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  • I wonder what spanners Windows can throw into the works to slow them down at this point, or if they're so checked out of the Desktop market as they suckle down hard on that Azure teat, that they're more than happy to let Linux eat their lunch
    by tetris11
  • MS does not care. At all. This doesn't affect anything that they make a profit on.
    by Night_Thastus
  • Really their best card is new and additional APIs, building incentives to develop against it.

    WinRT (not to be confused with Windows RT, the early ARM version of windows), UWP, GDK, xgameruntime. All of these are relatively new and require virtualization and other security features.

    Put pressure on devs by gateing xbox and gamepass behind this runtime and now you have a lever to make the situation more difficult for linux.

    Kinda has the opposite effect on me however, as the only reason I'm not subscribed to gamepass right now is the games wont work on my steamdeck. But if MS can get enough killer apps as exclusive to that platform then that will certainly add some pressure.

    by WhiteDawn
  • They can’t, they’re selling backwards compatibility - but it matters less and less each year as more stuff moves to the browsers.
    by baq
  • My theory is that Microsoft is paying Adobe billions never to release their tools on Linux. It's Windows' last stronghold.
    by sph
  • Given how popular Steam Deck and fiends have gotten I wonder if companies would avoid it because it could noticeably hurt sales until it’s added to proton.
    by MBCook
  • Microsoft/Xbox is in the process of losing the living room permanently in the next gen if you ask me.

    I don't know what they could do spanner tossing wise to really screw w/ Linux gaming at this point that wouldn't just drive more frustrated customers off their platform.

    by jdubs1984
  • You are not gonna get promoted slowing down Linux gaming at MS today, the thing they want is Netflix of gaming where the platform doesn’t matter but everyone’s paying them $20 a month
    by whywhywhywhy
  • I predict that ntsync will eventually evolve into full blown ntoskrnl.ko and there would be virtually no overhead on calling Windows API. You can almost call it a Linux Subsystem for Windows.
    by mifydev
  • It would be fun to call it Windows Subsystem for Linux!
    by advisedwang
  • I use Bazzite for all my gaming (Returnal at the minute) and it works unbelievably well. I don’t tinker with any of the proton version. I just press play.

    I recently completed Stellar Blade with zero issues.

    I don’t even shutdown the machine, I just hit the power to sleep it. Instantly resumes where I left off.

    Incredible to see just how far it’s come.

    by chromadon
  • im using bazzite with an amd cpu and amd gpu and sleep doesn't work properly? what motherboard/cpu/gpu do you have? did you have to do something special to make it work?
    by coconut08
  • There's been real progress. Wine's memory allocator had an architecture with three nested locks. "Realloc" held a futex lock on the memory allocator while recopying the buffer. Multiple threads doing allocation could go into futex congestion, with many threads looping on the futex. This made Vec::push in Rust insanely inefficient. Some of my programs dropped from 60FPS to about 0.5 FPS.

    Fixed in Wine 11.0. Thanks to the Wine team.

    Not sure if this was related to NTSYNC, but Wine's locking infrastructure definitely got an overhaul.

    by Animats
  • I developed for windows before moving to linux. I was surprised to find that was no system call similar to windows WaitForMultipleObjects. Sure you can implement something similar using poll() or using condition variables. but WaitForMultipleObjects seems so much simpler and more versatile
    by las_balas_tres
  • Its IO completion ports I miss.
    by lowbloodsugar
  • Epoll / select? since everything is a file, you can wait on everything.
    by FuckButtons
  • A lot of that flexibility is what makes it hard to efficiently emulate (especially without kernel level support), but some of it seems too flexible to make sense as the default choice. How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes, and why should that lock type be the one that a game engine uses for almost all of its locks?
    by wtallis
  • The article mentions this: "A few years back, Linux added a way for software to wait on several events at once, which is something Windows had built in for decades, but Linux didn't."

    This is not really my area, but from a quick web search, I think they mean io_uring. Here's a blog post about it: https://mazzo.li/posts/uring-multiplex.html

    by adrianmonk
  • I support linux gaming btw but I can't help but feel every narrative glosses over that certain games are going to require uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheating systems.

    I'm just realizing that I can't play Battlefield 6 and I do wonder what the path is. I don't think it's ever going to be supported on Linux or Mac.

    by zuzululu
  • Battlefield 4 plays great on Linux, with active servers and functional crossplay/anticheat. It's usually less than $5 on sale and satiates my transient BF urges.
    by bigyabai
  • The fact that some games now come with root kits is insane. I really hope Microsoft cracks down on that nonsense.
    by encom
  • What is even more insane is I was playing Battlefield 1 on Linux for years, until in 2023(?) they backported "EA Anticheat" to BF1, half a decade after the game stopped getting support.

    This broke what was otherwise a perfectly normal Battlefield experience. Battlefield 4 requires Punkbuster, although it can run on Linux with no issues. You have to downgrade to an older version though, since EA hasn't updated BF4 to the latest PB AC, which causes you to get kicked.

    by HDBaseT
  • Unfortunately, the alternative to uncomfortably intrusive anti-cheat is more cheaters, because cheaters don't care about how intrusive their cheats have to be in order to evade anti-cheat. They will happily run hypervisor-level cheats.

    There's certainly room for improvement on the netcode sometimes (Client-side hit registration is an absolute bone-headed design), but those won't prevent aim bots.

    Server-side anti-cheat relies on heuristics and can easily be evaded. At the high level, a highly-skilled player may be indistinguishable from a cheater, so you could easily get false positives.

    by Sohcahtoa82
  • Show me the numbers. Show me an identical gaming PC running Windows 11 and then Linux, and show not just FPS - but things like frametime pacing, latency, etc.

    This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.

    I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.

    by Night_Thastus
  • Unless you're playing CS competitively and really need 720fps for your 360Hz monitor, is 5-30% fewer frames (all else equal) really a deal breaker? Is this hardware thats barly good enough or something else?

    I ask because I feel like I can frequently play games at, say, 150fps, and losing 30% would mean almost nothing to me to switch to Linux. I worry more about general capatibility and anticheat.

    by xboxnolifes
  • Here are some numbers: I bought a windows box with misconfigured dram timings (bios bug).

    I never would’ve been able to root cause it under windows (certainly not with builtin tools), but dmidecode on linux made the problem obvious.

    Fixing the timings fixed crashes in amdgpu that windows users widely reported (with no diagnosis), and increased frame rates by 30-50%.

    Anyway, if you really want to move, do yourself a favor and just go with straight AMD.

    Software support is better than intel and nvidia, HW blows intel out of the water. The only exception is if you need cuda for AI dev work.

    by hedora
  • Depending on storage constraints, you could always dualboot. That would give you the exact same hardware to compare, and it's not a full commitment.

    Anecdotally, I find that getting Linux on somewhat older or underpowered hardware is always a massive positive. Better performance as well as battery life. I'm not as familiar with modern hardware's relationship to either OS ("OS vs. some flavor of OS based on a similar or same kernel" - I know) with modern hardware. Worth a shot though!

    Every supercomputer seems to do quite well with Linux kernels. Probably good enough for Crysis :)

    by harrisi
  • Windows and Linux trade punches in terms of overall experience. What I've seen around is that if Linux has worse FPS, it tends to have more consistent pacing (it generally has better pacing - but not always, I had to abandon Once Human).

    Gamer's Nexus has a pretty extensive benchmark video: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Cx5Q1a-lMMm14H4i . They refuse to compare to Windows, and it kinda makes sense: if it's satisfactory on Linux for your demands then who cares what Windows can do?

    Here's a less professional, but direct comparison https://youtu.be/Giois6VtLPM?si=XFaVUMbea3u0AmP. An extremely important thing to note: AMD GPU. I personally have no idea what NVIDIA is like, but it sounds like their drivers are still all over the place.

    And kernel-level anti-cheat doesn't work, though some (e.g. EAC) run in user mode if the developer allows it. Make sure to check ProtonDB for the games you care about. I have personally never had a good experience with Linux builds of games, so I just always use Proton now - but maybe I'm cursed because others have passionately disagreed with my experience. Either way, if a Linux game is broken/bad, try forcing it into Proton.

    I don't want to say, "switch now" because it still has rough edges in terms of gaming. Better for you to have a great experience and stick around, than hate it and leave for good. Only you can figure out if it needs more time to cook based on some very light (ProtonDB) research.

    I last used a Windows machine about a year ago, and I can say with confidence that the average desktop experience is significantly superior to the barrage of bullshit that Windows puts you through.

    by zamalek
  • If memory serves, Linux typically outperforms Windows with AMD and Intel graphics. Some of the gotchas are things like running games through Proton or anti-cheat/DRM stuff not getting the same attention that Windows does, but the raw performance is there. I wouldn't recommend using Nvidia on Linux though.
    by helterskelter
  • I think the actual answer you are looking for is this paragraph:

    > These old workarounds got subtle edge cases wrong in ways that produced occasional hitches, deadlocks, or weird behavior in specific games, which are bugs that don't show up on benchmark charts but can absolutely ruin individual experiences. NTSYNC fixes those at the source by matching Windows behavior exactly, and that means as soon as your favorite distro moves to the new kernel version, whether it be Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, or a flavor of Ubuntu, they all get this much-needed fix.

    That's the crux of the article. NTSYNC isn't faster, it's more "correct". Most games are around the same level of performance, with certain outliers both ways. Right now there isn't anything performance wise that Linux has to do that would impact all games. Just tweaks and additions to the different layers [1][2][3] in the same way driver vendors do. Much of the poor performance is for API violations and other shenanigans.

    1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...

    2: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/blob/master/src/util/confi...

    3: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/maste...

    by braiamp