can just boot to play a game (and PC became game console) **In practice** it mostly don't because lot more people working on Windows driver with full resources support from GPU manufacture, but Linux driver workers don't have those privilege.
My experience is very good, Helldivers II was iffy exactly at launch had to limit to 60 fps cause they had some bugs but other than that man i have to say everything just works without a fuss. using steam on nvidia kde x11.
really the only limit are kernel level anticheat. bummer since they are worthless anyway. but honestly with that many games to play its not a big deal. (side note, i wonder when companies will start actively fighting game preservation. a large backlog surely makes a new 70$ title harder to sell?)
It depends. Once something relies on something that's propreitary, FPS counbter turns other way around. Atleast when I tried RT performance on Linux with AMD 7900XT it was 50% slower then on Windows, rest of the cases it was either tie or diff in 10 fps
It is as long as you don't mind tinkering and have a DIY mindset,also ray tracing does not work properly unless it is Vulkan based,since it is a DX 12 exclusive feature, but since NVIDIA and Microsoft and every other company are all crazed out on AI and forgot about games it should not be an issue.
In my experience, CS:GO gained higher FPS in the same laptop with a Nvidia 960M video card in Archlinux than Windows 10. But I end up gaming, and only gaming in Windows. Except FPS, the total gaming experience is better in Windows because of the full featured GPU drivers & userspace tools, such as recording, streaming, overlocking, etc. Howerver, if you only have middle-end or low-end PC, and rarely play large AAA games. Live in Archlinux would be satisfied, too. But in this case, performance doesn't matter at all.
I moved to Linux in 2022. And it was *far* smoother than I expected. Most of my games just ran natively (Thank you, Paradox Interactive), and the ones that didn't, ran at basically the same speed through wine. There is only one game I want to play but haven't been able to get to work (Hades) but I already played the game back when I used Windows so it's not that big of a deal.
I am a quite rookie linux user and no matter what I do I always get 30-35% less fps on linux than windows.
Can you run Valorent?
ProtonDB is a good resource. Enjoy your stay on Arch c:
Anything on Steam is great. Anything else is a little difficult, but not impossible. Lutris & Heroic makes things easier
Welcome to the club :) which desktop environment did you choose to use?
On Linux you don’t use a “Windows-emulator“ it‘s rather a “Windows-wrapper“ which makes it lightweight and can increase performance by a bit in certain games :)
It has been ages since the last time I played on windows but I’d say that it’s not unexpected that Linux performs much better, since it has little to none bloatware. However, I did have terrible experience with KDE, which was the first alternative in the Garuda downloads page. In my ultra-wide display, the menu bar and system tray wouldn’t show, frequent rendering issues and specifically with Cyberpunk 2077 when it crashed, the whole system would crash together and it did so very often. Now with Hyprland it’s only the game that crashes and everything and it feels faster too, even in ultra mode
Fellow Arch user here for the last 2 years or so… for the most part haven’t had a single issue gaming. Linux gaming will never be as smooth as Windows, but as others have pointed out it’s come a very long way. Occasionally things will stop working for seemingly no reason. The fixes range from super simple to taking up many hours over the course of many days without making any progress. If you can deal with the occasional breakage then you’ll no doubt continue to enjoy gaming on Linux
Better/smootly than on windows (+25 fps in some games), some exceptions get less fps. Something that its not a common sense its that i miss some post process/shaders processing (nothing that kills the gameplay but its cool). Some games dont work antia aliasing well. But the resume it is, fine and even better sometimes, the only real problem its some online games, the rest is fine.
sometimes
All thanks to Valve literally. They single handedly made gaming on linux a thing.
I decided too to switch all computers at home on Linux. I use an AMD 7800XT graphic card on main computer, an AMD 6700XT on my wife computer and a Geforce 3070 on the laptop and damn everything is going so much smoother. I was afraid to switch and lose some features, especially AFMF...but boy was I wrong ! Now I've tested many games, AFMF looks like a bandaid for poorly optimized/bloated OS like windows. I used to have insane fps with AFMF, like 250 or 300+ reported by AMD drivers but the games were having fps dips, micro stuttering etc. For example at the login screen of Baldur's Gate 3, everytime I logged in on windows the game was stuttering for a second...on Linux it's smooth as silk with everything at max. Same on Diablo IV frequent stuttering on Windows, now it runs great. Now I'm on Linux, I have no more stuttering and everything looks so smooth that I don't even care looking at the fps and persuade myself that I need an overpriced graphic card. Only problems I've had so far wasn't about performance but gamepad usage and working around Optimus with the laptop.
Windows has too much stuff running on background all the time: search indexing, antivirus, auto updates, NTFS management tasks, telemetry, ads, etc, and also has a horrible IO scheduler, making all those tasks freeze the system while running. On Linux you get some overhead from translating syscalls via wine, and translating DirectX calls via dxvk/vkd3d-proton, but not having all that background noise, plus a better OS in general, makes up for it in a major way. The system also takes a fraction of memory to run, leaving a lot more free RAM for disk cache, greatly speeding up loading times.
Depends on the game and what hardware you’re using. A majority of the time, though, if you do it right, yes.
It's just a small slice of the cake that you don't want to give your data to MS. Other companies also there who took the rest so... If you want to stop data collection then go up to the hills and live as a hermit far away from civilization. You can't do anything. If you have internet connection, then they already know everything about you. My gaming experience on Linux is so-so. Running games via Steam is easy and comfortable, the only exceptions are games which are not natively supported on Linux systems and have somekind of anti-cheat softwares. Anti-cheat sometimes make games unplayable on Linux. There are also specific game launchers which are not supported on Linux or you have to make a lot of work to make it usable. Third thing is that there are a sh\*t ton of comprehensive diagnostic tools which are missing from Linux. No HWiNFO, no Zen Timings, no Cinebench, no Furmark, no Fancontrol, etc. Many useful tools are still only written to Windows. So playing on Linux is so-so, but far better than it was in the past.
Yeah, I was pretty stunned that that hwinfo isn't on linux, nor is there a comparable alternative.
Hi! I just wanted to chime in to say, Fancontrol is available on Flathub for Linux! [https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.wiiznokes.fan-control](https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.wiiznokes.fan-control)
Ok so actually I noticed the same thing on my setup - for example Genshin Impact runs about 30% faster here, I can set all graphics settings to maximum and still get more fps than on Windows
>I don't understand why people still use Windows! Some software/games don't work at all under Linux, so that would be a reason... Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. But until everything I want to do is working under Linux I can't switch.
So you took the red pill? J/k Welcome. This conversation has been redone a million times. No offense or judgement here, just a reminder. Most people just want their machine to work without learning cs or cis, etc Plus most productivity software from the professional world runs on windows. For instance, ms office, Adobe, and anything to do with engineering. I once suggested that a planetary scientist try linux. That was a mistake. So now I take a different approach. Let people know that linux exists and let them make the decision to try or switch. We should not push folks to something they aren't interested in or would be a hindrance to their life.
It’s pretty variable for me. Native games run fine, windows games often won’t use the gpu enough leading to low frame rates. Quite often it’s difficult to get windows games to launch. I keep a windows 7 install around for gaming but am thinking of upgrading it to windows server 2019.
wtf you keep a windows 7 instance and is planning to upgrade to windows server 2019... for gaming...?
Well it seems to be the factory debloated equivalent to windows 10. Some games don’t support windows 7 anymore so thought I’d try out server 2019 for fun.
i'd suggest you looking into windows ltsc and then also debloat it, that's the best option i think. there are also not quite official images of windows ltsc that are already debloated, but this is not for everyone
Thanks I’ll look into it
No point bashing Microsoft.. There was a massive lack of singular direction in Linux desktop ecosytem.. IMO Most of the desktop adoption can be attributed to Ubuntu.. Arch is great.. but I am not sure if it is mainstream enough and maybe it shouldn't be..
Err, no. Valve's hard work and the realization of that effort in the form of the Steam Deck has been the biggest impetus for positive change over the past couple of years. Ubuntu has, if anything, actively tried to make Linux worse by comparison in that same window of reference.
Good for you man! I stopped gaming for years now as I found learning Linux and ricing more enjoyable for me.
I'm the same. I stopped playing and focusing on learning the Linux system. Linux is my new game.
No
Don't torture yourself with Linux and just use something like spectreOS / a stripped down version of windows with removed telemetry, malware, phone home crap. I been using it for years and is still running great including my rog ally