Comment on Valve has little to worry about as new Steam Deck rival arrives
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 4 months agoSame. I just can’t imagine using anything other than Linux for this kinda handheld. Like, I’m mainly a Windows user and I can’t imagine trying to use windows on my steam deck. When you want to make a gaming-focueed handheld like this, you want as much performance as you can squeeze out of the hardware. You’re not doing that with windows.
Meansalladknifehands@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I understand what you’re saying, but that doesn’t have to be true. Many of the games are made to be run on windows, windows is still a effecient os, it’s just a lot of bloat, which can be disabled. Also a lot of optimizations in nt has been done for gaming, features which are missing in the linux kernel, but there are RFCs to add nt like synchronization primitives, in the linux kernel.
Opafi@feddit.de 4 months ago
I like that contradiction.
Pretty sure it can’t, especially not “officially” by the device manufacturer and certainly not in a way that keeps those debloat settings in place over the next few large updates.
Meansalladknifehands@lemm.ee 4 months ago
How is it a contradiction, theres bloat software installed on windows, which can be disabled? Ubuntu to me is also bloated but that doesn’t mean that the OS is slow.
Yes they can be disabled, do you think governmental entities would run windows without being able to disable a lot of the features?
jjlinux@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Ubuntu is THE distro that fucks it all up regularly. Most other distros have little to no bloatware.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 4 months ago
A) as someone else pointed out, “bloat” and “efficient” are exclusive to one another. Now, you can argue that windows is efficient in some areas and bloated in others, but “bloat” and “efficiency” are mutually exclusive when applied generally.
B) yes, most, if not all of it, can be disabled through registry edits and 3rd party hacks. However, in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the more unstable it gets. Then, it will all come back eventually via updates, which means you get to disable it all again. Finally, again in my experience, the more you try to debloat windows, the less stable it gets, and this carries over even when the OS reinstalls/reenables bloat you tried to get rid of. Seriously, my experience is that even after windows updates rebloat everything, the OS remains unstable, and becomes even more unstable after you debloat again. Granted this was with windows 10, but I imagine the same is more or less true for windows 11.
C) and yet, iirc, recent Linux vs Windows 11 benchmarks show Windows games running on Linux via Proton/Proton-GE anywhere from slightly slower to slightly faster than Windows, despite requiring translation layers to run; while the Linux-native games typically run faster than their Windows counterparts.
Windows is just that bloated.
Meansalladknifehands@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Bloat is in the form av pre installed software and services that can be turned of, Windows is not slow or resource hungry.
You’re the one contradicting yourself when you’re saying that linux requires a Translation layer. And the translations are not always 1:1. Please show me the benchmarks.
jjlinux@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Windows IS resource hungry. No matter what hardware you run your OS on, any Linux Distro will leave Windows in the dust when managing resources, guaranteed.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 4 months ago
How is this a contradiction? It seems like it’d be the opposite. Translation layers reduce performance as they translate programs from one system to another, so the fact that Linux can run games in a translation layer and still get as good, or better, performance than Windows means that Linux is fast enough to make up for the translation layer performance penalty.
Regardless, here are some benchmarks.
From 2019, Windows 10 vs Pop_OS:
forbes.com/…/these-windows-10-vs-pop-os-benchmark…
While these are all in 1080p, several are also running in translation layers. The ones that are running native were faster in Linux, while the ones running in proton achieved roughly the same performance. This was also 4~5 yrs ago, and proton has improved a lot. Additionally, these were run on an Nvidia card using their proprietary drivers, and Linux is known to be AMD-biased.
So here’s another one from a couple years ago with Windows 11 vs Manjaro (benchmark totals for 4k, 1440p and 1080p at the end): m.youtube.com/watch?v=xwmNLqJL7Zo
While they found that games tended to perform better on windows in 4k, they also found that games in 1440p were roughly the same while 1080p averaged faster on Linux despite running in a mix of proton, Proton-GE, and wine. This is also a couple years old though, and while the average might be better on Linux, there were some pretty significant performance gaps at the top and bottom of the chart.
Here’s a third one from about 6 months ago. This was pretty highly circulated on Lemmy, so I’m surprised you didn’t see it, but here it is:
discuss.tchncs.de/post/5340976
They claim to have seen an average 17% improvement on the games they benchmarked, and included a video of the benchmarks. There was a later benchmark where they claimed they got +20% performance using a tweaked version of Garuda Linux, but that required user tweaks and I’m mainly concerned with “un-tweaked” performance.
Linux isn’t perfect, and if you want to play games with no hassle, then Windows is probably still your best bet. However, in situations where you’re trying to squeeze as much performance as you can out of an underpowered device, Linux just seems obvious. You have standardized hardware that allows you to spend the time and effort to iron out bugs and deficiencies with fewer edge cases than you’d get with non-standardized hardware. I think that’s why Steam(Deck) OS is so good. It runs on standardized hardware and so it’s easy for Valve to configure and optimize for user-friendliness because they don’t have to worry about ten billion different hardware configurations.
Also, as a side note, I’ve found that older games just run better on Linux. They ironically tend to be way less of a hassle to get working. It’s because Wine (and I think Proton/Proton-GE) have compatibility for 16bit programs, while windows doesn’t. You have to run a virtual machine with Windows XP or earlier to run 16bit programs, and I’ve found that to be a mess.
Seriously, I cannot get a Windows 98 virtual machine set up on Windows 10 to save my life. It just won’t properly install on software like VMWare, and I’ve had to resort to actual PC emulators to get 16bit games to run on a modern windows PC (which are slow as fuck). I’ve read it has something to do with AMD CPUs? I don’t know what the specific issue is though, just that it supposedly works just fine on Intel but not AMD. However, I haven’t encountered that mess on Linux.