Have you seen protondb? A pretty impressive number of games just work. Really we are at the point now where games that don’t run are more the exception, and usually it is due to Anti-cheat incompatibility or some very specific issue.
what does “few” mean in this context? With proton the number of games (developed for Windows) now simply work. And without a bloated OS full of spyware they seem to run actually faster.
However, seeing as everyone has chosen to give me a tuneup with so many downvotes, I’m switching my Linux dual boot from Debian to Manjaro, a supposedly more game-friendly distro. So far Steam has installed just fine, but now I need to rearrange some partitions to make space to try out a few non-steam games and see if they work (stuff from EA/Origin and Epic).
Could you perhaps give us some examples of these games that don’t work? There aren’t really that many of these days, thanks to valve’s work on proton and thanks to the steam deck making developers want to at least not actively break their games the majority work out of the box. Even non-steam games and launchers
EA’s Battlefield franchise right off the top of my head. Tons of effort to get it to start, when it finally did start the sound was a wreck, couldn’t get the resolution set right and the FPS was probably 12-20.
I think I tried Elite: Dangerous, and that wouldn’t start at all.
Lutris appears to have installers available for both of those games. And I know some people that play Elite dangerous on Linux I asked them and they said they didn’t have any issues with it. Was that perhaps very close to its initial release or something? It could just be better now
I tried out all of this a couple times, most recently few years ago before COVID. While I realize nobody here on a pro-Linux sub wants to hear it, Linux is still a minefield of different distros and versions, many of which don’t work quite the same in various subtle ways that can be infuriating to someone trying to grab something off a repository that should work, but doesn’t for the aforementioned reasons. Whereas people here scoff at the premise that this is a flaw, for the vast majority of people it’s the very reason Linux isn’t mainstream outside the IT world. Yeah, unpopular opinion, but it’s from someone who’s been trying to love Linux for 25 years and gets put off by all the little issues.
i won’t argue with you there. i fucking hate people who push mint,Ubuntu, popos, or anything based on apt. it’s literally not designed to be up to date and rolling. People try to band-aid it on with repos but it just leads to systems eating themselves.
valve went with arch Linux on the steamdeck for a reason, it’s designed, from its core, to be rolling. which gaming needs. you need the latest drivers, libs, wine, etc. and there are easy to go arch installers. my favorite is EndeavorOS. sadly you get a similar problem in reverse with shit like manjaro. where they take a perfectly working rolling system and attempt to “stabilize” it with custom repos that arbitrarily hold packages back. and it tends to break a lot.
it’s the double edged sword of open source. i can do what i want, but so can everyone else. and the voice of the stupid is almost never a minority
Mines just a bit worse by that measure, and on the clickplay measure was about 20% tier 1, 20% tier 2, about 15% tier 3, and about 8% each tiers 4 and 5.
I feel like click play is a better measure for average users you’re trying to convert since it’s “how well does it work if I just try to start it” as opposed to “how well can it be made to work if I tinker with it enough”.
I’m glad OP’s linux gaming experience is so much better than it is on windows. I don’t say this to cast aspersions but if the results were reliable and repeatable, people like christitus, gardiner and many others would make daily videos on the topic just to get all the views(dollars) it would surely generate. It would cause a seismic shift in the PC gaming space.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I don’t think OP’s claims are extraordinary. I think he’s only saying “I’ve noticed Linux can outperform Windows on programs that are optimized for Windows. Kinda unexpected, but here are the benchmarks.”
OP is not claiming that this is true in 100% of cases. For example, in this thread he points out that Windows outperformed Linux on Doom.
Protondb.com is very helpful when a game doesnt run. I forget where I found info but like a good 10% of steam games dont run using Proton, no matter what you try. And a good 70+% of games work out of the box or with easy, common tweaks. We have some other tools available like Winetricks, Lutris, and if all else fails VM with GPU Passthru.
windows can have a similar troubleshooting workflow, dependent on Compatibility Mode for older games, and using GOG.com repacks to make things easier.
Linux has gotten a lot better with playing windows games. My issue is that I have one peice of software I want to use: Serato DJ Pro - and due to how that software works with hardware and real-time audio, I haven’t ever been able to get it to run on Linux. Mixxx is a thing, but it doesn’t have the features I use in Serato.
Would really love to drop windows for the one software I need it for.
I play Apex Legends, and I get way better performance in Linux. My regular squad mates were having graphical lag issues last weekend. Me on Linux, no issues. 120+fps
Yeah. It’s not kernel level like it is with Fortnite and Destiny. Works great on Linux and Steam Deck.
Edit: a tip if you take the plunge: When you launch it, it will pop up a box for “compiling vulkan shaders” with an option to skip. Do not skip it, at least not immediately. Apex has WAY more shaders than most games. In Steam settings, under downloads, I recommend enabling “shader pre-caching” as well as “allow background processing of vulkan shaders” so that ste can constantly compile shaders. It seems to make things work better “on the fly” as well. Nowadays I almost always hit skip on the shader dialogue.
Sometimes, not every time, my initial load into Apex has stuttering. This smooths out on my system after a minute or two, usually within the lobby. If it’s still happening once I am in the drop ship, I will take a late drop on my first game. Once it’s past all the shader compiling, it is buttery smooth the rest of the time. And keep in mind, this is not every time I play. Just sometimes. It’s way better than what my squaddies had last weekend.
That seems like a lot to say but I want to say it all so you don’t abandon ship because it’s choppy at first. That doesn’t last so stick it out. I haven’t had any chop or lag for weeks.
EDIT2: This is me playing on linux. ANy excuse to share this crazy win, no idea why we deserved to pull this off lol www.twitch.tv/videos/1961781842
People criticizing the ability of Linux to play games reminds me kind of like when people criticized solar power back in the early 90’s. They would say how it’s too expensive or it will never be able to produce the amount of electricity we need. Well, here we are.
Have you looked into diy? Over 60% of the installation cost from an installer can just be labor which is ridiculous because it’s actually quite easy to do. Safely and without a ton of specialized tooling. They have inverters now that’s basically everything you could possibly need in a single box which makes the install trivial
I remember looking into solar some 20 years ago. 5kWh battery bank was practically unheard of and iirc correctly was roughly $1k per kWh. Hopefully somebody with the time can come and correct numbers. Today you can find 5kWh battery banks for ~$2k.
Inverters I remember being about $5k-$10k for house sized and capable of running AC unit. Today roughly $1k-$2k.
Solar panels themselves I’ve not priced, but iirc I remember large arrays being $20k-$30k or more.
The cost to DIY a whole home off grid solar and battery bank system has gotten beyond easier, safer and an absolute fuck ton cheaper
Criticism of gaming on Linux some years back was very well deserved.
Barely any native games, and subpar drivers compared to windows didnt make it a good platform at all. And of course for basically almost every game the only choice was WINE, and more often than not it was impossible to make it work, or had game breaking issues.
Then came the Proton days and things started to change, and with the steam deck, it’s really incredible how far we’ve come.
Everyone called me mad when I told them that I get more FPS in linux through wine/proton than on windows native with my AMD card, look who’s laughing now
I installed Linux on my old laptop recently because it was impossible to install the drivers for the graphics card in windows. It just kept blue screening. Linux worked out of the box. From 13 fps to 120+
There’s something really wrong with your GPU usage in Windows. It’s hovering around 88%. I don’t think this is an accurate comparison. You need to figure out what’s wrong with your Windows install.
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