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Three gaming-focused Linux operating systems beat Windows 11 in gaming benchmark
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago1. Why not link the original article[1] with the benchmarks and use your favorite way to translate? 2. Curious why they didn't use OG Ubuntu in the benchmarks. Yes Popos(I still don't agree on that name) is just another Ubuntu, but I would have proffered the OG snice that's the most popular worldwide and I don't know what Popos does to make it more "gaming focused" than vanilla Ubuntu. For another popular Ubuntu alternative they could have also went with Linux Mint. AFAIK both are still default on X11 while latest Ubuntu defaults to Wayland so that could have made a difference. [1] https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distribution-zum-spielen/2/ https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distributio...
- smoldesu 3y ago> I don't know what Popos does to make it more "gaming focused" than vanilla Ubuntu. They have a few changes, chief among them being the PopOS scheduler which I find to be quite effective: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler The desktop itself is a weird custom-baked x11/GNOME customization you won't really get on Ubuntu. Not many distributions can claim the title of being truly "unique", but PopOS does deserve the title in my opinion. Even still it wouldn't be my choice for gaming, but I'll defend it's identity as something more than another GNOME/Debian spin.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago> Not many distributions can claim the title of being truly "unique" Sir, I think you've just insulted like dozens of distros out there. IMHO there are a lot of more "truly unique" distros out there than just spins of Ubuntu with a different DE and scheduler: Nobara(from the benchmark), Q4OS, Antix, Mabox, Linux Lite, Gecko Linux, Spiral Linux, in no particular order, not that they're better than Popos, but they're definitely more unique.
- smoldesu 3y agoProbably so. Relative to PopOS, not many of them are quite as pre-customized (not that it's an inherently good or bad thing).
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDepends. Personally I don't consider Popos's DE to be a feature but more of a bug. I think the two competing giants, KDE and Gnome, are more solid and see more dev time and effort put into them, and will do just fine to satisfy all users, preferences and use cases, I don't see the need for the Nth+1 DE that fixes problems Gnome & KDE don't have. But that's just my opinion.
- ianlevesque 3y agoFrom using PopOS, mostly for other reasons like out of the box drive encryption and nvidia support, the DE's purpose as far as I can tell is mostly to provide a reasonably user-friendly tiling window manager without replacing all of Gnome. Though now they are also replacing all of gnome in the next major release, so who knows.
- jwells89 3y agoI think the thing that makes popOS relevant to gaming is how system76 offers a variant with proprietary Nvidia drivers baked in and properly configured to not break with updates.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThat's a good point.
- brnt 3y agoThat's precisely what Ubuntu (and Debian) offer with the nvidia driver from their repos, isn't it?
- jwells89 3y agoYou have to install that after installing Ubuntu, which isn’t necessarily clear and might be confusing for someone coming from Windows where there is only one Nvidia driver, with the version shipped with Windows being adequate for most users.
- themaninthedark 3y agoIf you are gaming on Windows, you are most likely installing GeForce now and updating the Nvidia driver separately from the Windows updater so the install separate driver is probably not foreign or confusing to users. Also on Mint, the OS installs with the open source driver but upon first boot it shows a notification to allow you to download and enable the closed source driver so it is very upfront and not something that you need to hunt for.
- jwells89 3y agoPeople building their own systems are definitely going to be installing from GeForce Experience, but there’s quite a number of prebuilt users who probably aren’t. Mint’s approach is definitely better than Ubuntu’s, but pop’s has the advantage of making it clear from the point of download that Nvidia users are covered.
- Ardms78 3y ago@FirmwareBurner Just to answer the first question. I thought this was actually a good summary in English plus it has the link to the original article.
- type0 3y agoapropos popos, if you want Ubuntu but with Flatpak instead of Snap it's a good fast way to get it
- herbst 3y agoMint has degraded in the last 10 years and likely shouldn't be easily recommended anymore. After the buzz came the maintaining issues. I am not a fan of Ubuntu on desktops either and have no idea what PopOS is.
- spacechild1 3y ago> Yes Popos(I still don't agree on that name) Do you happen to be German? ;-) To be fair, it's actually spelled PopOS, making it more clear that it's not about baby butts. There are definitely worse offenders. Looking at you, Wix and MongoDB!
- ianai 3y agoPop_OS! Arch, and Nobara
- kiwijamo 3y agoI find it interesting that Arch is considered a gaming-focus Linux distro. Is that really the case? From my experience, I've see Arch as a general-purpose bleeding-edge distro.
- Hamuko 3y agoSteam Deck runs Arch.
- charcircuit 3y agoNo, it runs SteamOS. Else Pop_OS! is Ubuntu and Nobara is Fedora.
- calamari4065 3y ago>Pop_OS! is Ubuntu and Nobara is Fedora. Correct.
- yoyohello13 3y agoSteamOS is Arch based.
- pseudosaid 3y agoI cant get enough of the HN semantic pedantry overlooking the forest for the tree.
- Jnr 3y agoAnd Ubuntu is Debian based, it's not really Debian though. I own Steam Deck and I also use Arch as my main desktop distro. While Steam Deck uses Arch as a base, it is slightly tweaked. The file system is read only out of the box and you are supposed to upgrade it together with SteamOS from the Steam settings menu. When connected to monitor and switched to desktop mode, it runs regular KDE desktop. If you want to keep it a vanilla SteamOS (with read only system) but still install apps, you can install flatpaks (for example from KDE application store).
- charcircuit 3y ago>had a substantially larger 17 fps gap A gap of FPS has no meaning. FPS have to be compared with percentage difference. If you want to measure a gap in absolute terms you need to convert the measurements to milliseconds per frame.
- qayxc 3y agoThe original source features a frametime-based rating as well. Surprise, surprise, Windows 11 and Arch are both identical in terms of performance, while Pop!OS and Nobara are about 9% behind.
- GranPC 3y agoI think you're reading or portraying that wrong. Pop!_OS and Nobara are about 9% behind in frametime, i.e. their frametimes are 9% lower. That's a good thing!
- andrewmackrodt 3y agoThe charts don't make this particularly clear, but the text summary mentions "Windows is stronger in terms of 1% percentile frame times.". It's still open to interpretation what exactly they are measuring with their frame timings, e.g. is Windows consistently generating frames within 10.6ms but Nobora is up to 9% less performant then that, sometimes 11.6ms? Although this only seems to be for the 1% lows. I don't think it's a particularly insightful metric in this particular benchmark.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y agothey really doubled down on that Vavle typo, haha
- silisili 3y agoSix times they misspelled Valve, once even in the subtitle. Once I could see as poor editing, but this seems egregious.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoOr the editor mistakenly added "Vavel" to their autocorrect/spell-checker as the correct spelling, and hit 'Publish' without proof reading thoroughly.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago“Add to dictionary” shouldn’t be taken lightly.
- jzb 3y ago“Arch is the most ‘Linux-like’ of the three” Say what? Not sure how the other two are any less “Linux-like” than Arch. They’re all Linux, which is about as Linux-like as it gets.
- jamesTee49 3y ago[dead]
- jeppester 3y agoI was about to post the same thing. Distros the like of Arch are outliers in a landscape dominated by "batteries included" distros, neither of which are more or less Linux. It's a sentence you would expect from someone with little to no knowledge about Linux.
- danielheath 3y agoAs a sysadmin of machines on several distros, IME Arch is the most "linux-like" in that I'm constantly having to figure out obscure errors to make shit work again after an update. No snark: I understand that's largely a result of Arch deliberately pushing decisions down to users rather than deciding for you, appreciate that it's a deliberate decision, and am _very_ glad it exists. I guess if "Linux is about choice" (it's not) then Arch is very Linux-like.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI tried using Arch for my work machine for a bit. It might be better if I only manually run updates for security stuff, but that's management time I could spend doing my job, not polishing my tools.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kouteiheika 3y ago> As a sysadmin of machines on several distros, IME Arch is the most "linux-like" in that I'm constantly having to figure out obscure errors to make shit work again after an update. This is interesting because it hasn't been my experience at all. IIRC in the last 3 years I only had to fix something after an update once, and that was only because of my own stupidity. I actually find Arch a lot more stable now than when I was using Ubuntu many many years ago, where something would always break after upgrading to a new version. (But maybe Ubuntu's better in this regards nowadays; I don't know.)
- zamalek 3y agoThis should get even better with the new Wayland WINE stuff (freshly stable apparently, I haven't tried it yet).
- albertzeyer 3y agoI don't quite understand this benchmark. Why compare distributions? What's really the difference here? Some different X11 or Wayland settings? Different driver versions? Different kernel or kernel settings? Whatever distribution I currently have, in almost all cases, I should be able to configure those things just as well? So this is just a test about which distro has the best defaults? Ok, it's maybe interesting to some. But the text is misleading, it writes this as "what is the best distro for gaming". For me, much more interesting would be, what are relevant settings to maybe improve the performance, with my distribution of choice.
- adamomada 3y agoCheck out the nobara home page, it probably has more info that what you expected https://nobaraproject.org https://nobaraproject.org I guess the idea is that yeah you could do everything Nobara did to your own distro, but then you’d just end up with the same thing.
- monkaiju 3y agoNot sure what make Pop!_os, which i use daily, more gaming focused than just Ubuntu, which also comes with nvidia drivers... also they tested on amd so even more confused at the distinction.
- geoffbp 3y agoYear of the Linux desktop.
- juunpp 3y agoIt's this year for sure. Let's go, guys.
- eska 3y agoConsidering how user hostile Windows 11 has become, yes actually. Can’t even make local accounts anymore.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 3y agoW11 was the reason I quit dualbooting
- throwaway2990 3y agoWah wah wah windows 11 same as windows 10 with menu centered it hurts my feelings I can’t use it anymore. Still no one gives any /actual/ reasons why windows 11 is bad. Just their hurt feelings.
- gumballindie 3y agoLet me guess, you believe the earth is flat, ai is intelligent, and windows 11 is godsend.
- throwaway2990 3y agoEarth is round, and if you think ai isn’t going to be intelligent then you’re not intelligent yourself. Also don’t use windows daily but atleast I’m not an idiot “m$ bad cos reasons so I can whine on hacker news to my boyfriends in a circle jerk”
- 3y ago
- ashout33 3y agoI'm still trying to figure out how to stream to my friends with working game audio
- vondur 3y agoI think a lot of you are missing the forest for the trees. The fact that Linux is capable of running Windows binaries as well as Windows does is pretty awesome.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y agoThe problem with gaming on Linux I found is that a lot of games won't work. Even if it's advertised to work for Linux, it might not work on your distro, or it might not have controller support or audio. Sure you could try and troubleshoot, but I want to play a game, not work. What if you spend a few hours troubleshooting, you get the game working, and you find that it's not actually fun? MacOS is the same btw.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoI permanently deleted the Blizzard/Battle.net identity I'd had since D2:LoD after dealing with Blizzard Support over Diablo IV. Hour long waits to get in, frequent crashes and logouts, no actual help or troubleshooting, and my refund was denied for "too much in-game time" within 48 hours of purchase (6 hours of troubleshooting and waiting, about an hour of uninterrupted play). This was on a native Windows install, by the way. My point is that Linux is a great filter for companies with the worst behaviors. If it happens to be a coincidence that the games that tend not to work on Linux also belong to those companies, so much the better. Also, if it's not in Wine's AppDB or ProtonDB, try using https://looking-glass.io/ https://looking-glass.io/ with a Win10 IoT VM that's been "debloated". It's like having Windows as a Service.
- erinnh 3y agoDo be aware though that many modern games with anti cheat will not run in Windows VMs. It was the reason why I deleted my Windows VM last year.
- marcus_holmes 3y agoI think this is happening less as the Steam Deck forces non-Linux-compatible games (and games rated as Linux-compatible but with outstanding problems) to fix any outstanding issues so they can work properly on the Deck. Lots of games in my Steam list have had updates over the past 6 months making them work on the Deck, and I assume (though haven't tested) that that will also impact their compatibility with non-Deck Linux boxes.
- 3y ago
- catlover76 3y agoTrying to use Linux for gaming, expecting all one's expensive hardware to work well, etc., seems really risky to me. :e
- jaredhallen 3y agoI guess that's true, but seems like the only risk would be having to install Windows if one wasn't happy.
- Log_out_ 3y agoOnce one gaming generation doesn't grow up on windows.. It's dead. When they learn how to do all the things with the in game modding language. It has no real comeback. It can open up, become a 2nd Linux, but then why?
- Quentincestino 3y ago> Gaming-focused distros I'm a bit confused, literally any Linux distro has everything in their repositories to install Proton and GPU drivers. > Arch, which is the most Linux one I love Arch but it's not the "most Linux" (i dont even know what it's supposed to mean). And for someine trying to make a transition from Windows to Linux it's factually the most hostile.
- aledujke 3y agoI'm fairly certain that this has been the case in the past. I think i remember when wine was still very unstable some games ran better on linux than on windows. But the caveat was that some of the features were not translated via wine. For example some type of lightning or shading (as in shadows) technique... like you would just not have shadows. So back then it was said that games ran faster because the GPU did less work cause of the missing "features" when doing the translation. Is this not the case anymore? Does proton translate all of the api calls from say dx12? Were the games tested in vulkan or dx12 and are we sure thy look the same visually?
- Atlas26 3y ago> But the caveat was that some of the features were not translated via wine. For example some type of lightning or shading (as in shadows) technique... like you would just not have shadows. So back then it was said that games ran faster because the GPU did less work cause of the missing "features" when doing the translation. Do you have a source or example vid or something to link to showing this? I ask cause I've seen this claim pop up a number of times here and on reddit but never have been able to find concrete examples of it actually happening, in addition to the Wine docs saying (IIRC) that if Wine runs into something that isn't/can't be translated, that the program will crash, not just omit it. The idea that it would just not appear at all seems less probable to me than the game crashing.
- aledujke 3y agoUnfortunately no, this is from the memory, from around when I first heard of WINE like 20 years ago. Might have been a discussion on osnews.com but I can't really remember it well. >The idea that it would just not appear at all seems less probable to me than the game crashing. Now that you mention it, the story might have been something else... there was news about linux beating windows in gaming, but the issue was not WINE but linux drivers for the GPUs at the time not having some features supported. Again this is such a random information for me to remember it's all hazy. I'm almost 40 years old >.>