1. Steam on Linux via Proton + Wayland (Niri)

2. Steam on Linux via Proton + X11 (Xfce)

3. Steam on Windows

4. Games on Linux launched via other means (it's possible I was missing out on certain flags/optimizations, but this is just about the average experience)

The biggest thing I noticed when switching to Linux was an improvement in framerate consistency, i.e. I'd have fewer situations where the framerate would drop momentarily. Games felt more solid and predictable.

The biggest thing I noticed when switching from X11/Xfce to Wayland/Niri was just an overall increase in framerate. I'd failed this jump many times over the years, so it was notable when I jumped and stayed there earlier this year.

It does feel like games take longer to launch on average, but this makes sense given the fact that it's launching via Proton/Wine.

One we can play AAA games I am literally ditching windows forever. Steamos is the best thing that has happened to gaming

Does Valve run a SteamOS CI/CD farm? I could see a Rust based template and library for calling into this set of APIs that you could upload your well structured project and it would build and test for all platforms. Rust would just be the skeleton, your game logic could be in anything Rust could link to.

I never came up with a good explanation for that.

Not out of box - games require mild tweaking but nothing wildly challenging. Add parameter to launch command line etc. The proton database & comments on there usually explain what tweaks the game needs

Don't think I'll switch back

But even then, assuming that is true, if they're pretty much the same would people care about maybe some fog looks a little different but you get an extra 15-20fps in a game? I think a lot of people would still prefer the boost in frames.

Proton supplies a DLL that implements the Win32 API using Linux syscalls. Windows supplies a DLL that implements that Win32 API using Windows syscalls that you're not really supposed to use directly.

https://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38936868

I'm a Mac guy now mainly because of my job and I like UNIX-y stuff now, but of course, gaming is even more lacking than Linux.

We're so close. Once AAA releases and GPU drivers get there, it's over the cliff, and I could see that being in the next five years.

E.g. the difference between the Lenovo and Asus Win11 drivers is sometimes bigger than the difference of the faster Windows driver to Linux.

It's also not all that surprising though, there's a lot of very smart people working on Proton while the general quality level in the Windows ecosystem is slowly but steadily declining.

I also wouldn't be all that surprised if running a D3D11 or D3D12 game on a Proton-layer on Windows would be faster than running that same game without Proton. Sometimes Proton might have workarounds for 'API abuse' problems of specific games which the native D3D implementation or driver doesn't have.

Anybody know if Steam and games in general refuse to install in Windows LTSC? Its basically the stripped down ultimate lean version of windows. Boots insanely fast - no tracking bullshit - no windows store or candy crush. Battery life hugely improved. No big updates - security only - and for a longer supported time.

I know Adobe has forced their installers now to refuse to outright install on LTSC (for no real reason) which is annoying as hell. First they stopped it installing on Windows Server.....

Hopefully we do not see the same thing with graphics drivers and Steam and games because right now its the ultimate gaming OS (especially if you are running it as a second OS while daily driving Linux or MacOS)

   Today, though, Ars testing on the Lenovo Legion Go S finds recent games generally run at higher frame rates on SteamOS 3.7 than on Windows 11

With SteamOS coming to arbitrary hardware, that is a very bold claim to make. And not one that ars has data to back up, apparently.

It's also an embarrassment of an article because they were gifted the steam version of the handheld, then compared that performance against them installing windows... on the steam version of the handheld. Why not buy the version with Windows by default?

Personally I'm nearly certain that SteamOS would give better apples to apples performance than windows, but we shouldn't give an article that shits on both the scientific method and journalistic integrity the light of day

But then I remember that it's Nutella at the helm over there and he'll gladly give up ground to focus more on hype and share price.

What a waste.

My observation is that windows is slow at everything. I think because of Defender, but I'm not certain. If you set up a Linux VM on a Windows machine, most tasks run much faster than an identical task on the host OS. It's insane.

I run my C++ compiler in a linux VM because running it on windows is, no exaggeration, twice as slow.

Microsoft really needs to release a gaming version of Windows without the bloat. I only use Windows to launch Steam these days.

I made about 100-200 save files in a game, so opening a screen with list of saves took about 10 seconds.

But when I used the same save folder in the same game installed under wine in Linux, its loading screen took half the time. Even though NTFS is not native for Linux. I have no idea why. Windows was without antivirus software.

If folks can figure out how to run Gamepass on Linux before then, I'll bounce, but I understand it's pretty tightly coupled to the Windows OS.

Maybe 60% of games work and it's such a headache trying to get it working, if it can be fixed at all.

Modern games however tend to work really well.

I mean, at least until last week, when I bought myself a new top-of-the-line laptop. I’ve been distro-hopping trying to find something that works and everything failed in its own annoying way. Part of it is because I stubbornly decided to stick to Wayland because I really wanted to use my laptop’s HDR display to the fullest.

Nobara KDE had serious issues handling hybrid GPU mode. The SDR color profile of my built-in display got completely borked - worked fine in HDR or plugged in to a display. But then I had serious graphical artifacts when I plugged in my display with VRR disabled! They went away when I enabled VRR, but the flickering was really bad. All of this went away if I switched my laptop to dGPU mode, but grub stopped showing anything and I couldn’t reach the UEFI anymore unless I removed the SSD.

Next I tried Garuda Dragonized Gaming. The styling is atrocious IMO, but I really liked the OS management tools. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to recognize the dGPU, so I moved on.

Next I tried Bazzite. I was very impressed by how well everything worked and performed! Atomic Linux made some of my regular setup more complicated, but the challenge was interesting. But then I decided to unplug it from my dock, and I discovered that the kernel was rebooting the built-in keyboard constantly, making it impossible to type anything.

I decided to go back to my go-to safe choice, Pop!_OS. Installation went smoothly as usual, I even followed a tutorial to use Btrfs which I really like. Everything worked great until I plugged in my monitor and the whole system started stuttering.

I decided to give up for now, I installed Windows again and applied Atlas OS to it to trim down the annoying stuff. After some tweaking I got the battery life to something that seems reasonable. Games work as expected, and I’m mostly done finding alternatives to some of my personal setup quirks.

I want to be clear: my switch to Windows is temporary until fixes for the issues I experienced start to surface. My laptop model is very recent, and I don’t have the know how or time to dig deeply into all of these issues. I’ll probably be sick of Windows in 6 months, ready for round 2.

From my personal experience overall games run much much better on Windows ( 10 or 11 ).

Edit: ok I just noticed the title is missleading, it's for handled device not pc.

More news at 11.

Code and kernels that target known hardware doesn’t need dynamic conditional code to handle unpredictable hardware. This will be faster.

General purpose operating systems handle printing events, background updates, periodic online checks, network discovery, maintenance jobs etc, all these operations consume resources and time.

Yes, Steam deck on Linux will run faster than equivalent games on Windows. But Steam deck on a smaller OS like Haiku will run even faster than Linux.

Engineering is a compromise. A F1 car can corner faster than a passanger car. But it probably sucks to reverse park. Also, I cannot imagine using a sports car for grocery shopping and hauling furniture from Ikea.