If you want to swap, then just do it right now? As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works, and reaches speeds that are more than good enough to do so, even if they're not exactly the same as windows - the steam deck is pretty much proof of this.
If Linux was measurably 5% slower on all benchmarks, would that mean you wouldn't do it even if you wanted to? Is every single nanosecond of performance really that important to you? I switched 10 years ago when things were a lot rougher than this, and in the end everything still worked well enough that I never cared to swap back.
5% would already be well within the margin of difference for separate identical clean installations of windows on the same hardware.
But the issue is that it is many multiples of that, especially on the most common PC gaming hardware (Nvidia GPUs), often more than a 25% difference in framerates. Not so important at 144fps, but very important at a 60fps baseline and for genres like fighting games.
A lot of people don't mind, say, an extra 5 frames of input delay. They don't notice it. But a lot of people do notice even an extra 2 or 3.
I do think that frame pacing issues kinda do have a critical thin threshold where it's either bearable or an unacceptable difference. And the native windows version can often already be riding right on that line. So while it's not fair to the Linux version to demand better, it is unfortunately the case that it might tip over that line.
I'd guess that the difference only matters if you have the latest most expensive gear pushed to the limit. I have a 2019 RX5700 XT and one of the DDR4 ryzen 5 cpus and all of my games run flawlessly on Linux with great performance.
I've long since decided that buying the latest top end hardware is just spending a lot of money to be upset by buggy drivers or not being able to get 5000 fps in a benchmark but has no real gains in how fun games are.
> I have a 2019 RX5700 XT
So you have very old hardware, can barely play modern AAA games (if ever), and are still happy. Good for you.
But your opinion is relevant to average gamer who enjoys playing games released in current year in the same way that someone drinking instant coffee can advise on coffee beens that it's all just caffeine in the end.
This. I understand that getting your desktop fps to ridiculous heights is a hobby in and of itself, an obsession that I don't share at all, and good luck to them that do. But I'm colourblind and have the reaction speed of a slug. Anything over 25fps is wasted on me.
After building a few PCs over the years something I've noticed is every time I've bought the highest end new part I feel bad about the money spent, and then I feel bad every time there's a delayed frame or feature missing, and then I feel bad when the next model comes out.
Every time I get something mid range or second hand I feel good about what a good deal I got, and how I'm getting 98% of the features for 40% of the price, and how realistically as soon as you stop pixel peeping screenshots, you won't even notice your settings are on High instead of Ultra. You just take in the story, the sound design, and the actual game.
> all of my games run flawlessly on Linux with great performance.
Your definition of great performance is not mine, but it’s fantastic to watch Linux users continue to hand wave away real issues whilst continually claiming the same or better performance across the board, which is provably false.
> but has no real gains in how fun games are.
It absolutely does for me. Modern displays are absolutely dogshit. I won’t play at anything less than 144hz, as much as I can I aim for 200hz and I want that with consistent frame times.
This is exactly the mentality I'm talking about. People have entertained themselves for all of human history without anything nearly as sophisticated as modern displays. At some point this unchecked desire will suck all of the fun out of a hobby and leave you constantly buying the latest thing and dissatisfied at anything that isn't the highests specs possible to acquire.
The game story, gameplay elements, and such have become secondary to the real hobby of consumerism. If people could have fun gaming 20 years ago, there is no reason it isn't possible to have just as much fun gaming on low to mid range hardware today.
I think this is similar to how buying books is a related but different hobby to reading books, or buying board games is a related but different hobby to playing board games. I know people who have hundreds of board games, thousands of dollars worth, but rarely get to actually play them (for various reasons but mostly involving children).
The hobby of optimising your gaming desktop is a related but different hobby to actually playing games.
Completely agreed, I think most hobbies have this perverse side aspect that is just themed consumerism. And it's so easy to get sucked in to watching youtube videos about the latest board games that you just need to buy, while the reality is you aren't even playing the ones you already have.
It's much harder to step back and realise you don't need the new thing most of the time. Sure if you have a 15+ year old desktop and you can't run the new games at all then an upgrade could be good, but I'd guess most hardware purchases come from people who already have great hardware.
It’s a bizzare assumption to make that because people happen to have different preferences or needs than you do it must be “consumerism.”
I have very specific requirements for motion clarity in games on modern displays. Older display technologies like CRTs and plasmas achieved this naturally through the way they operated. Most modern sample-and-hold displays do not.
You may not notice or be affected by that difference, which is fine. Couldn’t be more thrilled for you, however I am affected. Anything below 120Hz on a sample-and-hold display causes noticeable discomfort for me, and for a long time I stopped gaming entirely because I couldn’t work out why playing anything had seemingly overnight become so bad to play from a comfort perspective. Eventually I realised the issue started when I moved away from CRTs and plasma TVs to modern sample and hold displays.
I was only able to comfortably return to gaming by using very fast displays at 120Hz minimum, preferably 240Hz, because that gets closer to the motion quality I was used to from years of using PC CRTs. For games locked to 60Hz or below, I still prefer playing them on a CRT for exactly that reason and I own a number of CRTs for this reason.
> At some point this unchecked desire will suck all of the fun out of a hobby
You’re projecting. I think I’ve got what I enjoy from my hobby figured out after 35+ years, but thanks anyway.
> The game story, gameplay elements, and such have become secondary to the real hobby of consumerism.
You’re projecting.
> If people could have fun gaming 20 years ago
I didn’t have to endure sample and hold slop 20 years ago, now I do. You may accept or tolerate it, I am under no requirement to do so, nor live in a world where I must accept a significant performance loss is “ok” in any circumstance.
If I wanted less performance, I’d buy something with less performance to begin with.
> 5% would already be well within the margin of difference for separate identical clean installations of windows on the same hardware.
what is the source of this non-determinism?
I gave it a try. Got a steam deck, tries steam os on my desktop.
I kept running into issues that took me time to solve. I understand that the only reason it took me time to solve these issues is because I'm new to it and that people who have been gaming on Linux for years already know how to solve them all. But what would happen was is I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game. I kept this up for a couple months but honestly at some point I just gave up. Now I'm playing games on Windows again.
To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of Linux gaming. I just unfortunately am too busy these days to spend the time to get it to work.
I can recommend CachyOS as a linux distribution for gaming that has worked for me across multiple computers without any fiddling. It's the one that's led to me ditching windows entirely after a few failed attempts over the years.
Although, everyone probably says that about whatever distro they happen to use lol.
I was only able to install the latest CachyOS image by modifying the boot arguments in grub of the live installer, after reading the lengthy log file it pooped out after the first install fail.
I have no idea why people recommend this to people who aren't actually deep into tech and linux already.
Agreed. Recommendations to use Arch-based distros especially. My personal recommendation, which has ended up sticking for a few Linux-curious gamer friends, has always been Bazzite.
Yeah, that's why I added the qualifier at the end. But I legit flashed a USB with the ISO, booted, installed the OS, installed steam, installed a game, ran it, and had 0 issues or customisations required.
I wonder if other Linux distros had the same issue.
I haven't had it in the past with PopOS or Fedora, but it could be that the nvidia drivers back then weren't an issue. I could try with another distro if you're curious, that laptop is mostly a sacrificial machine for testing out distros and other stuff.
I think I’d avoid the Cosmic version of POP!OS for a while for gaming. I mean it works but you do have to get fiddling again unlike the previous not cosmic version.
Most egregious problem is that steam games start in a strange window rather than full screen and you have to press a weird key combo to fix it.
Nvidia based Acer nitro FWIW your mileage may vary
I was in the same boat. You should try running an AI agent to solve your problems. Works like a charm. Most of the times. The times it doesn't, it wasn't worth it anyway.
Depends a lot on your hardware. I've got a ~2020 gaming pc and I just installed bazzite on it, moved my desktop to the TV and only use it with an xbox controller. Never opened the terminal or configured anything, all my games just work.
> I would sit down to play a game spend maybe an hour or two fixing issues and then after that I ran out of time to play the game
I know you framed this as a negative, but this is something I yearn for; It's the one of the best games, imo. I often wish I ran into more issues, but for the most part, things _just work_^TM.
You clearly don't work in a legacy codebase
Yeah some hardware combinations are just broken. IF ur lucky everything will just work, if not you can likely fix it with enough skill. That's better than nothing, but understandably frustrating if you accidentally pick a bad combination of devices.
Unfortunately the install process is always going to be at least a little bit technical. I wish it wasn't, but idk how you'd do that without making the os like an emmu chip that you can swap out, instead of a thing you write on your drive.
And I'll try again when I have more time.
Most folks are in this category. But most, including me, wont try anytime soon unless some very positive news come up. We have lives to live, kids to raise, work to do and so on.
Gaming moved for a lot of us from 'now I have 5 hours or whole weekend to gaming if I want to' to mere blips here and there, which need to be as frictionless as poasible.
Which is great - it means we are doing something actually meaningful and more worthy in our lives. But it also means I will never have enough time for such fiddling. I am fine with it, as much as I can be, but lets be honest to ourselves here.
Which brings up a point I've been wondering over the years.
Where are the hordes of kids like us back then who were content with the afternoons, evenings and wee early morning hours of endless fiddling? What I realize now is those years spent fiddling sharpened our debugging senses in both ineffable and tractable ways.
A larger proportion of the juniors I see coming through the corporate halls these days than I remember from even 10 years ago do not have that knack for fiddling, nor history when it comes up. And it shows in their debugging temperament. LLM's are making this worse.
I've seen the sentiment come up a lot, and I've talked about it with a buddy a lot.
For all the issues people claim to have with iOS or Android, they really "just work" compared to the shit we had to deal with back in the day. And I don't even mean bugs, but UX just wasn't as sleek.
I can find a pdf of the TTRPG I'm playing that's hidden deep in an iCloud drive by simply opening spotlight an typing the approximate name. And the same works on my iPhone. Apps that create documents for me hide their file structure, because it's all abstracted away from me. It works, and I don't have to think about it as much.
You still have kids that start fiddling with tech, but only out of clear interest. Not as a necessity.
I have both a Windows gaming machine and a Steam Deck, so I am already using Linux for gaming... when I can.
Some of my favorite games that I play don't work on it, though, so I need to keep my PC. My issues are not performance, but inability to play at all.
For me personally, the biggest game that keeps me from only using Linux for gaming is EA FC (used to be called FIFA, it is the soccer game). It requires Windows to play online. The same for PUBG, which is another game I play with friends.
As long as I can't play those games, I have to keep my windows gaming PC.
I personally don't mind that much, honestly. It would be nice to play on Linux for everything, but I can dual boot when I am not gaming if I want to.
> As far as gaming is concerned Linux just works
Absolutely not. It works, it doesn't "just work". Tuning is absolutely required for a lot of games to get them working. Random crashes, "oh multiplayer doesn't work? singleplayer does?", random glitches, random performance issues, etc.
I still prefer dealing with some issues over dealing with Windows, but it doesn't "just work".