Submitted 2 weeks ago by Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz to steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
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Source is this video:
Windows Was The Problem All Along - Dave2D
We could obviously compare performance between windows and steamOS before on the steam deck, or between windows and Bazzite on other handhelds. But this is the first time we have had official windows and SteamOS builds for the same hardware.
A performance uplift plus double or tripled battery life compared to running on Windows…hot damn that’s impressive.
Get rekt Windows.
What’s nice is that Microsoft doesn’t have a capability to improve in the short or even medium term. They could drop a billion dollars into it and it would still take them years to improve their offering, if they can at all.
And why would they? They’re printing so much money, this niche probably doesn’t make a dent.
It doesn’t matter if Windows is the best system for gaming. It just matters if people believe it is.
You can always justify using Windows. “How do I get Game Pass to work on my handheld?” is probably something people care about.
Granted this is an expensive way to lock customers into your platform, but they’re already doing it anyways, so no need to pour money into the OS experience when you can just sell services building on customer data.
Because they aren’t just optimizing for gaming.
Any change they make would influence their other markets as well, like general and office use.
It’s worse than that. MS could quickly turn the boat around. They have the cash. They have the manpower (well, have recently fired). The only thing they don’t have is THE ABILITY TO THINK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT AI AI AI AI GOTTA HAVE AI AIIIIIIII. The brainrot has eaten Nadella, and eaten the whole board.
I’d wager they could cut a lot of cruft from a handheld gaming device specific version of Windows.
I bet Antimalware Service Executable is still randomly springing it’s way to the top of task manager in this build. All sorts of crap that just doesn’t need to be running. On my PC right now I can see Service Host: DNS Client at 1-4% all the fucking time. Random driver update checks that run in fucking Electron for some godforsaken reason. That kind of shit.
I disagree. Take Windows, remove the bloat, slap a game-focused GUI on it, call it XBOX and Bob’s your uncle.
Windows Gamers (who will never switch to Linux): Linux still isn’t ready for mass adoption
Windows Gamers (who will never switch to Linux)
So you accept that Linux is not the problem. We are litterally at the point where it will get mass Adoption in the next few years. That is what this post is about. That you can litterally go out and buy a fully complete gaming system preinstalled with Linux that performs better than the same system with Windows.
We are very close to the point where the only thing holding Linux gaming back is marketing.
Marketing and market availability are the biggest problems. People need to be able to go into any store, buy a handheld/laptop/desktop and have it include Linux without them asking.
My partner and I have been transitioning to Linux over the past month or so, dual booting for now.
Linux still isn’t ready for mass adoption.
If you don’t mind me asking: What problems did you run into? And what distro were you using?
Even gamers do more than just game though.
That’s fair, but unless what you do requires windows in some way (like, say, Photoshop), Linux tends to be better for productivity as well, if you learn it
But of course, I understand that it takes some upfront work and learning to change your workflow, so I don’t blame people for not doing it
Most people dont use Windows because its compatible with more software, they use it because thats what their computer came with. If computers just starting shipping Linux then software will come.
Most people just need a web browser for most of their needs, unless you have a need for a specific software that’s Windows only and doesn’t have a good Linux alternative,
I personally like using my Legion Go for LLM training /s
It’s gotten so seamless now, and wine has gotten pretty good. I can download a Windows executable, double click it, go through the regular Windows installer, and then have it make a shortcut on my desktop which will launch it.
Your average user won’t even know all the Dark Magics making it possible, or that they were supposed to have looked around for a Linux alternative, it just works
I’m still waiting for games with big anticheats to run on Linux. Until I can play Fortnite with my nephew on Linux I won’t swap over.
Unfortunately the Epic CEO is explicitly blocking Linux. Fortnite runs, but he doesn’t like Linux.
Battery Life:
Battery life
Battery life doubled in some games? Now that is even more impressive than 10-20% performance gain.
I also find it interesting that the Steam Deck OLED has a smaller battery but gets longer life on the same OS
Valve doubling down on Linux as the default OS on the Steam Deck was such a great decision. It obviously has given them a massive competitive edge. Windows has become so horribly bloated, and Microsoft has almost zero interest in making it run more efficiently.
What it gave them - primarily - was the ability to be independent of Microsoft, not beholden to them in any way whatsoever, and not having to pay them any license fees.
The fact that after putting so much work into making Proton and that whole toolchain amazing it’s actually faster than Windows is just the icing on the cake, from a commercial perspective.
Goes to show how much bloat is in Windows that it kills hardware like this.
Maybe I need Cortana, Microsoft Excel, and OneDrive while I play Doom Eternal. You don’t know me.
Me looking up from my speed-running Excel sheets: “what”
Thibking bout that time a discord admin told me windows and linux use the same amount of resourced and she knows cause she works in it.
Well yeah duh windows and Linux use the same resources. I don’t put more memory in my computer when I boot into Linux…
So I’m not insane. Monster Hunter Wilds and Helldiver’s II both run better on my Ubuntu image with the same hardware than my Windows 10 image.
Does that mean that Proton and Vulkan are far more efficient than Direct3D?
I think there’s in play also background activity from Windows’ bloat.
Probably this. Especially on low end hardware that doesn’t really have a lot of background resources to give.
Just open task manager and see all the shit windows thinks is essential to run all the time. Scanning the drive for viruses, downloading updates for shit you’ve never even looked at…
They say I/O schedulers on Windows are weird.
You’d think anyone techliterate would disable the bloat.
My understanding is that vulkan is generally more efficient than directX.
Holy shit triple the hours
Finally an extra 3 1/2 hours of… dead cells? 3 more hours of… FPS? the hell is this graph?
max fps is mentioned to show that the GPU is running at maximum Performance
They said make electric cars fast, and you’ll get car guys to buy in. It was true.
Now they’re making linux make video games faster and prettier…
I dont know if there will ever be a year of the linux desktop, but this is the kind of stuff you gotta do to get there.
I dont know if there will ever be a year of the linux desktop
There won’t be. It won’t happen that quickly. If anything there will be a “decade of the Linux computer”.
Which I feel like were are at the beginning of, steam and proton are catalyzing the decade of linux right now.
Hmm, it’s like having spyware constantly run in the background slows down the computer?
Back in ~2010, my first dual boot was an Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to run WoW from Linux and it gave me a solid >15fps while Windows ran at less than 10fps.
I was very young at the time but still aware that this was super impressive with extra compatibility layers. That definitely took part in selling Linux to me.
I could barely get Minecraft to run 20fps on this old laptop I had given to me a few years ago. Loaded Ubuntu on it and Minecraft ran near 60fps. Blew my mind.
Pull the DE out and you could probably squeeze that performance out on a modded instance
makes a lot of sense honestly. I never knew the numbers behind it (tks for sharing). when I was ripping witcher 3 on nobara and then changed my OS back to Windows due to work related issues, I felt a SIGNIFICANT performance drop. the game became laggy, when it used to run top on Linux with the same settings. good share - the time for Linux gaming is now.
Linux Dev’s anti Sony bias shows front and center
/s
Sorry, what’s this got to do with Sony?
The only game in the main post photo where Windows beats Linux is Spiderman 2, published by Playstation Publishing, owned by Sony.
Valve won. Maybe it’s lucky timing, or maybe Gabe is actually a genius, but it’s only going to get worse for Windows as there is no way in hell Microsoft shifts resources from AI projects to make Windows better for PC gaming. Recently, Capcom announced that their PC gaming sales surpassed their console sales, and I don’t think it’s likely we’ll see that trend changing, and it’s also likely other publishers will make similar announcements soon (although idk if they count SteamOS as a console). The Switch 2 is coming out soon, but people already say it’s too expensive, and there are controversies surrounding some of their product decisions.
Will this bring about the era of the Linux desktop? Idk, but the era of the Linux gaming PC is inevitable now.
Will Steam do for the gaming PC what porn did for the internet?
I’d love to know what windows figures would be like with a stripped down guys ripped out windows, such as revi.cc.
pls dont suggest this blatantly obvious russian/us/chinese surveillance tool jesus chriat pls dont tell me people actually use this… if youre worried about security use a hardened linux distro this is just crazy
I am a little curious how something like Ubuntu would do on one of these gaming handhelds. Steam OS is a nicer user experience but I always wonder if it also adds any significant optimization.
I think you’re a bit better off with SteamOS’s gamescope rather than going through gnome-shell.
What do you mean? It’s just steamos is arch linux with a fancy suit.
iirc the original SteamOS for the SteamBox was Debian-based (like Ubuntu), i think they switched it to Arch since it moves a bit faster and offers a bit better compatibility.
Spiderman no
That’s interesting. But the second graph is designed to confuse.
Why is it confusing? Maybe I’m confused, not sure.
The speed of Linux is unmatched!
Now what about windows 10 ltsc iot, the ONLY version of windows worth comparing to linux.
IMHO you shouldn’t have to run a stripped down Windows to get good results. It should just work that way out of the box. LTSC is not supposed to be a consumer OS.
I’d still take this with a grain of salt. Not many games tested, and the SteamOS build might’ve been tweaked and worked on more to be more optimized.
So a specialized OS wins over a general OS in their specific tasks?
Say it aint so…
Can it play MH Wilds?
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
literally the next line
I really hate the dismissal of the heavy lifting proton does. Proton is what makes gaming on Linux so great. So many native linux games perform worse on Linux vs their windows counterparts. Then again, I’d expect nothing less from Dave2D
Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
I mean, yeah, but if Proton is doing an absolutely flawless job, then it has 0 performance penalty compared to Windows. All the actual gains still do come from Linux having less overhead. So, both are true, that Proton is killing it and that the gains come from Linux.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
DXVK (which also runs on windows) alone gives you a huge performance benefit. Playing world of warcraft on windows I’ll see about a 30% reduction in CPU usage and higher performance.
Proton doesn’t just get you to almost matching Windows’ performance. Proton easily outperforms windows even on higher end hardware where windows bloat isn’t a concern.
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.
I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Agreed. Proton is important as a bit of an “iPhone moment” where all this tech comes together in a way where non-techies “get it” in the sense where they understand why it’s useful, even if they’ll never bother to learn the details of why or how.
frazorth@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Why? Valve has been sponsoring all these projects for a really long time. While wine existed before that, it wouldn’t be anywhere near the shape thats its currently in because gaming was not its main focus. There have been loads of gaming bugs and sharp edges that have been around wine for a long time until Valve put in the money and devs to fix them.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
What does proton do?
I only vaguely understand it as “thing that makes game playable on other thing.”
(And also I have six versions installed on my steam deck why do I need six of these?)
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Proton is the compatibility layer that valve makes that lets you run games on Linux. Proton uses DXVK a program that converts Direct X API calls (windows only) to Vulkan API calls (runs on anything). DXVK alone gives you huge performance benefits (especially on older DirectX 11 and older games) and you can run it on windows.
Proton gives you a ton of other tools that can make huge performance differences.
BluescreenOfDeath@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Most simply put, it’s a layer that allows a computer program expecting windows to run on Linux. It isn’t emulating anything, just sorta like translating.
Think of it like a language. Windows speaks English, so a program expects to talk in English. But let’s pretend like Linux talks Spanish. Proton translates the English commands to Spanish for Linux to understand and execute, and then Proton converts the responses back to English for the program.
tormeh@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I think it’s what Valve has branded their fork of Wine. It translates win32 calls to Linux ones, and DirectX to Vulkan. Probably some other stuff too idk
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
What part of this did you interpret as a dismissal?
tormeh@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I also wonder how much of it is RADV vs AMDGPU drivers. Wonder what the result would have been if the Deck used the AMDGPU drivers instead. Saying it is just “the magic of Linux” papers over a lot.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I think it doesn’t really matter, in the end the question is, do I get a better experience as a consumer on Linux or Windows?
lorty@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
For every game that you claim runs worse on Proton you can find dozens that run better or at least as well as Windows.
Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Proton is incredible obviously, but by itself it doesn’t make games run better. Using vulkan instead of DirectX could improve performance, but presumably most of the performance gain is from not running windows in the background.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
It’s a bit of both, along with the Linux AMD drivers being superior in many cases to the Windows drivers.