Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmark
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
2. Curious why they didn't use OG Ubuntu in the benchmarks. Yes Popos(I still don't agree on that name) is just another Ubuntu, but I would have proffered the OG snice that's the most popular worldwide and I don't know what Popos does to make it more "gaming focused" than vanilla Ubuntu.
For another popular Ubuntu alternative they could have also went with Linux Mint. AFAIK both are still default on X11 while latest Ubuntu defaults to Wayland so that could have made a difference.
[1] https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distributio...
They have a few changes, chief among them being the PopOS scheduler which I find to be quite effective: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler
The desktop itself is a weird custom-baked x11/GNOME customization you won't really get on Ubuntu. Not many distributions can claim the title of being truly "unique", but PopOS does deserve the title in my opinion. Even still it wouldn't be my choice for gaming, but I'll defend it's identity as something more than another GNOME/Debian spin.
Sir, I think you've just insulted like dozens of distros out there.
IMHO there are a lot of more "truly unique" distros out there than just spins of Ubuntu with a different DE and scheduler: Nobara(from the benchmark), Q4OS, Antix, Mabox, Linux Lite, Gecko Linux, Spiral Linux, in no particular order, not that they're better than Popos, but they're definitely more unique.
Also on Mint, the OS installs with the open source driver but upon first boot it shows a notification to allow you to download and enable the closed source driver so it is very upfront and not something that you need to hunt for.
Mint’s approach is definitely better than Ubuntu’s, but pop’s has the advantage of making it clear from the point of download that Nvidia users are covered.
I am not a fan of Ubuntu on desktops either and have no idea what PopOS is.
Do you happen to be German? ;-) To be fair, it's actually spelled PopOS, making it more clear that it's not about baby butts.
There are definitely worse offenders. Looking at you, Wix and MongoDB!
Say what? Not sure how the other two are any less “Linux-like” than Arch. They’re all Linux, which is about as Linux-like as it gets.
It's a sentence you would expect from someone with little to no knowledge about Linux.
No snark: I understand that's largely a result of Arch deliberately pushing decisions down to users rather than deciding for you, appreciate that it's a deliberate decision, and am _very_ glad it exists.
I guess if "Linux is about choice" (it's not) then Arch is very Linux-like.
This is interesting because it hasn't been my experience at all. IIRC in the last 3 years I only had to fix something after an update once, and that was only because of my own stupidity.
I actually find Arch a lot more stable now than when I was using Ubuntu many many years ago, where something would always break after upgrading to a new version. (But maybe Ubuntu's better in this regards nowadays; I don't know.)
The parent poster was definitely right that Arch pushes all of the decisions down to the users rather than deciding for you, so I suppose how much it breaks depends on how good your decisions are and how much of a Linux expert you are. I could fix virtually any broken Linux system while blindfolded, so I know how to set it up so that it never breaks and doesn't require any maintenance. This probably explains the difference in our experiences.
Maybe the original authors meant Unix-like?
i would describe it as more "pure" in that sense, saying its more "linux-like" is oversimplifying
Most people I’ve talked to want the freedom that comes with Linux, but also as little pain as possible. Arch isn’t it. There’s a reason Ubuntu became so popular back in the day: it was a free and easy to use into to desktop Linux.
Arch has always felt more like a distribution for people who enjoy tinkering with the distro rather than just using the computer to get things done.
The website (computerbase) also seems to host their own downloads of the operating systems they review, very weird.
Nobody else likes to do these kinds of benchmarks because if you do them right the performance differences should be negligible. If not you've probably stumbled upon a bug.
Phoronix actually does Linux benchmarks right. [1]
Whatever distribution I currently have, in almost all cases, I should be able to configure those things just as well?
So this is just a test about which distro has the best defaults? Ok, it's maybe interesting to some. But the text is misleading, it writes this as "what is the best distro for gaming". For me, much more interesting would be, what are relevant settings to maybe improve the performance, with my distribution of choice.
I guess the idea is that yeah you could do everything Nobara did to your own distro, but then you’d just end up with the same thing.
MacOS is the same btw.
Hour long waits to get in, frequent crashes and logouts, no actual help or troubleshooting, and my refund was denied for "too much in-game time" within 48 hours of purchase (6 hours of troubleshooting and waiting, about an hour of uninterrupted play). This was on a native Windows install, by the way.
My point is that Linux is a great filter for companies with the worst behaviors. If it happens to be a coincidence that the games that tend not to work on Linux also belong to those companies, so much the better.
Also, if it's not in Wine's AppDB or ProtonDB, try using https://looking-glass.io/ with a Win10 IoT VM that's been "debloated". It's like having Windows as a Service.
I wonder if there's a guide to setting up Arch in a way that makes it work as much like the Deck as possible? I'm fairly indifferent to choice of distro, maybe it's worth choosing Arch just for game support.
Edit: I found this -- https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown I guess they're using Debian rather than Arch
However in my experience games just work these days in 9 of 10 cases. And if it doesn't it's the launcher and not the game in the far majority of cases, a issue only found with big shit studios.
pcgamingwiki.com sometimes has issues and fixes for native games, but there don't seem to be many Linux users contributing.
Correct.
I own Steam Deck and I also use Arch as my main desktop distro. While Steam Deck uses Arch as a base, it is slightly tweaked. The file system is read only out of the box and you are supposed to upgrade it together with SteamOS from the Steam settings menu. When connected to monitor and switched to desktop mode, it runs regular KDE desktop. If you want to keep it a vanilla SteamOS (with read only system) but still install apps, you can install flatpaks (for example from KDE application store).
Arch is the only distro I've tried that just works out of the box. It's the only distro where Optimus/Prime/Bumblebee actually works and doesn't just run the GPU at full bore all the time.
All of my games work as well as you could hope with this hardware, with no configuration or tinkering up front.
Arch has been the absolute most stable and fast OS I have ever used, bar none. My current installation is the longest I've ever gone without reinstalling the OS, including windows. It's definitely not the most ergonomic OS, but it just works, and it works every time.
Specifically, I use the Garuda flavor. It's advertised as being specifically for games, but I don't know what's special about it other than the garish "gamer" RGB default desktop theme. I'm gonna try Cinnamon next.
Everytime you run into an issue you'll not know if its related to Arch itself or something the Garuda installer has messed with. Which is why people on the ArchLinux forums and IRC aren't eager to help others using a derivative.
Garuda is one of the worst examples with the team being so unprofessional. As an example their emberassingly small wiki contains emoticons. Manjaro already gets shame for not properly informing users of the risks of the AUR, and Garuda absolutely discards security entirely by using a third party repository with pre-compiled AUR packages...
All-in-all you get a whole lot of uncertainty for having some stuff pre-configured. Something a simple install script (that you can actually review and modify) could cover as well.
As for Cinnamon, it's nice I like it.
I picked Garuda because my requirements were:
1. Arch
2. Has desktop environment out of the box
It was the first one I found and looked adequately shiny.
I just really dislike raw Arch and having to install my DE from scratch. It always feels like I'm doing something wrong and I'm never sure I configured everything correctly.
For new hardware, not being closer to bleeding edge sometimes means your WiFi, Ethernet, etc don’t work.
Is this not the case anymore? Does proton translate all of the api calls from say dx12? Were the games tested in vulkan or dx12 and are we sure thy look the same visually?
Do you have a source or example vid or something to link to showing this? I ask cause I've seen this claim pop up a number of times here and on reddit but never have been able to find concrete examples of it actually happening, in addition to the Wine docs saying (IIRC) that if Wine runs into something that isn't/can't be translated, that the program will crash, not just omit it. The idea that it would just not appear at all seems less probable to me than the game crashing.
>The idea that it would just not appear at all seems less probable to me than the game crashing.
Now that you mention it, the story might have been something else... there was news about linux beating windows in gaming, but the issue was not WINE but linux drivers for the GPUs at the time not having some features supported.
Again this is such a random information for me to remember it's all hazy. I'm almost 40 years old >.>
I'm a bit confused, literally any Linux distro has everything in their repositories to install Proton and GPU drivers.
> Arch, which is the most Linux one
I love Arch but it's not the "most Linux" (i dont even know what it's supposed to mean). And for someine trying to make a transition from Windows to Linux it's factually the most hostile.
Still no one gives any /actual/ reasons why windows 11 is bad. Just their hurt feelings.
With due diligence and careful selection pigs can eventually fly.
Everywhere, it's pushy designs, pushy notifications, pushy popups, pushy integrations, pushy reinstalls of programs you uninstall, pushy and second-guessing about everything you want to do that isn't someone else's plan for your computer.
It's infuriating, and people hate it. But someone out there thinks it's leaving money on the table to not push everyone who will tolerate their pushiness deeper into their dependency. "Gosh this would be so easy if you'd just cave and make a $yetAnother account and your tie your wallet and entire identity to it. Aren't you sick of having to be told that over and over?"
I feel the same about all of big tech right now. A bunch of pushy, self-important asses out to shakedown the fools who don't see them and immediately cross the street. And if you can't tell who I'm talking about, exactly.
Use your Windows 11 with your ads, no one is stopping you.
A gap of FPS has no meaning. FPS have to be compared with percentage difference. If you want to measure a gap in absolute terms you need to convert the measurements to milliseconds per frame.
It's still open to interpretation what exactly they are measuring with their frame timings, e.g. is Windows consistently generating frames within 10.6ms but Nobora is up to 9% less performant then that, sometimes 11.6ms? Although this only seems to be for the 1% lows. I don't think it's a particularly insightful metric in this particular benchmark.