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trashface 1 hours ago [-]
Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old). The laptop actually has plenty of power for the games I play, but I underclock to keep the heat/fan speeds down (been doing the same on the win10 install on the same system), still getting acceptable framerate in proton for most of the things I do in game, non intense stuff.
Decades ago I ported some games to linux but I do think proton is the correct approach now. One underappreciated advantage is you get most of the mod environment too. In ESO for instance, there is an addon (tamriel trade center) which lets you download item prices, but it requires a windows client exe to do that. That client works on proton.
I also do some modding myself and can cross compile my rust code to windows with cargo xwin, and run it right away in proton, which is fairly amusing to behold.
I actually don't mind windows generally (been a MS user since DOS 5), but Win11 is a game changer, pun intended, and not in a good way.
ToucanLoucan 43 minutes ago [-]
I'm looking to finally get off Windows for good. My experience with the SteamDeck started me, later I upgraded to a ROG Ally X for beefier performance but found Windows insufferable on a handheld, and installed SteamOS. I was blown away by the performance gains. A few months later I installed Kubuntu for the first time since 2013 or so, Steam shortly after, and while the desktop linux route is definitely more taxing (manually installing things like Mod Organizer 2 instead of Vortex, for instance, and all of that needing to run differently as opposed to Windows where it's all just .exe's) I've been absolutely blown away by the performance gains again. Mind you this machine is no slacker, it's a GE76 Raider from MSI, 3060 under the hood, but games just run smoother in Linux. And the alt-tab experience is untouchable, Fallout: New Vegas hates it and crashes, but everything more modern utterly doesn't care. I can alt-tab in and out, check messages, desktop composing works great no matter what game I'm playing, no more issues in modded games where the game completely locks the machine as Linux just doesn't seem to allow it, it's fantastic.
I have a couple more things to figure, I need XBox authentication to work for Halo Infinite and Sea of Theives, among others, and I need to figure out some solutions for some ancient software I have to run, which will probably end up being a Windows 11 VM. But as for my daily driver OS, I am so excited to get off Windows once and for all.
cwel 27 seconds ago [-]
RE: Sea of Thieves on linux w/ xb/microsoft auth. I was able to work around it by just removing 2fa from my microsoft acc. Obviously not a great solution. but yeah. You may be able to reenable it afterwards, I never tried, its the only thing my microsoft account is useful for at this point anyways.
progforlyfe 1 minutes ago [-]
Modding will continue to be a challenge, but doable, thing, until more mod devs get onboarded to Linux themselves. If the mod devs enjoy using Linux, they'll probably start building mods with UIs native to Linux.
I would say custom modding and online multiplayer anti-cheat systems are the last real hold outs, and even then it doesn't affect every game.
beart 5 minutes ago [-]
There were specific games keeping me on windows, mostly online PVP. At some point I switched anyway and I don't regret it at all. Now when my friends suggest a game and I'm not able to play it, I just do something else or we choose a different game. There are so many great games out there now, and more release every week. Plus, as I've gotten older, it has become more apparent the fun is in socializing, not the game itself.
My point is, you may find the one or two games holding you back won't be missed much.
foo12bar 22 minutes ago [-]
What do you plan to do about firmware updates?
cogman10 5 minutes ago [-]
Believe it or not, it's actually easier to handle on linux than it is on windows now [1]. Normal caveats apply, it depends on your HW manufacturer. However, a lot of them are participating which makes it pretty slick.
And, assuming your are doing x86, you probably already have an EFI partition so even doing motherboard bios updates isn't much of a big deal. You just drop the update in the FAT32 EFI partition, reboot, and point the motherboard at that location. Some motherboards even support just doing that as part of an online update.
Used to be a staff member working on an x86 OS called CTOS. I realized if I implemented a couple of traps, we could run command-line DOS programs. So I did. And it worked. Dev tools, text processing, piped commands all worked.
It helped that the DOS executable format was the same as the CTOS format - because we had traded Bill Gates our linker (which produces executables) for his BASIC compiler.
actionfromafar 2 hours ago [-]
That's a great twist! Very few people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler!
jr_isidore 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, I agree. Amazing twist of fate.
CyberDildonics 1 hours ago [-]
if I implemented a couple of traps
What does this mean? System calls?
rtkwe 1 hours ago [-]
Similar but traps are triggered automatically on attempts to execute a protected instruction.
Why/when are traps used rather than explicit system calls? Is it just historical coevolution? Or is the idea that the user mode program doesn’t need to know that it’s unprivileged? Or is it just repurposing the error handler path to perform privileged operations?
rolph 1 hours ago [-]
if you know a particular process or system callmakes errors,then you run code that checks for that error,or exception,or preempively hooks a problematic system call,to redirect to "your"code that handles the state of exception,and returns.
Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.
This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.
I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.
worble 12 minutes ago [-]
If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this.
If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that important to you? I switched 10 years ago when things were a lot rougher than this, and in the end everything still worked well enough that I never cared to swap back.
anonymousab 1 minutes ago [-]
5% would already be well within the margin of difference for separate identical clean installations of windows on the same hardware.
But the issue is that it is many multiples of that, especially on the most common PC gaming hardware (Nvidia GPUs), often more than a 25% difference in framerates. Not so important at 144fps, but very important at a 60fps baseline and for genres like fighting games.
A lot of people don't mind, say, an extra 5 frames of input delay. They don't notice it. But a lot of people do notice even an extra 2 or 3.
I do think that frame pacing issues kinda do have a critical thin threshold where it's either bearable or an unacceptable difference. And the native windows version can often already be riding right on that line. So while it's not fair to the Linux version to demand better, it is unfortunately the case that it might tip over that line.
BoxedEmpathy 1 minutes ago [-]
I gave it a try. Got a steam deck, tries steam os on my desktop.
I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game. I kept this up for a couple months but honestly at some point I just gave up. Now I'm playing games on Windows again.
To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of Linux gaming. I just unfortunately am too busy these days to spend the time to get it to work.
BoxedEmpathy 1 minutes ago [-]
And I'll try again when I have more time.
braiamp 6 minutes ago [-]
I think the actual answer you are looking for is this paragraph:
> These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.
That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.
If memory serves, Linux typically outperforms Windows with AMD and Intel graphics. Some of the gotchas are things like running games through Proton or anti-cheat/DRM stuff not getting the same attention that Windows does, but the raw performance is there. I wouldn't recommend using Nvidia on Linux though.
harrisi 20 minutes ago [-]
Depending on storage constraints, you could always dualboot. That would give you the exact same hardware to compare, and it's not a full commitment.
Anecdotally, I find that getting Linux on somewhat older or underpowered hardware is always a massive positive. Better performance as well as battery life. I'm not as familiar with modern hardware's relationship to either OS ("OS vs. some flavor of OS based on a similar or same kernel" - I know) with modern hardware. Worth a shot though!
Every supercomputer seems to do quite well with Linux kernels. Probably good enough for Crysis :)
jmalicki 28 minutes ago [-]
A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows!
If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
anonymousab 7 minutes ago [-]
One problem is that having better FPS stops mattering if the frame pacing and timing is bad, making the game feel like a juddery mess. Or if there is significant input delay differences.
That's why all the data matters for all of these dimensions; game performance is much more than FPS per watt over time.
When people see "linux gaming is great now, look at the fps" it comes across as potentially disengenuous because of all the other factors that matter and should be tested. Or rather, if a reviewer is talking entirely about framerate, then I just can't trust their opinion and expertise when it comes to the state of Linux gaming.
las_balas_tres 2 hours ago [-]
I developed for windows before moving to linux. I was surprised to find that was no system call similar to windows WaitForMultipleObjects. Sure you can implement something similar using poll() or using condition variables. but WaitForMultipleObjects seems so much simpler and more versatile
FuckButtons 2 hours ago [-]
Epoll / select? since everything is a file, you can wait on everything.
gpderetta 2 hours ago [-]
The last time I asked the same question here, user dwattttt finally pointed out[1][2] to me that there is a significant difference: wfmo can actually acquire semaphores in addition to waiting for them, which poll can't do in a non-racy way and efficient way. It can also do rendezvous synchronization (i.e. signal-and-wait).
A lot of that flexibility is what makes it hard to efficiently emulate (especially without kernel level support), but some of it seems too flexible to make sense as the default choice. How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes, and why should that lock type be the one that a game engine uses for almost all of its locks?
spacechild1 1 hours ago [-]
> How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes,
What do you mean? SRWLock (or the older CRITICAL_SECTION) cannot be shared between processes. A (Win32) Mutex does work across processes, but that's its entire purpose. So Windows does have different tools for different jobs.
In fact, it's really the other way round: on Linux, a futex also works across processes, but there is no equivalent in Windows. (Sadly, WaitOnAddress can only be used in a single process.)
FpUser 37 minutes ago [-]
It very often being used for thread management inside single process etc. Very convenient. Nobody says it has to be default.
CyberDildonics 1 hours ago [-]
How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes,
That seems hugely useful for interprocess communication and I can immediately think of reasons to use IPC in a game. Having a separate voice process for one.
Dylan16807 41 minutes ago [-]
But that goes back to "how often". Not how many games use it, but how many times per second they use it. You might touch your voice process lock once per frame? That's negligible in terms of CPU time. Any half-reasonable overhead makes no difference in that lock, but might have a big impact in a more common lock.
lowbloodsugar 47 minutes ago [-]
Its IO completion ports I miss.
Animats 49 minutes ago [-]
There's been real progress. Wine's memory allocator had an architecture with three nested locks. "Realloc" held a futex lock on the memory allocator while recopying the buffer. Multiple threads doing allocation could go into futex congestion, with many threads looping on the futex. This made Vec::push in Rust insanely inefficient. Some of my programs dropped from 60FPS to about 0.5 FPS.
Fixed in Wine 11.0. Thanks to the Wine team.
Not sure if this was related to NTSYNC, but Wine's locking infrastructure definitely got an overhaul.
tetris11 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder what spanners Windows can throw into the works to slow them down at this point, or if they're so checked out of the Desktop market as they suckle down hard on that Azure teat, that they're more than happy to let Linux eat their lunch
whywhywhywhy 2 hours ago [-]
You are not gonna get promoted slowing down Linux gaming at MS today, the thing they want is Netflix of gaming where the platform doesn’t matter but everyone’s paying them $20 a month
dpoloncsak 48 minutes ago [-]
I think this, as a business model, really relies on them also selling the licenses to the OS that you're using as well. Otherwise, gamepass would be on MacOS already, no?
baq 33 minutes ago [-]
They can’t, they’re selling backwards compatibility - but it matters less and less each year as more stuff moves to the browsers.
Night_Thastus 30 minutes ago [-]
MS does not care. At all. This doesn't affect anything that they make a profit on.
jdubs1984 2 hours ago [-]
Microsoft/Xbox is in the process of losing the living room permanently in the next gen if you ask me.
I don't know what they could do spanner tossing wise to really screw w/ Linux gaming at this point that wouldn't just drive more frustrated customers off their platform.
funimpoded 2 hours ago [-]
That might make room for Apple to finally try. The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go. Most of what's missing is a first-party controller and a marketing push. Disk space is tight, too, I guess. Still, they're most of the way to having a horse in the race, if they want to.
I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.
koutakun 1 hours ago [-]
>The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go
What benchmarks are you talking about? CPU-wise the A15 Bionic just barely beats the Ryzen 3700X in single-core and gets absolutely destroyed in multi-core (Geekbench). As for the GPU, the Radeon RX 7600 (closest thing I can find to a "modern console") does >10x the TFLOPS in FP32.
The only reason why they look like they're "in a similar tier" in ported games is because the A15 Bionic is usually tested on 5-6" screens that can be upscaled from 360p without any measurable loss in visual quality, with a massive downgrade in model and texture quality for the same reason. The only modern console the Apple TV "may be" similar to is the Switch 1
criddell 50 minutes ago [-]
I use Steam Link on my AppleTV which lets me play games on my PC. It works great as long as the game works well with a PS5 controller (and lots of them do).
neutronicus 1 hours ago [-]
Hmm.
Me and all my dad friends are all signing up for XBox accounts so our kids can play Minecraft. So IDK about that.
weezing 2 hours ago [-]
Their gaming marketshare is minuscule both on PCs and consoles already. It's a downward spiral for years already.
onli 1 hours ago [-]
Windows still has a huge gaming marketshare on PC, and Microsoft as publisher is still a big player. You mean something else?
pinkmuffinere 56 minutes ago [-]
wow that's interesting. Where is the gaming share moving, if not pc and consoles? I guess hand-held devices (do those not count as consoles?) and phones?
mvdtnz 1 hours ago [-]
According to my google searching XBox has almost a quarter of the console gaming market share. Hardly miniscule.
doublerabbit 2 hours ago [-]
Lock future game developers in to a corner forcing them only to produce compatible for WSL, Windows for Linux releases. Restricting the license of use on GNU/Linux.
mifydev 2 hours ago [-]
I predict that ntsync will eventually evolve into full blown ntoskrnl.ko and there would be virtually no overhead on calling Windows API. You can almost call it a Linux Subsystem for Windows.
advisedwang 2 hours ago [-]
It would be fun to call it Windows Subsystem for Linux!
bradley13 38 minutes ago [-]
It's actually been a couple of years since I ran across a game that didn't work well on Linux. At most, I have had to bump the default Proton version.
tdb7893 25 minutes ago [-]
I have occasional issues mainly with graphics drivers or anti-cheat. Otherwise thought it's remarkably stable. I've also gotten a lot of non-Steam games to work fine.
melonpan7 33 minutes ago [-]
I stopped using Windows all together two years ago, and since then Linux gaming has made huge strides. Almost everything is playable now with the exception of Kernel AC games - which I don’t play anyways. The success of the Steam Deck has been an integral part, and Vulkan performance is similar if not equal to DX.
gamesbrainiac 15 minutes ago [-]
Anyone move completely over to Linux for gaming? What is the experience like and what are you using?
cobar 8 minutes ago [-]
Overall experience is very good with AMD graphics. Most games run on Steam out of the box. There are also emulators for all the systems I've wanted to use. I use Faugus Launcher for other stores like BattleNet and Epic Games (Magic Arena).
For the most part the games just work, it's more system issues that I've run into where Linux suspend mode and the audio stack can be a little flaky and required Claude to diagnose and sort out.
caycep 2 hours ago [-]
If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?
eikenberry 2 hours ago [-]
AMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2).
I sort of figured that HDMI stupidity was strategically a good thing as it sort of brought the dynamic of the HDMI consortium and VESA. specifically how they treat the end users, more to the public eye.
That is, more people being subtly pushed to using display port is not a bad thing.
_puk 1 hours ago [-]
I was faintly surprised that my recent monitor purchase came with a displayport cable.
Didn't help connecting it to my Macbook, but still..
esseph 39 minutes ago [-]
DisplayPort has been running the best PC high end monitors for a long while. HDMI OTOH has been in A/V land (DRM management).
perching_aix 1 hours ago [-]
I didn't follow this story much: how exactly did they get past the legal hurdles? Or there never actually were any hurdles, just sabre rattling?
JCTheDenthog 1 hours ago [-]
Purely rumor, but supposedly Valve put tons of pressure on them (no idea by what means, again this is all rumor) because they wanted support for the Steam Machine release.
cute_boi 2 hours ago [-]
any reason why we are using hdmi over display port?
ThatPlayer 1 hours ago [-]
Unless you're on the absolute newest stuff with DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DP1.4. That'll be Nvidias 2000 through 4000 series. No DisplayPort 2.1 until the RTX 5000s.
And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too.
Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
esseph 36 minutes ago [-]
AMD Radeon 7000 and 9000 series all support DisplayPort 2.1
saidinesh5 2 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of the TVs only come with HDMI .. not even good enough analog inputs anymore..
0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours ago [-]
I have been told (but not confirmed) that is mandated by the HDMI mob. If you want HDMI on your TV, it cannot also have DP.
okanat 2 hours ago [-]
This can only be true for consumer-grade stuff. Even then I just guess the manufacturers kind of cheap out.
I have a dumb-ish Samsung Hotel TV / commercial TV at home. It has DP.
MarsIronPI 40 minutes ago [-]
I want a TV with DP. Do you have a recommended source for where to pick up commercial TVs?
bee_rider 44 minutes ago [-]
Which is kind of funny. At least, to my mind this has associated HDMI-only with the budget option (TVs), and DP with the premium tier (monitors).
bayesnet 1 hours ago [-]
What really drives me nuts is smart TVs with 100mbps Ethernet connections. When I bought a tv we looked in vain for gigabit Ethernet.
navigate8310 50 minutes ago [-]
It is futile to expect the TV to be smart and support all sorts of apps and hardware only to be abandoned by the manufacturer years down the line. The only correct way to buy a TV imho is to hunt for a dumb but excellent display properties and get a streaming device such as Google TV Streamer, Apple TV or DIY x86 HTPC.
bisby 2 hours ago [-]
Some people have TVs or displays that only use HDMI. I personally wouldn't recommend HDMI if DisplayPort is available, but if HDMI is your only option, then having it work properly will be important.
eikenberry 1 hours ago [-]
My monitor has 1 displayport and 2 hdmi and I have 2 computers I use with it. They can't share the displayport. All comparable monitors (last time I checked) have the same. So it'd be nice if both worked.
jaxefayo 2 hours ago [-]
For one, DisplayPort doesn’t support HDR output
hmry 1 hours ago [-]
That can't be right. I'm reading this comment on an HDR monitor over DP right now.
Don't all USB-C video outputs use DP alt mode too, with an HDMI adapter at the end? And they can do HDR.
1 hours ago [-]
funimpoded 1 hours ago [-]
The cable length limitations are also a pain in the ass for not-uncommon A/V system configurations. 6' recommended max, and the best you might get working stably if the device and cable gods smile on you is 15'. 6' is the lower edge of acceptable for just about any A/V system setup (in practice it means your devices need to be within about a meter of the screen's port[s], which is pretty close) and even 15' is still too short to be useful for, say, a projector, or a "the A/V receiver or HDMI switch is over in that cabinet, the TV is on this wall across the room" situation.
HDMI goes 25'+, no problem.
Gracana 1 hours ago [-]
Do you mean in practice, or something? DP definitely supports HDR, and it seems to work fine for me.
john_strinlai 1 hours ago [-]
displayport has supported HDR10 since 2016
and displayport 2.0, since 2019, has supported all the same variations (hdr10+, dolby vision) that HDMI does
traderj0e 41 minutes ago [-]
If true, not supporting HDR is a feature
wolfd 1 hours ago [-]
This seems wrong to me? I use it to do so every day.
jerf 18 minutes ago [-]
I run Steam on Ubuntu with a "GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER" (according to lspci), and while it generally works it has some weird issues with gaming in Linux. Some games end up with what feels like ~200ms latency for no apparent reason, and frame rates on some things like Just Cause 3, which I ought to be horribly overspec'd for (a 2015 game) run comfortably, but just barely, which really isn't right. And Persona 5 gets about 2 frames per second in Linux. My Steam Deck pushes it at 60 at 720p with no problem, and I think was pushing out 1080 at one point quite playably, and I think I benchmarked my PC at ~6 times more powerful than my Steam Deck.
Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.
SimianSci 2 hours ago [-]
AMD does a lot of work to ensure their support for Linux is first-class.
With the kernel now natively supporting their systems, you can expect good support.
It's earned them some good will over Nvidia
which has gotten better recently with the rise of AI, but still requires users to jump through a couple of hoops due to their attempts to protect their IP.
somat 1 hours ago [-]
It is more than that, I really like openbsd as a desktop system. This is niche enough that I have zero expectation for any sort of support from the hardware vendors. However, because the amd drivers are opensource. Heroic people in the obsd dev community are able to make it work there. I don't strictly need a gaming gpu for my desktop work, but it is nice to have a setup I can boot linux on to play games with.
Heroic because the amdgpu driver is strangely huge, more code than the rest of the obsd kernel combined, It has something to do with gpu's having no isa stability and the generated code for each card present in the driver.
tapoxi 2 hours ago [-]
I built a Linux gaming PC a few years ago, running Bazzite.
AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.
hx8 43 minutes ago [-]
I think this gets overblown a bit. AMD is better, but Nvidia can work. There's plenty of valid reasons to put in the extra effort and go with Nvidia.
traderj0e 42 minutes ago [-]
I hope this is right, because "you have to use AMD GPU" is not what people want to hear when building a PC.
hx8 39 minutes ago [-]
I know plenty of people that use Nvidia and Linux, and it's something I've done in the past. You just suck it up and install the closed-source black box drivers and get on with your life.
bee_rider 25 minutes ago [-]
Although, eventually NVIDIA will drop support for your card and you’ll have an annoying situation. This happened for Pascal on Arch Linux a while ago. The 10X0 series are pretty old at this point, but then Linux shines on older systems too.
esseph 33 minutes ago [-]
There's so much "old info" that people pass around online when it comes to linux (or anything I guess with an ever evolving feature set).
Any modern distro running NVidia or AMD should be fine. I've done both. I didn't have to do anything for the NVIDIA 3000 or NVIDIA 4000 series cards but select the nvidia driver. AMD otoh is build into kernel now.
lunar_rover 2 hours ago [-]
Right now AMD is the better choice due to support from Valve. It might change in the future due to Red Hat's effort.
dgunay 1 hours ago [-]
I bought AMD as my last GPU purely because it meant I didn't have to stress out about how I was actually going to acquire one. I just walked into Microcenter, picked one off the shelf, and checked out. It was the crypto craze then, and I get the impression that this hasn't changed much today with AI sucking all the oxygen out of consumer electronics. Didn't care very much about DLSS or any other Nvidia specific features. That AMD works well on Linux only sweetened the deal.
uyzstvqs 1 hours ago [-]
AMD has provided great support for far longer, but newer Nvidia cards which support the nvidia-open driver should also be good.
Still, if you don't absolutely need CUDA, then AMD provides better value anyway.
MattPalmer1086 1 hours ago [-]
Just anecdata, but I just got a Lenovo T16 with AMD. Graphics is just painless, everything works with no issues. My old system with an Nvidia card running the same O/S keeps running into weird issues. It mostly works, just needs attention and little tweaks and extra stuff sometimes.
the8472 1 hours ago [-]
For gaming and desktop use AMD is great, though for raytracing you'll need newer cards. If you want to run local AI models too then AMD is quite shaky, rocm only supports a few cards with each version and their software stack just isn't as polished as nvidia's.
everdrive 2 hours ago [-]
AMD for sure. Years ago for Linux NVIDIA was the sure winner. At the moment, AMD beats it out soundly on both cost and performance. ie, the same game running on either an NVIDIA or AMD GPU in Linux will generally run much better on the AMD GPU.
notac26 2 hours ago [-]
Def AMD. And if your focus is gaming I’d give SteamOS a go. With a full AMD setup you should basically be plug and play.
jimmaswell 1 hours ago [-]
AFAIK none of AMD's offerings match the 5090 for pure gaming performance, so personally that's what I would stick with regardless.
RussianCow 2 minutes ago [-]
Sure, if you're made of money. For the rest of us, AMD gives you more bang for your buck. Though in this market, it's hard to argue that any of them give you good value.
ammut 1 hours ago [-]
End of 2024 I did exactly that. Ryzen and RADEON all the way. Rocking Fedora right now but was using Ubuntu for a bit. I have no reason to use Windows at all.
anschl 2 hours ago [-]
People say you will have less problems with AMD but I am using a Nvidia GPU for years now (on Cachyos and Pop OS) without issues. I'm using Steam and Proton pretty much exclusively though.
stuxnet79 2 hours ago [-]
Which card and which drivers? I switched from Windows 10 to Xubuntu last year and have had endless issues with my Nvidia card (GTX 970). At the moment, I can't even use the desktop without annoying flickering & hard to diagnose / fix bugs.
Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
okanat 1 hours ago [-]
Anything between 700 and 2000 series (inclusive) is in this "completely proprietary due to signed firmware but also not fully supported in Wayland" zone. You need to have at least 3000 series to have proprietary drivers with open kernel driver and good KMS/GBM/Wayland support.
davidspiess 2 hours ago [-]
I run a GTX 970 on Fedora 44 KDE Plasma (Wayland) without issues. Make sure to use the 580.xx Nvidia driver.
maplant 2 hours ago [-]
I can't speak for the parent but I have a 5090 and it works perfectly fine
saidinesh5 2 hours ago [-]
Nvidia on desktop has been mostly fine, if not rock solid, on the happy path they provide.
But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time.
Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
the_af 1 hours ago [-]
> Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
I have an RTX 5070 (whatever the laptop variant is) and it absolutely rocks with almost everything I throw at it, running Ubuntu+Steam+Proton. I no longer worry whether a Windows game is going to run, because almost all of them do with good performance.
saidinesh5 1 hours ago [-]
I think things might have changed in the last 6-7 years? That's when I switched away from Nvidia.
Or does your laptop have no other igpu?
My last Nvidia laptop was a Hybrid optimus laptop. I almost always ran it on the built in Intel igpu because of the really bad issues with the Nvidia cards. Video tearing, bad power management etc... I remember even switching the GPU wasn't easy... And performance wasn't as good either ..
graynk 2 hours ago [-]
AMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers
guizadillas 2 hours ago [-]
yes
tryauuum 2 hours ago [-]
both are shit
I used a recent nvidia blackwell GPU with linux, periodic crashes. Blackwell generation is shit.
Used recent builtin AMD GPU... Even worse, super reproduceable X crashes when using firefox
Pooge 1 hours ago [-]
In good faith, you can't really say "[x] is shit" if you don't have an usual setup; X11 is no longer the default on most distros. Even when I was also using it, it never crashed.
I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
traderj0e 49 minutes ago [-]
Linux Mint uses X11 for some reason. I was getting black screen after sleep because of that. Nuked it and installed Ubuntu, worked fine.
wnevets 55 minutes ago [-]
It may finally be the year of the linx desktop. Microsoft actively being hostile to towards Windows users can't last forever.
hx8 45 minutes ago [-]
The Linux desktop won not with a bang, but because all of the Windows users realized they would be happier with iPads.
Beijinger 1 hours ago [-]
I found the computer in the article more interesting than the fact, that gaming is getting faster under Linux.
Interesting, but I wish it was half the size folded...
bsimpson 2 hours ago [-]
I remember when XDA was the home of Android homebrew hackers working on things like CyanogenMod. It's so strange to see it repurposed as the brand for the same quasi-correct tech article slop that gets parroted between all the big blogs.
Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.
hx8 42 minutes ago [-]
This is not just a Tech Journalism problem, but applies to a lot of other Journalism.
sphars 2 hours ago [-]
Same with all the bigger tech blogs from a decade ago. How-To Geek is completely overrun with the same sort of slop. Finally had to remove it from my RSS reader.
Oh look at that, XDA and HTG are both owned by Valnet:
At least Anandtech just shut down rather than turning into a zombie tech blog.
r_lee 2 hours ago [-]
private equity, what would we do without you?!
navigate8310 46 minutes ago [-]
The same happened with AndroidPolice
keithnz 1 hours ago [-]
my son, and his friends all seem to have switched to https://garudalinux.org/ recently for gaming. Seems to be working out well for them.
Prunkton 35 minutes ago [-]
I'm working and gaming on Garuda for over 3 years and not planing to switch any time soon.
It runs super smooth, with the build in 'wayback machine' and 'curated' Arch distro (7.0 zen kernel just dropped a week ago) pretty much bullet proof for beginners or as a daily distro if you want to get stuff done w/o caring much about it - just loving it. On the other hand side you have cutting edge gaming tech like wine/proton staging versions per default, so I'm playing Blizzard games with NTSYNC (the tech from the article) for several months now :)
Forgot about most of the flashy default UI though :D
skipants 47 minutes ago [-]
Pretty cool distro! I switched to Bazzite myself but I've also seen a lot of popularity for CachyOS for gaming rigs.
whimblepop 1 hours ago [-]
That's exactly the kind of flashy, gaming-forward distro I was drawn to as a teenager. Good times :)
willis936 20 minutes ago [-]
I sometimes wonder if my modern machines could run Sabayon's DE with high performance.
wwweston 2 hours ago [-]
I only hope this eventually reaches enough coverage to support media production. It’s the last commercial area I care about. I’m entirely willing to pay for good work here (and have) but both major commercial desktop OSs are exhibiting significant warning signs of contempt for the users.
Dwedit 2 hours ago [-]
Headline says "Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features", but only provides two actual examples? It lists NTSYNC, and waiting on multiple events at once.
the8472 1 hours ago [-]
ability to make some filesystems case-insensitive was also added for wine
This is good to hear, but I get 120FPS on Windows in Cyberpunk 2077 and ~70 on Ubuntu. Horizon Zero Dawn is much worse, and quite often drops to seconds-per-frame instead of frames-per-second, if I turn on dynamic scaling. I just have an ssd with windows on it for gaming and boot to that from the bios. Also means my headphones UI works too. But, to be fair, the fact that I _can_ run Cyberpunk and HZD if I want to is pretty impressive.
TheRealPomax 2 hours ago [-]
This page really does not like playing nice with reader mode, making it near impossible to read unfortunately.
dmvvilela 1 hours ago [-]
What about macos?
Pooge 1 hours ago [-]
Apple doesn't care about gaming.
criddell 48 minutes ago [-]
Apple has never really cared about games unless it's on the iPhone or iPad. It's worked out well for them though. Mobile gaming is a $100 billion dollar market, PC gaming and console gaming are each about half that.
bigyabai 30 minutes ago [-]
Well sure it worked out great for Apple. By preventing users from sideloading emulators or playing real games, you force them to purchase gambling apps and low-quality slopware to entertain themselves. "Real world" game developers like Nintendo outright gave up on iOS/mobile gaming because it wasn't a comparable gaming experience.
A good example of this is the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which were so lazily ported that most fans advocate for pirating the originals instead. Why should anyone pay $14.99 for the bad version of FFVI?
traderj0e 48 minutes ago [-]
I don't mind playing whatever games my Mac will play, but it does feel like Apple has an entire org full-time making sure games don't work on Mac.
doctorpangloss 1 hours ago [-]
overwatch plays flawlessly on macOS right now, Game Porting Toolkit 2 is DirectX on Metal done by a $1T company.
all that said, they view this as enabling the consumer by supporting their hardware better, they have an antagonist, mafia-like relationship with game developers.
bigyabai 34 minutes ago [-]
Overwatch is a low bar - it's one of the games you can run with the upstream WineD3D OpenGL drivers from the early 2010s.
fleroviumna 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
torusle 2 hours ago [-]
Linux does not dragged down in performance by the thousands of virus and malware scanners.
Pooge 1 hours ago [-]
If by "thousands of virus" you mean software shipped by default in Windows, then I agree with you. Everything feels so sluggish on Windows 11 compared to any Linux distribution even if you run it on an HDD... it's ridiculous.
ThrowawayR2 3 days ago [-]
“He who fights with Windows should see to it that he himself does not become Windows. And when you gaze long into ntoskrnl, ntoskrnl also gazes into you.”
Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?
breve 3 days ago [-]
Microsoft and Windows were never the enemy.
To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
ThrowawayR2 3 days ago [-]
He got less humble later on when momentum started building behind Linux. To quote Linus Torvalds from 2003: “Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”
2 hours ago [-]
dpoloncsak 41 minutes ago [-]
I mean, this whole thread is basically suggesting that 23 years later, improvements to Linux and self-sabotage by Microsoft are going to possibly destroy (or atleast, start to cause some bleeding) to Microsoft (in the gaming-market).
This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.
MisterTea 2 hours ago [-]
We are so far removed from 1997 that this statement means nothing.
> the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
not2b 2 hours ago [-]
Rather, several missing, useful APIs that were hard to emulate efficiently have been added. That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".
ranger_danger 2 hours ago [-]
How do we "have Windows in the Linux kernel"?
Pay08 2 hours ago [-]
Does Windows muscle memory work? The vast majority of shortcuts are completely different for the casual user, and for the power user, there's no regedit or control panel and other such things.
nottorp 2 hours ago [-]
> there's no regedit or control panel and other such things
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
stavros 8 minutes ago [-]
We weren't talking about whether the registry was better or worse, we were talking about how similar the two OSes were.
Pay08 2 hours ago [-]
Be that as it may, it means that the muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system) is gone. I've long held the belief that power users or knows-enough-to-be-dangerous users have a harder time switching for that exact reason.
A control panel (or cross-distro YaST) would be very welcome in the ecosystem I think.
delecti 1 hours ago [-]
> muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system)
That's not "more accurately", that's just a completely different thing. When I'm on Mac, my muscle memory is thrown off. I'll be typing and my ctrl+s, alt+tab, win+4, ctrl+left* all cause wildly unpredictable (to me) things. I'm currently using Linux, and all of those things work how I expect (with a tiny asterisk on win+#). When I want a control panel, I press the windows button on my keyboard to open something functionally equivalent to the start menu, and open System Settings to get something functionally equivalent to the control panel.
I have no doubt that I could learn the deep differences between Windows and Mac over time, but the initial muscle memory causes me stress before I get to that point. When I switch to Linux I don't have that stress, and so I've been comfortably learning those differences.
* - save, switch to the previously in-focus window, switch to the 4th program on the taskbar, move the cursor one word to the left
ms_menardi 2 hours ago [-]
Um... Are you referring to WSL? Wouldn't that be the linux kernel running under windows?
hparadiz 1 hours ago [-]
WSL 1.0 was doing something like that. Doing syscall translation in real time. Eventually edge cases forced them to abandon that architecture and now it's just a VM.
tardedmeme 3 days ago [-]
What is the purpose of achieving victory? Is it to produce the software that works better or is it to stick your fingers in your ears and lalala the loudest?
Windows copied futexes from Linux first, anyway.
2 hours ago [-]
general1465 2 days ago [-]
If you are refusing to have a stable architecture, then you will maintain architecture of your enemy
weiliddat 2 hours ago [-]
Is the intent of Linux the architecture, or the philosophy of free / open source software?
tester756 3 days ago [-]
What you care more about?
technical details or real-world outcomes?
majorchord 1 hours ago [-]
You might not get the answer you were hoping for there.
pjmlp 3 days ago [-]
Not really, in the drunken happiness to have games, Linux users keep forgetting those are games developed on game studios that the only place there are GNU/Linux installations running are their MMO servers.
It is no different from arguing how Linux is getting better GameCube games with Dolphin.
Also Valve is only as good as its current management is still around, eventually like any other company time will pass, and new warm bodies will take other decisions.
wwweston 2 hours ago [-]
interface and architecture may influence each other, but interface doesn’t determine architecture
pixl97 3 days ago [-]
I mean the NT kernel was never really the enemy, it was the company behind it.
Decades ago I ported some games to linux but I do think proton is the correct approach now. One underappreciated advantage is you get most of the mod environment too. In ESO for instance, there is an addon (tamriel trade center) which lets you download item prices, but it requires a windows client exe to do that. That client works on proton.
I also do some modding myself and can cross compile my rust code to windows with cargo xwin, and run it right away in proton, which is fairly amusing to behold.
I actually don't mind windows generally (been a MS user since DOS 5), but Win11 is a game changer, pun intended, and not in a good way.
I have a couple more things to figure, I need XBox authentication to work for Halo Infinite and Sea of Theives, among others, and I need to figure out some solutions for some ancient software I have to run, which will probably end up being a Windows 11 VM. But as for my daily driver OS, I am so excited to get off Windows once and for all.
I would say custom modding and online multiplayer anti-cheat systems are the last real hold outs, and even then it doesn't affect every game.
My point is, you may find the one or two games holding you back won't be missed much.
And, assuming your are doing x86, you probably already have an EFI partition so even doing motherboard bios updates isn't much of a big deal. You just drop the update in the FAT32 EFI partition, reboot, and point the motherboard at that location. Some motherboards even support just doing that as part of an online update.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fwupd
It helped that the DOS executable format was the same as the CTOS format - because we had traded Bill Gates our linker (which produces executables) for his BASIC compiler.
What does this mean? System calls?
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-sy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt#Terminology
This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.
I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.
If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that important to you? I switched 10 years ago when things were a lot rougher than this, and in the end everything still worked well enough that I never cared to swap back.
But the issue is that it is many multiples of that, especially on the most common PC gaming hardware (Nvidia GPUs), often more than a 25% difference in framerates. Not so important at 144fps, but very important at a 60fps baseline and for genres like fighting games.
A lot of people don't mind, say, an extra 5 frames of input delay. They don't notice it. But a lot of people do notice even an extra 2 or 3.
I do think that frame pacing issues kinda do have a critical thin threshold where it's either bearable or an unacceptable difference. And the native windows version can often already be riding right on that line. So while it's not fair to the Linux version to demand better, it is unfortunately the case that it might tip over that line.
I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game. I kept this up for a couple months but honestly at some point I just gave up. Now I'm playing games on Windows again.
To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of Linux gaming. I just unfortunately am too busy these days to spend the time to get it to work.
> These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.
That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.
1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...
2: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/confi...
3: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/maste...
Anecdotally, I find that getting Linux on somewhat older or underpowered hardware is always a massive positive. Better performance as well as battery life. I'm not as familiar with modern hardware's relationship to either OS ("OS vs. some flavor of OS based on a similar or same kernel" - I know) with modern hardware. Worth a shot though!
Every supercomputer seems to do quite well with Linux kernels. Probably good enough for Crysis :)
If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
That's why all the data matters for all of these dimensions; game performance is much more than FPS per watt over time.
When people see "linux gaming is great now, look at the fps" it comes across as potentially disengenuous because of all the other factors that matter and should be tested. Or rather, if a reviewer is talking entirely about framerate, then I just can't trust their opinion and expertise when it comes to the state of Linux gaming.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513667 [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5a...
What do you mean? SRWLock (or the older CRITICAL_SECTION) cannot be shared between processes. A (Win32) Mutex does work across processes, but that's its entire purpose. So Windows does have different tools for different jobs.
In fact, it's really the other way round: on Linux, a futex also works across processes, but there is no equivalent in Windows. (Sadly, WaitOnAddress can only be used in a single process.)
That seems hugely useful for interprocess communication and I can immediately think of reasons to use IPC in a game. Having a separate voice process for one.
Fixed in Wine 11.0. Thanks to the Wine team.
Not sure if this was related to NTSYNC, but Wine's locking infrastructure definitely got an overhaul.
I don't know what they could do spanner tossing wise to really screw w/ Linux gaming at this point that wouldn't just drive more frustrated customers off their platform.
I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.
What benchmarks are you talking about? CPU-wise the A15 Bionic just barely beats the Ryzen 3700X in single-core and gets absolutely destroyed in multi-core (Geekbench). As for the GPU, the Radeon RX 7600 (closest thing I can find to a "modern console") does >10x the TFLOPS in FP32.
The only reason why they look like they're "in a similar tier" in ported games is because the A15 Bionic is usually tested on 5-6" screens that can be upscaled from 360p without any measurable loss in visual quality, with a massive downgrade in model and texture quality for the same reason. The only modern console the Apple TV "may be" similar to is the Switch 1
Me and all my dad friends are all signing up for XBox accounts so our kids can play Minecraft. So IDK about that.
For the most part the games just work, it's more system issues that I've run into where Linux suspend mode and the audio stack can be a little flaky and required Claude to diagnose and sort out.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...
That is, more people being subtly pushed to using display port is not a bad thing.
Didn't help connecting it to my Macbook, but still..
And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too.
Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
I have a dumb-ish Samsung Hotel TV / commercial TV at home. It has DP.
Don't all USB-C video outputs use DP alt mode too, with an HDMI adapter at the end? And they can do HDR.
HDMI goes 25'+, no problem.
and displayport 2.0, since 2019, has supported all the same variations (hdr10+, dolby vision) that HDMI does
Whereas the AMD-based Steam Deck always does what it should do.
Heroic because the amdgpu driver is strangely huge, more code than the rest of the obsd kernel combined, It has something to do with gpu's having no isa stability and the generated code for each card present in the driver.
AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.
Any modern distro running NVidia or AMD should be fine. I've done both. I didn't have to do anything for the NVIDIA 3000 or NVIDIA 4000 series cards but select the nvidia driver. AMD otoh is build into kernel now.
Still, if you don't absolutely need CUDA, then AMD provides better value anyway.
Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time.
Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
I have an RTX 5070 (whatever the laptop variant is) and it absolutely rocks with almost everything I throw at it, running Ubuntu+Steam+Proton. I no longer worry whether a Windows game is going to run, because almost all of them do with good performance.
Or does your laptop have no other igpu?
My last Nvidia laptop was a Hybrid optimus laptop. I almost always ran it on the built in Intel igpu because of the really bad issues with the Nvidia cards. Video tearing, bad power management etc... I remember even switching the GPU wasn't easy... And performance wasn't as good either ..
I used a recent nvidia blackwell GPU with linux, periodic crashes. Blackwell generation is shit.
Used recent builtin AMD GPU... Even worse, super reproduceable X crashes when using firefox
I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-wo...
Interesting, but I wish it was half the size folded...
Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.
Oh look at that, XDA and HTG are both owned by Valnet:
https://www.valnetinc.com/en/technology
It runs super smooth, with the build in 'wayback machine' and 'curated' Arch distro (7.0 zen kernel just dropped a week ago) pretty much bullet proof for beginners or as a daily distro if you want to get stuff done w/o caring much about it - just loving it. On the other hand side you have cutting edge gaming tech like wine/proton staging versions per default, so I'm playing Blizzard games with NTSYNC (the tech from the article) for several months now :) Forgot about most of the flashy default UI though :D
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...
A good example of this is the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which were so lazily ported that most fans advocate for pirating the originals instead. Why should anyone pay $14.99 for the bad version of FFVI?
all that said, they view this as enabling the consumer by supporting their hardware better, they have an antagonist, mafia-like relationship with game developers.
Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?
To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.
> the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
A control panel (or cross-distro YaST) would be very welcome in the ecosystem I think.
That's not "more accurately", that's just a completely different thing. When I'm on Mac, my muscle memory is thrown off. I'll be typing and my ctrl+s, alt+tab, win+4, ctrl+left* all cause wildly unpredictable (to me) things. I'm currently using Linux, and all of those things work how I expect (with a tiny asterisk on win+#). When I want a control panel, I press the windows button on my keyboard to open something functionally equivalent to the start menu, and open System Settings to get something functionally equivalent to the control panel.
I have no doubt that I could learn the deep differences between Windows and Mac over time, but the initial muscle memory causes me stress before I get to that point. When I switch to Linux I don't have that stress, and so I've been comfortably learning those differences.
* - save, switch to the previously in-focus window, switch to the 4th program on the taskbar, move the cursor one word to the left
Windows copied futexes from Linux first, anyway.
technical details or real-world outcomes?
It is no different from arguing how Linux is getting better GameCube games with Dolphin.
Also Valve is only as good as its current management is still around, eventually like any other company time will pass, and new warm bodies will take other decisions.