windows is using steamOs as their gaming performance goal
6d 1h ago by lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/not_IO in linuxmemes from lemmy.blahaj.zone
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/116487564737536325
Just a hunch, but it's not performance why peeps are migrating away from windows
The performance boost is just the icing on the cake
Windows could run twice as fast and I still wouldn't switch back to it.
Good news if you're on a nvidia gpu then 🫠
I migrated because I was frustrated with having to constantly fix problems caused by forced updates. I didn't expect the benefit of my computer being WAY faster.
My biggest "wow" was when I could hit the super key and have the start menu open immediately instead of waiting 4 minutes for it to load in and another 20 minutes to take my search input and give me back results from Bing.
Sorry you didn't like Bing, but now we have set Edge as your default browser, you'll love it. Also Teams is now installed on your PC, surprise!
Teams? You mean Copilot Remote Friends?
Hotkeys related thing that got me is the fact that on almost any DE you can configure your own hotkeys the way you want them, you don't have to use the ones Microslop thought are good. Using three languages, layout switching was an absolute pain with what hotkeys Windows has to offer.
If it took that long, then you might've accidentally installed your os on a harddrive
I wish.
It was the same Samsung 970 NVME that I'm using right now lol.
Windows 8 on a hard drive was 1000x worse. I made the mistake of upgrading my laptop back in the day from 7 to 8, and it would just sit at 100% disk IO at idle.
But just in case, on the SSD it actually would take anywhere from several seconds to a full 15 before the start menu decided to load.
XFCE, WF-Shell, KDE, and the many dmenu clones are all instant.
Nobody is going to say what the real problem is unless they want to get fired
They can't. The people working on complaints are in a different department. And departments don't communicate at Microsoft.
That’s an understatement
Just 1 more AI data centre?
Lightly squeezes AI bubble a few times
"Yeah, there's room for one more."
Can't wait to see how the fediverse grows when all these datacenters have to liquidate their stock for dirt cheap
Homelab community will get a lot more activity XD
It was for a time, when linux+Proton started outperforming Windows, in recent games, a few years ago.
But yeah, now... well Microsoft just seems very determined to actively destroy everything it maintains or touches.
the windows file explorer and terminal have horrible performance, it's one of the reasons I'll never switch back
lol. They’re not going to reduce the bloat in their OS.
But they have gaming mode that disables a lot of it
They only spy on you most of the time!
lol, just kidding, that part doesn't turn off
How do you manually enable it? Otherwise you are spreading lies and bullshit
Press the xbox button, under settings, "enable game mode".
It's been a thing for years.
Win + G if you don't have an XBox controller connected to your PC, like I presume most people probably don't.
Thank you for the reply, and please accept my sincere apologies for sounding so aggressive in my previous reply
Oh, well you're welcome. Having mode is pretty useful for me so I'm glad you got it up and running. It's not perfect but it does suspend a lot of background shit.
Lol it's true
It's wild that they recognized that software compiled for their own operating system goes faster through an interpreter on a different operating system
Its funny because Valve doesn't need SteamOS to compete with Windows. They made it to enable playing more games, so you buy more games. If MS matches performance with Windows, Valve still wins, because its just another avenue for people to buy more games. They don't care what OS you do it on. But MS does care, because they need you on Windows to eat up your data. Which also means they're at a disadvantage in competing on performance as well, because they need your games to play as well as they do on SteamOS while also enabling all their bullshit background services and telemetry.
Valve also needed to break its dependency on Windows, in case MS decides to go down the walled garden route like Apple. MS making the windows store the only supported way to install apps and games would be devastating for Valve.
Besides the data collection angle, Microsoft wants gamers on Windows instead of Linux so that there's at least a chance they'll buy games from the Microsoft Store.
Gaming aside, it's incredible how bad Windows Explorer performs compared to e.g. Dolphin. It's performance got even worse with Windows 11, but at least it finally has tabs now
Is that Dolphin on Linux or Windows?
They are talking about the file explorer Dolphin, which is available on Linux and Windows.
But it is a core app for the KDE desktop environment, so it is primarily optimized for Linux.
I haven't actually tried Dolphin on Windows, not sure how usable it is
It's from KDE so usually Linux
Edit: ..realising there's also Dolphin Emulator and now I'm also confused lol but still feel they're talking about KDE file manager vs Win Explorer
I was also talking about KDE dolphin.
https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows
See also
https://apps.kde.org/platforms/windows/
"With things like instant file search!" Omg I can't, what a joke of an OS.
The company views a third party app called File Pilot as benchmark for these [file search] improvements
That app is still in beta and was launched one year ago.
They're comparing the search from the native shell (where they could directly query the NTFS table like Everything does and get instant results), native to their OS with 40 years of experience with some unknown newcomer still in beta???
Windows Update will also be improved, with the goal of making Windows 11 reliable enough so that a restart is only necessary once a month.
This isn't just a matter of Windows 11 reliability, it'll take big improvements in Microsoft's quality control to stop needing to follow the monthly updates with emergency patches and hotfixes.
Right now they are:
it's patch Tuesday!!!!!!1!1!!!! We MUST release immediately an update or the users will revolt!!
But Sir, preliminary testing says that it has a 80% bricking chance with full data loss, can we postpone it?
PUSH. IT. NOW. Force the install and make sure to reboot all the computers during the working hours, bonus if you force close all the opened apps without saving
They arent going to improve the quality they've just added the ability to do the patches via hotpatch and not require a restart. Still gonna be same quality of slop
Whats really fun about this is Valve started investing in Linux because a bunch of changes Microsoft made to windows 8 signaled they were moving to a locked-down ecosystem to bully corporations like Valve out of the market.
The current state of Windows is a product of MS's blind greed but the current state of the viable alternatives is, in some ways, also a product of MS's greed.
An abstraction layer that reverse-engineers the Windows GPU and kernel syscalls and runs on a completely different operating system does better than the native platform after a decade or so of volunteer labor, and a few years of a couple paid devs.
How embarassed would you be if this happened to something you spent 40 years building?
Microsoft is deep into the vibe coding now, but even before that it was cheap devs who could write somewhat functional code but had little concept of optimization, amidst a sprawling bloated OS that has only grown fatter over time.
The mentality of RAM and storage are cheap has suddenly come to a screeching halt but it's taking to take them a long time to find talent that can actually fix the mess they've already built, especially as they try to grab more AI crap into every nook and cranny of their product line.
Linux gaming went from good luck to Windows is taking notes. That’s a pretty wild timeline.
And it all started with a guy wanting to see sexy android ass on Linux
So we can also say indirectly that Steam Deck wouldn't have happened without the horniness of Yoko Taro who created that android ass in the first place.
What a chain of causality that is
This is how art changes the world for the better
If anything has been a driver of human ingenuity, it's the horny
Wait what lol
Are you judging him?
yes. I judge it as pretty neat
I need the lore
Single wizard made DirectX 11 translation to Vulkan because he wanted to enjoy his waifu. Then he made it to the point of Witcher 3 running.
There was a problem tho - some models were broken because Vulkan didn't have some DirectX features. Then valve got involved and submitted proposal to Kronos for necessary Vulkan extension. Driver guys from MESA implemented it really quickly and suddenly almost all the DirectX 11 games became playable. Nvidia also added support.
It's an insane story of one guy with Anime waifu in avatar turning the tides of history. AFAIK he now works full time for Valve.
🗿
the power of open source
Open source and st. Gabe willing to embrace it. Valve made tremendous effort in order to push it to the mainstream
link to article https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/what-is-windows-k2-everything-you-need-to-know-saving-windows-11
For gaming, Microsoft views steamOS as the benchmark, and is working to optimize the platform so that steamOS and Windows gaming performance are comparable. Within the next year or two, it believes that Windows will be able to truly compete head-to-head with steamOS in gaming performance on identical hardware due to foundational changes that are being made to the platform in the coming months.
Doubt.
i bet the "foundational changes" are all vibecoded
Do "foundational changes" mean they will play games on WSL hoping the "hyperV, WSL(inux), proton, game, WSLg (Wayland)" chain will have less slowdown than the "Windows, game, directX" route?
At least if they do it performance will stay on par with SteamOS as long as hyperV doesn't bloat too much.
Competition is good and the more Windows tries to meet this promise, the more Linux gets exposure.
In two years the race will likely be over already.
Some games have better performance running under wine on Linux than natively on Windows.
On the flip side, I couldn’t get Linux native Jackbox to run because the devs failed to update it to support something (Wayland maybe, IDK was troubleshooting mid Xmas party).
Ended up installing the Windows version in Proton.
That's a story old as Linux. Native shit stops working. Thankfully wine/Proton is there to keep it functional
Hm. I wonder if still will become a problem in the future if we get more Linux native games. We shit on Windows for not playing old games when wine can, but if a game stops functioning moving from x11 to Wayland (or some other dependency) will there be people there to care enough to fix it? Although I would assume it would be an easier fix for Linux than Windows for when it does.
it will always be a problem with native games.
I think it was about 5 years ago, the Terraria team Linux dev left. Something happened that stopped the Linux build launching, and the native version was not playable until they got a new Linux dev in the team. Proton version worked flawlessly with more stable framerate.
As far as I know the native Undertale build is still unplayable. If it is working now, well it wasn't for about 6 years.
I see people get excited about native game builds, that's great but unless it's a very dedicated team that will update the game constantly it seems to be is no use.
I feel like the issue could be solved with a flatpak-like solution.
It won't. You have so many options. Just install the old libraries, use a chroot, use docker. Probably automate all this with Lutris or similar.
Once 32bit libraries are gone, only wine with the recently added WoW64 will be able to run old games ot of the box. Old native titles made for 32bit Linux will require installing all the 32 bit libs again, assuming they'll be even available for your distro
Which is no issue w Since you can even still run old 16-bit games on linux. Maybe someone will start packaging convenient library collections at some point.
Many games ship with dependencies statically linked into the binary. Those won't even have the problem apart from maybe glibc.
Edit: 16-bit still works. For 8-bit there are emulators.
Oh yeah that happens. Some devs are just too lazy to understand their build toolchain.
I always wonder whether that's because it's doing less... like some graphics feature that isn't supported might just no-op in Wine.
Nah. I mean, there might be some stuff like that, but nowadays, I'd be surprised if feature parity wasn't 1:1 (or even better, with some open source drivers having features that are removed from official windows drivers…).
The underlying OS is pure garbage, that's mostly it. Windows will start chugging everywhere with even moderate FS activity: running a background, single-threaded backup process will sometimes make it impossible to click in another window or open a new application. Driver API is not great, you have to jump through hoops to do basic stuff. There are many ways to do the exact same thing, each being more or less efficient than the other. Audio API is so bad, an audio device failing will sometime cause ohter, unrelated, non-audio application to spontaneously combust.
And so on and so on.
On the other hand, the Linux compatibility layer that proton provides do add some overhead in places, but surprisingly, it's not that much overhead. And it's not that common (basically, the code runs natively until specific instructions that requires special handling).
Obviously, when you have a better operating base, and very little extra overhead, software tends to run smoother.
And all that is not taking into account optimisation to Linux system themselves; there's been a lot of improvement in technical stuff for graphic drivers (especially on AMD side, but not exclusively), the kernel itself can get improvement in its handling of IO and memory, the whole thing is more flexible, etc.
It's because Windows is bloated. A lot of games rely on the CPU to deliver frames. If the CPU is congested so are the frames.
It's usually because of all the other bloat running on Windows. Just various background processes on Windows will eat up like 10G of RAM just idling, where most desktop Linux distros I've used will use 2-5G idling. Having a few extra gigs of RAM available can make a noticeable difference.
I feel like system calls in the Linux kernel are just more efficient/faster than system calls in Windows. Windows system calls have decades worth of compatibility layers all cobbled together for business reasons, whereas I don't think the Linux kernel suffers from that same problem.
And that's not even mentioning the multiple layers of absolute voodoo black magic wizardry that is Vulkan (Linux graphics API) and DXVK (a translation later that translates DirectX calls to Vulkan calls). Those are some absolutely incredible pieces of software, and deserve a ton of the credit as well.
I don't really think Linux is faster because it just injects noops sometimes though lol. You'd definitely be able to notice if part of the graphics pipeline was just... skipping enough steps to make a noticeable performance difference lol
Edit: correction
Just one small correction for that - Vulkan is universal, not tied to any platform.
Ah right, thanks for the correction!
Windows 11/10 does some stuff that isn't in the feature scope of wine/proton, namely on the security front (KDP, HVCI, ACG), which has a measurable performance impact. Whether you want to call that bloat or not is up to you.
Unless there's a bottleneck it's usually Vulkan vs dx.
Yeah, when you're not trying to support random crap compiled for winxp you can leave out a lot of cruft
Well the funny bit is winxp games and software run through wine quite well lol
Yeah, that's a separate piece of software though.
get ventoy, start trying
Unrelated but the ventoy usb I keep on me really helped me today after a ram stick decided to die and corrupt my system along with it
Add a HIREN boot USB to your toolkit too.
Edit: shit, just add the iso to ventoy, 🙄😂
I've run out of devices to put Linux on, so maybe I'll create some VMs today
let's pump those numbers up on steam hardware survey. although they might not count VMs
I'm doing my part, switched last week to Linux. A few growing pains getting everything working, but it beats the nightmare that was keeping Win11 stable.
CachyOS for gaming PCs, Debian for browsing laptops
Cachy is great
Everyone should try it once.
I have Linux on my personal computer and Windows on my work laptop. Best of both worlds. Linux is currently a very nice 0 stress experience for gaming/casual stuff. With Proton, gaming on Linux is nearly as viable as on Windows.
Yeah, as soon as you come to the conclusion that it’s worth not playing league, battlefield, apex legends etc it’s a no brainer now
Woo competition doing its thing!
not really... microslop will always be trash and will always demand that you own nothing, and it's all their data
Oh absolutely. But MS reacting to pressure from competition still benefits the poor souls who have to use it and shows that we need more people to switch away to encourage more improvements.
It also legitimizes it as a viable option for gaming. We already know this, but the general masses are going to start looking at Linux vs Microsoft the same way folks look at PlayStation vs Xbox.
I bet you're still giving them too much credit and most won't know the difference between a steam deck and all the windows-based clones that popped up when business saw that people wanted something like that so made more corporate versions. A non-trivial portion of them will try one of the shitty clones and decide based on that that the steam deck is garbage.
lol
Never change, Lemmy
???
I dont even check if a game will work anymore on Linux, it always does. Last one was Planet Crafter which was a really good game. The entire planet is changing as you terraform it which is very fun to see.
That game ate 60 hours of my life in a week when I first played it
Pure addiction planet crafter, I bought the dlc in a heartbeat
Planet crafter, steer clear of that game. That's some addictive shit, I 100%'ed that game before I even knew what I was doing. Really hit the subnautica style base building, alongside a progression system that frankly didn't take the piss with my time
Getting it to work is one thing, getting past anticheat bullshit to play MP is different. Luckily I'm really only into single player at the moment, which all work flawlessly on my bazzite.
There are good MP games that works on Linux, but if one really cares about a specific title (and I totally get it, we want to enjoy stuff with our friends and all) dual boot I feel is a good compromise. Sure it is annoying to reboot every time you want to play some X game but nothing is perfect and you can keep your windows install pretty minimal.
Fair enough. I hate the way windows has gone, so I'm perfectly fine with any flavor of Linux.
Yeah, it's good. Sort of like a survival cookie clicker.
No please, continue shooting yourself in the foot.
People begged for performance debloating for more than a decade but you're only interested now because Proton outperforms Windows.
I would be asking for a multi million dollar salary as an NT kernel engineer to undo all the crappary intentionally introduced in every update ever since Windows 8.
Native Windows CS2 dust2 benchmark gives me 120fps over the native Bazzite Linux (fedora 43) CS2 - 180fps. Running proton CS2 gives me 100fps.
Wish more games had native Linux ports.
I feel like half the games I play with native Linux ports actually perform worse compared to using proton and are buggier
most of them are like that
That's a consequence of the native ports not being maintained by most studios, especially post-proton.
That might change in the future though.
Microsoft is doing this ONLY because they finally recognized that Linux surpassed them flying on the one thing they were king: games
Microsoft doesn't give a single shit about end users, never had. It always had the goal of becoming the dominant ayer, then get a monopoly, and then doing absolutely nothing anymore until users complain too much. This has been their work ethos since it's inception and if you believe otherwise I have a bridge to sell you.
Nah they'll just do anti-competive shit to make Steam worse.
They'll copy Steam's source code, patent it, and then sue Steam for infringement.
How do you imagine they patent a fork of Linux?
They already tried patent trolling for over a decade before they gave up... (Look up "Microsoft Novell-Suse patent trolling")
I wouldn't put it past them to try...
As I said, they tried it at the height of their power and failed. I find it far more likely that winblows becomes a Linux distro. It fits their EEE motto a lot better.
Some bullshit to do with vibe coding a copy, then make some important new feature and patent that. Then require all new games on windows to support that. Some bullshit like that. Make direct 13 as incompatible with translations to vulkan as possible.
Some bullshit to do with vibe coding a copy, then make some important new feature and patent that.
You think Microslop can vibe code an OS that's competitive with Linux?
not linux, the steam client
And what's that going to accomplish? The steam client isn't magically improving performance, their kernel patches are.
And that's perfectly fine and legal because patents are 'first to file'
Because their legal system is captured by people who don't give a fuck about what's right and who see "competition" as something that needs to be squashed rather than encouraged.
Yeah 😥
Hate this place.
I'm not sure if this is a joke, but patents are very much (supposed to be) required to be innovative, as in if there's any "prior art" (i.e. anything evidence of it already existing either in another patent or just publicly) then you can't patent it
I'm sure lots of things are "supposed to be" a certain way, but in true American fashion, most of these kinds of laws aren't enforced until the parties end up in court.
You know, the courts that are famously impartial and who never rule along ideological or party lines, are never swayed by whoever has the "better" lawyers, and are never biased against minoities. Oh, and litigation is super cheap too, and so frivolous lawsuits definitely can't be used as financial weapons.
And only because of portable devices like the steam deck. If the software scene was exactly the same but these devices didn't exist, I don't think they would be doing this. They wouldn't care windows is heavier if it was about standard gaming computers only.
wait, MS cares about their product? then why is it so... gestures vaguely at the OS
Perhaps they are talking handhelds, specifically?
Look. I am the biggest, most shameless CachyOS fanboy you will find. It’s like 90% of my desktop time, has been for years.
But I’ve benchmarked a few games on Windows and Linux, Proton and native, sparsely, and Windows still has an advantage, sometimes. Cyberpunk 2077 was the biggest outlier for Proton (eg faster on Windows, enough to visibly affect settings I can manage on my 3090).
And many native ports are still truly awful. Often where performance equates to simulation time, like modded Stellaris or Rimworld.
Mind you, that’s not always the case. Proton is faster in many games, and (for example) anything Java like Minecraft or Starsector are just hilariously faster on Linux.
The caveats:
-
My Windows 11 is neutered to hell. It’s a barren wasteland. Even Defender is disabled.
-
I’m running Nvidia.
-
Some of my testing is aging now.
Still, I am a Linux shill, and think the headline is a bit dramatic. Stripped Windows is still faster in plenty of realistic scenarios.
Since they’re referencing SteamOS, they’re probably talking about stock mobile systems, where the overhead from that mountain of background junk in Windows is much more painful.
Yes but ... Windows is not stripped Windows. The real Windows is a spyware hell installed by your laptop vendor. Barely usable.
Good point. My laptop is dualbooting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 22) and its faster to:
start Linux, login, start quemu, start Windows VM in quemu, login in windows in the VM, shutdown windows in the VM gracefully, exit quemu, shutdown Linux gracefully
than
boot windows natively, login and wait till it is responsive enough to do anything with it.
See, my Windows partition starts instantly. TBH its faster than linux, which takes an extra second to initialize SDDM, and then network connectivity.
...Perhaps because its so neutered. It's not really a fair comparison, as Windows is a narrow-focus OS for me, a tool for running things, to the point I don't trust it for anything security sensitive.
Nvidea might be making a big difference there, I'm on AMD and didn't lose any frames, even in AAA games, when I switched from Windows 10 to Bazzite 42. Haven't gained any either, but there's a lot less stutter in menus and faster loading times that still make it feel smoother anyway.
THANK YOU!!!
What if they find out that people went to CachyOS for even more performance?
Cachy uses a lot of unstable patches. I wouldn't recommend it just for benefit of bunch more frames.
So far it has been the most stable distro I've run, since moving to Linux full time three years ago, i think they are doing something right, idn 🤷
Agreed. The only major challenges I've had with CachyOS are from my Windows VM or from not realizing that Docker containers are the best option for server-type things, like the controller for my WiFi mesh network. Once I stopped trying (and failing) to run that from the AUR, it's been smooth sailing.
But most people would just buy the dedicated mesh network controller, and the only reason I need a Windows VM is for SharePoint integration in Explorer, which is a fairly specialized requirement. Even as a power user, I almost exclusively use the web apps for O365 just so I don't need to use Windows.
Apparently, earlier in CachyOS's history, there were more issues, but I don't think that's at all true anymore. I tried installing a more "standard"/conservative choice, Debian on my wife's and friend's laptops, and it's been way harder. I should have just stuck with "unstable" CachyOS, and it would have been much more stable. Turns out things usually get better with newer patches. Who knew?
I was there early in CachyOS’s history, and it was still great. The only huge issues I can remember (that wasn’t totally self inflicted) are upstream Nvidia problems, and some ambiguous manual package installs/uninstalls when some stuff was shuffled and renamed. But the later just taught me to watch the update log, as I should.
That, and I keep an LTS kernel around whenever something minor breaks. Which their setup makes totally painless.
I agree with others. CachyOS is the most stable Linux distro I’ve ever used, to the point where my laptop and desktop installs are years old now. It’s also that Linux desktop, overall, is in a good place, but still.
Debian is IMO just bad distro for desktop users. There's a reason why Valve moved from Debian to Arch based for their SteamOS.
Oof. They are about to inject a bunch of vibe code into the only part that functions well.
Just die already microslop
IDK performance on Linux is amazing IMO.
My current favorite is Windrose, and it has an official requirement of a Radeon 6800XT or better, I'm playing it on Linux with a 2 levels lower Radeon 6600XT and has even increased graphics settings from the defaults, and it plays perfectly.
IDK if this is better or worse on Windows, but it seems to me that performance is for sure no longer a serious problem on Linux, even on games that run on the proton compatibility layer. And this is even on an early access game that isn't fully optimized.
i think you misread the post
windows is trying to be comparable to steamos in terms of performance
Year of the Windows desktop here we go!
(credit)
Lmao imagine whatever improvement they try to do end up making wine even more performant
my favourite thing about linux/open source: It's often one person in their garage writing this code (or at least started that way), and it's more often than not better than the closed source alternatives. Booyeah!
It already is better in a number of games.
And even with the overhead of translating DirectX and Windows API calls.
I am using Linux for 30 years at this point and it blows my mind that I can play AAA Windows games on Linux now
I've been fooling with Linux for nearly as long. I ain't no gamer beyond the intense game of KPatience, but I'm amazed at just how far and versatile Linux has become. From servers to gaming to real-time kernels that can power industrial machinery. It's got something for everyone.
What's my easiest distro route to get straight to gaming with an RTX 4070ti plus a Vive VR?
Outside of Valve hardware certainly Bazzite or Nobara. Not sure about Vive VR support in general though, but if it exists those distros are the most likely to work with it with minimum of issues.
Reject Fedora nonsense. Go Arch, use CachyOS. Seriously, I only ever had issues with Fedora and Fedora based distros. And besides, Red Hat is slowly turning to shit. You heard it from me first. In 5 to 10 years most people will put Red Hat on the same level as Canonical.
I second CachyOS. I don’t even consider myself an advanced Linux user and it’s been a relatively painless transition from Windows gaming.
Plugged in a second SSD m.2 into my motherboard, installed off a USB, and an hour later I was goofing around with some friends on our weekly Satisfactory run like nothing changed.
If it’s the first time trying it just follow along with a YouTube guide, ezpz.
I have a very similar setup (Vive + 4070) working under Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The only special workaround was to install Steam natively, downloading directly from Valve instead of using the Snap provided by Canonical. Aside from that, everything worked immediately right out of the box.
CachyOS or Nobara if you want the option to tinker down the line
Bazzite if you don't want to do any tinkering ever
I'd say something Arch based will be the easiest on account of it having so many users. For VR, check out the Linux VR Adventures wiki, and the Matrix community attached to it.
NVidia kind of sucks. I'd expect that to be the biggest wrinkle.
CachyOS would be my recommendation; it has options to get a kernel with the closed-source drivers automatically during install, iirc. I bought an AMD card, so I have no direct experience, but I'd expect the least friction with it, even compared to Bazzite or other gaming-focused distributions.
Yeah. Being Arch based it's flexible, and I've heard it's got a good setup. A friend has a bit of a rough time with the default kernel but you have options.
VR will automatically be a bit janky. The smoothest out of the box VR experience at the moment is WiVRn coupled with an Android VR headset, like a Quest or a Pico. Requires a good router though.
If someone's looking to get into VR on Linux, I'd wait for Valve's headset to come out. No idea if it'll be any good or not, but the Quest is arse. I absolutely hate mine.
There is none. VR is a fools errand on Linux. You can maybe get something to technically run, but with missing features, worse performance, and even then only some VR will even attempt to launch to that broken state.
I have a Windows VM for VR gaming. Dual boot also works. For all non-VR gaming, Linux is pretty much flawless nowadays.
Which Distro? Pick one that has existed for at least 10 years, with the desktop environment your like the look and feel of most, and most popular and well supported from that.
We have a Vive and it works pretty okay actually, aside from SteamVR being janky.
Hopefully they fix the SteamVR jank with the upcoming Steam Frame, though!
-- Frost
at this point just port wine to windows
This is the Year of Linux on the handheld
Wow what a twist of events.
you are (not) an emulator
They must not know about how terrible DX12 games perform with Nvidia cards...