- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Nobara OS, Arch Linux and Pop!_OS beat Windows 11 by a slim margin in fps (delta 8) in Windows native games - Cyberpunk 2077, Forspoken, Starfield and The Talos Principle II. Windows 11 wins in Rachet & Clank.
ComputerBase’s testing was done on an all-AMD test rig, featuring a Ryzen 7 5800X (non-3D) and a Radeon RX 6700 XT.
Update: Windows 11 wins in one game.
Soooo when did Arch become a gaming focused OS?
Since Valve decided that.
Pretty much this.
I upvoted but it sounds hostile. Since valve started using and contributing to arch appears to be more reasonable.
No arch btw.
it sounds hostile.
I like my Steam Deck. Why would I be hostile? You’re reading too much into a concise statement.
Many readers are overly sensitive these days. If you use things like a period on the end of your sentences, and don’t include emojis, then anything you say will be called out as “hostile” by some people.
Also, I’ve noticed many people ignore qualifiers in speech. If you use qualifiers thoughtfully, having them ignored by the reader can lead to miscommunication. I think the fact that so many people have used them without thought has led to a blindness for qualifiers. OTH, not including qualifiers can make us sound authoritative and even arrogant to some people.
For instance, in my first sentence, above, I said “Many readers…”, and “…things like…”, and “…by some people.” If you ignore those qualifiers, what I said takes on a very different tone.
Can’t win for losing.
Assuming this is the usual case where most games are within noise of each other, the ones that don’t run under linux are excluded, and nobody acknowledges that the need to precache/predownload shaders provides short term benefits.
Its like people miss the good old days of “This is the year of linux gaming. Everything works and is perfect. Okay, those games don’t work. But every game I care about works. Except the ones that don’t”. Like, we really are in a golden age of gaming parity but pretending there isn’t still work to be done serves no benefit.
Yup. Just use the same benchmarks major sites use and note any interesting differences. They usually pick games for specific technical reasons, so most of the work figuring out where Linux is weak is done for you.
I personally play on Linux because I use Linux, but because I think it has better performance than Windows or whatever. That should be the selling point, not slight differences in performance. Show that Linux is largely on par with Windows, and then go through all of the other benefits to using Linux, like privacy, package management, and user choice.
Yeah. More or less the same. Pretty much the entirety of my work day is in a terminal and I have increasingly liked “linux” as a desktop since Mint (and now Plasma) are “more windows than windows” in terms of UI/UX. WSL gets Windows a lot of the way toward the OS I want (a good nix-ish terminal with a strong GUI for day to day), but MS also add more and more spyware and stupidity with every update so…
But holy crap do the evangelists go out of their way to undermine widespread linux adoption. Whether it is pretending that opencad is at all a replacement for fusion 360 or that gimp is comparable to photoshop or it is inflating performance or compatibility numbers.
Like, I’ve tried to switch over a few times over the years. And it has always been a shitshow. ProtonDB goes a long way, but it is also prone to outdated information (since the one person still playing Tribes 2 has no need to try newer versions of wine/proton and so forth). And if you check message boards you get the same skewed bullshit. Which mostly boils down to “Okay, well. I figured out that game X won’t work. And I now assume that these fifty other games I care about won’t either”
These days? it is a lot easier because Valve have put in the work to the point that I can more or less just check games in steam. There is still the risk of a new patch breaking something, but it is a lot closer to the good parts of protondb where the steps to recover to a good build are pretty easy (Armored Core 6 was basically a case of just rolling back a major revision of proton) rather than the shitshow. Which then makes it “Well, game X won’t work. But I am reasonably confident that every other game I care about will run performantly so…”
This is exactly why I don’t recommend my distro, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It works well for me, but online help is more limited vs Fedora and the various Debian derivatives. I’ve been Linux only for something like 15 years, and I’d hate for someone to take my advice and have a bad experience.
So I recommend Linux Mint Debian, because I know Debian is solid and Linux Mint has a ton of support. I also tell people to not expect crazy performance and for some games to just not work, that way they’ll be pleasantly surprised when things work better than they expect. As they say, under promise, over deliver.
Ok, but what about Nvidia GPUs? Those are what the the vast majority of gamers use.
93A1A71EABD6B6CD658458CC1F4
Does it really matter? The majority buy Nvidia due to mindshare, the same probably goes for why they use Windows.
The majority buys NVIDIA, because NVIDIA cards are just better.
At least in terms of the latest features, like RTX. If you’re only interested in raster performance, AMD works quite well and provides excellent value.
Not just the latest features. NVENC is better for both streaming and untethered VR, CUDA is usually better supported by photo/video/3D/CAD software, etc. AMD is only good if you’re only playing games and can’t afford an NVIDIA card.
Or you’re like me and use Linux and value better drivers (e.g. Wayland support, no update bugs on rolling release distros, etc) over those other features.
And on Windows as well, if you’re buying mid-range, you’re probably not going to have a good experience with those other features, so you should go with AMD. The premium for buying Nvidia at the mid-range often isn’t worth it.
Well, I don’t buy midrange, personally. As I tend to use my GPU for hobbies and work, I tend to buy the best thing available on the market.
And even when I play games, I play in 4K exclusively, for the past seven years :)
I’ve been using arch and manjaro for the past 3 years with awesomewm and gnome (can’t get awesomewm to behave with second monitor while gaming so I switch to gnome when using the second monitor, using laptop) and this has pretty much been my experience. Windows is bloated and it never"just works".
Windows almost always just works.
This seems crazy to say when talking about Linux. Especially when saying you have to switch to use dual monitors.
Linux allows you to change anything. Like using a WM that’s specifically made for enthusiasts, and developed by random people in their spare time.
Windows doesn’t allow you to move the taskbar.
Who’d guess some Linux setups are not going to be plug and play…
Windows allows you to do anything. If you don’t know how - that’s the problem of your skills.
Windows never works so much that you have to switch between distros to do different stuff, ahahaha! Oh my, the delusion…
Doesn’t matter. Easy of use + compatibility trumps all.
More like, “doesn’t matter – not being tracked > all.” :^)
Even so, Linux is easier to use than Windows (yes, I went there.) because of a single and only fact:
Configuration files.
Does the average Windows user can configure EVERYTHING through a SINGLE configuration/text file, that explicitly says “what does what”? Video, sound, window size, hotkeys…?
No? So there you have it.
Windows has a configuration file, it’s called a registry. Always has been.
Linux, is not for gaming. Period.
Then you must be lost.
I recently switched to ubuntu in a gaming laptop, right now I’ve been using it just for jellyfin and some other coding tasks, but it definitely runs smoother, more stable, quicker, and cooler than windows did for the same workload.
I was surprised at the difference of even just having the machine idle, on windows it was noticeable warm, now on ubuntu it’s almost as if it has been turned off.Honestly, at this point – If Valve made a more generalized Linux OS… or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.
Now now, I’m not saying YEAR OF LINUX ON THE DESKTOP!! - but Valve would be a great mother for fostering an ecosystem that would potentially make Microsoft compete by not making their OS shittier year-by-year.
If Valve made a Linux OS… or even at the very least started making honest proposals at unifying how the OS ran, so that their efforts in getting gaming to work on it could be more widely productive; we could see a radical shift in adoption.
Sorry, does SteamOS 3 not count? Is Valve’s massive investment in Mesa, Wine, Wayland (HDR, Gamescope, etc) not exactly what you’re talking about? I feel like we’re living in parallel dimensions or something lol
Yh it does count although it only supports a certain set of hardware. Not entirely sure if that’s true though.
Yes but the improvements and contributing Valve made to various packages in the Linux ecosystem and the kernel were all pushed upstream meaning any Linux distribution can benefit from them.
Is arch really gaming focused though?
SteamOS is based on Arch, likely why they picked it.
That’s like saying PlayStation 5 and Switch are based on FreeBSD, so you should game on FreeBSD (well, not quite, but hopefully the point is clear). FreeBSD isn’t good for gaming, it’s just liberally licensed and easy to build on top of, hence why it’s used.
Valve has reasons to use an Arch base, and none of them have anything to do with any specific benefit regarding gaming. It’s easy to fork and maintain customized build files for since it makes so few assumptions (packages are as vanilla as possible in Arch, so it’s easier to maintain a patch set).
Valve likely has patches in SteamOS that haven’t made it to upstream Arch, and there’s likely a number of packages that are quite outdated vs upstream Arch, so installing upstream Arch will give you quite a different experience vs SteamOS.
Arch is focused on being cutting-edge and lightweight which happens to be perfect for gaming performance in most cases but that’s all.
Arch is focused on however you put it together
Arch is focused like the same way a beach is a camera lens.
Exactly. The only thing Arch focuses on is not focusing on anything. They ship packages as vanilla as possible, have pretty much no default configuration, etc. In short, they try to make as few assumptions as possible.
It ends up being pretty good for gaming because Linux is pretty good for gaming. They’re explicitly not doing anything special here.