Linux

Let me explain what I mean.

I play a lot of Rocket League. It's the game I have played on and off for the last 10 years.

I have a better 1% FPS on Linux than on Windows. So how is that possible? The game was designed for Windows. It's "translated" to Linux by Wine/Proton and yet even with one more layer between the code and the frame being displayed, it's still faster.

This seems impossible. It shouldn't be.

But cachyos is literally built different than Windows. It's efficient and lean in ressource usage. It does better because the underlying system frees up more performance for the game I'm playing. It doesn't handle dozens of background services I don't use while I'm fully focused on playing Rocket League.

But it's also sometimes more complicated to do the initial setup to reach that level of performance. So yeah, Linux has to overcome more obstacles to be at the same level of Windows gaming performance on a very small number of games.

But most of the time, I don't tweak anything to get the same performance. I play with friends that are all on Windows and when we suddenly decide to play a new coop game that just got out, I do just like them. I buy the game, I press "Play" and that's it. Yes I may not have HDR but the rest works just the same. And that's the vast majority of games.

Years of poor performance on Linux is now so ingrained in everyone mind that I'm certain people will read me and think I'm exgaerrating when I say that most games just run better. Exact same hardware, different OS and yet I get better performance. And by performance I mean mostly FPS. When I started Overwatch on Linux it was just like Rocket League. Slightly more stable and higher FPS. It's the same game on the same settings and yet it displays frames faster.

So yeah compatibility is a constant struggle for the devs working on proton but it works so well that with the leaner operating system it performs better.

I didn't sacrifice much for this higher and more stable FPS. I lost HDR mostly because I'm too lazy to try to fix it and I lost BF6 because the devs explicitly forbid my operating system from running the game.

And even when I do need to tweak proton, it's usually just me copy pasting the same command line arguments over and over again. I'm not opening logs or anything. I try without any tweaks. 95% of the time the game runs fine. If it doesn't I usually open the steam properties and switch the compatibility layer to GE-Proton. At this point I rarely ever need to go further. And if really with both proton version I don't run the game fine, then I open protondb and copy paste the settings someone else used successfully on cachyos.

Seriously, this is not opening shells and diagnosing stuff. Most of the time my experience of Steam games is exactly the same as my Windows counterparts. And if not I usually need 2/3 extra minutes to get the game running and then I don't change anything. I just play with my friends.

We recently played Far Far West, no tweaking. I played Sintopia (a rather obscure french game), no tweaking. I played Arc Raiders from the first day to last month without tweaking anything. The game has an anticheat and has no problem whatsoever running on linux.

I'm not missing out on anything beside BF6 and that's certainly a minor issue. I also spend way less time fixing stuff on the operating system. I remembered recently that I had an issue with my Windows 10 where the system would wake up from sleep in the middle of the night to update itself. It was waking me even though I wasn't using my computer. I spent around 45 minutes researching why it was doing that and disabling what's called "Wake timers". It's more time than I have spent in the last 4 months tweaking proton to run games.

Windows got so bad at the basics of providing a stable environment to run games that Linux even with the odd and increasingly rare proton tweak is still more efficient in term of actual time playing.

I have never played as much and as diverse games as since I switched to Linux.

So really, I genuinely think cachyos on my setup at least is objectively a more comfortable environment to actually play. You just forget the OS pain and spend a fraction of the time wasted fixing some odd Windows issue in sometimes spending a few minutes tweaking a game.

Anyway, believe what you want really, but switching was a net positive for the gamer that I am. Maybe for someone that plays mostly kernel level anticheat games that's not true, but for me it is.

That's the saddest thing here, Windows is regressing with all the bloat injected in the OS to the point where Linux can get better framerate on the same hardware. It's both a testament to the philosophy behind Linux and the catastrophy that is recent Windows development.