I really like that now some Content Creators are working on providing useful information for Linux gamers. Especially information like bad Frame pacing or “unreasonable” bad performance for some certain games for certain hardware is a very important information to make a good decision when buying a card.
Me personally I am not very interested in the performance comparison between Linux and Windows. I choose Linux as my daily driver for specific reasons, and game performance was not a high priority. But knowing which Hardware might have strange performance problems compared to other Hardware if I wamt to game is always a very nice thing.
I liked that the Intel B580 was included in the charts. This gave me some usefull information for comparing it to a AMD 9060 XT. Only thing I am missing is if it is the 8GB or 16GB version of the Sapphire Pulse. But I did not check their Blog/Site post yet.
Me personally I am not very interested in the performance comparison between Linux and Windows.
Very fair, it’s not really the reason I made the jump either. I would like to see that tackled at some point though, perhaps with some external recording setup to eliminate the apple/orange comparison issues between benchmarking tools.
I switched about a year ago, and was remarkably impressed to see performance gains or only minor decreases in everything I compared, when running my own benchmarks. I’d love to see that result more widely reported, and also academically to see it validated better than I can, across more hardware and games and with better methodology.
Even if not though, really glad to see Gamer’s Nexus taking it seriously and giving us some of the same access to information as we would have comparing hardware for a Windows config. Definitely wishing them the best as they explore automation and even more tooling to make this better.
gaming has really been flawless, in my experience, the past year on proton.
I had a lot of issues playing games in the past, that were usually resolved with proton updates or switching to GE Proton… but the past year? I’ve had zero issues playing anything. The past hear has been so smooth as to, honestly, make me forget I’m playing on linux from time to time.
The only real issue I have left is fooling around in single player games (Which i have beaten many times and just futzing around in to play with, and NOT in any way impacting any kind of online play… hell, the games I’m futzing around in don’t even have online components) with cheat engine/save editors/etc… For some reason recently cheat engine/pince has stopped working, even on games i used to use it on, and cant seem to even find the game memory addresses anymore… and trying to get windows based save editors and stuff installed has been kinda painful… and certain mods, like for Cyberpunk, I’ve never gotten to work. Minor side issues most people wont ever run into. Which is why its understandably still difficult. get shit running like butter, than worry about edge cases and shit like this.
100% this. I’ve been on Linux longer than Steam has, and I’m not changing anytime soon. I’m probably also not going to buy Nvidia (I value FOSS drivers), but maybe I will if the performance gap is significant enough.
If nividia just dropped a driver the quality of their windows one randomly one day. I would expect like 70%+ of the Linux community would suddenly be buying a Nvidia card no questions asked.
I’ve noticed a lot more talk about Bazzite lately and I’ve been wanting to at least give it a try as a daily driver. I’m not us gaming though I do dev work and what have you. For people on Bazzite that also do that, how is it? easy to set up for that like say using Doom Emacs or what have you?
I use Bazzite for my HTPC (AMD NUC).
For a “set it and forget it” gaming console experience? It is awesome. It feels like I already have a GabeCube under my TV (that I bought for probably half the price…). And when I have to do more complicated things than “run the update once a month”, I just ssh in from either my desktop or laptop.
But… it is an immutable/atomic distro. So if the packages you want to add are flatpaks or appimages? You are probably fine. Otherwise? You get into a mess where you are adding packages to your layers (?) and kinda feel like you are playing with fire. I did that to get iperf3 installed to test some networking upgrades and it was mostly painless but it was also a really bad experience versus
sudo dnf install iperf3. And… even on machines where I spend 90% of my time ssh’ing into servers, I still tend to want to install a good amount of local packages as a developer.So my suggestion would be to stick to Bazzite for gaming first platforms and continue to use whatever distro you like (Fedora for the win!) for “real” computers.
Also, if you aren’t as annoyed by atomic distros as I am, I would still be wary of Bazzite. They have a lot of different SKUs and I don’t care enough to try to parse what each one does. But the common use case is to basically treat a machine like a Steam Deck… which means you boot into Big Picture with essentially no login screens or a REALLY insecure pin code. And then you switch to desktop mode with a single click.
There are ways to harden that (and very much an argument of whether you need to harden a machine in your home). And Linux, generally, has very good protections by actually requiring auth for
sudo. But I already feel sketchy that I am logged into Steam/GoG on a box with almost no protections. But I also live in an environment where I don’t have to worry about someone buying 10k in fortnite bucks on my TV.You can use distrobox/distroshelf to set up a container with a regular distro and install packages in that instead of layering; if a package installs a GUI application you can export the application and it will show up in your applications menu.
And you can similarly do most/all of your dev work in a container that you spin up with a
podmanalias (fuck hashicorp with a rusty metal pole but damn if Vagrant wasn’t awesome). Hell, there are a lot of arguments that you should.It inherently becomes a question of what your primary use case for a machine is and how often you spend fighting it to accomplish that. And, personally, I run Linux so I DON’T have to fight my OS. Which… is really weird when you think about it but holy crap Windows and Mac are annoying.
Immutable OSes are amazing for corporate environments and HTPC/Gaming computers are another solid use case. But if your primary focus is whether you can be a developer (as indicated by the doomemacs ask)… you are gonna be cranky.
Bazzite comes with no dev tools pre-installed and a lot of gaming-related stuff.
Of course you can add what you need through flatpaks, containers or image layering, but why not choose a distro aimed at dev work in the first place?Dev work in the uBlue family (and yes I use bazzite for dev) leans heavily on distrobox (think development containers). Took a bit to adapt but now I think it’s the ducks nuts. Because you decouple the dev environment from the main, immutable OS you get a lot of wins, especially if you work with a lot of different projects as you can setup distroboxes specifically for each. AI code that only works with specific drivers / libraries / python with instructions only for Ubuntu or Arch, no worries, make up a distrobox, when you’re finished archive it and spin it up later if needed. If you’re only working one project on say LTS or something it’s going to be much less of a win, but for the flexible developer it’s a godsend.
As to doom emacs or whatever, I have a post install script for distroboxes that sets up my preferred environment for the big 3 (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu), it’s not hard. Very much a kill your darlings philosophy.
ETA Because of this workflow it really doesn’t matter what the host OS is, so it may as well be something I can game on, and I’m fond of the Fedora relative stability with sharp, but not bleeding edge.
bazzite is an excellent all-round linux distro for contemporary spec computer (gpu, >=16GB ram)
i use it for rust and c# dev work using distrobox. all gui ide’s and tooling run in the containers with excellent performance
i also layer a handful of packages on the “immutable” or atomic base os for some carefully chosen tools i want. the base os is generally well fitted out
very highly recommend as daily dev driver and also gaming
Bluefin and Auroa are for you, changed how I program and organise, our you can make your own template and just pop everything you’re missing in the containerfile similar to how nix pkgs works
I’m a huge fan of Aurora, the least popular ublue desktop OS. Bazzite is great, too. But I prefer Aurora.
Hell, even my wife uses it and has no complaints.
I’m not us gaming though I do dev work and what have you
Bazzite isn’t really for you. Bazzite is a gaming 1st distro. You probably want a more normal general use distro.
Don’t agree with this. I do dev work in bazzite without any issues. Just spin a distrobox and that’s it. Also it’s better that usual dev environments, just like a python env is better than using native os python.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There’s better distros out there.
Especially when you have no interest in gaming.
If you have no interest in gaming and want a modern development environment there’s Aurora/Bluefin. Bazzite is just those with gaming bits added on.
If you don’t mind a learning
curvecliff, NixOS is great for development, and I haven’t had any issues gaming either.Recommending someone who’s curious about Bazzite to maybe check out NixOS instead is… Certainly something lol
I’m so happy to see some big channels doing these Linux tests. I know it’s probably way more difficult since there are thousands of distros to try!
You don’t need to test every distro.
Honestly you could capture 90 percent of the market with just arch and Debian/Ubuntu.
You could add 2 or 3 of the gaming focused distros for comparison however since they tend to be built on top of the two above things are more likely going to vary based on configuration more than which distro or de you are using.
Me looking at these benchmarks like I’m about to play anything other than FTL.
I appreciate the work they are putting into this. I think we will see more linux adoption in the future as microsoft keeps doing all the things it has been with windows 11.
AMD is more stable in games where Proton/Native Linux builds have weird issues, sometimes leading to a 9070xt leading a 5080 (even beating a 5090 in like starfield but like, lol.) Raytracing still heavily prefers Nvidia.
Does not directly compare to windows benchmarks. Low V-ram causes failures. Some native versions for linux are actively worse than running windows through Proton Loading Shaders before launching game can take long (longer on Nvidia cards), and can be required very often.
Suggest watching the last 10m where they talk about these issues if you don’t have time for the whole video.
solving anti-cheat would basically seal the Dingus
Enabling anticheat means the user must sacrifice many of their core freedoms just to play a video game. And in principle anticheat will never fully prevent cheating short of pointing a camera at the user and watch them the whole time they are playing.
I hope Linux community can push back. This whole thing is idiotic and harms the consumers.
Enabling anticheat means the user must sacrifice many of their core freedoms just to play a video game.
Lots of games support anti-cheat in Linux. It’s critical to note that anti-cheat in general is not the issue.
Kernel-level anti-cheat however is. It’s a massive security issue and something that everyone, including Windows users, should roundly reject.
The way I solve anti-cheat is by never playing games that require it.
i want to play dayz tho
Just play something else. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of games out there that require no anti-cheat.
Just play something else
no thanks I’m good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8&t=2746
I’m not sure I quite understand the issue Steve has with things updating when adding new cards.
Sure, updates during a single benchmark series is a problem but what is the issue with the system being updated for the next benchmarks?
Proton/amdgpu/Mesa receiving updates is no different than installing newer “Game Ready” drivers when a new GPU comes out.
I assume they don’t go out of their way to install older (potentially incompatible) drivers on Windows just so they can compare two separate benchmarks.
Besides that, after disabling Flatpak and rpm-ostree updates in Bazzite, the only remaining variable is Proton. Which should be easily fixed by manually copying a fixed Proton version to their compatibility tools and using that.
Without re-testing their entire suite of cards for every new card review (which is cost prohibitive), performance changing from updates would make the comparisons between cards less useful, as it cannot be determined if the newer card being tested is better or worse purely on the merits of the hardware itself, since newer software may be artificially making it look better or worse than the tested cards that came before, and thus the actual integrity and usefulness of the testing comes into question.
They are trying to assemble a like-for-like dataset that doesn’t require their entire catalog of cards to be regularly retested to ensure that it remains like-for-like. Keeping all the software the same across tests ensures that they can add new data piecemeal and still retain an apples-to-apples comparison.
That makes sense.
So the best option seems to be to note updates for newer cards down until the automated testing can be done on Linux as well.
AFAIK, It’s not an issue of automated testing, and I don’t believe they re-test all their cards on Windows with every new review either. Instead, they maintain the same versions of software on Windows as well until enough time has passed and enough updates have piled up that they do finally re-test everything with new games to create a new dataset to compare against. They’re trying to do the same methodology on Linux.
Instead, they maintain the same versions of software on Windows as well until enough time has passed and enough updates have piled up that they do finally re-test everything
I’m not that involved with their testing procedure but doesn’t that put newer cards at a disadvantage?
They lack any sort of driver optimization if the release drivers are never installed.
That’s a good point. I went back to the video to rewatch it, and turns out I totally missed where they said they only freeze things during a testing phase, then unfreeze it after they’re done and allow updates to commence as normal.
They mentioned that due to Linux receiving more frequent updates often with meaningful performance improvements, they’ll have to throw away older data and re-test more often on Linux, as Windows doesn’t really change much in performance between updates. So I would guess that they would use release drivers with new cards, and likely would only re-test their entire suite if the release driver also gave a big performance boost on older cards.
At 3:27: “Linux still isn’t for everybody.”
Please stop saying this! Linux is for everybody. It’s Windoze that isn’t because that’s where the exceptions lie. E.g., it’s only some people that need 3ds Max or some other niche proprietary software that isn’t supported on Linux. Conversely, the majority of the population simply uses the browser for email, videos, simple administrative tasks, et cetera, for which Linux is perfect and better than anything M$.
Hypothetically, let’s say Linux Mint came preinstalled on every computer instead of Windoze. People would lose their shit if through an update the UX suddenly became like Windoze.
Linux isn’t for everyone, this isn’t a false statement, it’s 100% true. I consider myself more tech savvy than the general population and I have had to do a LOT of troubleshooting on every Linux install I tried, for things that should have just worked out of the box, and I needed help from friends who are much more tech savvy (people who deal with servers for a living and their hobbies are setting up NAS servers and messing with tech in general) and they all had some trouble with some issues I was having, like for example a Bluetooth USB adapter not working that on windows was just plug and play, and it turned out that the GUI that came with mint just didn’t actually change any settings, and I had to go to the terminal and type the commands to directly control the Bluetooth stuff. I can deal with all of these and other issues, but my dad who has to be reminded how to download a picture from whatsapp on his laptop to send through his email could never deal with Linux, something would pop up every single day and he would need someone to help him. Hell, I installed libre office for him to use and he kept having issues with it, his documents wouldn’t show up, they would not be saved properly or where he wanted, would lag a lot, updates would be super slow and that’s ignoring stuff like the GUI differences that made him constantly have to stop and search for what he wanted. I ended up installing office and cracking it for him to be able to keep messing with his text documents and excel sheets
If Linux is to become the OS for everyone, it needs to become much more foolproof, and currently it is not that
