this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Steam Deck
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I'm no fanboy but Windows just sucks for anything portable. At first I was exited to see how manufacturers would pivot to adopt linux for their portables. Now it's just watching flop after flop.
Same. 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.
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.
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.
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?
Ubuntu is THE distro that fucks it all up regularly. Most other distros have little to no bloatware.
The bloatware is not the point!! I am talking about the kernel!
The kernel is one of the main issues. Nobody can touch that hot mess other than Microsoft, and they do a crappy job at that. And you're the one that brought up the bloatware, and said it can be fully disabled (which isn't true). As for government use, read a bit and see how many governments are moving away from Windows, and many more that already have. Dude, nobody cares if you want to use Windows, have at it, but there's no need for you to try to push that crap on some of us that have already been there and now know better. Enjoy Cortana, or copilot or whatever they are calling that dumb shit these days.
I'm not a windows user, I would be considered more of a power user, because I use it professionally and at home, both handling servers and software development. Don't get me wrong I hate windows user interface more then anything. But I'm not in denial, windows kernel is a very good kernel for gaming, it has a lot of features that doesn't exist yet. Where do you think the kernel devs for linux take their inspiration from, my god they are adding stuff like windows NT thread primitives to the linux kernel.
First of all, you're just making up stuff, you have no idea what the code base of the Microsoft kernel looks like. Second, who do you think develops the linux kernel, a lot of them are Microsoft engineers, most linux kernel devs nowadays are hired by big tech companies, because they all have a stake in linux, it's one of the main reasons why linux is evolving so rapidly.
Third looking from the outside the Microsoft kernel is pretty amazing for what it does, backwards compatible, you can still run windows 98 software on windows 11, it's fast and efficient, you have yet to prove that it's slower than linux.
Bro no large or medium sized government entities are using anything else, even if they do, it's for a little while and then they go back. You know why? Microsoft office, exchange, outlook, there is no other good alternative, good lucking telling their employees that they are going to learn libre office and linux. They can't even handle windows properly.
Most if them have already spent years building their infrastructure around windows and Microsoft office suite, and they are not changing anytime soon.
Fine, you aeain. Enjoy. 🙄
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.
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.
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.
Show me the benchmarks, stop changing topic.
You can start by looking at your downvotes, and I didn't downvote even one of your comments.
Then, there's plenty out there, but I will humor you with 1 to get you started:
https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/linux-vs-windows/
Now, if you like Windows, that's fine, nobody really cares, but that doesn't make Windows good in any way, shape or form.
You send some shit article, like wtf is that all you have?
Yes I have a hard time finding benchmarks where the game runs faster on linux, are you going to find some blog post again?
You just got one and called it shit.
Don't downvote his comments. Way I see it, he's passionate about Microsoft. That's cool. I mean, wrong, but it's cool he defends his position.
No amount of links or data are going to change his mind.
He even brought out the card of "I know the windows kernel and you don't". That's where you know he's going to keep bringing stuff out of nowhere to try to push his mind and make it valid.
I do not know any kernel, but as a user, that has been on and off windows and Linux for over 20 years, at pretty much all use cases, I can confidently say that Windows is a solid shit show that knows how to market itself and grab their industry by the balls. Nothing else.
Where talking about gaming on the os, not the os itself.
https://www.gamingpcbuilder.com/windows-11-vs-linux-gaming-benchmarks/
Here, enjoy.
Look at my other comment, and stop saying that I like windows I don't. But i live in reality unlike you
We live in very different realities, buddy.
We live in very different realities, buddy.
What did I get, random blog with the most basic Comparison? The title of the blog is which OS is the best, yeah I expect a lot of high level Quality from an article like that.
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:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/07/17/these-windows-10-vs-pop-os-benchmarks-reveal-a-surprising-truth-about-linux-gaming-performance/?sh=6035a5e65e74
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): https://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:
https://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.
Edit: as an amusing side-side note, I'm old enough that a number of my favorite games from when I was growing up are no longer able to run on Windows because they require a 16bit OS (or a 32bit OS with 16bit compatibility). Despite that, my grandfather's Hoyle card game that's older than I am, still somehow runs flawlessly on Windows 10. What the fuck?
I don't know how to tell you, but these benchmarks doesn't say anything if there's not any technical discussion. Sometimes yes games run better on linux, and the reasons are not that linux is faster. It has to do with mainly two reasons, dx10 or dx11 might cause bottleneck that is resolved by the translation layer in vk3d, for games that have that issue. Second all the features of dx is not supported, you might think that the game looks ok in linux while it looks and feels different on windows. You might have shadows or lightning that is rendered differently, you put your graphics settings on ultra and on windows that might include hdr and linux it doesn't exist. So of course the games run faster if it doesn't have to do the same work. The game literally runs through a translation layer, it's not fucking magic.
You think a youtube video or some fucking idiot at Forbes is going to convince me.
This is a benchmark that you can trust. https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia2022-windows11-linux
https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon2022-windows-linux
I read they pivoted berceuse of community complaint
That should tell you all you need to know about who their community is 🤣
They're all scared to piss off Microsoft by bringing out a Linux device.
I'm following Bazzite's development closely because I feel like that'll be the saving grace for all the gaming handhelds that are windows-only at the moment. If Bazzite matches or supplants SteamOS then I might consider a device like an ROG Ally.
I would definitely consider Bazzite as a good upgrade for those devices, but until Asus fixes their warranty issue, hardware issues, and adds track pads, I'm not really interested in their hardware.
I really appreciate knowing that valve will fix any issues that come up.
I used bazzite on my ROG Ally for a couple of days before I went back to windows because it didn’t reliably work. Crashes abound and some games that work fine on my Steam Deck just refused to open.
Hopefully one day it gets ironed out.
How long ago did you try this?
I've been keeping up with Bazzite and Chimera, and it looks like they've made some progress.
The ROG Ally is listed at gold level compatibility, denoting it requires a few workarounds and has some caveats. I would not be able to get over having no control over the LEDs, so I'll keep an eye out for a bit later as well.
Like less than a month ago.
Yeah I tried it last night just to fuck around and so much stuff doesn't work properly.
When you flip into desktop mode it just immediately crashes.
I just tried installing Bazzite on a desktop, and its installer is a hot mess. The most I could get out of it was an error screen at the end, and an unbootable OS. Grub's config file was just an error message. I couldn't make heads or tails of how its ostree mess was ever supposed to boot, so I moved on to Debian.
I run Bazzite on my laptop, and have no complains other than getting confused sometimes on the terminal, but that's on me for forgetting it's not Fedora per se. The installer, while a bit slower than Fedora (and only by a couple of minutes, if that) worked as intended for me.