Pretty exciting times ahead as Valve might finally release SteamOS to more hardware. This amount of Linux desktop coverage would be unimaginable few years ago.

  • @[email protected]
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    113 minutes ago

    It’s the right thing to do. Windows isn’t nearly as stable or reproducible as a testing platform anymore and I imagine it’s a PITA to handle for benchmarking dozens of not hundreds of hardware configs.

    Of course they’ll still do those Windows tests, not suggesting they won’t, but Linux may become a more useful benchmarking platform for reviewers thanks to the control and automation it provides.

    A whole host of configurations can be quickly booted and tested on a benchmark suite to confirm performance of older hardware and provide context, whilst newer products can get a bespoke review on all platforms. If a new benchmark game comes out, it’ll be way easier to insert into the Linux setups than Windows.

  • Cyborganism
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    641 day ago

    That’s great news! Linux gaming is increasingly taken more seriously.

  • mesamune
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    1621 hours ago

    That would be great.

  • @[email protected]
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    471 day ago

    I remember back in the day, running Quake3 on linux provided better FPS than on windows. I haven’t compared the two since then on any game.

    Is it still the case? And is this difference (mostly) there in other games too?

    • Leaflet
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      331 day ago

      On AMD, it’s not uncommon for games to perform better than on Windows.

      For Nvidia, games almost always perform worse than on Windows.

      • @[email protected]
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        817 hours ago

        Your nvidia information might be outdated since driver version 560.x. And I’m getting tired of the anti nvidia circlejerk in the Linux communities on lemmy.

        At least Shadow of the Tomb Raider (+20fps) and Cyberpunk (+5fps) run better than they did on windows with the same settings, for me. And those are the only games I tested, because they are the only AAA titles I own that come with a performance test.

        I’m not defending nvidia here, there are still issues like missing multi monitor vrr or a few (!) titles that are too broken to play. And it’s not as much of an out of the box experience as it is with AMD.

        But for most people that own an nvidia card it’s probably already a good idea to make the switch from windows.

        So, to anyone owning a nvidia card having doubts: feel free to try things out!

        • @[email protected]
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          215 hours ago

          You’re pretty brave to call us “circlejerk” and then agree that there are flaws in drivers.

          For you this can work. For my wife the nvidia works also. I mean, almost. Wayland buggy, poor VRAM management, from time to time fights with drivers. Compared to that my AMD journey is “set and forget”.

          I mean, yes, make a switch and test things out. But once you settle down on Linux OS, Nvidia is the worst choice you can make for purchase. World’s shifting towards Wayland and it’s not even worth your time to go and run Steam in Gamescope on Nvidia. And did you notice the push from distros to switch to wayland? Right now NV is same experience as was anything 10 years ago - hit or miss.

          Just don’t call anybody jerk when you don’t share their experience. You are very low statistical sample and there are lots of us in the wild having real troubles with green team

          • @[email protected]
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            214 hours ago

            I’m not calling anyone jerk. I just don’t like that every discussion involves ‘nvidia bad’ on here. That, to me, is a circlejerk. And repeatedly summing up the situation as ‘nvidia is so bad, don’t use it’ puts people off from making the jump and consequently doesn’t help the growth of linux in general, which doesn’t help you, me or anyone else.

            • @[email protected]
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              131 minutes ago

              If I had feared about nvidia drivers, I wouldn’t have been using Linux for 4 years straight now. Mint supported my 1060 and 2060 before now, PopOS was fantastic aside from a quirk with waking the screens with the 2060, and honestly those issues have worsened with AMD now. Admittedly I haven’t tried much to remedy it as it’s as simple as turning off my monitors.

              But if you never try, you can never know 🤷‍♂️

        • Desdinova
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          116 hours ago

          @jul @that_leaflet Outdated because of a lack of knowledge about driver that came out six months ago and still, to your own admission, has major bugs on everyday use compared to AMD? Doesn’t change my opinion in the least.

          My only issue with AMD on Linux has been wanting to use Stable Diffusion, and that’s more due to the fact that it’s hard to get it to work at all on Linux, no matter your GPU.

      • @Vikthor
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        1422 hours ago

        Well, no surprise, AMD’s cooperation with Linux/Mesa/etc. devs is longer and deeper than Nvidia’s. In fact, when Linus Torvalds was asked about how cooperative Nvidia are, he gave them the finger.

        • @[email protected]
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          319 hours ago

          For all the flak they (rightfully!) get, a 1st party open source nvidia driver is in the works.

          Altough it’s only the userspace part and it’s not compliant (yet?) to be upstreamed into the kernel. It is still something.

      • Kaity
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        216 hours ago

        To provide some additional anecdotes to support jul’s comment. I’ve personally been experiencing better performance than windows even with nvidia. Though it does vary per game, with the occasional workaround especially when going outside the realm of plug and play to mod games.

        I’d say most games are great, the “10% low” games are still good, and the “1% lows” where things just don’t work are pretty rare but sometimes there is a fix. Proton.db is a good resource for those instances.

        And being honest… windows has those moments too, people just ignore them because windows is the ubiquitous gaming OS.

        It’s a lot better than when I had last “tried” and it may be more impactful to bring up that this time I haven’t gone back even once, and I actually went ahead and pulled the plug on my windows partition.

        Linux is just better now, there’s one thing windows had but I gave it up. Linux is just better for most things now and to make that win even better… windows has increasingly been becoming worse than itself.

    • mesamune
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      1121 hours ago

      Quite a few games work better on Linux now than windows.

      • @lepinkainen
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        415 hours ago

        World of Warcraft was a big one, it was faster on wine than native windows

        • Desdinova
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          115 hours ago

          @lepinkainen @mesamunefire It was faster on Wine “back in the day” when it was THE game to play.

          Though, it runs wonderfully on Apple Silicon, mostly because it’s Apple Silicon native.

    • @[email protected]
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      161 day ago

      there are edge cases where linux performa better, especially with older apis because dx9/dx11 to vulkan allows for more draw calls than thr native language can do.

      then you have rare situations like elden rings launch ehere shader caching was broken on windows and vulkans shader caching on linux worked making elden ring play better on linux

      • @[email protected]
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        222 hours ago

        Do you think most games might perform better on linux in the future? When game makers put more effort towards optimising for linux considering linux has less bloatware etc?

        • @[email protected]
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          21 hours ago

          Do you think most games might perform better on linux in the future?

          maybe, depends on steamOS hardware adoption rate. You’re far more likely going to see windows regress in performance rather than linux get better upper tier performance on average (imo)

          When game makers put more effort towards optimising for linux considering linux has less bloatware etc?

          theyll optimize for linux whent he market grows enough for it, which I personalyl believe will only happen when Linux gets at least ~30% of the steam hardware survey OS market.

          not many devs will spend time to cater to 2% of the steam market.

        • mesamune
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          221 hours ago

          Given that quite a few consoles use Linux or a variety of it, it’s definitely coming around. Plus s lot of video game creation engines now have a Linux export option.

    • ElectricMachman
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      101 day ago

      The Sims 2 performs better on Linux than it ever did on Windows.

      Y’know, for what it’s worth.

      • @[email protected]
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        122 hours ago

        Mad Max too, my computer doesnt heat up and the framerate is smoother when I’m not running 6gb ram worth of bloatware before the game

    • qyron
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      61 day ago

      I remember playing Neverwinter Nights and running it on Linux providing a more stable and clean experience than on Windows. Even modding it was easier.

  • @[email protected]
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    101 day ago

    SteamOS is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting. I reckon there are quite a few people who are waiting for its release before trying Linux.

    Does SteamOS even have functional desktop, or is it just Steam big picture wrapper thing?

    • @[email protected]
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      18 minutes ago

      It boots into Game scope (as others said, it’s not “big picture mode” it’s a compositor stack tailored for high gaming performance) but it’s nothing more than an immutable arch distribution (and immutability can be disabled for tweaking) so you could definitely swap the defaults if someone has documented how.

      Would be a nice feature to have once SteamOS becomes independent of the deck.

    • @[email protected]
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      36 hours ago

      I reckon there are quite a few people who are waiting for its release before trying Linux.

      I always recommend against it people wanting a gaming linux desktop
      SteamOS being an immutable operating system works a bit different to most well known operating systems
      albeit this also makes any breackage almost impossible

      • @[email protected]
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        22 hours ago

        I am pretty sure even LTT Linus said he was waiting for a SteamOS release before trying again. I was thinking, like damn dude, if you can’t use PopOS, how will this be any different for you.

        albeit this also makes any breackage almost impossible

        Maybe, just maybe, this will stop people like him from catastrophically uninstalling their entire desktop environment.

    • GHiLA
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      25 hours ago

      Does SteamOS even have functional desktop

      Unlike Windows, yes. It does.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 hour ago

        Yep. What I was meaning, will SteamOS boot right into KDE and be a computer operating system first, or boot into big picture mode and be a gaming system first.

    • @[email protected]
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      622 hours ago

      Yes, but it is also set up as an OS image.

      I think there is a process for persistence, but without some effort, changes are lost for OS updates.

      • skimm
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        922 hours ago

        Changes aren’t lost on update. If you enable a sudo user/password, and make changes to the system that way, those changes can be lost when applying the new system image.

        Its an immutable Arch-based distro and you have full readwrite to your home directory and all config, settings, and files within persist.

        • @[email protected]
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          16 minutes ago

          Even the stuff in the “immutable” section isn’t necessarily wiped, it’s more that there is a strong chance changes may be overwritten. I’d definitely make no guarantees to anything stored on the immutable sections of SteamOS.