Unless there's a bottleneck it's usually Vulkan vs dx.

So far it has been the most stable distro I've run, since moving to Linux full time three years ago, i think they are doing something right, idn 🤷

lol

Never change, Lemmy

I wouldn't put it past them to try...

Outside of Valve hardware certainly Bazzite or Nobara. Not sure about Vive VR support in general though, but if it exists those distros are the most likely to work with it with minimum of issues.

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.

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.

Reject Fedora nonsense. Go Arch, use CachyOS.
Seriously, I only ever had issues with Fedora and Fedora based distros. And besides, Red Hat is slowly turning to shit. You heard it from me first. In 5 to 10 years most people will put Red Hat on the same level as Canonical.

Some bullshit to do with vibe coding a copy, then make some important new feature and patent that. Then require all new games on windows to support that. Some bullshit like that. Make direct 13 as incompatible with translations to vulkan as possible.

I'd say something Arch based will be the easiest on account of it having so many users. For VR, check out the Linux VR Adventures wiki, and the Matrix community attached to it.

NVidia kind of sucks. I'd expect that to be the biggest wrinkle.

Year of the Windows desktop here we go!

(credit)

Year of the Windows desktop here we go!

(credit)

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.

CachyOS would be my recommendation; it has options to get a kernel with the closed-source drivers automatically during install, iirc. I bought an AMD card, so I have no direct experience, but I'd expect the least friction with it, even compared to Bazzite or other gaming-focused distributions.

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!

Linux gaming went from good luck to Windows is taking notes. That’s a pretty wild timeline.

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.

I feel like the issue could be solved with a flatpak-like solution.

Competition is good and the more Windows tries to meet this promise, the more Linux gets exposure.

Yeah. Being Arch based it's flexible, and I've heard it's got a good setup. A friend has a bit of a rough time with the default kernel but you have options.

VR will automatically be a bit janky. The smoothest out of the box VR experience at the moment is WiVRn coupled with an Android VR headset, like a Quest or a Pico. Requires a good router though.

If someone's looking to get into VR on Linux, I'd wait for Valve's headset to come out. No idea if it'll be any good or not, but the Quest is arse. I absolutely hate mine.

Agreed. The only major challenges I've had with CachyOS are from my Windows VM or from not realizing that Docker containers are the best option for server-type things, like the controller for my WiFi mesh network. Once I stopped trying (and failing) to run that from the AUR, it's been smooth sailing.

But most people would just buy the dedicated mesh network controller, and the only reason I need a Windows VM is for SharePoint integration in Explorer, which is a fairly specialized requirement. Even as a power user, I almost exclusively use the web apps for O365 just so I don't need to use Windows.

Apparently, earlier in CachyOS's history, there were more issues, but I don't think that's at all true anymore. I tried installing a more "standard"/conservative choice, Debian on my wife's and friend's laptops, and it's been way harder. I should have just stuck with "unstable" CachyOS, and it would have been much more stable. Turns out things usually get better with newer patches. Who knew?

How do you manually enable it? Otherwise you are spreading lies and bullshit

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.

Because their legal system is captured by people who don't give a fuck about what's right and who see "competition" as something that needs to be squashed rather than encouraged.

Yeah 😥

Hate this place.

I bet you're still giving them too much credit and most won't know the difference between a steam deck and all the windows-based clones that popped up when business saw that people wanted something like that so made more corporate versions. A non-trivial portion of them will try one of the shitty clones and decide based on that that the steam deck is garbage.

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.

I second CachyOS. I don’t even consider myself an advanced Linux user and it’s been a relatively painless transition from Windows gaming.

Plugged in a second SSD m.2 into my motherboard, installed off a USB, and an hour later I was goofing around with some friends on our weekly Satisfactory run like nothing changed.

If it’s the first time trying it just follow along with a YouTube guide, ezpz.

An abstraction layer that reverse-engineers the Windows GPU and kernel syscalls and runs on a completely different operating system does better than the native platform after a decade or so of volunteer labor, and a few years of a couple paid devs.

How embarassed would you be if this happened to something you spent 40 years building?

And it all started with a guy wanting to see sexy android ass on Linux

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.

I have a very similar setup (Vive + 4070) working under Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The only special workaround was to install Steam natively, downloading directly from Valve instead of using the Snap provided by Canonical. Aside from that, everything worked immediately right out of the box.

There is none. VR is a fools errand on Linux. You can maybe get something to technically run, but with missing features, worse performance, and even then only some VR will even attempt to launch to that broken state.

I have a Windows VM for VR gaming. Dual boot also works. For all non-VR gaming, Linux is pretty much flawless nowadays.

Which Distro? Pick one that has existed for at least 10 years, with the desktop environment your like the look and feel of most, and most popular and well supported from that.

We have a Vive and it works pretty okay actually, aside from SteamVR being janky.

Hopefully they fix the SteamVR jank with the upcoming Steam Frame, though!

-- Frost

Microsoft is deep into the vibe coding now, but even before that it was cheap devs who could write somewhat functional code but had little concept of optimization, amidst a sprawling bloated OS that has only grown fatter over time.

The mentality of RAM and storage are cheap has suddenly come to a screeching halt but it's taking to take them a long time to find talent that can actually fix the mess they've already built, especially as they try to grab more AI crap into every nook and cranny of their product line.

I was there early in CachyOS’s history, and it was still great. The only huge issues I can remember (that wasn’t totally self inflicted) are upstream Nvidia problems, and some ambiguous manual package installs/uninstalls when some stuff was shuffled and renamed. But the later just taught me to watch the update log, as I should.

That, and I keep an LTS kernel around whenever something minor breaks. Which their setup makes totally painless.

I agree with others. CachyOS is the most stable Linux distro I’ve ever used, to the point where my laptop and desktop installs are years old now. It’s also that Linux desktop, overall, is in a good place, but still.

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:

• My Windows 11 is neutered to hell. It’s a barren wasteland. Even Defender is disabled.

• I’m running Nvidia.

• 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.

This is the Year of Linux on the handheld

Windows 11/10 does some stuff that isn't in the feature scope of wine/proton, namely on the security front (KDP, HVCI, ACG), which has a measurable performance impact. Whether you want to call that bloat or not is up to you.

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.

you are (not) an emulator

Yes but ... Windows is not stripped Windows. The real Windows is a spyware hell installed by your laptop vendor. Barely usable.

Native Windows CS2 dust2 benchmark gives me 120fps over the native Bazzite Linux (fedora 43) CS2 - 180fps. Running proton CS2 gives me 100fps.

Wish more games had native Linux ports.

I haven't actually tried Dolphin on Windows, not sure how usable it is

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.

Some bullshit to do with vibe coding a copy, then make some important new feature and patent that.

You think Microslop can vibe code an OS that's competitive with Linux?

That game ate 60 hours of my life in a week when I first played it

"With things like instant file search!" Omg I can't, what a joke of an OS.