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?
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’ve run out of devices to put Linux on, so maybe I’ll create some VMs today
let’s pump those numbers up on steam hardware survey. although they might not count VMs
I’m doing my part, switched last week to Linux. A few growing pains getting everything working, but it beats the nightmare that was keeping Win11 stable.
get ventoy, start trying
Unrelated but the ventoy usb I keep on me really helped me today after a ram stick decided to die and corrupt my system along with it
Add a HIREN boot USB to your toolkit too.
Edit: shit, just add the iso to ventoy, 🙄😂
CachyOS for gaming PCs, Debian for browsing laptops
Cachy is great
I have Linux on my personal computer and Windows on my work laptop. Best of both worlds. Linux is currently a very nice 0 stress experience for gaming/casual stuff. With Proton, gaming on Linux is nearly as viable as on Windows.
Yeah, as soon as you come to the conclusion that it’s worth not playing league, battlefield, apex legends etc it’s a no brainer now
Everyone should try it once.
wait, MS cares about their product? then why is it so… gestures vaguely at the OS
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
Whats really fun about this is Valve started investing in Linux because a bunch of changes Microsoft made to windows 8 signaled they were moving to a locked-down ecosystem to bully corporations like Valve out of the market.
The current state of Windows is a product of MS’s blind greed but the current state of the viable alternatives is, in some ways, also a product of MS’s greed.
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.
Valve also needed to break its dependency on Windows, in case MS decides to go down the walled garden route like Apple. MS making the windows store the only supported way to install apps and games would be devastating for Valve.
Besides the data collection angle, Microsoft wants gamers on Windows instead of Linux so that there’s at least a chance they’ll buy games from the Microsoft Store.
Gaming aside, it’s incredible how bad Windows Explorer performs compared to e.g. Dolphin. It’s performance got even worse with Windows 11, but at least it finally has tabs now
Is that Dolphin on Linux or Windows?
They are talking about the file explorer Dolphin, which is available on Linux and Windows.
But it is a core app for the KDE desktop environment, so it is primarily optimized for Linux.
I haven’t actually tried Dolphin on Windows, not sure how usable it is
It’s from KDE so usually Linux
Edit: …realising there’s also Dolphin Emulator and now I’m also confused lol but still feel they’re talking about KDE file manager vs Win Explorer
I was also talking about KDE dolphin.
https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows
See also
Windows Update will also be improved, with the goal of making Windows 11 reliable enough so that a restart is only necessary once a month.
This isn’t just a matter of Windows 11 reliability, it’ll take big improvements in Microsoft’s quality control to stop needing to follow the monthly updates with emergency patches and hotfixes.
Right now they are:
it’s patch Tuesday!!!1!1!!! We MUST release immediately an update or the users will revolt!!
But Sir, preliminary testing says that it has a 80% bricking chance with full data loss, can we postpone it?
PUSH. IT. NOW. Force the install and make sure to reboot all the computers during the working hours, bonus if you force close all the opened apps without saving
They arent going to improve the quality they’ve just added the ability to do the patches via hotpatch and not require a restart. Still gonna be same quality of slop
“With things like instant file search!” Omg I can’t, what a joke of an OS.
The company views a third party app called File Pilot as benchmark for these [file search] improvements
That app is still in beta and was launched one year ago.
They’re comparing the search from the native shell (where they could directly query the NTFS table like Everything does and get instant results), native to their OS with 40 years of experience with some unknown newcomer still in beta???
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
So we can also say indirectly that Steam Deck wouldn’t have happened without the horniness of Yoko Taro who created that android ass in the first place.
What a chain of causality that is
This is how art changes the world for the better
If anything has been a driver of human ingenuity, it’s the horny
I need the lore
Single wizard made DirectX 11 translation to Vulkan because he wanted to enjoy his waifu. Then he made it to the point of Witcher 3 running.
There was a problem tho - some models were broken because Vulkan didn’t have some DirectX features. Then valve got involved and submitted proposal to Kronos for necessary Vulkan extension. Driver guys from MESA implemented it really quickly and suddenly almost all the DirectX 11 games became playable. Nvidia also added support.
It’s an insane story of one guy with Anime waifu in avatar turning the tides of history. AFAIK he now works full time for Valve.
🗿
the power of open source
Open source and st. Gabe willing to embrace it. Valve made tremendous effort in order to push it to the mainstream
Do you judge him?
yes. I judge it as pretty neat
Wait what lol
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
Getting it to work is one thing, getting past anticheat bullshit to play MP is different. Luckily I’m really only into single player at the moment, which all work flawlessly on my bazzite.
There are good MP games that works on Linux, but if one really cares about a specific title (and I totally get it, we want to enjoy stuff with our friends and all) dual boot I feel is a good compromise. Sure it is annoying to reboot every time you want to play some X game but nothing is perfect and you can keep your windows install pretty minimal.
Fair enough. I hate the way windows has gone, so I’m perfectly fine with any flavor of Linux.
Planet crafter, steer clear of that game. That’s some addictive shit, I 100%'ed that game before I even knew what I was doing. Really hit the subnautica style base building, alongside a progression system that frankly didn’t take the piss with my time
Yeah, it’s good. Sort of like a survival cookie clicker.
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 feel like half the games I play with native Linux ports actually perform worse compared to using proton and are buggier
most of them are like that
That’s a consequence of the native ports not being maintained by most studios, especially post-proton.
That might change in the future though.
Oof. They are about to inject a bunch of vibe code into the only part that functions well.
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.
I always wonder whether that’s because it’s doing less… like some graphics feature that isn’t supported might just no-op in Wine.
Nah. I mean, there might be some stuff like that, but nowadays, I’d be surprised if feature parity wasn’t 1:1 (or even better, with some open source drivers having features that are removed from official windows drivers…).
The underlying OS is pure garbage, that’s mostly it. Windows will start chugging everywhere with even moderate FS activity: running a background, single-threaded backup process will sometimes make it impossible to click in another window or open a new application. Driver API is not great, you have to jump through hoops to do basic stuff. There are many ways to do the exact same thing, each being more or less efficient than the other. Audio API is so bad, an audio device failing will sometime cause ohter, unrelated, non-audio application to spontaneously combust.
And so on and so on.
On the other hand, the Linux compatibility layer that proton provides do add some overhead in places, but surprisingly, it’s not that much overhead. And it’s not that common (basically, the code runs natively until specific instructions that requires special handling).
Obviously, when you have a better operating base, and very little extra overhead, software tends to run smoother.
And all that is not taking into account optimisation to Linux system themselves; there’s been a lot of improvement in technical stuff for graphic drivers (especially on AMD side, but not exclusively), the kernel itself can get improvement in its handling of IO and memory, the whole thing is more flexible, etc.
It’s because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.
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.
It’s usually because of all the other bloat running on Windows. Just various background processes on Windows will eat up like 10G of RAM just idling, where most desktop Linux distros I’ve used will use 2-5G idling. Having a few extra gigs of RAM available can make a noticeable difference.
I feel like system calls in the Linux kernel are just more efficient/faster than system calls in Windows. Windows system calls have decades worth of compatibility layers all cobbled together for business reasons, whereas I don’t think the Linux kernel suffers from that same problem.
And that’s not even mentioning the multiple layers of absolute voodoo black magic wizardry that is Vulkan (
Linuxgraphics API) and DXVK (a translation later that translates DirectX calls to Vulkan calls). Those are some absolutely incredible pieces of software, and deserve a ton of the credit as well.I don’t really think Linux is faster because it just injects noops sometimes though lol. You’d definitely be able to notice if part of the graphics pipeline was just… skipping enough steps to make a noticeable performance difference lol
Edit: correction
Just one small correction for that - Vulkan is universal, not tied to any platform.
Ah right, thanks for the correction!
Unless there’s a bottleneck it’s usually Vulkan vs dx.
Yeah, when you’re not trying to support random crap compiled for winxp you can leave out a lot of cruft
Well the funny bit is winxp games and software run through wine quite well lol
Yeah, that’s a separate piece of software though.
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.
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.
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.
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.See, my Windows partition starts instantly. TBH its faster than linux, which takes an extra second to initialize SDDM, and then network connectivity.
…Perhaps because its so neutered. It’s not really a fair comparison, as Windows is a narrow-focus OS for me, a tool for running things, to the point I don’t trust it for anything security sensitive.
Nvidea might be making a big difference there, I’m on AMD and didn’t lose any frames, even in AAA games, when I switched from Windows 10 to Bazzite 42. Haven’t gained any either, but there’s a lot less stutter in menus and faster loading times that still make it feel smoother anyway.
-
Nah they’ll just do anti-competive shit to make Steam worse.
They’ll copy Steam’s source code, patent it, and then sue Steam for infringement.
And that’s perfectly fine and legal because patents are ‘first to file’
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’m not sure if this is a joke, but patents are very much (supposed to be) required to be innovative, as in if there’s any “prior art” (i.e. anything evidence of it already existing either in another patent or just publicly) then you can’t patent it
I’m sure lots of things are “supposed to be” a certain way, but in true American fashion, most of these kinds of laws aren’t enforced until the parties end up in court.
You know, the courts that are famously impartial and who never rule along ideological or party lines, are never swayed by whoever has the “better” lawyers, and are never biased against minoities. Oh, and litigation is super cheap too, and so frivolous lawsuits definitely can’t be used as financial weapons.
How do you imagine they patent a fork of Linux?
They already tried patent trolling for over a decade before they gave up… (Look up “Microsoft Novell-Suse patent trolling”)
I wouldn’t put it past them to try…
As I said, they tried it at the height of their power and failed. I find it far more likely that winblows becomes a Linux distro. It fits their EEE motto a lot better.
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.
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?
not linux, the steam client
And what’s that going to accomplish? The steam client isn’t magically improving performance, their kernel patches are.
I am using Linux for 30 years at this point and it blows my mind that I can play AAA Windows games on Linux now
I’ve been fooling with Linux for nearly as long. I ain’t no gamer beyond the intense game of KPatience, but I’m amazed at just how far and versatile Linux has become. From servers to gaming to real-time kernels that can power industrial machinery. It’s got something for everyone.
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
THANK YOU!!!
