this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Windows 11 scores dead last in gaming performance tests against 3 Linux gaming distros (www.notebookcheck.net)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 419 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Well this article is pretty disingenuous...

  1. The distribution "managed by a single person" depends on hundreds of people working on different sofware to keep up. It's not "one person doing better than the thousands of Microsoft employees combined" implication they are pushing

  2. Windows 11 beat the linux distros by up to 20% in 1% lows which are argued as much more important by most tech reviewers. It wasn't consistant at all which means that there was a giant margin of error.

I love linux and linux gaming has gotten radically better, but I am tired of tech "journalism" literally just cherrypicking, misleading, clickbait trash.

[–] [email protected] 132 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Not to mention the major hurdle for Linux gaming is anti cheat software being brought over. Too many games are 100% unplayable because the devs don't allow their anticheat to be installed on Linux systems

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As if the anti-cheat even worked.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Client-side anti-cheat has always been a scam to offload server processing onto client machines.

This results in worse cheat detection and wastes client resources, but companies like EA can spend less on servers.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It also doesn't work. I know that's what the parent comment said, but it's a total scam at the company level too.

"Oh, server networking is hard to do right. Let's do it client side"

"Oh, people are cheating. Let's add anticheat"

Ensue 3 years of fixing network consistency bugs and playing whackamole with cheaters

I've developed games where the client is the source of truth, and games where it's the server. It is almost always better to do anything that will be developed for more than a few weeks serverside.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Also from an engineering perspective it makes LOADS more sense as you can apply patches to the servers instantly vs. requiring the users patch the game themselves.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

>client is the source of truth

>company doesn't like the clients truth

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

In the defence of client side AC; if the entire game runs on the server, then network delay makes FPS:es awful to play. Being able to trust clients and let them do hit detection is quite important in making online FPS:es responsive. In addition, cheats that remove walls/grass, highlight players or even autoaim are near impossible to detect server side. One could try to use heuristics and statistics but it would be difficult to tell the difference between cheaters and players who are just good at aiming and map awareness.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago

I really wish valve would make this more clear on steam store pages. It says games are "unsupported" on steam deck due to anticheat when really it should say something like "The developer of this title does not allow players using the steam deck" so that people are more aware it's not linux or valve's fault

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Honestly I can't say that I miss installing rootkits with terrifying privileges just to play games. I'd rather limit the privileges games have with Flatpak etc., not give them even more.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup. People always latch on to the "Sony (it was actually on Philips, who ran the disc factory that Sony had a stake in, but that's just nitpicking) installed a rootkit on PCs in the 90s via CDs" and say about how awful that is, and they're right, then they throw that out the Window and install more advanced rootkits filled with god knows what telemetry when they install games.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sure but gaming is predominantly a social pastime. Meaning that most gamers will make the trade off between installing anticheat and not playing the game their friends are all playing, much like the overwhelming majority of people will trade privacy in favor of being able to send a message to friends on Facebook.

It doesn't matter how much you value your privacy: most people don't care and never will. So without the option to give away privacy to play the latest Ubisoft game they won't be using Linux. Full stop.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah, what the heck Valorant. I'm not installing that.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yep. The world is full of trash, that's for sure.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

1% lows are way more important. I also think frame time is very important.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the only time proton can actually outperform windows is when it spots a fundamental performance error that the app has made, and is able to optimize it out, AND no windows driver does the same. This is comparing Linux+proton at its best vs windows+native at its worst.

What we really want to see is Linux+native at its best vs windows+native at its best. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of demanding games that natively support Linux.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Wait, isn't a lower frame time better? Why does their screenshot show windows having the lowest and say that it scored last?

Looking at the source article, windows did have generally better 1% lows except for Starfield, so I think this article has it backwards. They also cherry picked 2 results where windows was worse lol.

I'm all for pro-linux stuff but articles like this just reek of making shit up so it looks better.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think FPS was actually selected, not frametimes. 1% low frametimes of 89 does not make sense.

There is an issue with the image in the article, but not the one that you might think it was. The FPS should have been more clearly indicated that it was the selected tab and then it probably would have been fine.

edit: I went to the base website https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distribution-zum-spielen/2/ it's in German, but, it seems like the frametimes and frame rates are nearly the exact same values - which doesn't even seem to make sense to me?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They probably didn't label their axes properly. FPS is a clearly defined metric, and there, more is better. This indicates that the conclusion (Linux is faster) holds. Since frame times have an entry with value “100” and all other values are lower, I assume that's in percent, i.e. Arch Linux is the fastest and picked as comparison point, and the others are shown with relative performance to Arch.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eKSQT5mV-c

Important: Nobara is way less Secure than Fedora.

  • no Secureboot
  • monthly updates instead of often daily
  • purposefully removed SELinux (because the Dev doesnt know how to use it)
  • still no Fedora39!

If you want to game, stick to regular Fedora. A project that is actually secure is ublue with dedicated NVIDIA images that should just work and never break, and they even have Bazzite, an Image specifically for the Steamdeck but also for Desktop.

These images are only ½ day behind upstream, apply minimal additions and patches (like drivers, codecs, packages, udev rules for controllers) and Nick from the video above found out that the Nobara patches with their weird less supported Kernel arent really worth the hassle.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Secure Boot is an utter piece of bullshit from the depths of hell.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I’ll need to give Linux gaming another chance at some point.

All I know is that people were saying games run great on Linux a couple of years ago as well, but when I actually tried it for myself the performance was unusable.

Maybe that was my fault for over complicating my setup, but even when I tried a basic setup it still felt very janky.

Not sure if anyone’s able to advise, but does RTX and variable refresh rate work on Linux?

Those are absolute requirements for me.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

All three major GPU manufacturers support ray tracing and variable refresh rate on Linux. When playing windows games, ray tracing has to be handled through VKD3D, which AFAIK supports most but not all DXR features. I haven't had any problems with it though.

The one thing that can still completely make or break your (Windows games on Linux) gaming experience is anti-cheat software, since it's up to the game developers to enable it for wine. The major anti cheat providers offer solutions for this, but not all game studios are interested in their games running on platforms other than windows. Games like valorant will probably never work. Good riddance though.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Valorant is a fucking awful game with über ban techniques when you force quit a game for some reason, like needing to go to the bathroom in middle of game play.

I can't understand anyone can accept such a thing.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks, I’ll definitely need to give Linux gaming another shot then.

The last bit that might hold me back is getting my Hue Sync stuff working. It sounds silly, but it really makes games feel so much more immersive that I don’t want to be without it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a GNOME extension called HUE lights that allows you to control everything from your tray, entertainment zones and all. Similar probably exists for KDE/etc.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

OpenRGB can handle a ton of stuff like this if I recall. I dont know if its hue extension is any good as i havent used it, but ive seen videos.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

nvidia is always hit of miss

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (5 children)

A typical Linux distro, especially lightweight and simpler ones like Arch, will of course be better than a bloated OS, like Pop or Windows. The only problem with Linux distros might be the choice of tools - X and AMD will work much better overall than Wayland and Nvidia.
Just that many people may have an Nvidia GPU before deciding to use Linux, and some people just prefer to use Wayland over X for literally everything else.

My PC with Wayland + Nvidia has so many problems with gaming, especially flickering and performance, while my Laptop with Wayland + integrated Intel graphics has no problems at all - even in games, that I wonder if Nvidia + Wayland still really sucks ass or if my GPU is just broken. Currently there's a bug where frames are 'switched' somehow, so it's not Frame 1, Frame 2, ... Frame n, but Frame 1, Frame 3, Frame 2, Frame 5, Frame 6, Frame 4 etc.
I expect it to be fixed by an update of nvidia in the future, but there are always such bugs.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

That frame issue is because of the fact that Nvidia uses "explicit sync" and AMD/Intel use "implicit sync" - XWayland is built to only support implicit syncing for now (Nvidia is trying to get it changed), and since most games right now run under XWayland... Along with a ton of apps of course.

Until then, that issue won't be resolved sadly. It's what finally pushed me to get an AMD card since the issue has been open for over a year with a ton of back and forth.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

especially flickering and performance

If my experience is any indicator, your GPU is fine :(. Any chance you're using mixed display scalings? I've got an RTX 3050 eGPU for my Plasma/Wayland laptop, and for the most part it actually works fairly smoothly (albeit more slowly compared to windows), but if I try to run a game at a higher resolution than my monitor (used by Plasma for mixed scaling) I get constant flashing/frame shifting, but when I drop it down to the native 1080p it starts working again

As a side note, X and eGPUs do not play well together, but Wayland is literally plug and play after installing the drivers--I can even hot plug/unplug as long as nothing's using the GPU!

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (5 children)

In windows defence they don’t really have the resources to compete

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Real question- I have a steam deck and am incredibly pleased with the playability. I also have a desktop with a newer nvidia card. Does Linux have support for DLSS yet? It make a huge difference in oerformance and honestly it’s the only thing holding me back

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

That depends which DLSS. In my testing DLSS 1 and 2 work fine in games that I tried, with recent Proton enabling it as well as ray tracing shouldnt require extra steps anymore (it was experimental and opt-in using environment variables). DLSS 3 with frame generation is known as no go yet and it’s unfortunately on NVIDIA to provide support for it as it’s very much locked down guarded proprietary stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well since it’s slower that just means it’s being more careful and not prone to making mistakes

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Open your source and prove that or else we know you're lying.

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