19 ms·

Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

980 points by haunter 6mo ago

ThrowawayR2 6mo ago
“He who fights with Windows should see to it that he himself does not become Windows. And when you gaze long into ntoskrnl, ntoskrnl also gazes into you.” Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?
- tester756 6mo ago
  What you care more about? technical details or real-world outcomes?
  - majorchord 5mo ago
    You might not get the answer you were hoping for there.
- tardedmeme 6mo ago
  What is the purpose of achieving victory? Is it to produce the software that works better or is it to stick your fingers in your ears and lalala the loudest? Windows copied futexes from Linux first, anyway.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  I mean the NT kernel was never really the enemy, it was the company behind it.
- breve 6mo ago
  Microsoft and Windows were never the enemy. To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
  - ThrowawayR2 6mo ago
    He got less humble later on when momentum started building behind Linux. To quote Linus Torvalds from 2003: “Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dpoloncsak 5mo ago
      I mean, this whole thread is basically suggesting that 23 years later, improvements to Linux and self-sabotage by Microsoft are going to possibly destroy (or atleast, start to cause some bleeding) to Microsoft (in the gaming-market). This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.
  - MisterTea 5mo ago
    We are so far removed from 1997 that this statement means nothing. > the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different. So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
    - not2b 5mo ago
      Rather, several missing, useful APIs that were hard to emulate efficiently have been added. That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".
      - MisterTea 5mo ago
        > several missing, useful APIs Windows API's. > That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel". How is that not?
    - Pay08 5mo ago
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  Not really, in the drunken happiness to have games, Linux users keep forgetting those are games developed on game studios that the only place there are GNU/Linux installations running are their MMO servers. It is no different from arguing how Linux is getting better GameCube games with Dolphin. Also Valve is only as good as its current management is still around, eventually like any other company time will pass, and new warm bodies will take other decisions.
- general1465 6mo ago
  If you are refusing to have a stable architecture, then you will maintain architecture of your enemy
- weiliddat 5mo ago
  Is the intent of Linux the architecture, or the philosophy of free / open source software?
- wwweston 5mo ago
  interface and architecture may influence each other, but interface doesn’t determine architecture
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
JoeAltmaier 6mo ago
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.
- CyberDildonics 5mo ago
  if I implemented a couple of traps What does this mean? System calls?
  - jjk7 5mo ago
    Before SYSCALL there was INT
    - m463 5mo ago
      I remember SVC. and also things like BR14 and IEFBR14
  - hack1312 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - rtkwe 5mo ago
    Similar but traps are triggered automatically on attempts to execute a protected instruction. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-system-calls-in-operating-system-os/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-sy...
    - dullcrisp 5mo ago
      Why/when are traps used rather than explicit system calls? Is it just historical coevolution? Or is the idea that the user mode program doesn’t need to know that it’s unprivileged? Or is it just repurposing the error handler path to perform privileged operations?
quxuejun 5mo ago
very nice~
tetris11 5mo ago
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
- jdubs1984 5mo ago
  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.
  - doublerabbit 5mo ago
    Lock future game developers in to a corner forcing them only to produce compatible for WSL, Windows for Linux releases. Restricting the license of use on GNU/Linux.
  - weezing 5mo ago
    Their gaming marketshare is minuscule both on PCs and consoles already. It's a downward spiral for years already.
    - onli 5mo ago
      Windows still has a huge gaming marketshare on PC, and Microsoft as publisher is still a big player. You mean something else?
    - mvdtnz 5mo ago
      According to my google searching XBox has almost a quarter of the console gaming market share. Hardly miniscule.
    - pinkmuffinere 5mo ago
      wow that's interesting. Where is the gaming share moving, if not pc and consoles? I guess hand-held devices (do those not count as consoles?) and phones?
Dwedit 5mo ago
Headline says "Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features", but only provides two actual examples? It lists NTSYNC, and waiting on multiple events at once.
- the8472 5mo ago
  ability to make some filesystems case-insensitive was also added for wine https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/using-the-linux-kernel-case-insensitive-feature-in-ext4/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...
las_balas_tres 5mo ago
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
- FuckButtons 5mo ago
  Epoll / select? since everything is a file, you can wait on everything.
  - gpderetta 5mo ago
    The last time I asked the same question here, user dwattttt finally pointed out[1][2] to me that there is a significant difference: wfmo can actually acquire semaphores in addition to waiting for them, which poll can't do in a non-racy way and efficient way. It can also do rendezvous synchronization (i.e. signal-and-wait). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513667 [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5ad1d43@codeweavers.com/T/#u https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5a...
- wtallis 5mo ago
  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?
  - spacechild1 5mo ago
    > How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes, What do you mean? SRWLock (or the older CRITICAL_SECTION) cannot be shared between processes. A (Win32) Mutex does work across processes, but that's its entire purpose. So Windows does have different tools for different jobs. In fact, it's really the other way round: on Linux, a futex also works across processes, but there is no equivalent in Windows. (Sadly, WaitOnAddress can only be used in a single process.)
caycep 5mo ago
If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?
- guizadillas 5mo ago
  yes
- notac26 5mo ago
  Def AMD. And if your focus is gaming I’d give SteamOS a go. With a full AMD setup you should basically be plug and play.
- graynk 5mo ago
  AMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers
- eikenberry 5mo ago
  AMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-hdmi-2-1-support-is-coming-to-linux-now-with-frl-and-dsc/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...
  - cute_boi 5mo ago
    any reason why we are using hdmi over display port?
    - saidinesh5 5mo ago
      The vast majority of the TVs only come with HDMI .. not even good enough analog inputs anymore..
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 5mo ago
fleroviumna 5mo ago
[dead]
wwweston 5mo ago
I only hope this eventually reaches enough coverage to support media production. It’s the last commercial area I care about. I’m entirely willing to pay for good work here (and have) but both major commercial desktop OSs are exhibiting significant warning signs of contempt for the users.
mifydev 5mo ago
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.
- advisedwang 5mo ago
  It would be fun to call it Windows Subsystem for Linux!
  - sedatk 5mo ago
    which would be the right use of the term. WSL was originally called LXSS = linux subsystem. As I understand, lawyers stepped in soon after.
    - sunaookami 5mo ago
      They already did the same thing 25 years ago with "Windows Services for UNIX": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
      - wmf 5mo ago
        Which is also backwards.
    - throwaway27448 5mo ago
      The two terms seem semantically identical (i.e., ambiguous and therefore meaningless) to me.
      - sedatk 5mo ago
        You wouldn't call a Nintendo emulator "Windows emulator for Nintendo" would you.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
bsimpson 5mo ago
I remember when XDA was the home of Android homebrew hackers working on things like CyanogenMod. It's so strange to see it repurposed as the brand for the same quasi-correct tech article slop that gets parroted between all the big blogs. Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.
- sphars 5mo ago
  Same with all the bigger tech blogs from a decade ago. How-To Geek is completely overrun with the same sort of slop. Finally had to remove it from my RSS reader. Oh look at that, XDA and HTG are both owned by Valnet: https://www.valnetinc.com/en/technology https://www.valnetinc.com/en/technology
  - r_lee 5mo ago
    private equity, what would we do without you?!
  - stuartq 5mo ago
    At least Anandtech just shut down rather than turning into a zombie tech blog.
- navigate8310 5mo ago
  The same happened with AndroidPolice
- hx8 5mo ago
  This is not just a Tech Journalism problem, but applies to a lot of other Journalism.
- Fogest 5mo ago
  I get a lot of XDA articles appearing in my Google News feeds and a good chunk of the ones I read definitely have the slop half baked vibe to them. Where they barely provide much substance in the article and sometimes barely even address what the article headline said. They also pump out so many articles about the same topics. I swear I've seen like 100 articles from them just on Obsidian Notes alone and so many of them are barebones and lackluster. There is the odd decent nugget in there, but it is a shame seeing them fall like this. Unfortunately the same sentiment is true about most news sites now.
TheRealPomax 5mo ago
This page really does not like playing nice with reader mode, making it near impossible to read unfortunately.
torusle 5mo ago
Linux does not dragged down in performance by the thousands of virus and malware scanners.
- Pooge 5mo ago
  If by "thousands of virus" you mean software shipped by default in Windows, then I agree with you. Everything feels so sluggish on Windows 11 compared to any Linux distribution even if you run it on an HDD... it's ridiculous.
dmvvilela 5mo ago
What about macos?
- Pooge 5mo ago
  Apple doesn't care about gaming.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    Apple has never really cared about games unless it's on the iPhone or iPad. It's worked out well for them though. Mobile gaming is a $100 billion dollar market, PC gaming and console gaming are each about half that.
    - bigyabai 5mo ago
      Well sure it worked out great for Apple. By preventing users from sideloading emulators or playing real games, you force them to purchase gambling apps and low-quality slopware to entertain themselves. "Real world" game developers like Nintendo outright gave up on iOS/mobile gaming because it wasn't a comparable gaming experience. A good example of this is the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which were so lazily ported that most fans advocate for pirating the originals instead. Why should anyone pay $14.99 for the bad version of FFVI?
    - MBCook 5mo ago
      They don’t care about iPhone/iPad gaming either. They stumbled into the perfect spot with the iPhone, then IAP sweetened it. Since they found money they support it. But in the process they’ve really destroyed gaming on the platform unless you want casino games or candy crush/clash of clans things designed to extract money and show another ad every 12 seconds. Yeah they show Resident Evil VIII and Assassins Creed Whatever but they don’t sell much. And the race to free IAPs created mean good games can’t sell even at a single $2 purchase. Apple Arcade is the only sanctuary. I haven’t heard good things from the dev side, and it’s 80%+ old games from before things were destroyed or IAP riddled games with the IAPs removed, at times not even rebalanced. I use it because it’s about all that’s left. But iPhone gaming is a shadow of what we had in the early years. And at this point there is no competition left. The smart phone ate everything. And as far as I know Android games are in the same mess.
keithnz 5mo ago
my son, and his friends all seem to have switched to https://garudalinux.org/ https://garudalinux.org/ recently for gaming. Seems to be working out well for them.
- whimblepop 5mo ago
  That's exactly the kind of flashy, gaming-forward distro I was drawn to as a teenager. Good times :)
  - willis936 5mo ago
    I sometimes wonder if my modern machines could run Sabayon's DE with high performance.
    - whimblepop 5mo ago
      When I wrote the comment you replied to here, I of course had Sabayon in mind. Sabayon had some loveliness beyond that surface level, too. If the distro still existed (MocaccinoOS is a thing nowadays, but it's a completely different base), I'd probably spin it up out of nostalgia.
- skipants 5mo ago
  Pretty cool distro! I switched to Bazzite myself but I've also seen a lot of popularity for CachyOS for gaming rigs.
- Prunkton 5mo ago
  I'm working and gaming on Garuda for over 3 years and not planing to switch any time soon. It runs super smooth, with the build in 'wayback machine' and 'curated' Arch distro (7.0 zen kernel just dropped a week ago) pretty much bullet proof for beginners or as a daily distro if you want to get stuff done w/o caring much about it - just loving it. On the other hand side you have cutting edge gaming tech like wine/proton staging versions per default, so I'm playing Blizzard games with NTSYNC (the tech from the article) for several months now :) Forgot about most of the flashy default UI though :D
Beijinger 5mo ago
I found the computer in the article more interesting than the fact, that gaming is getting faster under Linux. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-worlds-first-keyboard-with-a-built-in-computer https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-wo... Interesting, but I wish it was half the size folded...
trashface 5mo ago
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.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
  I'm looking to finally get off Windows for good. My experience with the SteamDeck started me, later I upgraded to a ROG Ally X for beefier performance but found Windows insufferable on a handheld, and installed SteamOS. I was blown away by the performance gains. A few months later I installed Kubuntu for the first time since 2013 or so, Steam shortly after, and while the desktop linux route is definitely more taxing (manually installing things like Mod Organizer 2 instead of Vortex, for instance, and all of that needing to run differently as opposed to Windows where it's all just .exe's) I've been absolutely blown away by the performance gains again. Mind you this machine is no slacker, it's a GE76 Raider from MSI, 3060 under the hood, but games just run smoother in Linux. And the alt-tab experience is untouchable, Fallout: New Vegas hates it and crashes, but everything more modern utterly doesn't care. I can alt-tab in and out, check messages, desktop composing works great no matter what game I'm playing, no more issues in modded games where the game completely locks the machine as Linux just doesn't seem to allow it, it's fantastic. I have a couple more things to figure, I need XBox authentication to work for Halo Infinite and Sea of Theives, among others, and I need to figure out some solutions for some ancient software I have to run, which will probably end up being a Windows 11 VM. But as for my daily driver OS, I am so excited to get off Windows once and for all.
wnevets 5mo ago
It may finally be the year of the linx desktop. Microsoft actively being hostile to towards Windows users can't last forever.
- hx8 5mo ago
  The Linux desktop won not with a bang, but because all of the Windows users realized they would be happier with iPads.
  - MBCook 5mo ago
    If you competitor starts fading faster than you improve, eventually you’ll pass them no matter how far ahead they were.
- lunar_rover 5mo ago
  It might be the year of Linux gaming systems. The desktop went from terrible to bad and is still at least a decade behind unless some organisation invests dozens of millions and gets themselves an actual professional dev team.
lowbloodsugar 5mo ago
This is good to hear, but I get 120FPS on Windows in Cyberpunk 2077 and ~70 on Ubuntu. Horizon Zero Dawn is much worse, and quite often drops to seconds-per-frame instead of frames-per-second, if I turn on dynamic scaling. I just have an ssd with windows on it for gaming and boot to that from the bios. Also means my headphones UI works too. But, to be fair, the fact that I _can_ run Cyberpunk and HZD if I want to is pretty impressive.
Animats 5mo ago
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.
bradley13 5mo ago
It's actually been a couple of years since I ran across a game that didn't work well on Linux. At most, I have had to bump the default Proton version.
- tdb7893 5mo ago
  I have occasional issues mainly with graphics drivers or anti-cheat. Otherwise thought it's remarkably stable. I've also gotten a lot of non-Steam games to work fine.
- laughing_man 5mo ago
  It really depends on the type of game you play. As everyone points out, kernel level anti-cheat is a problem on Linux, but also games that require odd controllers have trouble as well. One game I play, Farming Simulator 22, doesn't work well on Linux because they use the raw windows input from joysticks and wheels. You can still play with mouse and keyboard, but the fun isn't there. I was pleasantly surprised at just how many of my games worked well on my new Ubuntu install. Even more so at how many games are playable on my Xubuntu Chromebook install.
- makeitdouble 5mo ago
  On the games that won't work well, last time I looked at it anything VR was a huge PITA (e.g. https://github.com/chaosmaou/wivrn-guide https://github.com/chaosmaou/wivrn-guide) That's where Valve's Frame brought huge expectations.
- tombert 5mo ago
  Same. I admittedly don't play a lot of new games, and I don't do online games, but like 95% things Just Work when I load a Steam game on my box. The remaining five percent are fixed if I change the Proton version to GE Proton. I played through Miles Morales at full specs a few weeks ago, and it ran just about perfectly as far as I could tell.
Night_Thastus 5mo ago
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.
- jmalicki 5mo ago
  A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows! If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
  - anonymousab 5mo ago
    One problem is that having better FPS stops mattering if the frame pacing and timing is bad, making the game feel like a juddery mess. Or if there is significant input delay differences. That's why all the data matters for all of these dimensions; game performance is much more than FPS per watt over time. When people see "linux gaming is great now, look at the fps" it comes across as potentially disengenuous because of all the other factors that matter and should be tested. Or rather, if a reviewer is talking entirely about framerate, then I just can't trust their opinion and expertise when it comes to the state of Linux gaming.
    - bisby 5mo ago
      Another problem is that having better frame pacing, or better timing stops mattering if the OS decides to reboot for updates mid game. Game experience is much more than just game performance. Part of the issue is that a large part of linux gamers are saying "linux gaming is great" and meaning "linux gaming is good enough now that it is better than putting up with microsoft and windows 11" Some people would rather put up with slightly worse frame pacing if it means no microsoft. Some linux folks are super gung-ho pro privacy, some are just super anti-microsoft but can't game on mac. There's a whole lot of reasons to wind up on linux, so the importance of specific performance details may vary depending on WHY you would be swapping. And some people are playing games on good enough hardware that there arent noticeable frame pacing issues, so good raw FPS numbers just reinforce their views, and they just genuinely mean they are having a good experience themselves.
melonpan7 5mo ago
I stopped using Windows all together two years ago, and since then Linux gaming has made huge strides. Almost everything is playable now with the exception of Kernel AC games - which I don’t play anyways. The success of the Steam Deck has been an integral part, and Vulkan performance is similar if not equal to DX.
gamesbrainiac 5mo ago
Anyone move completely over to Linux for gaming? What is the experience like and what are you using?
- cobar 5mo ago
  Overall experience is very good with AMD graphics. Most games run on Steam out of the box. There are also emulators for all the systems I've wanted to use. I use Faugus Launcher for other stores like BattleNet and Epic Games (Magic Arena). For the most part the games just work, it's more system issues that I've run into where Linux suspend mode and the audio stack can be a little flaky and required Claude to diagnose and sort out.
  - cogman10 5mo ago
    Nvidia has gotten a lot better over the last 2 years as well. There are still driver bugs that are somewhat annoying. It's also annoying that the driver is out of kernel. But otherwise, the open source nvidia by nvivia works just fine.
    - HDBaseT 5mo ago
      Nvidia for me on Linux (Fedora 43 - KDE Plasma) for about half of the titles I play works flawlessly, although the other half of the games seemingly have issues. I encounter a few games with frame pacing issues, otherwise not present on Windows. Shader compile time is longer than on Windows. Occasional crash in some games, etc. Windows has issues too. It's not perfect, although they are different issues to Linux. Ryzen 5800x3D RTX 4080 64GB DDR4 @ 4000 M/T's
  - LAC-Tech 5mo ago
    I gave up trying to fix issues with hibernate and audio on linux. I just leave my machine on overnight love linux but the audio situation has always been bad.
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    Do Epic titles even work on Linux? I thought I read somewhere that Tim Sweeney hated Linux and does whatever possible to make sure Epic's games like Fortnite don't run on it.
tantalor 5mo ago
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ How do I actually see the graph? All I see is stats for April: - Windows 93.47% +1.14% - Linux 4.52% -0.81% - OSX 2.01% -0.34%
- braiamp 5mo ago
  Valve doesn't keep a historic of the numbers, you will have to do with people that collect them and aggregates them https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
chromadon 5mo ago
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.
- coconut08 5mo ago
  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?
  - chromadon 5mo ago
    I’m using an AMD cpu and an Nvidia gpu and it worked out of the box.
    - coconut08 5mo ago
      are you in game mode or like a normal desktop mode?
      - chromadon 5mo ago
        desktop mode
shmerl 5mo ago
ntsync was out already for a while. And it's not necessarily faster than previously available esync and fsync, but it's more correct and clean.
jongjong 5mo ago
Crazy to think that it took over 35 years for the superior technical fundamentals to matter. It's true what Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. So does the tech industry as a whole.
9x39 5mo ago
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.
- Mariajaved906 5mo ago
  Yeah, anti-cheat support is probably the biggest barrier right now. The Steam Deck already showed that many gamers do not really care about the OS as long as their favorite games work smoothly.
  - cogman10 5mo ago
    Arguably, the PS2/3/4/5 proved that as did the various Nintendo platforms.
  - DevKoala 5mo ago
    Quite the contrary. I care about the OS and that’s why I switched to Linux gaming. The experience wrapping the game is just so much better.
    - cortesoft 5mo ago
      Sure, but the point is that Windows gamers generally do not care. In other words, no one is going to refuse to use Linux out of loyalty to Windows, as long as all the games they want to play work.
  - Gigachad 5mo ago
    I can’t see it happening until valve adds some kind of trusted compute environment. I’m imagining online games could have a flag which enforces secure boot, boot chain attestation, and disables multi tasking features. So while you are playing the game it becomes a single task device, but after you quit it’s fully unlocked again to do whatever you want.
aftbit 5mo ago
Linux gaming is fine unless you want to play something with anti-cheat, which is basically any non-Valve competitive multiplayer title.
h3t08 5mo ago
It’s wild to think that the "Year of the Linux Desktop" didn't happen because of a massive marketing push, but because the kernel just slowly absorbed the competition's DNA.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
andix 5mo ago
Time to start betting: Will Windows 12 be based on a Linux kernel? :D
- simonask 5mo ago
  The problem with Windows isn’t the kernel, which is generally reported to be actually quite excellent. The problem is everything else.
torginus 5mo ago
Personally I don't know if this is some weird compatibility stuff for Windows apps, or the reason why Windows apps on Linux, whether running via Wine or being ports, rely on these apis because no good alternatives exist.. And if these apis are going to be used/useful for stuff beyond Windows compatibility, for native Linux apps. Which is a weird thing to think about, and not sure very lovely.
taintlord22 5mo ago
[dead]
panzi 5mo ago
Is NTSYNC used for anything else other than wine/proton?
- shoo 5mo ago
  Doubt it. No linux-native application would be designed to use a Windows API.
- 12_throw_away 5mo ago
  The docs explicitly say not to: https://docs.kernel.org/next/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/next/userspace-api/ntsync.html
  - le-mark 5mo ago
    One wonders if it uses futex and poll under the hood, why not?
zuzululu 5mo ago
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.
- encom 5mo ago
  The fact that some games now come with root kits is insane. I really hope Microsoft cracks down on that nonsense.
  - ChocolateGod 5mo ago
    Given the kernel level anticheats inform you they're going to be installed, I don't think they fit the definition of a root kit.
    - bigyabai 5mo ago
      CloudStrike was installed with user consent, and still ended up being a fatal rootkit. Installing software in Ring 0 is always a bad idea.
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
  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.
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  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.
- 5mo ago
embeng4096 5mo ago
I switched to Linux for everything but AAA FPS PVP games last year and have had a great experience so far. Steam+Proton makes everything I play just work: Helldivers 2, Slay the Spire 2, No Rest For The Wicked, FF7 Remake, Stardew, modded Lethal Company (using r2modman) are the main things I've been playing recently, and all worked out of the box with Proton. My PS5 controller may have needed me to install one package or something but has been working flawlessly after that. I keep a Windows drive around for stuff like Apex Legends, Battlefield 6, but I pretty much never boot into Windows anymore except for those. (I probably sound like a shill at this point, having commented something like this on multiple Linux threads now, but I continue to be impressed at how well Linux performs for gaming these days!)
everyone 5mo ago
The fundamental difference between Linux and OSes like Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, is that the people making Linux are simply trying to make it good, give it as many features as possible, let the user do as much as possible, make it as easy to use as possible.. Whereas the design of the others is guided by a bunch of weird business-goals and internal politics that constantly change. That's why Linux keeps getting better while the others keep getting worse.
mattrighetti 5mo ago
Seeing XDA brought up some good memories. That's the website that really got me into software engineering. I remember trying thousands of different ROMs every month and changing phone every 6 months. My username is still there and seeing the forum still alive and well is awesome!
pluc 5mo ago
It can't be neglected that Microsoft is alienating its own power users on such a level that they are now considering switching over and bringing all their know-how with them. Linux gaming is also faster because there's more developers interested in making gaming work outside of the Microsoft dominion.
- protocolture 5mo ago
  Man if only they had a leader at Microsoft that was famous for prioritising developers.
  - caspper69 5mo ago
    They still prioritize developers, look at .NET Core, Typescript, NPM, Github (lol), but the problem is that they're not Windows exclusive enclaves anymore. In fact, I'd bet most people now deploy (and probably develop) .NET Core on non-Windows machines.
neverkn0wsb357 5mo ago
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.
- inquirerGeneral 5mo ago
  [dead]
- KennyBlanken 5mo ago
  Online multiplayer games keep trying to allow linux users in and keep having to lock them out because there's an instant influx of cheaters. The Nintendo Switch (which runs Linux) was a favorite of cheaters after jailbreaks came out. When anyone can compile and run their own kernel with god knows what for modifications, that makes it substantially easier for cheaters and substantially harder for anti-cheat. I don't see that ever changing. You can't rely on server-side detection either, because some of the cheats are so advanced they go to great lengths to "behave" like a highly skilled human player would with their aiming
  - emkoemko 5mo ago
    i am really doubting that Nintendo Switch uses Linux?... they would have to provide source code no?
    - f33d5173 5mo ago
      Only to the kernel. And only if they patched it. Kernel modules don't count as patches. This is how myriad android vendors get out of providing source. But no, the switch doesn't use linux afaik.
stodor89 5mo ago
Win32 - the #1 stable userland ABI for Linux!
naikrovek 5mo ago
Nothing like copying someone else’s shit when you want to avoid thinking of new things for an operating system. You could be more like Plan9, Linux. You could actually innovate and create new paradigms that make people look at MacOS and Windows and think that they are no longer in the same league. But you don’t want to do that. You want to play games faster. Fucking children run the world today. There are no adults keeping track of things making sure that as we go forward that things make sense. There’s no adult supervision in the computing industry anymore. None. It’s all just profit margins calling all the shots. Asinine. How did it turn out for windows, being “The OS for Games”? Not great, I’d say. Windows is quickly losing that title and will soon become more and more irrelevant for gaming. If you focus on games until you’re “The OS for Games” then decide to innovate on real things that matter outside the home, then you’ll lose that title just like Microsoft is losing it now, and it will happen a lot faster for you than it did Microsoft, because the Linux community is about as organized as an Oklahoma town recently destroyed by a tornado. Games are fast enough for anyone and there are certainly enough games today that if 5 people lived for 500 years each, there’s not enough time for them collectively to play all games that are available today. I don’t know what you gamers think the “end game” is for games. Graphics? When are you meant to be happy? When will you stop and say, “ok, we made it”? Graphics. Pfft. Games do not get better with more realistic graphics, and you know it. Great games are great because they are well thought out and well tested. Great games are not great because the shadows are sharper or because the reflections are more accurate. Some of the shittiest games ever look amazing, and some of the shittiest looking games are S-tier. And you all know it. Old man mode: off
- caspper69 5mo ago
  OS Development has halted in 1970 at this point. I know everybody loves Unix, but it has the same problem as Windows- namely that anything you run under your user context has access to your whole user context. And it will continue to be a scourge until/if we ever figure out how to make capabilities ergonomic. I've been racking my brain for 30 years to try and do it, but they just make certain things very painful.
  - naikrovek 5mo ago
joaohaas 5mo ago
>NTSYNC isn't the first time Linux has gained a new feature specifically because Windows games needed it. 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. Lol. Post doesn't sound explicitly vibewritten, so probably just a non-technical person.
0dayz 5mo ago
What excites me is that the kernel gets better not only for windows games but can also get benefits that can be more general purpose, such as what the article writes about: program able to wait for multiple events at once. It will be interesting to see how native Linux games differ in what fancy under the hood kernel or syscall features they use.
- KennyBlanken 5mo ago
  There will never be native games that use unique Linux kernel features because no studio will waste their time spending those development resources on an OS with even 10% market share, which Linux is nowhere near. The exception would be if, say, Playstation switches to Linux from BSD, which they will never do, as GNU licensing in essentially fatally incompatible with copy protection and anti-cheat functions.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 0dayz 5mo ago
    I doubt it, if Linux can consistently prove to be more performant and easy to use compared to windows and have decent marketshare, it will see adoption by serious game studios. Sure it might take at least 20 years I assume. But definitely a possibility.
- poizan42 5mo ago
  NTSYNC seems quite cumbersome to use for your own linux software though > The ntsync driver creates a single char device /dev/ntsync. Each file description opened on the device represents a unique instance intended to back an individual NT virtual machine. Objects created by one ntsync instance may only be used with other objects created by the same instance. So you need a server process that can open the char device and hold onto the fd that you can then request through a Unix domain socket.
jordigh 5mo ago
A great talk at a conference given by Elizabeth Figura, the main developer behind putting NTSYNC into Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjU4nyWyhU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjU4nyWyhU8
mhh__ 5mo ago
One canary I have for Linux vs Windows is whether Bloomberg ever support Linux natively on the terminal. You can actually use the API from inside WSL quite easily already.
tensegrist 5mo ago
"how does it feel to be embraced and extended?"
asveikau 5mo ago
This is a fluffy, non-technical article so I googled NTSYNC. It seems like they implement Win32 events, semaphores, mutex and WaitForMultipleObjects. It's curious that they didn't do this as file descriptors that can be epolled. For example I think you could do semaphores and events with eventfd(2), which always struck me as inspired by those Win32 objects somehow. But maybe this is a simpler purpose built interface.
- peesem 5mo ago
  isn't this how esync works? edit: i think so https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync/README.esync https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync/README.esync
JoheyDev888 5mo ago
[flagged]
wazulu 5mo ago
That's a great twist! Very few people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler!
- blep_ 5mo ago
  The way you worded this has me imagining the counterfactual world where lots of people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler. Compilers cost real money back then. Word got out that this was how you got a free compiler. You just wrote a linker, and you got in touch with Bill and offered it to him. (You did have to write your linker in a single huge file of assembly, because you didn't have a compiler or a linker yet. It was fine, more programmers knew assembly back then.) Microsoft has thousands of linkers. They're the linker company now. Most of their other products started as test cases for their linkers, that they also happen to sell separately as a side business because why not. Excel is a notable exception, because due to a series of overengineering decisions, it actually is a linker that gradually gained spreadsheet features.
leflob 5mo ago
I love that I am a part of this with my Steamdeck. Hands down great machine and absolutly incredible what you can do with what I thought to be be quiet limited hardware
d0gwut 5mo ago
[dead]
jocelyner 5mo ago
[flagged]
akakabrian 5mo ago
I made 50 TUI games recently to just test my agent orchestration skills. If pixel graphics are retro, then ASCII is OG. Part of the reason is to make them playable on any device (including Linux), and partially so that agents themselves can play them (to help me practice my RL skills).
Shorel 5mo ago
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 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.
- mappu 5mo ago
  I used to love Descent 2! People say this a lot about Linux and it somewhat rubs me the wrong way - sure, the Windows binary works if you install its library dependencies (wine). Likewise (OK, ever since libc5/glibc2 changeover in 2001) the Linux binary should work if you have its library dependencies (SDLv1 it looks like?). So what's really the problem? Your distribution stopped distributing the dependencies, making them harder to find? "DLL Hell" was a thing too. I didn't see any binary downloads for Linux on that website, only source code. I gave it a try anyway, the dependencies were actually not a problem for me, Debian has libsdl-{net,image}1.2-dev, libglew-dev, and so on, and if your distro does not have SDLv1 there is libsdl1.2-compat. But after the dependencies, there was a problem with the source code doing something involving bitfield packing that does not compile on x86_64. I do see the source code has lived on, i can `apt install d2x-rebirth` on Debian 13 which has a comment about https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ ...is that helpful?
  - badsectoracula 5mo ago
    > the Windows binary works if you install its library dependencies (wine). Yes but all it takes is an `apt-get install wine` or `zypper install wine` or `pacman -S wine` or your distro equivalent and if you are using a Linux distro with any sort of desktop functionality, 99% of the time wine will be there. > Your distribution stopped distributing the dependencies, making them harder to find? Yes, this is a big problem because these dependencies not only are harder to find but even if you track all of them (there is a chance they too have their own dependencies) you still need to figure out how to build and install them. And if they are old enough for distros to drop them, then chances are building them isn't going to be a straightforward `./configure && make && make install` ("straightforward" is very relative here :-P). And woe is you if there are conflicts with newer (yet API/ABI incompatible) versions of these libraries and/or their dependencies. Of course since you have the source, technically you can make things work, but that doesn't make the process any less of a major PITA.
KolibriFly 5mo ago
[dead]
krige 5mo ago
Meanwhile I'm over here, trying to get Age of Wonders 1 to run and completely failing on everything spare a laptop with an old Windows 7 installation. Linux API aping (sorry) is so good that they even exhibit the exact same CTD as Windows 10 with this game.
asdfbank 5mo ago
My linux gaming experience has left me with a wierd irony... I have been stealing windows for the last 25 years and never ever felt like i owed M$ a cent. Now after totally switching to free stuff i suddenly feel (not in a bad way at all) a kind of debt to open source developers for just making cool stuff and putting it out there for me to use and play with and i'm not doing a crime anymore!
chanki 5mo ago
[flagged]
tobyhinloopen 5mo ago
I'm very happy with my Linux install. After almost 2 decades of trying Linux Desktop and falling back to Windows (and MacOS) I've finally switched to Linux (and MacOS). The only thing missing is my Adobe stuff. I now run Lightroom in a VM and it's incredibly slow to unusable.
ossianericson 5mo ago
I remember two decades back when Games for Windows was introduced with Vista, I wrote an article that this was killing gaming. As a PC (master race) gamer back then, I didn't always find it appealing to think that PC games had to have gamepad support etc. To be called and have the Games for Windows logo. Now seeing Linux just absorbing Windows APIs into the kernel to make gaming work better? That is the opposite direction. This is what PC gaming needs. I got into PC gaming when I got my Ambra Hurdla SX25 in 1992. Back then it was the fantastic era of first for everything. We got Comanche, Alone in the Dark, Dune, Dig, etc. First of all game types, not just clones of the same concepts.
KingOfCoders 5mo ago
Having migrated from Windows11 to Popos/Nvidia, Minecraft is ~20% slower depending on shaders installed and distant horizons mod. TF2 is also slower but both still fine.
dundunUp 5mo ago
Not really. It’s not “Windows APIs turning into Linux kernel features,” it’s Windows games being translated on Linux way more efficiently than they used to be. Proton stack, Vulkan, Mesa, driver work — that’s where most of the improvement came from.
anordal 5mo ago
Are there 2 things called fsync now? I had to ask google, because the article fails to explain it. Google says yes, this is something else than the fsync syscall (man 2 fsync).
philipwhiuk 5mo ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150
londons_explore 5mo ago
I was under the impression that most windows games copy and anti cheat protection won't work in Linux. It often has a kernel mode driver to prevent you emulating things, using debuggers etc. What changed? Do game manufacturers make special versions with toned down anti-cheat specifically to run on the steam box/Linux?
- lccerina 5mo ago
  No, simply 95% of games don't have copy and anti cheat, and some anti cheats run ok on Linux
- npodbielski 5mo ago
  Nothing. Majority of those games do not work, but they are small percentage of all games on steam. Most is just small time developers trying to hit some big niche for big money, like Stardew Valley or Terraria or Meat Boy.
picsao 5mo ago
[dead]
gigatexal 5mo ago
I just want to be able to play the latest COD on linux to ditch my windows partition ... but anti-cheat makes it impossible.
FartyMcFarter 5mo ago
As someone without strong feelings on Linux vs Windows (I've used and developed on both about equally): this kind of news, along the way Windows has been changing has me wondering if I should change my primary desktop environment at home to Linux. In my eyes, Windows used to be the desktop environment that "just works and can run almost everything". Lately it's becoming enshittified, with weird bugs showing up more and more frequently (a memorable one is not being able to launch Notepad from the start menu!!). I think Microsoft is losing its best attributes when it comes to consumer software. Linux may not be perfect but it's looking more and more attractive in comparison, even with its imperfections.
sylware 5mo ago
If you don't compile the CPU hardware bugs mitigation for linux, which windows has, you'll be mechanically and significantly faster. 1 + 1 = 2
zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago
It’s ironic that even Linux is better Windows than Windows.
natewrench 5mo ago
people dont use dos anymore even though its quite powerful
hpcgroup 5mo ago
[flagged]
quibono 5mo ago
The only reason I have a dual-boot Windows setup now is for MSFS2024 and DCS. They will probably be the last to ever get full-Linux support (if ever).
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  DCS World and MSFS2020 play on Linux just fine. MSFS2020 is flawless; DCS World has a few visual glitches with smoke tessellation and MFD textures that need to be converted before working, but besides that it's great. I fly modded and first-party modules on multiple maps, hours at a time, zero complaints.
  - quibono 5mo ago
    That’s interesting… have you tried MSFS2024? That’s my main driver for now; god it would be amazing if I could run it on Linux. I’ll definitely need to try DCS on Arch! By the way - what module would you recommend (apart from F-18)?
    - bigyabai 5mo ago
      Haven't tried MSFS2024, but ProtonDB suggests that it works okay. The 2020 version is definitely set-and-forget once you log into your Microsoft account. Module-wise - once you have the F/A-18, a lot of the other modules feel like wasted money. I can wholeheartedly recommend the AJS37 Viggen when it's on sale, for $30 it's got a lot of flexibility and surprisingly simple systems for a 1970s jet. It's very easy to memorize the cold start process in the Viggen too, which makes it a joy to get off the tarmac. The JF-17 is also a barrel of fun, and much easier to fly/fight in than the F-16 if you don't have a HOTAS and don't need JHMCS. Besides that, the only other modules I can fully recommend is the Syria map, Persian Gulf map, and Flaming Cliffs for all the modded planes it unlocks. Not personally a fan of the Sinai map right now, and the Apache is very difficult to fly without a copilot/gunner in the second seat. Black Shark 3 is fun, but one of the most goddamn complex modules in the game. Even with translated cockpit labels, you'll be permanently conjoined to a YouTube guide telling you how to do the most basic flight maneuvers.
clircle 5mo ago
I was gaming on Linux when steam first came out for that platform, but there were too many broken games. Tried again with Proton debute, and more problems. I switched back to Win10 for about 5 years on my gaming machine, but the push to Win11 made me want to try linux again for gaming. I installed Guix and Steam, and I am still just floored at how much progress Linux gaming has made in 5 years. Basically every works, and it feels only imperceptibly slower than gaming on Win10. I'm on AMD card, so ymmv! I'm about to beat Lies of P :)
gpvos 5mo ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150 (1306 points, 50 days ago, 508 comments, same site even)
RaphaelBenHamo 5mo ago
[flagged]
estimator7292 5mo ago
[dead]
rpigab 5mo ago
I have been a gamer for all my life, I have many PCs, until early 2024 one of them had to run Windows for gaming. I quit Windows, and didn't have to quit gaming, thanks to Steam's Proton + WINE + everything else. Now, because I have Steam compat activated by default, when I download and launch a new game, most of the time I do not know if I'm running a native version or if I'm running it through Proton. I also can run Windows games from the 2000s or 90s that didn't not work in Windows 7's basic compatibility options because of old video drivers and whatnot. They run just fine on Ubuntu through Steam, just add the exe or installer as non-Steam game, add Proton and voilà, also sometimes there's some headache around making it work when the exe requires the CD inserted to play, even though I have mounted the CD files in a drive in the wine/proton prefix. I wish there were scripts to do that easily, even adding the exe as non-steam game, changing the name, etc. is not very convenient, I wish there were scripts (Lutris does some of that but not the CD part). I should also mention that I do not play competitive multiplayer games that have kernel-level anticheat anymore. Check out https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/

980 points by haunter 6mo ago

“He who fights with Windows should see to it that he himself does not become Windows. And when you gaze long into ntoskrnl, ntoskrnl also gazes into you.” Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?

tester756 6mo ago
What you care more about? technical details or real-world outcomes?
- majorchord 5mo ago
  You might not get the answer you were hoping for there.
tardedmeme 6mo ago
What is the purpose of achieving victory? Is it to produce the software that works better or is it to stick your fingers in your ears and lalala the loudest? Windows copied futexes from Linux first, anyway.
pixl97 6mo ago
I mean the NT kernel was never really the enemy, it was the company behind it.
breve 6mo ago
Microsoft and Windows were never the enemy. To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
- ThrowawayR2 6mo ago
  He got less humble later on when momentum started building behind Linux. To quote Linus Torvalds from 2003: “Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dpoloncsak 5mo ago
    I mean, this whole thread is basically suggesting that 23 years later, improvements to Linux and self-sabotage by Microsoft are going to possibly destroy (or atleast, start to cause some bleeding) to Microsoft (in the gaming-market). This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.
- MisterTea 5mo ago
  We are so far removed from 1997 that this statement means nothing. > the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different. So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
  - not2b 5mo ago
    Rather, several missing, useful APIs that were hard to emulate efficiently have been added. That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".
    - MisterTea 5mo ago
      > several missing, useful APIs Windows API's. > That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel". How is that not?
  - Pay08 5mo ago
pjmlp 6mo ago
Not really, in the drunken happiness to have games, Linux users keep forgetting those are games developed on game studios that the only place there are GNU/Linux installations running are their MMO servers. It is no different from arguing how Linux is getting better GameCube games with Dolphin. Also Valve is only as good as its current management is still around, eventually like any other company time will pass, and new warm bodies will take other decisions.
general1465 6mo ago
If you are refusing to have a stable architecture, then you will maintain architecture of your enemy
weiliddat 5mo ago
Is the intent of Linux the architecture, or the philosophy of free / open source software?
wwweston 5mo ago
interface and architecture may influence each other, but interface doesn’t determine architecture
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

JoeAltmaier 6mo ago

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.

CyberDildonics 5mo ago
if I implemented a couple of traps What does this mean? System calls?
- jjk7 5mo ago
  Before SYSCALL there was INT
  - m463 5mo ago
    I remember SVC. and also things like BR14 and IEFBR14
- hack1312 5mo ago
  [dead]
- rtkwe 5mo ago
  Similar but traps are triggered automatically on attempts to execute a protected instruction. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-system-calls-in-operating-system-os/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-sy...
  - dullcrisp 5mo ago
    Why/when are traps used rather than explicit system calls? Is it just historical coevolution? Or is the idea that the user mode program doesn’t need to know that it’s unprivileged? Or is it just repurposing the error handler path to perform privileged operations?

quxuejun 5mo ago

very nice~

tetris11 5mo ago

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

jdubs1984 5mo ago
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.
- doublerabbit 5mo ago
  Lock future game developers in to a corner forcing them only to produce compatible for WSL, Windows for Linux releases. Restricting the license of use on GNU/Linux.
- weezing 5mo ago
  Their gaming marketshare is minuscule both on PCs and consoles already. It's a downward spiral for years already.
  - onli 5mo ago
    Windows still has a huge gaming marketshare on PC, and Microsoft as publisher is still a big player. You mean something else?
  - mvdtnz 5mo ago
    According to my google searching XBox has almost a quarter of the console gaming market share. Hardly miniscule.
  - pinkmuffinere 5mo ago
    wow that's interesting. Where is the gaming share moving, if not pc and consoles? I guess hand-held devices (do those not count as consoles?) and phones?

Dwedit 5mo ago

Headline says "Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features", but only provides two actual examples? It lists NTSYNC, and waiting on multiple events at once.

the8472 5mo ago
ability to make some filesystems case-insensitive was also added for wine https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/using-the-linux-kernel-case-insensitive-feature-in-ext4/ https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...

las_balas_tres 5mo ago

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

FuckButtons 5mo ago
Epoll / select? since everything is a file, you can wait on everything.
- gpderetta 5mo ago
  The last time I asked the same question here, user dwattttt finally pointed out[1][2] to me that there is a significant difference: wfmo can actually acquire semaphores in addition to waiting for them, which poll can't do in a non-racy way and efficient way. It can also do rendezvous synchronization (i.e. signal-and-wait). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513667 [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5ad1d43@codeweavers.com/T/#u https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5a...
wtallis 5mo ago
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?
- spacechild1 5mo ago
  > How often does a video game really need a lock that can be shared between processes, What do you mean? SRWLock (or the older CRITICAL_SECTION) cannot be shared between processes. A (Win32) Mutex does work across processes, but that's its entire purpose. So Windows does have different tools for different jobs. In fact, it's really the other way round: on Linux, a futex also works across processes, but there is no equivalent in Windows. (Sadly, WaitOnAddress can only be used in a single process.)

caycep 5mo ago

If you purpose build a Linux gaming PC, would you lean more towards AMD GPUs over Nvidia?

guizadillas 5mo ago
yes
notac26 5mo ago
Def AMD. And if your focus is gaming I’d give SteamOS a go. With a full AMD setup you should basically be plug and play.
graynk 5mo ago
AMDs are much better supported. There is life with NVIDIA GPUs too, I am on 4070Ti currently doing fine, but for new builds AMD is clearly a better choice with better drivers
eikenberry 5mo ago
AMD. The final holdout, HDMI 2.1 support being blocked by the HDMI group, has been overcome w/ the HDMI group relenting and support is now landing in the kernel (expected in 7.2). https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-hdmi-2-1-support-is-coming-to-linux-now-with-frl-and-dsc/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...
- cute_boi 5mo ago
  any reason why we are using hdmi over display port?
  - saidinesh5 5mo ago
    The vast majority of the TVs only come with HDMI .. not even good enough analog inputs anymore..
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 5mo ago

fleroviumna 5mo ago

[dead]

wwweston 5mo ago

I only hope this eventually reaches enough coverage to support media production. It’s the last commercial area I care about. I’m entirely willing to pay for good work here (and have) but both major commercial desktop OSs are exhibiting significant warning signs of contempt for the users.

mifydev 5mo ago

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.

advisedwang 5mo ago
It would be fun to call it Windows Subsystem for Linux!
- sedatk 5mo ago
  which would be the right use of the term. WSL was originally called LXSS = linux subsystem. As I understand, lawyers stepped in soon after.
  - sunaookami 5mo ago
    They already did the same thing 25 years ago with "Windows Services for UNIX": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
    - wmf 5mo ago
      Which is also backwards.
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
    The two terms seem semantically identical (i.e., ambiguous and therefore meaningless) to me.
    - sedatk 5mo ago
      You wouldn't call a Nintendo emulator "Windows emulator for Nintendo" would you.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

bsimpson 5mo ago

I remember when XDA was the home of Android homebrew hackers working on things like CyanogenMod. It's so strange to see it repurposed as the brand for the same quasi-correct tech article slop that gets parroted between all the big blogs. Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.

sphars 5mo ago
Same with all the bigger tech blogs from a decade ago. How-To Geek is completely overrun with the same sort of slop. Finally had to remove it from my RSS reader. Oh look at that, XDA and HTG are both owned by Valnet: https://www.valnetinc.com/en/technology https://www.valnetinc.com/en/technology
- r_lee 5mo ago
  private equity, what would we do without you?!
- stuartq 5mo ago
  At least Anandtech just shut down rather than turning into a zombie tech blog.
navigate8310 5mo ago
The same happened with AndroidPolice
hx8 5mo ago
This is not just a Tech Journalism problem, but applies to a lot of other Journalism.
Fogest 5mo ago
I get a lot of XDA articles appearing in my Google News feeds and a good chunk of the ones I read definitely have the slop half baked vibe to them. Where they barely provide much substance in the article and sometimes barely even address what the article headline said. They also pump out so many articles about the same topics. I swear I've seen like 100 articles from them just on Obsidian Notes alone and so many of them are barebones and lackluster. There is the odd decent nugget in there, but it is a shame seeing them fall like this. Unfortunately the same sentiment is true about most news sites now.

TheRealPomax 5mo ago

This page really does not like playing nice with reader mode, making it near impossible to read unfortunately.

torusle 5mo ago

Linux does not dragged down in performance by the thousands of virus and malware scanners.

Pooge 5mo ago
If by "thousands of virus" you mean software shipped by default in Windows, then I agree with you. Everything feels so sluggish on Windows 11 compared to any Linux distribution even if you run it on an HDD... it's ridiculous.

dmvvilela 5mo ago

What about macos?

Pooge 5mo ago
Apple doesn't care about gaming.
- criddell 5mo ago
  Apple has never really cared about games unless it's on the iPhone or iPad. It's worked out well for them though. Mobile gaming is a $100 billion dollar market, PC gaming and console gaming are each about half that.
  - bigyabai 5mo ago
    Well sure it worked out great for Apple. By preventing users from sideloading emulators or playing real games, you force them to purchase gambling apps and low-quality slopware to entertain themselves. "Real world" game developers like Nintendo outright gave up on iOS/mobile gaming because it wasn't a comparable gaming experience. A good example of this is the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which were so lazily ported that most fans advocate for pirating the originals instead. Why should anyone pay $14.99 for the bad version of FFVI?
  - MBCook 5mo ago
    They don’t care about iPhone/iPad gaming either. They stumbled into the perfect spot with the iPhone, then IAP sweetened it. Since they found money they support it. But in the process they’ve really destroyed gaming on the platform unless you want casino games or candy crush/clash of clans things designed to extract money and show another ad every 12 seconds. Yeah they show Resident Evil VIII and Assassins Creed Whatever but they don’t sell much. And the race to free IAPs created mean good games can’t sell even at a single $2 purchase. Apple Arcade is the only sanctuary. I haven’t heard good things from the dev side, and it’s 80%+ old games from before things were destroyed or IAP riddled games with the IAPs removed, at times not even rebalanced. I use it because it’s about all that’s left. But iPhone gaming is a shadow of what we had in the early years. And at this point there is no competition left. The smart phone ate everything. And as far as I know Android games are in the same mess.

keithnz 5mo ago

my son, and his friends all seem to have switched to https://garudalinux.org/ https://garudalinux.org/ recently for gaming. Seems to be working out well for them.

whimblepop 5mo ago
That's exactly the kind of flashy, gaming-forward distro I was drawn to as a teenager. Good times :)
- willis936 5mo ago
  I sometimes wonder if my modern machines could run Sabayon's DE with high performance.
  - whimblepop 5mo ago
    When I wrote the comment you replied to here, I of course had Sabayon in mind. Sabayon had some loveliness beyond that surface level, too. If the distro still existed (MocaccinoOS is a thing nowadays, but it's a completely different base), I'd probably spin it up out of nostalgia.
skipants 5mo ago
Pretty cool distro! I switched to Bazzite myself but I've also seen a lot of popularity for CachyOS for gaming rigs.
Prunkton 5mo ago
I'm working and gaming on Garuda for over 3 years and not planing to switch any time soon. It runs super smooth, with the build in 'wayback machine' and 'curated' Arch distro (7.0 zen kernel just dropped a week ago) pretty much bullet proof for beginners or as a daily distro if you want to get stuff done w/o caring much about it - just loving it. On the other hand side you have cutting edge gaming tech like wine/proton staging versions per default, so I'm playing Blizzard games with NTSYNC (the tech from the article) for several months now :) Forgot about most of the flashy default UI though :D

Beijinger 5mo ago

I found the computer in the article more interesting than the fact, that gaming is getting faster under Linux. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-worlds-first-keyboard-with-a-built-in-computer https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-wo... Interesting, but I wish it was half the size folded...

trashface 5mo ago

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.

ToucanLoucan 5mo ago
I'm looking to finally get off Windows for good. My experience with the SteamDeck started me, later I upgraded to a ROG Ally X for beefier performance but found Windows insufferable on a handheld, and installed SteamOS. I was blown away by the performance gains. A few months later I installed Kubuntu for the first time since 2013 or so, Steam shortly after, and while the desktop linux route is definitely more taxing (manually installing things like Mod Organizer 2 instead of Vortex, for instance, and all of that needing to run differently as opposed to Windows where it's all just .exe's) I've been absolutely blown away by the performance gains again. Mind you this machine is no slacker, it's a GE76 Raider from MSI, 3060 under the hood, but games just run smoother in Linux. And the alt-tab experience is untouchable, Fallout: New Vegas hates it and crashes, but everything more modern utterly doesn't care. I can alt-tab in and out, check messages, desktop composing works great no matter what game I'm playing, no more issues in modded games where the game completely locks the machine as Linux just doesn't seem to allow it, it's fantastic. I have a couple more things to figure, I need XBox authentication to work for Halo Infinite and Sea of Theives, among others, and I need to figure out some solutions for some ancient software I have to run, which will probably end up being a Windows 11 VM. But as for my daily driver OS, I am so excited to get off Windows once and for all.

wnevets 5mo ago

It may finally be the year of the linx desktop. Microsoft actively being hostile to towards Windows users can't last forever.

hx8 5mo ago
The Linux desktop won not with a bang, but because all of the Windows users realized they would be happier with iPads.
- MBCook 5mo ago
  If you competitor starts fading faster than you improve, eventually you’ll pass them no matter how far ahead they were.
lunar_rover 5mo ago
It might be the year of Linux gaming systems. The desktop went from terrible to bad and is still at least a decade behind unless some organisation invests dozens of millions and gets themselves an actual professional dev team.

lowbloodsugar 5mo ago

This is good to hear, but I get 120FPS on Windows in Cyberpunk 2077 and ~70 on Ubuntu. Horizon Zero Dawn is much worse, and quite often drops to seconds-per-frame instead of frames-per-second, if I turn on dynamic scaling. I just have an ssd with windows on it for gaming and boot to that from the bios. Also means my headphones UI works too. But, to be fair, the fact that I _can_ run Cyberpunk and HZD if I want to is pretty impressive.

Animats 5mo ago

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.

bradley13 5mo ago

It's actually been a couple of years since I ran across a game that didn't work well on Linux. At most, I have had to bump the default Proton version.

tdb7893 5mo ago
I have occasional issues mainly with graphics drivers or anti-cheat. Otherwise thought it's remarkably stable. I've also gotten a lot of non-Steam games to work fine.
laughing_man 5mo ago
It really depends on the type of game you play. As everyone points out, kernel level anti-cheat is a problem on Linux, but also games that require odd controllers have trouble as well. One game I play, Farming Simulator 22, doesn't work well on Linux because they use the raw windows input from joysticks and wheels. You can still play with mouse and keyboard, but the fun isn't there. I was pleasantly surprised at just how many of my games worked well on my new Ubuntu install. Even more so at how many games are playable on my Xubuntu Chromebook install.
makeitdouble 5mo ago
On the games that won't work well, last time I looked at it anything VR was a huge PITA (e.g. https://github.com/chaosmaou/wivrn-guide https://github.com/chaosmaou/wivrn-guide) That's where Valve's Frame brought huge expectations.
tombert 5mo ago
Same. I admittedly don't play a lot of new games, and I don't do online games, but like 95% things Just Work when I load a Steam game on my box. The remaining five percent are fixed if I change the Proton version to GE Proton. I played through Miles Morales at full specs a few weeks ago, and it ran just about perfectly as far as I could tell.

Night_Thastus 5mo ago

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.

jmalicki 5mo ago
A lot of the revolution is just getting within 5-30% of Windows! If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
- anonymousab 5mo ago
  One problem is that having better FPS stops mattering if the frame pacing and timing is bad, making the game feel like a juddery mess. Or if there is significant input delay differences. That's why all the data matters for all of these dimensions; game performance is much more than FPS per watt over time. When people see "linux gaming is great now, look at the fps" it comes across as potentially disengenuous because of all the other factors that matter and should be tested. Or rather, if a reviewer is talking entirely about framerate, then I just can't trust their opinion and expertise when it comes to the state of Linux gaming.
  - bisby 5mo ago
    Another problem is that having better frame pacing, or better timing stops mattering if the OS decides to reboot for updates mid game. Game experience is much more than just game performance. Part of the issue is that a large part of linux gamers are saying "linux gaming is great" and meaning "linux gaming is good enough now that it is better than putting up with microsoft and windows 11" Some people would rather put up with slightly worse frame pacing if it means no microsoft. Some linux folks are super gung-ho pro privacy, some are just super anti-microsoft but can't game on mac. There's a whole lot of reasons to wind up on linux, so the importance of specific performance details may vary depending on WHY you would be swapping. And some people are playing games on good enough hardware that there arent noticeable frame pacing issues, so good raw FPS numbers just reinforce their views, and they just genuinely mean they are having a good experience themselves.

melonpan7 5mo ago

I stopped using Windows all together two years ago, and since then Linux gaming has made huge strides. Almost everything is playable now with the exception of Kernel AC games - which I don’t play anyways. The success of the Steam Deck has been an integral part, and Vulkan performance is similar if not equal to DX.

gamesbrainiac 5mo ago

Anyone move completely over to Linux for gaming? What is the experience like and what are you using?

cobar 5mo ago
Overall experience is very good with AMD graphics. Most games run on Steam out of the box. There are also emulators for all the systems I've wanted to use. I use Faugus Launcher for other stores like BattleNet and Epic Games (Magic Arena). For the most part the games just work, it's more system issues that I've run into where Linux suspend mode and the audio stack can be a little flaky and required Claude to diagnose and sort out.
- cogman10 5mo ago
  Nvidia has gotten a lot better over the last 2 years as well. There are still driver bugs that are somewhat annoying. It's also annoying that the driver is out of kernel. But otherwise, the open source nvidia by nvivia works just fine.
  - HDBaseT 5mo ago
    Nvidia for me on Linux (Fedora 43 - KDE Plasma) for about half of the titles I play works flawlessly, although the other half of the games seemingly have issues. I encounter a few games with frame pacing issues, otherwise not present on Windows. Shader compile time is longer than on Windows. Occasional crash in some games, etc. Windows has issues too. It's not perfect, although they are different issues to Linux. Ryzen 5800x3D RTX 4080 64GB DDR4 @ 4000 M/T's
- LAC-Tech 5mo ago
  I gave up trying to fix issues with hibernate and audio on linux. I just leave my machine on overnight love linux but the audio situation has always been bad.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  Do Epic titles even work on Linux? I thought I read somewhere that Tim Sweeney hated Linux and does whatever possible to make sure Epic's games like Fortnite don't run on it.

tantalor 5mo ago

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ How do I actually see the graph? All I see is stats for April: - Windows 93.47% +1.14% - Linux 4.52% -0.81% - OSX 2.01% -0.34%

braiamp 5mo ago
Valve doesn't keep a historic of the numbers, you will have to do with people that collect them and aggregates them https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

chromadon 5mo ago

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.

coconut08 5mo ago
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?
- chromadon 5mo ago
  I’m using an AMD cpu and an Nvidia gpu and it worked out of the box.
  - coconut08 5mo ago
    are you in game mode or like a normal desktop mode?
    - chromadon 5mo ago
      desktop mode

shmerl 5mo ago

ntsync was out already for a while. And it's not necessarily faster than previously available esync and fsync, but it's more correct and clean.

jongjong 5mo ago

Crazy to think that it took over 35 years for the superior technical fundamentals to matter. It's true what Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. So does the tech industry as a whole.

9x39 5mo ago

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.

Mariajaved906 5mo ago
Yeah, anti-cheat support is probably the biggest barrier right now. The Steam Deck already showed that many gamers do not really care about the OS as long as their favorite games work smoothly.
- cogman10 5mo ago
  Arguably, the PS2/3/4/5 proved that as did the various Nintendo platforms.
- DevKoala 5mo ago
  Quite the contrary. I care about the OS and that’s why I switched to Linux gaming. The experience wrapping the game is just so much better.
  - cortesoft 5mo ago
    Sure, but the point is that Windows gamers generally do not care. In other words, no one is going to refuse to use Linux out of loyalty to Windows, as long as all the games they want to play work.
- Gigachad 5mo ago
  I can’t see it happening until valve adds some kind of trusted compute environment. I’m imagining online games could have a flag which enforces secure boot, boot chain attestation, and disables multi tasking features. So while you are playing the game it becomes a single task device, but after you quit it’s fully unlocked again to do whatever you want.

aftbit 5mo ago

Linux gaming is fine unless you want to play something with anti-cheat, which is basically any non-Valve competitive multiplayer title.

h3t08 5mo ago

It’s wild to think that the "Year of the Linux Desktop" didn't happen because of a massive marketing push, but because the kernel just slowly absorbed the competition's DNA.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

andix 5mo ago

Time to start betting: Will Windows 12 be based on a Linux kernel? :D

simonask 5mo ago
The problem with Windows isn’t the kernel, which is generally reported to be actually quite excellent. The problem is everything else.

torginus 5mo ago

Personally I don't know if this is some weird compatibility stuff for Windows apps, or the reason why Windows apps on Linux, whether running via Wine or being ports, rely on these apis because no good alternatives exist.. And if these apis are going to be used/useful for stuff beyond Windows compatibility, for native Linux apps. Which is a weird thing to think about, and not sure very lovely.

taintlord22 5mo ago

[dead]

panzi 5mo ago

Is NTSYNC used for anything else other than wine/proton?

shoo 5mo ago
Doubt it. No linux-native application would be designed to use a Windows API.
12_throw_away 5mo ago
The docs explicitly say not to: https://docs.kernel.org/next/userspace-api/ntsync.html https://docs.kernel.org/next/userspace-api/ntsync.html
- le-mark 5mo ago
  One wonders if it uses futex and poll under the hood, why not?

zuzululu 5mo ago

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.

encom 5mo ago
The fact that some games now come with root kits is insane. I really hope Microsoft cracks down on that nonsense.
- ChocolateGod 5mo ago
  Given the kernel level anticheats inform you they're going to be installed, I don't think they fit the definition of a root kit.
  - bigyabai 5mo ago
    CloudStrike was installed with user consent, and still ended up being a fatal rootkit. Installing software in Ring 0 is always a bad idea.
HDBaseT 5mo ago
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.
bigyabai 5mo ago
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.
5mo ago

embeng4096 5mo ago

I switched to Linux for everything but AAA FPS PVP games last year and have had a great experience so far. Steam+Proton makes everything I play just work: Helldivers 2, Slay the Spire 2, No Rest For The Wicked, FF7 Remake, Stardew, modded Lethal Company (using r2modman) are the main things I've been playing recently, and all worked out of the box with Proton. My PS5 controller may have needed me to install one package or something but has been working flawlessly after that. I keep a Windows drive around for stuff like Apex Legends, Battlefield 6, but I pretty much never boot into Windows anymore except for those. (I probably sound like a shill at this point, having commented something like this on multiple Linux threads now, but I continue to be impressed at how well Linux performs for gaming these days!)

everyone 5mo ago

The fundamental difference between Linux and OSes like Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, is that the people making Linux are simply trying to make it good, give it as many features as possible, let the user do as much as possible, make it as easy to use as possible.. Whereas the design of the others is guided by a bunch of weird business-goals and internal politics that constantly change. That's why Linux keeps getting better while the others keep getting worse.

mattrighetti 5mo ago

Seeing XDA brought up some good memories. That's the website that really got me into software engineering. I remember trying thousands of different ROMs every month and changing phone every 6 months. My username is still there and seeing the forum still alive and well is awesome!

pluc 5mo ago

It can't be neglected that Microsoft is alienating its own power users on such a level that they are now considering switching over and bringing all their know-how with them. Linux gaming is also faster because there's more developers interested in making gaming work outside of the Microsoft dominion.

protocolture 5mo ago
Man if only they had a leader at Microsoft that was famous for prioritising developers.
- caspper69 5mo ago
  They still prioritize developers, look at .NET Core, Typescript, NPM, Github (lol), but the problem is that they're not Windows exclusive enclaves anymore. In fact, I'd bet most people now deploy (and probably develop) .NET Core on non-Windows machines.

neverkn0wsb357 5mo ago

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.

inquirerGeneral 5mo ago
[dead]
KennyBlanken 5mo ago
Online multiplayer games keep trying to allow linux users in and keep having to lock them out because there's an instant influx of cheaters. The Nintendo Switch (which runs Linux) was a favorite of cheaters after jailbreaks came out. When anyone can compile and run their own kernel with god knows what for modifications, that makes it substantially easier for cheaters and substantially harder for anti-cheat. I don't see that ever changing. You can't rely on server-side detection either, because some of the cheats are so advanced they go to great lengths to "behave" like a highly skilled human player would with their aiming
- emkoemko 5mo ago
  i am really doubting that Nintendo Switch uses Linux?... they would have to provide source code no?
  - f33d5173 5mo ago
    Only to the kernel. And only if they patched it. Kernel modules don't count as patches. This is how myriad android vendors get out of providing source. But no, the switch doesn't use linux afaik.

stodor89 5mo ago

Win32 - the #1 stable userland ABI for Linux!

naikrovek 5mo ago

Nothing like copying someone else’s shit when you want to avoid thinking of new things for an operating system. You could be more like Plan9, Linux. You could actually innovate and create new paradigms that make people look at MacOS and Windows and think that they are no longer in the same league. But you don’t want to do that. You want to play games faster. Fucking children run the world today. There are no adults keeping track of things making sure that as we go forward that things make sense. There’s no adult supervision in the computing industry anymore. None. It’s all just profit margins calling all the shots. Asinine. How did it turn out for windows, being “The OS for Games”? Not great, I’d say. Windows is quickly losing that title and will soon become more and more irrelevant for gaming. If you focus on games until you’re “The OS for Games” then decide to innovate on real things that matter outside the home, then you’ll lose that title just like Microsoft is losing it now, and it will happen a lot faster for you than it did Microsoft, because the Linux community is about as organized as an Oklahoma town recently destroyed by a tornado. Games are fast enough for anyone and there are certainly enough games today that if 5 people lived for 500 years each, there’s not enough time for them collectively to play all games that are available today. I don’t know what you gamers think the “end game” is for games. Graphics? When are you meant to be happy? When will you stop and say, “ok, we made it”? Graphics. Pfft. Games do not get better with more realistic graphics, and you know it. Great games are great because they are well thought out and well tested. Great games are not great because the shadows are sharper or because the reflections are more accurate. Some of the shittiest games ever look amazing, and some of the shittiest looking games are S-tier. And you all know it. Old man mode: off

caspper69 5mo ago
OS Development has halted in 1970 at this point. I know everybody loves Unix, but it has the same problem as Windows- namely that anything you run under your user context has access to your whole user context. And it will continue to be a scourge until/if we ever figure out how to make capabilities ergonomic. I've been racking my brain for 30 years to try and do it, but they just make certain things very painful.
- naikrovek 5mo ago

joaohaas 5mo ago

>NTSYNC isn't the first time Linux has gained a new feature specifically because Windows games needed it. 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. Lol. Post doesn't sound explicitly vibewritten, so probably just a non-technical person.

0dayz 5mo ago

What excites me is that the kernel gets better not only for windows games but can also get benefits that can be more general purpose, such as what the article writes about: program able to wait for multiple events at once. It will be interesting to see how native Linux games differ in what fancy under the hood kernel or syscall features they use.

KennyBlanken 5mo ago
There will never be native games that use unique Linux kernel features because no studio will waste their time spending those development resources on an OS with even 10% market share, which Linux is nowhere near. The exception would be if, say, Playstation switches to Linux from BSD, which they will never do, as GNU licensing in essentially fatally incompatible with copy protection and anti-cheat functions.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- 0dayz 5mo ago
  I doubt it, if Linux can consistently prove to be more performant and easy to use compared to windows and have decent marketshare, it will see adoption by serious game studios. Sure it might take at least 20 years I assume. But definitely a possibility.
poizan42 5mo ago
NTSYNC seems quite cumbersome to use for your own linux software though > The ntsync driver creates a single char device /dev/ntsync. Each file description opened on the device represents a unique instance intended to back an individual NT virtual machine. Objects created by one ntsync instance may only be used with other objects created by the same instance. So you need a server process that can open the char device and hold onto the fd that you can then request through a Unix domain socket.

jordigh 5mo ago

A great talk at a conference given by Elizabeth Figura, the main developer behind putting NTSYNC into Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjU4nyWyhU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjU4nyWyhU8

mhh__ 5mo ago

One canary I have for Linux vs Windows is whether Bloomberg ever support Linux natively on the terminal. You can actually use the API from inside WSL quite easily already.

tensegrist 5mo ago

"how does it feel to be embraced and extended?"

asveikau 5mo ago

This is a fluffy, non-technical article so I googled NTSYNC. It seems like they implement Win32 events, semaphores, mutex and WaitForMultipleObjects. It's curious that they didn't do this as file descriptors that can be epolled. For example I think you could do semaphores and events with eventfd(2), which always struck me as inspired by those Win32 objects somehow. But maybe this is a simpler purpose built interface.

peesem 5mo ago
isn't this how esync works? edit: i think so https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync/README.esync https://github.com/zfigura/wine/blob/esync/README.esync

JoheyDev888 5mo ago

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wazulu 5mo ago

That's a great twist! Very few people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler!

blep_ 5mo ago
The way you worded this has me imagining the counterfactual world where lots of people traded Bill Gates a linker for a compiler. Compilers cost real money back then. Word got out that this was how you got a free compiler. You just wrote a linker, and you got in touch with Bill and offered it to him. (You did have to write your linker in a single huge file of assembly, because you didn't have a compiler or a linker yet. It was fine, more programmers knew assembly back then.) Microsoft has thousands of linkers. They're the linker company now. Most of their other products started as test cases for their linkers, that they also happen to sell separately as a side business because why not. Excel is a notable exception, because due to a series of overengineering decisions, it actually is a linker that gradually gained spreadsheet features.

leflob 5mo ago

I love that I am a part of this with my Steamdeck. Hands down great machine and absolutly incredible what you can do with what I thought to be be quiet limited hardware

d0gwut 5mo ago

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jocelyner 5mo ago

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akakabrian 5mo ago

I made 50 TUI games recently to just test my agent orchestration skills. If pixel graphics are retro, then ASCII is OG. Part of the reason is to make them playable on any device (including Linux), and partially so that agents themselves can play them (to help me practice my RL skills).

Shorel 5mo ago

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 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.

mappu 5mo ago
I used to love Descent 2! People say this a lot about Linux and it somewhat rubs me the wrong way - sure, the Windows binary works if you install its library dependencies (wine). Likewise (OK, ever since libc5/glibc2 changeover in 2001) the Linux binary should work if you have its library dependencies (SDLv1 it looks like?). So what's really the problem? Your distribution stopped distributing the dependencies, making them harder to find? "DLL Hell" was a thing too. I didn't see any binary downloads for Linux on that website, only source code. I gave it a try anyway, the dependencies were actually not a problem for me, Debian has libsdl-{net,image}1.2-dev, libglew-dev, and so on, and if your distro does not have SDLv1 there is libsdl1.2-compat. But after the dependencies, there was a problem with the source code doing something involving bitfield packing that does not compile on x86_64. I do see the source code has lived on, i can `apt install d2x-rebirth` on Debian 13 which has a comment about https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/ ...is that helpful?
- badsectoracula 5mo ago
  > the Windows binary works if you install its library dependencies (wine). Yes but all it takes is an `apt-get install wine` or `zypper install wine` or `pacman -S wine` or your distro equivalent and if you are using a Linux distro with any sort of desktop functionality, 99% of the time wine will be there. > Your distribution stopped distributing the dependencies, making them harder to find? Yes, this is a big problem because these dependencies not only are harder to find but even if you track all of them (there is a chance they too have their own dependencies) you still need to figure out how to build and install them. And if they are old enough for distros to drop them, then chances are building them isn't going to be a straightforward `./configure && make && make install` ("straightforward" is very relative here :-P). And woe is you if there are conflicts with newer (yet API/ABI incompatible) versions of these libraries and/or their dependencies. Of course since you have the source, technically you can make things work, but that doesn't make the process any less of a major PITA.

KolibriFly 5mo ago

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krige 5mo ago

Meanwhile I'm over here, trying to get Age of Wonders 1 to run and completely failing on everything spare a laptop with an old Windows 7 installation. Linux API aping (sorry) is so good that they even exhibit the exact same CTD as Windows 10 with this game.

asdfbank 5mo ago

My linux gaming experience has left me with a wierd irony... I have been stealing windows for the last 25 years and never ever felt like i owed M$ a cent. Now after totally switching to free stuff i suddenly feel (not in a bad way at all) a kind of debt to open source developers for just making cool stuff and putting it out there for me to use and play with and i'm not doing a crime anymore!

chanki 5mo ago

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tobyhinloopen 5mo ago

I'm very happy with my Linux install. After almost 2 decades of trying Linux Desktop and falling back to Windows (and MacOS) I've finally switched to Linux (and MacOS). The only thing missing is my Adobe stuff. I now run Lightroom in a VM and it's incredibly slow to unusable.

ossianericson 5mo ago

I remember two decades back when Games for Windows was introduced with Vista, I wrote an article that this was killing gaming. As a PC (master race) gamer back then, I didn't always find it appealing to think that PC games had to have gamepad support etc. To be called and have the Games for Windows logo. Now seeing Linux just absorbing Windows APIs into the kernel to make gaming work better? That is the opposite direction. This is what PC gaming needs. I got into PC gaming when I got my Ambra Hurdla SX25 in 1992. Back then it was the fantastic era of first for everything. We got Comanche, Alone in the Dark, Dune, Dig, etc. First of all game types, not just clones of the same concepts.

KingOfCoders 5mo ago

Having migrated from Windows11 to Popos/Nvidia, Minecraft is ~20% slower depending on shaders installed and distant horizons mod. TF2 is also slower but both still fine.

dundunUp 5mo ago

Not really. It’s not “Windows APIs turning into Linux kernel features,” it’s Windows games being translated on Linux way more efficiently than they used to be. Proton stack, Vulkan, Mesa, driver work — that’s where most of the improvement came from.

anordal 5mo ago

Are there 2 things called fsync now? I had to ask google, because the article fails to explain it. Google says yes, this is something else than the fsync syscall (man 2 fsync).

philipwhiuk 5mo ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150

londons_explore 5mo ago

I was under the impression that most windows games copy and anti cheat protection won't work in Linux. It often has a kernel mode driver to prevent you emulating things, using debuggers etc. What changed? Do game manufacturers make special versions with toned down anti-cheat specifically to run on the steam box/Linux?

lccerina 5mo ago
No, simply 95% of games don't have copy and anti cheat, and some anti cheats run ok on Linux
npodbielski 5mo ago
Nothing. Majority of those games do not work, but they are small percentage of all games on steam. Most is just small time developers trying to hit some big niche for big money, like Stardew Valley or Terraria or Meat Boy.

picsao 5mo ago

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gigatexal 5mo ago

I just want to be able to play the latest COD on linux to ditch my windows partition ... but anti-cheat makes it impossible.

FartyMcFarter 5mo ago

As someone without strong feelings on Linux vs Windows (I've used and developed on both about equally): this kind of news, along the way Windows has been changing has me wondering if I should change my primary desktop environment at home to Linux. In my eyes, Windows used to be the desktop environment that "just works and can run almost everything". Lately it's becoming enshittified, with weird bugs showing up more and more frequently (a memorable one is not being able to launch Notepad from the start menu!!). I think Microsoft is losing its best attributes when it comes to consumer software. Linux may not be perfect but it's looking more and more attractive in comparison, even with its imperfections.

sylware 5mo ago

If you don't compile the CPU hardware bugs mitigation for linux, which windows has, you'll be mechanically and significantly faster. 1 + 1 = 2

zsoltkacsandi 5mo ago

It’s ironic that even Linux is better Windows than Windows.

natewrench 5mo ago

people dont use dos anymore even though its quite powerful

hpcgroup 5mo ago

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quibono 5mo ago

The only reason I have a dual-boot Windows setup now is for MSFS2024 and DCS. They will probably be the last to ever get full-Linux support (if ever).

bigyabai 5mo ago
DCS World and MSFS2020 play on Linux just fine. MSFS2020 is flawless; DCS World has a few visual glitches with smoke tessellation and MFD textures that need to be converted before working, but besides that it's great. I fly modded and first-party modules on multiple maps, hours at a time, zero complaints.
- quibono 5mo ago
  That’s interesting… have you tried MSFS2024? That’s my main driver for now; god it would be amazing if I could run it on Linux. I’ll definitely need to try DCS on Arch! By the way - what module would you recommend (apart from F-18)?
  - bigyabai 5mo ago
    Haven't tried MSFS2024, but ProtonDB suggests that it works okay. The 2020 version is definitely set-and-forget once you log into your Microsoft account. Module-wise - once you have the F/A-18, a lot of the other modules feel like wasted money. I can wholeheartedly recommend the AJS37 Viggen when it's on sale, for $30 it's got a lot of flexibility and surprisingly simple systems for a 1970s jet. It's very easy to memorize the cold start process in the Viggen too, which makes it a joy to get off the tarmac. The JF-17 is also a barrel of fun, and much easier to fly/fight in than the F-16 if you don't have a HOTAS and don't need JHMCS. Besides that, the only other modules I can fully recommend is the Syria map, Persian Gulf map, and Flaming Cliffs for all the modded planes it unlocks. Not personally a fan of the Sinai map right now, and the Apache is very difficult to fly without a copilot/gunner in the second seat. Black Shark 3 is fun, but one of the most goddamn complex modules in the game. Even with translated cockpit labels, you'll be permanently conjoined to a YouTube guide telling you how to do the most basic flight maneuvers.

clircle 5mo ago

I was gaming on Linux when steam first came out for that platform, but there were too many broken games. Tried again with Proton debute, and more problems. I switched back to Win10 for about 5 years on my gaming machine, but the push to Win11 made me want to try linux again for gaming. I installed Guix and Steam, and I am still just floored at how much progress Linux gaming has made in 5 years. Basically every works, and it feels only imperceptibly slower than gaming on Win10. I'm on AMD card, so ymmv! I'm about to beat Lies of P :)

gpvos 5mo ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150 (1306 points, 50 days ago, 508 comments, same site even)

RaphaelBenHamo 5mo ago

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estimator7292 5mo ago

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rpigab 5mo ago

I have been a gamer for all my life, I have many PCs, until early 2024 one of them had to run Windows for gaming. I quit Windows, and didn't have to quit gaming, thanks to Steam's Proton + WINE + everything else. Now, because I have Steam compat activated by default, when I download and launch a new game, most of the time I do not know if I'm running a native version or if I'm running it through Proton. I also can run Windows games from the 2000s or 90s that didn't not work in Windows 7's basic compatibility options because of old video drivers and whatnot. They run just fine on Ubuntu through Steam, just add the exe or installer as non-Steam game, add Proton and voilà, also sometimes there's some headache around making it work when the exe requires the CD inserted to play, even though I have mounted the CD files in a drive in the wine/proton prefix. I wish there were scripts to do that easily, even adding the exe as non-steam game, changing the name, etc. is not very convenient, I wish there were scripts (Lutris does some of that but not the CD part). I should also mention that I do not play competitive multiplayer games that have kernel-level anticheat anymore. Check out https://areweanticheatyet.com/ https://areweanticheatyet.com/