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- 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
- 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 - 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.
- Linux is one of the best Win-API platforms.
It is the absolute best for backwards compatibility: it runs 16 bit apps.
Now it is getting faster for gaming.
And the reverse relation is also true: In Linux, the best backwards compatible stable API is WinAPI.
I can play 30 year old Windows games in Linux. They just work and run better than ever.
For the same project (https://www.descent2.de), I can not even install the dependencies to compile it in a modern distro, as every library is deprecated and removed from the repositories. The precompiled native Linux binaries also can't work.
by Shorel - Finding a way to get the multiplayer studios to get Linux support for their competitive games like Valve does could crack a wedge in the market for mainstream users to get in, particularly in those who don't want to pay the Windows tax (not everyone is willing to experiment or go unlicensed).
I can't prove it, but the Steam Deck has probably torn down a lot of barriers for mainstream use among the crowd that care about the game more than the OS. Getting some of the other games (League, Vanguard, Warzone, BF6, etc.) or whatever is popular in those segments onboard might be the critical mass that justifies fixing all the rough edges that get fixed when a big pile of users are represented.
by 9x39 - Given the current momentum, it feels like (to me) the adage of “Windows is for Games” is going by the wayside.
If you look at Steam, and OSs like Bazzite it’s clear the consumer-side is finally shoring up. But that aside, from an economic incentive, game providers (for example Amazon Luna), don’t want to be paying the licenses for running Windows machines for Video Game Streaming on Demand. In fact, at my time there one of the major thing I worked on was figuring out how to stream the games using Linux + Proton + Vulkan so we could use the AMD machines.
Honestly the biggest hurdle was (and probably still is) Anti-Cheat and BattlEye.
At any rate, I’m personally happy to see this trend as I haven’t had a Windows OS since Windows 7.
- Feels like there is some real momentum on linux gaming now. I mostly play older games but I've gotten most of them working acceptably in proton on my old system 76 laptop (oryp5, with a nvidia 2060; ~7 years old). The laptop actually has plenty of power for the games I play, but I underclock to keep the heat/fan speeds down (been doing the same on the win10 install on the same system), still getting acceptable framerate in proton for most of the things I do in game, non intense stuff.
Decades ago I ported some games to linux but I do think proton is the correct approach now. One underappreciated advantage is you get most of the mod environment too. In ESO for instance, there is an addon (tamriel trade center) which lets you download item prices, but it requires a windows client exe to do that. That client works on proton.
I also do some modding myself and can cross compile my rust code to windows with cargo xwin, and run it right away in proton, which is fairly amusing to behold.
I actually don't mind windows generally (been a MS user since DOS 5), but Win11 is a game changer, pun intended, and not in a good way.
by trashface - Used to be a staff member working on an x86 OS called CTOS. I realized if I implemented a couple of traps, we could run command-line DOS programs. So I did. And it worked. Dev tools, text processing, piped commands all worked.
It helped that the DOS executable format was the same as the CTOS format - because we had traded Bill Gates our linker (which produces executables) for his BASIC compiler.
by JoeAltmaier