Recent testing revealed that Arch Linux, Pop!_OS, and even Nobara Linux, which is maintained by a single developer, all outstripped Windows for the performance crown on Windows-native games. The testing was run at the high-end of quality settings, and Valve's Proton was used to run Windows games on Linux.
Well this article is pretty disingenuous…
The distribution “managed by a single person” depends on hundreds of people working on different sofware to keep up. It’s not “one person doing better than the thousands of Microsoft employees combined” implication they are pushing
Windows 11 beat the linux distros by up to 20% in 1% lows which are argued as much more important by most tech reviewers. It wasn’t consistant at all which means that there was a giant margin of error.
I love linux and linux gaming has gotten radically better, but I am tired of tech “journalism” literally just cherrypicking, misleading, clickbait trash.
Not to mention the major hurdle for Linux gaming is anti cheat software being brought over. Too many games are 100% unplayable because the devs don’t allow their anticheat to be installed on Linux systems
Honestly I can’t say that I miss installing rootkits with terrifying privileges just to play games. I’d rather limit the privileges games have with Flatpak etc., not give them even more.
Sure but gaming is predominantly a social pastime. Meaning that most gamers will make the trade off between installing anticheat and not playing the game their friends are all playing, much like the overwhelming majority of people will trade privacy in favor of being able to send a message to friends on Facebook.
It doesn’t matter how much you value your privacy: most people don’t care and never will. So without the option to give away privacy to play the latest Ubisoft game they won’t be using Linux. Full stop.
Yeah, what the heck Valorant. I’m not installing that.
Anti cheat = rootkit. You should not install it at all.
This is because most anti cheats for windows are kernel level rootkits that have full access to your entire system, and gamers just trust that known to be ineffective, scammy and profiteering, anti cheat companies software companies would /never/ do anything nefarious.
How can you trust them?
You can’t! Black boxed code, babyyyyyy.
Anyway yeah on linux systems basically the designs of all common anti cheat systems would be laughed at as hilariously insecure code that no sane person would allow on their computer because you would have to give it root level access.
This is basically insane as in the linux paradigm, root level access is reserved only for a bare minimum of system processes, whereas on Windows, well with the new Pluton tech in the latest lines of major CPUs, Windows has the ability to DRM literally anything you install on it and just get rid of your ability to run or install it, as they see fit, with a network enabled sub layer of the CPU that you as a user cannot override from within Windows.
The only hurdle for linux gaming is for more gamers and game developers to realize the truth of what I just said.
Its possible to do anti cheat in less invasive ways. But that requires more work from game development studios, and is costly.
Anyone else remember when servers had like actual human admins that would respond to player complaints, and would work on the backend of a server to come up with their own ways to detect cheating server side?
Yeah, the only time proton can actually outperform windows is when it spots a fundamental performance error that the app has made, and is able to optimize it out, AND no windows driver does the same. This is comparing Linux+proton at its best vs windows+native at its worst.
What we really want to see is Linux+native at its best vs windows+native at its best. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of demanding games that natively support Linux.
Yep. The world is full of trash, that’s for sure.