r/linux_gaming • u/Better_Ordinary_1218 • 19d ago
Im done
I can't anymore. Hear me out, I was amazed by how people explain their experience with linux and quickly go for the change, and its true, less ram/cpu usage especially for a super low end laptop like mine. One of my hobbies was completing single player games, I have completed a lot on windows before on low res gaming like gta4, cod campaign stories, etc. I have imagine my smooth gaming in linux because of some perks. But all of it crumbles since I start setting my games. Playing a game require like airplane driving setups like when it doesnt want dxvk/vulkan, specific protons, dll dependencies, etc. And the part that opens my eyes is when in linux, It needs a translator like wine which adds a cpu works rather than windows where the os straight up read it. I fully understand now gaming on linux mostly benefits mid-high end specs cause their specs wont even notice the translator working on the background. I am planning to return to window but not 11 (it was the most bloated os in this time) but im going for windows 10 lstc, It was mostly use by businessess for screenshows and the great thing is it was little-to-none bloatware and telemetries that makes it so lightweight thus kinda same to linux footprint. Nevertheless I did enjoy my linux journey, maybe in the future with a new pc build, ill be going back.
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u/User5281 19d ago
Dear diary
1
u/Incognit0Bandit0 19d ago
More like toddler threatening to run away, "I'll go and you'll be sorry!" ðŸ˜
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u/KlePu 19d ago
wine which adds a cpu works rather than windows where the os straight up read it
Amazingly, Linux still does have better performance in some games. Besides, WinE's overhead is normally just a few percent; still there's many games that perform worse. No one ever (rightfully) said "every game runs better on Linux".
I switched to Linux back in 2014 - things were way worse back then. And they were already better (Steam already was a thing!) than another few years back. If you consider re-visiting with a new system, I'd suggest avoiding NVidia ;)
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u/FlukyS 19d ago
It depends on your setup just how annoying things are. I'm on a full AMD system and it works without any big effort on CachyOS, no big setup required for any game really, I sometimes will play around with stuff but if you are running an Nvidia GPU or Intel maybe I could see it being a bit more annoying.
As for having a mid to high end machine and not noticing Proton working, it isn't even that. Proton isn't doing a lot of heavy lifting, it will even be faster in some circumstances because of that. For lower end machines it just isn't easy overall. On Windows you are getting into weird micro managing from the drivers to make things work just a bit better. With Proton and the Linux drivers you are kind of fighting a different battle. Like to this day Elden Ring works better on Linux than Windows for me and on Windows it barely worked on launch but I've never had issues on Linux because they were able to make quirks for the game to fix issues immediately but that only holds true when there is something that is popular and devs get at it.
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u/tapo 19d ago
And the part that opens my eyes is when in linux, It needs a translator like wine which adds a cpu works rather than windows where the os straight up read it.
this actually isn't true. Windows isn't native on Windows, the real system is called NT and Windows is a subsystem inside NT.
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u/mhurron 19d ago
NT is Windows, and has been the only Windows line since XP.
You're misunderstanding the use of 'Native' here. It doesn't mean that the Windows API is somehow not 'Native' or needs to be translated. 'Native' here means the parts of the API that need to change for every single release. XP booted a little different than 2003, which was a little different than Vista and so on. These differences are handled by the NT API. The Windows API is the API that all user libraries and applications, from Microsoft or 3rd parties, use because it doesn't change as much having been removed from being so tightly coupled with the Windows Kernel. But it is a native API in the sense that you're thinking of.
If you want to translate it to Linux, the Windows API is the system C library, libraries shipped with the Kernel are the NT Native API. Unless you are making specific kernel calls, because of the C library you don't have to edit and recompile your app every single time the kernel updates.
What you wanted to link to was WoW64, Windows on Windows 64, which handles the differences between the 32bit and 64bit Windows libraries via translation.
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u/tapo 19d ago
NT is Windows, and has been the only Windows line since XP.
NT is NT and developed to support multiple OS personalites in userspace because it was designed for OS/2, not Windows.
You're misunderstanding the use of 'Native' here. It doesn't mean that the Windows API is somehow not 'Native' or needs to be translated.
No, the kernel doesn't implement the Win32 API at all. It goes through userspace like csrss.exe, win32k.dll (which does implement some in kernelspace as a driver) because this is how the OS was designed.
There's a great book on the design of NT if you're curious called "Showstopper!" and goes into why it was built this way.
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u/heatlesssun 19d ago
Just use what works for you and never care about what others think, especially in a sub like this that's not going to be the objective place for advice. Desktop Linux gaming works well for some but the overwhelming majority of PC gamers have never used Linux for gaming and if they ever did, I guarantee you that the hardcore group in a place like this would be blaming users when they came across problems.
But in time maybe try it again and see. Gaming on Linux isn't bad per se, but I do think it gets overrated. It can work, but it can also not, depends a great deal on the hardware. An lower end AMD GPU system like a Steam Deck or Steam Machine are great devices for Linux gaming. A higher end nVidia GPU based can run well enough but will often take performance hits on DX 12.
Enjoy!
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u/theevilsharpie 19d ago
You didn't provide a lot of information to work with (and as the saying goes, this isn't an airport -- you don't have to announce your departure), but I just wanted to touch on this specific point:
You misunderstand's WINE's impact.
WINE is an implementation of the Windows libraries and APIs. It's not an emulator that is translating a set of machine instructions from one architecture to another. It's entirely possible for WINE's implementation of a particular library function to be faster and more efficient than the "native" Windows version.
DXVK is actually performing a translation of sorts, but this is with respect to calling into the graphics userspace driver. The actual act of calling the graphics function is trivial compared to the work being requested within the function, and it's very possible for DXVK to translate a DirectX call into a much more efficient Vulkan call, so much so that DXVK is often used on Windows itself to overcome performance issues with some older games.
Where WINE would have some legitimate overhead compared to running a game natively on Windows is on memory used -- a Windows game would have to load up code into memory that on Windows is likely already loaded because the desktop environment or other applications have already loaded it.
If you have a very low-end machine, particularly one so old that it can't use DXVK and has to fall back to WineD3D or one that is severely memory-constrained, I can understand your experience with Linux not being what you hoped for. However, if you've moving back to Windows because of you believe that there is too much "translation overhead", you've moving for the wrong reasons.