For my lazy fellas on mobile: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/what-is-windows-k2-everything-you-need-to-know-saving-windows-11
I dont even check if a game will work anymore on Linux, it always does. Last one was Planet Crafter which was a really good game. The entire planet is changing as you terraform it which is very fun to see.
That game ate 60 hours of my life in a week when I first played it
Perhaps they are talking handhelds, specifically?
Look. I am the biggest, most shameless CachyOS fanboy you will find. It’s like 90% of my desktop time, has been for years.
But I’ve benchmarked a few games on Windows and Linux, Proton and native, sparsely, and Windows still has an advantage, sometimes. Cyberpunk 2077 was the biggest outlier for Proton (eg faster on Windows, enough to visibly affect settings I can manage on my 3090).
And many native ports are still truly awful. Often where performance equates to simulation time, like modded Stellaris or Rimworld.
Mind you, that’s not always the case. Proton is faster in many games, and (for example) anything Java like Minecraft or Starsector are just hilariously faster on Linux.
The caveats:
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My Windows 11 is neutered to hell. It’s a barren wasteland. Even Defender is disabled.
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I’m running Nvidia.
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Some of my testing is aging now.
Still, I am a Linux shill, and think the headline is a bit dramatic. Stripped Windows is still faster in plenty of realistic scenarios.
Since they’re referencing SteamOS, they’re probably talking about stock mobile systems, where the overhead from that mountain of background junk in Windows is much more painful.
Yes but … Windows is not stripped Windows. The real Windows is a spyware hell installed by your laptop vendor. Barely usable.
Good point. My laptop is dualbooting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 22) and its faster to:
start Linux, login, start quemu, start Windows VM in quemu, login in windows in the VM, shutdown windows in the VM gracefully, exit quemu, shutdown Linux gracefully
than
boot windows natively, login and wait till it is responsive enough to do anything with it.
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Microsoft is doing this ONLY because they finally recognized that Linux surpassed them flying on the one thing they were king: games
Microsoft doesn’t give a single shit about end users, never had. It always had the goal of becoming the dominant ayer, then get a monopoly, and then doing absolutely nothing anymore until users complain too much. This has been their work ethos since it’s inception and if you believe otherwise I have a bridge to sell you.
Linux gaming went from good luck to Windows is taking notes. That’s a pretty wild timeline.
And it all started with a guy wanting to see sexy android ass on Linux
you are (not) an emulator
Wow what a twist of events.
No please, continue shooting yourself in the foot.
People begged for performance debloating for more than a decade but you’re only interested now because Proton outperforms Windows.
I would be asking for a multi million dollar salary as an NT kernel engineer to undo all the crappary intentionally introduced in every update ever since Windows 8.
Lol it’s true

It’s wild that they recognized that software compiled for their own operating system goes faster through an interpreter on a different operating system
Its funny because Valve doesn’t need SteamOS to compete with Windows. They made it to enable playing more games, so you buy more games. If MS matches performance with Windows, Valve still wins, because its just another avenue for people to buy more games. They don’t care what OS you do it on. But MS does care, because they need you on Windows to eat up your data. Which also means they’re at a disadvantage in competing on performance as well, because they need your games to play as well as they do on SteamOS while also enabling all their bullshit background services and telemetry.
my favourite thing about linux/open source: It’s often one person in their garage writing this code (or at least started that way), and it’s more often than not better than the closed source alternatives. Booyeah!
Just a hunch, but it’s not performance why peeps are migrating away from windows
The performance boost is just the icing on the cake
I migrated because I was frustrated with having to constantly fix problems caused by forced updates. I didn’t expect the benefit of my computer being WAY faster.
My biggest “wow” was when I could hit the super key and have the start menu open immediately instead of waiting 4 minutes for it to load in and another 20 minutes to take my search input and give me back results from Bing.
Sorry you didn’t like Bing, but now we have set Edge as your default browser, you’ll love it. Also Teams is now installed on your PC, surprise!
Windows could run twice as fast and I still wouldn’t switch back to it.
Good news if you’re on a nvidia gpu then 🫠
Nobody is going to say what the real problem is unless they want to get fired
They can’t. The people working on complaints are in a different department. And departments don’t communicate at Microsoft.
That’s an understatement

Just 1 more AI data centre?
Lightly squeezes AI bubble a few times
“Yeah, there’s room for one more.”
Can’t wait to see how the fediverse grows when all these datacenters have to liquidate their stock for dirt cheap
Homelab community will get a lot more activity XD
the windows file explorer and terminal have horrible performance, it’s one of the reasons I’ll never switch back
Some games have better performance running under wine on Linux than natively on Windows.
On the flip side, I couldn’t get Linux native Jackbox to run because the devs failed to update it to support something (Wayland maybe, IDK was troubleshooting mid Xmas party).
Ended up installing the Windows version in Proton.
That’s a story old as Linux. Native shit stops working. Thankfully wine/Proton is there to keep it functional
Hm. I wonder if still will become a problem in the future if we get more Linux native games. We shit on Windows for not playing old games when wine can, but if a game stops functioning moving from x11 to Wayland (or some other dependency) will there be people there to care enough to fix it? Although I would assume it would be an easier fix for Linux than Windows for when it does.
it will always be a problem with native games.
I think it was about 5 years ago, the Terraria team Linux dev left. Something happened that stopped the Linux build launching, and the native version was not playable until they got a new Linux dev in the team. Proton version worked flawlessly with more stable framerate.
As far as I know the native Undertale build is still unplayable. If it is working now, well it wasn’t for about 6 years.
I see people get excited about native game builds, that’s great but unless it’s a very dedicated team that will update the game constantly it seems to be is no use.
I feel like the issue could be solved with a flatpak-like solution.
It won’t. You have so many options. Just install the old libraries, use a chroot, use docker. Probably automate all this with Lutris or similar.
Once 32bit libraries are gone, only wine with the recently added WoW64 will be able to run old games ot of the box. Old native titles made for 32bit Linux will require installing all the 32 bit libs again, assuming they’ll be even available for your distro
Which is no issue w Since you can even still run old 16-bit games on linux. Maybe someone will start packaging convenient library collections at some point.
Many games ship with dependencies statically linked into the binary. Those won’t even have the problem apart from maybe glibc.
Edit: 16-bit still works. For 8-bit there are emulators.
Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.
lol. They’re not going to reduce the bloat in their OS.
But they have gaming mode that disables a lot of it
They only spy on you most of the time!
lol, just kidding, that part doesn’t turn off
How do you manually enable it? Otherwise you are spreading lies and bullshit
For gaming, Microsoft views steamOS as the benchmark, and is working to optimize the platform so that steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable. Within the next year or two, it believes that Windows will be able to truly compete head-to-head with steamOS in gaming performance on identical hardware due to foundational changes that are being made to the platform in the coming months.
Doubt.
Competition is good and the more Windows tries to meet this promise, the more Linux gets exposure.
Do “foundational changes” mean they will play games on WSL hoping the “hyperV, WSL(inux), proton, game, WSLg (Wayland)” chain will have less slowdown than the “Windows, game, directX” route?
At least if they do it performance will stay on par with SteamOS as long as hyperV doesn’t bloat too much.
Woo competition doing its thing!
not really… microslop will always be trash and will always demand that you own nothing, and it’s all their data
Oh absolutely. But MS reacting to pressure from competition still benefits the poor souls who have to use it and shows that we need more people to switch away to encourage more improvements.


















