[BENCHMARK] Linux run games faster than M$ spyware/bloatware.

[JC'sBarber]

I hope we start seeing more native linux games, and games that use open APIs like Vulkan instead of DirectX. So many PC games rely on Microsoft software to run, it's ridiculous.

 

[Inec0rn]

Y'know, 99% of all distros are pointless, they just save you like 30 minutes of installing stuff yourself.
This was my first problem back when I wanted to do the switch: people would recommend Ubuntu, Pop!, Mint, Debian, Fedora, ''just'' learn to install Arch, trolls would recommend Gentoo/Nix, etc.
This is most obvious initial problem with Linux: too much division, too many slightly different choices, too many ''protest'' distros like Mint, Artix, Devuan, etc
When I first tried Mint, I had no idea what the hell was the difference between a normal package, a flatpack, or why I was supposed to hate snaps, it doesn't say anything about that in the actual OS.
I really don't understand why there isn't a community-driven Linux wiki where all this stuff is easily explained, instead of having to comb through a hundred different forums every time you need to find a command or the name of some stupid package.
To clarify: I don't have these problems, I'm talking about the initial experience of most people.

Yeah thats a very good point, and i entered the same way starting with Ubuntu/mate etc. This is a recipe for failure as you start out of the box with tons of abstraction and therefore have no fucking idea what is going on when you use it.

Yeah imo that's why Arch is the best noob distro because the Archwiki knowledgebase is that good. As well as being the perfect middle-ground, no need to compile the kernel stupidity like Gentoo, but also clean, lightweight and free of abstraction so you can start to learn and tailor your own desktop experience and default utilities etc. from scratch.

I guess that's why Valve chose it for steamdeck too.

 

[Hag]

Linux's fine and dandy but its security reputation is overblown. While it was arguably more secured in the age of Windows XP, it is nowadays severely lacking behind Windows.

Not that security on Linux has always been a complex and misunderstood subject. The Reflection on trusting trust paper is 40 years old but still relevant : even if all Linux code was reviewed and perfectly secured (and up to date to modern threats, which it isn't) it would be no guarantee of security.

 

[Cryomancer]

it is nowadays severely lacking behind Windows.

LOL. No way. Military forces around the world uses Linux by a reason.

 

[Hag]

LOL. No way. Military forces around the world uses Linux by a reason.

Customization ? Integration ? Easier software and driver development ? No big buck licensing ?

I'd be glad if you could give me a source to your claim or any in-depth articles about Linux use in the military.

 

[Cryomancer]

Customization ? Integration ? Easier software and driver development ? No big buck licensing ?

I'd be glad if you could give me a source to your claim or any in-depth articles about Linux use in the military.

US uses TENS ( https://archiveos.org/tens ), Russia uses Astra Linux( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_Linux ) and China, Kylin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylin_(operating_system) ).

If security could be better provided by paying a M$ a license fee, military would pay for it. You article only said that Linux is not perfect and no one argues that Linux is perfect. But guess what, Windows is full of backdoors. _NSAKEY is the most famous of all. Allow NSA to spy encrypted data.



Good comment :

What would happen if the linus allowed backdoors in Linux:
1. Someone would find it
2. They would fix it and push it back to the official repository
3. If Linus refuses, then someone would just fork linux and fix the bug and then we would have the Linux kernel and some other forked kernel like LibreLinux of SafeLinux, or some other stupid shit.

Basically it's in nobody's interest except the NSA's.

 

[Necrensha]

Customization ? Integration ? Easier software and driver development ? No big buck licensing ?

I'd be glad if you could give me a source to your claim or any in-depth articles about Linux use in the military.

The french used this thing for years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu
Russia uses Astra.
The US navy is the single biggest client of Red Hat:
https://linuxsecurity.com/features/...government-s-security-needs-heading-into-2020

 

[Eisen]

It only takes 200 hours and programming socks to get the games to run on Linux.

Everything needed to install games is automated with a very friendly UI in some distros

$ install wine
$ wine64 game.exe

Done.

nigga you may need DXVK

 

[Hag]

Cryomancer Necrensha thank you for the links, much appreciated.

However I rest my case. Astra and Kylin seem to have heavy security customization, including support for security hardware. There is no indication those changes have been submitted to the official kernel sources. This is not security but customization (and moving away from Windows) that drove the adoption to Linux.

When using of the shelves distros, there are other considerations. While it has NOT been proven that Window present any backdoor or security risks (_NSAKEY is fishy but doesn't prove anything, plus it is kind of old news, and modern telemetry has not been shown to leak user data), if it is compromised then it is fair to believe code from other American giants and heavy Linux contributors, such as Intel and Google, has also been. Not counting individual developers that can be under NSA pressure. We just can't know.

However what we can know if that against non-state threat Windows security is more up to date than Linux's. I'm more interested in not getting infected by ransomware or other shit than fighting the governement that can send agents to beat the shit out of me and imprison me without reason backdoors or not.

 

[Cryomancer]

may need DXVK

If you only run old games, you don't need DXVK. Wine works fine with direct x up to 9.

But look how the performance of DXVK improved in this benchmark

While it has NOT been proven that Window present any backdoor or security risks

LOL.

Only to talk about their most recent "addition" the AI powered spyware called recall.

Is so vulnerable that M$ AI teaches you how to exploit it

Not counting individual developers that can be under NSA pressure

Again, anyone can find a backdoor, patch it and make a fork if there is a backdoor in Linux very well hidden.

And note, if the NSA backdoor "leaks" in a dark web forum, M$ will need to ask permission to NSA, implement another backdoor, put a diversity hire to remove it and will be months where your PC is exposed to all types of problems.

 

[Melcar]

DXVK is really only needed for DX10/11/12. I think DX8 support was recently added to DXVK, but WINED3D works fine for anything DX9 and lower.

 

[gooseman]

I bought a Linux laptop after getting violently angry at windows update for the 1000th time in my life

Im fucking sick of the updates too. The explorer also sucks dick, working with the filesystem in general is cancer, copying a lot of small files takes forever, forced to use robocopy. Heard AMD drivers are better on linux (amd drivers broke resolve, for example, but a friend said it didn't happen on linux). And then there's a bunch of cool software that's linux only...
I tried a bunch of distros in a VM (not full experience, since it doesn't let it use the gpu without extra setup), it really isn't that complicated. Ran suse on a laptop for a while.
As for distros, it seems anything should work, as long as it's not something very niche (like void), not ubuntu (any other branch of debian is better) or arch-based (even ones that remove most of the setup autismo, the main issue is that most of the software is in AUR, which is definitely not trustworthy. and it bricks with updates for no substantial benefit). I'd probably go for mint or fedora. I'd be dualbooting, but I don't have a spare drive and read windows is either retarded or malicious (likely both) and can brick linux partitions, possibly irrecoverably.

 

[Semiurge]

Some say that the default Linux CPU scheduler is superior to that of Windows which prioritises power saving, and then there's of course the ridiculous amount of background bloat in Windows. In addition you have all the possible distro/kernel/driver/user- specific causes that contribute to performance differences.

the seven games that run on linux do run faster

ProtonDB has 16,230 verified or playable games. In my steam library, only 4% of my games borked. Some games like Jade Empire, I can't run in M$ spybloatware but can easily run in Linux. M&M VII from CD(not from GoG) too. Runs perfectly in Linux and can't be run in M$ spybloatware.

That's probably due to either new DX implementations or the way modern Windows doesn't automatically disable desktop composition when you run games in fullscreen. Games that were designed for Windows XP hate this.

Okay, now show me any online multiplayer games. Oh wait...

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Micro...ld-kill-kernel-level-anti-cheat.888345.0.html

a random repository and everything breaks.

Interesting. Never had that happen with wine.

I had WINE update and it made anything that use it go very slowly despite having powerful enough hardware. Felt like I was playing everything in slow motion. Also, pulseaudio kept shitting itself at inopportune times. Once my distro updated and a critical part for samba prevented the distro from booting, I cut my losses, decided to stop using the computer in question, and now plan on using Windows 11. While I can jump to another distro and spin the wheel again, I'm tired of fiddling with Linux shit for the time being. There is potential, but things need to be ironed out.

Just use a WINE frontend so you can tool around with different WINE runners that update independently. Bottles allows you to keep backups of older versions.

Ubuntu I don't recommend because snaps.

Not a problem if most of your software is for Windows or is installed as Flatpak. Ubuntu does make it hard to install native packages with apt though, snap is always prioritised. An asshole move considering that they're developing their snap-based immutable distro, so what possible reason could they have for pushing snaps on vanilla Ubuntu other than being assholes?

Later I tried OpenSuse, but it was... weird.

It wouldn't receive as much praise if it didn't include Snapper and that software manager. Everything else about the distro is just mediocre, and it's german. That means there will be a lot of german users online from whom you might need to ask for help, and their poor english skills might make things more difficult. Its documentation also isn't as good as that of Debian, Ubuntu or Arch Wiki. Also I've heard that SUSE is having financial problems, so the future of their distros is unclear. I'd trust community-project monoliths like Debian to be around for at least as long as they already have.

I hope we start seeing more native linux games, and games that use open APIs like Vulkan instead of DirectX. So many PC games rely on Microsoft software to run, it's ridiculous.

The KEX engine is built around Vulkan at least. I read that the main reason why DX is still dominating game development is that it's easier to program games with it than with Vulkan.

 

[Melcar]

OpenSuse is a fine distro, or rather Tumbleweed (the only serious rolling release distro I would even consider). The documentation sucks (even worse than Fedora's) but nothing stops you from referencing the Arch wiki instead for the general stuff and the idiosyncrasies proper to the distro are easy enough to figure out. Base software selection from their official repos kind of sucks (better than official Arch at least), so you will rely on flatpaks/snaps/appimages or their OBS sometimes. Their stance on non-free codecs is problematic and the solutions are to either use Pacman (not a good option for Tumbleweed) or just use flatpaks/snaps/appimages. The graphical YAST package manager sucks (too slow) but hey, at least it's a proper graphical package manager and not an "app store" like most popular distros are using now. I like that they update their mesa package to the latest point release rather fast (faster than Arch).

 

[Eisen]

OpenSuse is a fine distro, or rather Tumbleweed (the only serious rolling release distro I would even consider). The documentation sucks (even worse than Fedora's) but nothing stops you from referencing the Arch wiki instead for the general stuff and the idiosyncrasies proper to the distro are easy enough to figure out. Base software selection from their official repos kind of sucks (better than official Arch at least), so you will rely on flatpaks/snaps/appimages or their OBS sometimes. Their stance on non-free codecs is problematic and the solutions are to either use Pacman (not a good option for Tumbleweed) or just use flatpaks/snaps/appimages. The graphical YAST package manager sucks (too slow) but hey, at least it's a proper graphical package manager and not an "app store" like most popular distros are using now. I like that they update their mesa package to the latest point release rather fast (faster than Arch).

What's your opnion about EndeavourOS? If you tried of course.

 

[cretin]

OpenSuse is a fine distro, or rather Tumbleweed (the only serious rolling release distro I would even consider). The documentation sucks (even worse than Fedora's) but nothing stops you from referencing the Arch wiki instead for the general stuff and the idiosyncrasies proper to the distro are easy enough to figure out. Base software selection from their official repos kind of sucks (better than official Arch at least), so you will rely on flatpaks/snaps/appimages or their OBS sometimes. Their stance on non-free codecs is problematic and the solutions are to either use Pacman (not a good option for Tumbleweed) or just use flatpaks/snaps/appimages. The graphical YAST package manager sucks (too slow) but hey, at least it's a proper graphical package manager and not an "app store" like most popular distros are using now. I like that they update their mesa package to the latest point release rather fast (faster than Arch).

What's your opnion about EndeavourOS? If you tried of course.

I run endeavoros. I think it's great. As far as I understand it's just arch but set up to be n00b friendly.

 

[Melcar]

OpenSuse is a fine distro, or rather Tumbleweed (the only serious rolling release distro I would even consider). The documentation sucks (even worse than Fedora's) but nothing stops you from referencing the Arch wiki instead for the general stuff and the idiosyncrasies proper to the distro are easy enough to figure out. Base software selection from their official repos kind of sucks (better than official Arch at least), so you will rely on flatpaks/snaps/appimages or their OBS sometimes. Their stance on non-free codecs is problematic and the solutions are to either use Pacman (not a good option for Tumbleweed) or just use flatpaks/snaps/appimages. The graphical YAST package manager sucks (too slow) but hey, at least it's a proper graphical package manager and not an "app store" like most popular distros are using now. I like that they update their mesa package to the latest point release rather fast (faster than Arch).

What's your opnion about EndeavourOS? If you tried of course.

Great option if you want to try out Arch without the autism. Comes with a fairly complete KDE install without having to muck around with Arch install scripts. The Calamares version they use is slow as fuck for some reason. Most lengthy install ever. No graphical package manager like Manjaro, but comes with an AUR helper pre-installed (easy enough to install your own graphical package manager) and several helper scripts that automate the more mundane daily tasks. It's always an Arch base (more "pure" than Manjaro), so same pitfalls apply (AUR, updates that can break your OS, etc).

 

[Cryomancer]

What do you guys think about gaming distros? Like Nobara, Garuda, etc?

 

[Daemongar]

Because my IRL luck stat is very low, so if things can go wrong, they will. My dosbox stopped working from nothing, and I lost my M&M IV: Clouds of Xeen save. A update broke the nVidia driver. Another update makes Chrome stop working. VScode, Docker, QMake, everything that I need to work also suddenly stop working. I only used it because everyone at work was using it. I like Debian because things just work and nothing breaks. If I want to deal with instability, I would be using M$ spybloatware.

Wayland doesn't work for me. I'm using X11.

I feel your pain, as I'm just as unlucky with computers, and I work in technology. The only thing I encourage is for folks to use a cloud based storage service (Dropbox, Google Drive, whatever) to store your critical info. When your system drivers stop or the system becomes unstable, start over and make improvements based on what you have learned.

• First time I setup my system, I installed linux 32bit libraries for gaming which eventually hosed the system
• Second time, an update broke my internet driver, and I couldn't get on the internet
• Third time, ok I set up the home partition as EXT2 - I was kind of messing around and thought I could just convert it to EXT4 down the road. No. I mean, eventually it reported it was EXT4, but it really didn't work out. Lots of applications won't run on EXT2.
• Fourth time, this is the version I'm on. Sometime 2 months ago an update broke my wifi. I put in another wireless adapter. Last week, for some reason, the old adapter was working again. Ok, whatever.

Just get the distro you want, set it up, cloud backup your critical data, and let loose.

 

[OSK]

I see we got some fanboyism in here as well as the regular butthurt Windows crew who would rather gargle Bill Gates' balls than admit they're too dumb to learn a new operating system. Let me try to drop some (mostly) unbiased stuff here without my normal trolling.

Q: Do games perform better on Linux over Windows?
A: In general, performance is comparable. Some games run better on Windows, and some games run better on Linux. Whenever you see the Linux vs Windows benchmarks where Linux is performing way better, know that they usually cherry-pick both the hardware and the games. In those videos, they always run on AMD hardware. The reason for that is Linux AMD GPU drivers kick the shit out of AMD's Windows drivers. For Nvidia the experience flips (though maybe not as big of a difference). Also, the games chosen are usually using the Vulkan API. Games using DirectX need to run through a compatibility layer called DXVK which can have a noticeable performance hit. A 17% performance difference in either direction likely isn't going to affect your experience a ton. While Linux definitely has less bloat and random shit running in the background to slow your games down, having to run through compatibility layers like Wine and DXVK tend to balance things out.

Q: Will my entire game library run on Linux?
A: It depends on your library, but mostly. Compatibility is so good that I honestly don't even check Linux compatibility when I'm buying games. You'll get the best experience using Steam. It's honestly pretty close to Windows due to how much Valve has invested in Linux gaming with the Steam Deck. Outside of Steam things are still pretty good, but you might have to tinker with some more obscure games. If you can handle cracks and mods for games, you can probably figure out Wine prefixes. Older Windows games actually tend to be easier to get running on Linux. In fact, some Windows users are using Linux tools like DXVK to help run older Windows games on Windows. If you run games through emulators or programs like DOSBox, ScummVM, etc. on Windows, you'll have the same experience on Linux. The games that will absolutely not work are any that are running kernel-level anti-cheats. These are mostly online multiplayer games. If you play those types of games a lot, you'll likely have a bad time. Though you should probably question if it's worth running that kernel-level shit on your machine. I should also point out modding games on Linux can be a lot more complicated and challenging to find help for if it's more involved than dropping a file in a certain location.

Q: Is Linux more secure than Windows?
A: Yes, but maybe not for the reasons you think. Linux is malleable like clay. You can make it way more secure and you can make it way less secure, but, in general, a typical desktop Linux installation is probably comparable to a Windows installation in terms of security. What makes using Linux more secure than using Windows is that it's way less of a target. If someone is trying to do something malicious to home users, they're targeting Windows because there's way more targets and there's way less diversity in the operating system making it easier to target.

Q: Is Linux hard to learn?
A: It can be. I've been using Linux for so long it's hard for me to judge how difficult it is for a new person to learn Linux today. From what I've personally witnessed, the people who have the most difficulty learning Linux are experienced Windows users. These users have decades of Windows experience. When something goes wrong on their machine, they know exactly what steps to take to diagnose and fix the issue. Almost none of that Windows knowledge is going to carry over to Linux, and that's going to be incredibly frustrating. You're basically starting over from scratch. In fact, the best way to have a bad time with Linux is to treat it like Windows. The other thing that trips people up is becoming overwhelmed with the sheer number of choices available to Linux. There are hundreds of distros that can be mixed and matched with dozens of different desktop environments, window managers, file managers, etc. On Windows it mostly comes down to whether you want to run the current version of Windows or an older one. And I suppose whatever the minor differences are between Home and Pro editions.

Q: Should I switch to Linux for gaming?
A: Exclusively for gaming? No. Gaming on Windows is objectively better than gaming on Linux. Linux has some things Windows doesn't, like being able to use FSR in any game, but nothing that compares to the simple truth that every game developer targets Windows to ensure it's the best experience it can be. As long as that continues to be the case, gaming will be better on Windows and Linux will be playing catch up. On Windows you don't need to worry about dumb shit like a 10 year old game no longer working because its developer decided now was the perfect time to enable anti-cheat (see GTA online). You also don't have to worry about Microsoft releasing a new version of DirectX that could take Linux a year+ to get working. That said, gaming on Linux is actually pretty good. If you have any reasons outside of gaming to move away from Windows, gaming shouldn't hold you back from switching to Linux. Your biggest hurdle is going to be learning an entirely new operating system.

 

[Necrensha]

What do you guys think about gaming distros? Like Nobara, Garuda, etc?

Pointless.
Imagine being so ridiculously lazy than rather than spend 30 minutes installing all of that stuff yourself, your would rather go with a niche distro that may or may not die tomorrow. It's just much more logical to go with a popular one and install the gaming stuff manually.

 

[Quatlo]

What do you guys think about gaming distros? Like Nobara, Garuda, etc?

EndeavourOS is the one I picked from these because its pretty much an Arch with some preinstalled stuff, everything you can do in Arch you can do here. I've taken a shortcut because last year I tried using Arch for gaming and it was... okay but sometimes stuff randomly broke. So I just picked up something that is quick to install to check it out, and I stayed with it. I guess Endeavour has nothing to do with it, just overall improvement in Linux gaming happened.

But in the end, they are pointless. Any distro that can run Lutris is all you need for complete package of gaming on Linux. emulators, dosbox, everything.
Also, I like the GUI in Endeavour

 

[Cryomancer]

Gaming on Windows is objectively better than gaming on Linux.

Your post was good in every aspect. Only a nitpick about this.

Sure, gaming in M$ spybloatware is better for modern games, but some old games, for example, Fallout New Vegas. Jade Empire and M&M VII (CD, not GoG), I can't run in M$ spybloatware no matter what. In Linux is click and play. However, with modern games, is not also every game that can run flawlessly. Some games can be "gold" for other people and require tinkering for you. For example, Lords of the Fallen (2023). Is considered "gold" in protondb. But for me, in order to run it in my Linux, I need the Proton 8 version and use the command below:

 VKD3D_SHADER_MODEL=6_6 gamemoderun %command% -noh

About the AMD driver is that the driver is open source. Hence, people from all over the world optimize it. Nothing else to complement; your post is an amazing FAQ.

Pointless.
Imagine being so ridiculously lazy than rather than spend 30 minutes installing all of that stuff yourself,

Yep. But Nobara, for example, was made by Glorious Eggroll, a very famous Redhat developer, and comes with a lot of optimizations and modifications in the kernel to make it better for gaming. https://nobaraproject.org/ He made so his father that is much less "tech savy" could use Fedora and game in Linux.



_____

For the M$ spybloatware users that are curious about Linux. I don't recommend a full switch. Do you have a very old computer collecting dust? Install a easy to use Linux distro there only to see how things are. Wanna test in your main machine? Dual boot it. So you don't need to fully commit to Linux.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I went cold-turkey Linux in 2020, though I admittedly haven't taken the time to become a power user. I can run just about any game I want without much fuss, but there are exceptions. Chaos Reborn and Solasta have fatal graphical errors that I can't seem to resolve. Modding gets complicated. I'm also recently frustrated by my inability to run the NWN EE Aurora Toolset. Terminal isn't the hardest part about Linux. I find myself stymied most by not knowing my way around the file system.

 

[Cryomancer]

Yep. Modding in Linux is a problem for gaming in Linux. About file system, is not complicated. To show "hidden" files, in Dolphin(KDE), press CTRL + H.

• / (Root): This is like the entrance to the library, the top level where everything starts. It’s the main directory.
• /home: This is like your personal locker or bookshelf in the library. Each user has their own folder inside, like /home/username, where they store their stuff (files and documents).
• /bin: This is the shelf where all the essential books (programs) are kept that help the computer work.
• /etc: Think of this as the section where all the rulebooks and instructions (system settings) are kept. These are configuration files that tell the computer how to behave.
• /var: Like the library’s bulletin board where notices change often. This directory holds temporary files like logs and data that the system constantly updates.
• /dev: This is the storage room where equipment like printers and drives are kept. It holds files that represent the computer’s hardware.
• /lib: The section where reference materials (libraries) are stored. Programs need these to run.

In case of your steam games, check :

~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/

To see your games in steam. To find the wine virtual drive :

~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/<game_id>/pfx/drive_c/

For example, if you want to mod Skyrim :

~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/489830/pfx/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim Special Edition/

To "mod" Solasta, just change the 489830 for 1096530(Solasta ID). The video bellow has instructions to run Nexus Mod Manager in Linux :



Some games will need special configuration from you. For example, to run Dark Souls III with Convergence mod, as it changes some DLLs, I need to run it with the parameters bellow, otherwise the wine wouldn't load the modded DLCs and the mod wouldn't load.

WINEDLLOVERRIDES="dinput8.dll=n,b" %command%

EDIT : Linux has case sensitivity. So some times, you will have problems with replacing files of the game while modding. I had problems running Project 1999 and had trouble finding everything needed to change the name. But now, there is a lutris script that does everything for you.