Linux is now the best gaming system. ｜ fernvenue's Blog
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When it comes to gaming on Linux, many many many people’s understanding stil remains in the Jurassic era. For the past few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for both work and gaming. From my personal experience, the gaming experience on Linux is far superior to that of macOS and Windows. I know I know…whenever I mention this, there are always some old-school individuals who come out to say that Linux’s driver configuration is complex, its game support is not rich enough, and its compatibility issues are significant, among other problems. In this article, I will directly address these issues and let everyone understand how much the gaming experience on Linux has developed by 2025.
  • who@feddit.orgEnglish
    288·
    2 days ago

    Lots of people comment on this subject pointing out that some games don’t run on Linux, and conclude that Linux is still behind Windows. This fails to recognize a distinct advantage that Linux has: More efficient use of hardware.

    If your system doesn’t have an especially fast SSD or lots of RAM, you might find that Linux gives a better gaming experience. It can often do more with less.

    Edit to add: When I consider the fact that we’re mostly talking about games designed and built just for Windows, I find this really damn impressive. And it just keeps getting better.

    • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      The counter argument is that some games don’t run on Windows anymore either. All the software, all the time is the classic disingenuous argument that is always levied against Linux. It has to do something that not even windows does anymore. Then people ignore the fact that Linux sometimes offer greater compatibility with old games than windows itself.

      • ThePancakeExperiment@feddit.orgEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, I’ve still got a win11 install, but every game that did not run on linux did not run on win11 either. I do not play multiplayer games though and those games had pretty obscure engines. Compatibility with older games is great though.
        I rarely use windows these days, and I hate that updates can take up to half an hour and you can’t do anything with your system.

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      72·
      2 days ago

      If your system doesn’t have an especially fast SSD or lots of RAM, you might find that Linux gives a better gaming experience. It can often do more with less.

      This has been tested to death and, barring some exceptions, and barring Nvidia hardware, performance is more or less the same.

      • who@feddit.orgEnglish
        72·
        2 days ago

        Then whomever tested it “to death” wasn’t particularly comprehensive. I speak from more than a little personal experience.

        Of course it won’t help in every case, nor did I claim it would. That’s not the point, and your contrarianism doesn’t help anyone. Good day.

        • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
          31·
          2 days ago

          Helps everyone who might make the mistake of thinking your information is accurate.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            Linux can feel faster in a number of cases because its scheduler is better IMO, but that doesn’t help when running something like a game. A desktop feeling snappier won’t increase your benchmark scores or framerates.

            It’ll certainly breathe new life into that crappy old laptop, but it’s not magic.

      • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
        52·
        2 days ago

        It is not, ext4 does circles around piece of junk ntfs and I’ve got the load times from my own old world of warships install to prove it.

        Windows gg ez’d its way out of making a better filesystem with the advent of SSDs which doesn’t have performance hits from fragmenting like a spinning disk does.

        I still remember running defraggler every few months just so I could play Batman Arkham Knight on Windows, otherwise the game would freeze lag and run at a ridiculous 10 FPS.

        Windows also eats 2GB RAM at idle for no reason compared to usually 1.3-1.4 for KDE and 1.0 flat for XFCE. Zswap/Zram also helps a lot when you don’t have an SSD.

        And to top it off, Compiz, Wayfire, KWin, etc all outperform Windows’s desktop compositor by miles in terms of performance and visual snappiness. Windows lags heavily on anything mobile like a light laptop or tablet, yet you can run a full transparent 3D compiz cube no problem with basically no hit to hardware usage due to its use of OpenGL.

        • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
          32·
          2 days ago

          I’ve got the load times from my own old world of warships install to prove it.

          That’s what we call an anecdote.

          • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
            32·
            2 days ago

            No that’s what we call HDD fragmentation, and the whole point of fragmentless filesystems like ext2/3/4, UFS, HFS, APFS, etc.

            And it’s not like a small difference, the load time and HDD read demand was down by 40% system wide, not just videogames.

            I’d even go and demo it again, but I removed windows from my ye olde HDD a few years ago. I mentioned WoWs specifically because its a asset heavy game that I actually happened to have installed both on Windows and on Linux on the same HDD, each within their own respective partition.

            spoiler

            Also bonus, HDDs were getting so bottlenecked that Vista introduced preload file fetching to guess which files to cache in RAM based on read call usage, which then also became a feature in Linux with the preload daemon which no one uses anymore.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      38·
      2 days ago

      SSD speed only affects boot time. Which on any reasonable SSD isn’t bad.

      Linux distros can use a good bit less ram than windows, but the gap isn’t that big. Unless you’re borderline on windows Linux won’t make much of a difference. Especially the more noob friendly distros since they tend to be more bloated.

      And they only talk about games built for windows through proton/whatever because native games suck balls. Proton emulating windows made Linux gaming good. Native Linux gaming is still typically worse than native windows.