I really like that now some Content Creators are working on providing useful information for Linux gamers. Especially information like bad Frame pacing or “unreasonable” bad performance for some certain games for certain hardware is a very important information to make a good decision when buying a card.
Me personally I am not very interested in the performance comparison between Linux and Windows. I choose Linux as my daily driver for specific reasons, and game performance was not a high priority. But knowing which Hardware might have strange performance problems compared to other Hardware if I wamt to game is always a very nice thing.
I liked that the Intel B580 was included in the charts. This gave me some usefull information for comparing it to a AMD 9060 XT. Only thing I am missing is if it is the 8GB or 16GB version of the Sapphire Pulse. But I did not check their Blog/Site post yet.
100% this. I’ve been on Linux longer than Steam has, and I’m not changing anytime soon. I’m probably also not going to buy Nvidia (I value FOSS drivers), but maybe I will if the performance gap is significant enough.
I forget as I wasn’t looking for intel, but If it ran stuff, it was likely the 16GB, and if it was excluded often for not running higher resolutions it was probably the 8GB, as they did mention the lower ram cards had weird issues in some games and simply crashed on load.
i switched to linux mint permanently finally after support for 10 ended, and wished i had done so earlier. Even the problems i have had with linux have been more pleasant than what i have had with windows, even though they have been more disruptive. I guess knowing that I could probably fix them if i bother to look into it hard enough, while on windows there is good chance there is nothing i can do about it.
I switched to Linux a while back for gaming and I am happy with it. There were a couple initial issues getting the sound and screen colors configured correctly and I did lost a few frames, but it seems to be improving.
Still some games I can not get to work on Linux, such as Sacred 2 and some other older ones. Probably just a lack of knowledge on my part. Still no US tax prep software that I trust for Linux, though.What tax prep software do you use? I thought they had all gone to just webapps at this point …
H&R Block. They still used a downloaded app last year.
Maybe they mean for a business?
Try free tax USA next time. It’s what we use!
such as Sacred 2
Where are you installing it?
Maybe this helps? https://www.protondb.com/app/225640#lTflZjszpq
I was trying to run it from steam. I tried a while back, looks like support has gotten much better.
Me looking at these benchmarks like I’m about to play anything other than FTL.
I’m on my 3rd all achievement run of Into the Breach. Subset is God tier.
Quite possibly one of my top 5 games.
My gripe with this kind of game is that i quickly get a mod list of 300 and then it takes so much effort. Especially with Steam auto-updating the game, despite making accumulating mods so much easier.
Oh god, you’ve just given me a glimpse into my future. I’m currently plowing through Multiverse, and I’m tempted to add something else. Must… resist…
But they are all essential!! All fixes or features that should be vanilla.
I’m so happy to see some big channels doing these Linux tests. I know it’s probably way more difficult since there are thousands of distros to try!
You don’t need to test every distro.
Honestly you could capture 90 percent of the market with just arch and Debian/Ubuntu.
You could add 2 or 3 of the gaming focused distros for comparison however since they tend to be built on top of the two above things are more likely going to vary based on configuration more than which distro or de you are using.
They don’t test all the windows varieties either. 10, 11, 23h2, 25h2, home, pro, N, …
Lets be real, Ubuntu/Arch is the way to go. Debian is just not present on gaming set ups, Arch is close to what Valve is doing and Ubuntu has like 69 downstream distros.
I am a Debian user, and I think you are 100% right :)
Before I say anything, I think Gamer’s Nexus only testing with Bazzite makes a ton of sense. It would be silly to expect them to test with Windows S, N, Pro, LTSC, etc as well.
Lets be real, Ubuntu/Arch is the way to go.
The distinction between Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian are pretty minor as far as gaming goes. They are all considered the same family for a reason.
Debian is just not present on gaming set ups
Linux Mint (a Debian-based distro) and Ubuntu (also Debian-based) are extremely popular in gaming setups. In fact, the steam hardware survey has Mint 22.2, Ubuntu Core 22, Ubuntu 24, and Mint 22.1 as the second, third, fourth, and fifth most common Linux OSes.
While true, the issue is that Debian release cadence is such that they will always be “behind” kernel and wine wise.
Also they are more purist and less likely to facilitate proprietary bits. Last time I tried wine a lot of apps didn’t work because they had no work to enable non-free fints So they may have the same general packaging strategy, but the vintage of content and scope are distinctly different from more aggressive distributions.
Debian is just not present on gaming set ups
You are mistaken.
It’s not popular in that arena, but it’s definitely present.
Ubuntu is in the same boat, 90% of its users are using the LTS version.
Arch isn’t that good of a choice either simply because it’s a DIY distro. It’s not meant to be complete out of the box and may require tweaks and making choices that Gamers Nexus is explicitly trying to avoid.
The vast majority of the use of arch at this point is complete out of the box… Arch hasn’t been a diy distro any more or less then fedora or Ubuntu for a few years at this point.
Between endeavour cachy and steam os. Diy arch is basically not really a thing for gamers. It’s a meaningless concern.
With archinstall, I largely agree. However, you still need to make a lot of choices. Which kernel branch? Which filesystem? Enable swap? Which desktop environment? And other choices that I forget, it’s been a few uses since I used Arch.
Gamers Nexus is very clear they want to avoid making decisions. They want to stick as close as possible to as possible, but that’s tricker since Arch doesn’t have defaults for those, unlike Bazzite. Bazzite uses the Fedora kernel (which follows the latest stable); btrfs; zswap; desktop environment they do provide a choice between KDE and Gnome, in which case is easier to choose KDE since it’s what Valve is pushing.
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This is fucking benchmarking… You don’t benchmark a 5090 with crysis 1. That would be objectively stupid.
So you are actually correct your use case literally is not real gaming for the purpose of the context.
I would be amused by some DOOM benchmarks. Let’s see how many zeroes we can get before the FPS counter breaks!
I just threw it on the family laptop to give it another life. So far it’s great, and I would honestly suggest it as a regular user desktop system. My kids will be fine with it, so would my mom, and any of my non-tech-savvy friends.
Personally I probably won’t switch from my beloved LMDE, but I’m also a greybeard nerd who’s set in my ways.
that’s how I started 15 years ago… put it on a netbook just to try it and loved it… showed the wife and she said “it’s coooler than windows” (loved her more from that day)… windows never entered my house since
I’ve noticed a lot more talk about Bazzite lately and I’ve been wanting to at least give it a try as a daily driver. I’m not us gaming though I do dev work and what have you. For people on Bazzite that also do that, how is it? easy to set up for that like say using Doom Emacs or what have you?
its nice as a console. boots right into steam, start game with controller, bam. Since you can get Lutris games added to your steam library, there are so many game and platform options available.
bad: yeah you need to tinker around with a couple of games so they run right. Some only start with the specific proton version, some just take very long to start, some dont like the steam overlay, etc. But once you have them set up, its the best.
bazzite is an excellent all-round linux distro for contemporary spec computer (gpu, >=16GB ram)
i use it for rust and c# dev work using distrobox. all gui ide’s and tooling run in the containers with excellent performance
i also layer a handful of packages on the “immutable” or atomic base os for some carefully chosen tools i want. the base os is generally well fitted out
very highly recommend as daily dev driver and also gaming
Dev work in the uBlue family (and yes I use bazzite for dev) leans heavily on distrobox (think development containers). Took a bit to adapt but now I think it’s the ducks nuts. Because you decouple the dev environment from the main, immutable OS you get a lot of wins, especially if you work with a lot of different projects as you can setup distroboxes specifically for each. AI code that only works with specific drivers / libraries / python with instructions only for Ubuntu or Arch, no worries, make up a distrobox, when you’re finished archive it and spin it up later if needed. If you’re only working one project on say LTS or something it’s going to be much less of a win, but for the flexible developer it’s a godsend.
As to doom emacs or whatever, I have a post install script for distroboxes that sets up my preferred environment for the big 3 (Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu), it’s not hard. Very much a kill your darlings philosophy.
ETA Because of this workflow it really doesn’t matter what the host OS is, so it may as well be something I can game on, and I’m fond of the Fedora relative stability with sharp, but not bleeding edge.
I use Bazzite for my HTPC (AMD NUC).
For a “set it and forget it” gaming console experience? It is awesome. It feels like I already have a GabeCube under my TV (that I bought for probably half the price…). And when I have to do more complicated things than “run the update once a month”, I just ssh in from either my desktop or laptop.
But… it is an immutable/atomic distro. So if the packages you want to add are flatpaks or appimages? You are probably fine. Otherwise? You get into a mess where you are adding packages to your layers (?) and kinda feel like you are playing with fire. I did that to get iperf3 installed to test some networking upgrades and it was mostly painless but it was also a really bad experience versus
sudo dnf install iperf3. And… even on machines where I spend 90% of my time ssh’ing into servers, I still tend to want to install a good amount of local packages as a developer.So my suggestion would be to stick to Bazzite for gaming first platforms and continue to use whatever distro you like (Fedora for the win!) for “real” computers.
Also, if you aren’t as annoyed by atomic distros as I am, I would still be wary of Bazzite. They have a lot of different SKUs and I don’t care enough to try to parse what each one does. But the common use case is to basically treat a machine like a Steam Deck… which means you boot into Big Picture with essentially no login screens or a REALLY insecure pin code. And then you switch to desktop mode with a single click.
There are ways to harden that (and very much an argument of whether you need to harden a machine in your home). And Linux, generally, has very good protections by actually requiring auth for
sudo. But I already feel sketchy that I am logged into Steam/GoG on a box with almost no protections. But I also live in an environment where I don’t have to worry about someone buying 10k in fortnite bucks on my TV.Bazzite has a Desktop image explicitly to cover your last issue. The SKU picker has a “Do you want Steam Gaming Mode?” question and explains that it’s intended for less secure single user/HTPC setups. If you say no, you’ll get the standard Desktop image with a standard user login like any other distro.
You can use distrobox/distroshelf to set up a container with a regular distro and install packages in that instead of layering; if a package installs a GUI application you can export the application and it will show up in your applications menu.
And you can similarly do most/all of your dev work in a container that you spin up with a
podmanalias (fuck hashicorp with a rusty metal pole but damn if Vagrant wasn’t awesome). Hell, there are a lot of arguments that you should.It inherently becomes a question of what your primary use case for a machine is and how often you spend fighting it to accomplish that. And, personally, I run Linux so I DON’T have to fight my OS. Which… is really weird when you think about it but holy crap Windows and Mac are annoying.
Immutable OSes are amazing for corporate environments and HTPC/Gaming computers are another solid use case. But if your primary focus is whether you can be a developer (as indicated by the doomemacs ask)… you are gonna be cranky.
Even Flatpaks get annoying sometimes during dev work. Yes I do need to talk to that device. Yes I know the risks. It’s ok. It’s just a microcontroller. Yes I know what I’m doing. It’s not going to hurt you. I wrote it!
Thank goodness for flatseal. If I were to do it again, I would probably do it the “old fashioned” way.
The solution for packages is do it in a container, that way its easy and doesnt involve layering more stuff.
distroboxes are incredible and distrobox expose is legitimately the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. I have protonge and proton tricks which every game uses installed in a distrobox, and via distrobox expose my host can use them without any any other setup. it’s awesome.
same thing goes for any of my dev tools. i was just shocked about the ability to expose commands and have it be seamless enough for games.
Bazzite has a developer version. Not sure what the differences are though. It’s on their site.
If IDEs from Flathub and CLI tools from Homebrew serve your needs, no further action is required. If deeper system integration is needed for VSCode (ie. devcontainers), Docker (ie. Podman is not sufficient), etc - then see below specialized images.
There is a whole Bazzite for Devs page that mentions Bazzite-DX for development to handle some things like devcontainers: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite-dx
Their main website also says:
Running a game, a development environment, a container for your Jellyfin server, or a utility only available on the Arch User Repository? You can rest assured it works here. Bazzite is developed on Bazzite.
At the end of the day, its an immutable fedora distro. Which may serve your needs. or may not. And bazzite’s primary focus is on gaming. It will most likely work (given a few criteria), but it may not given that is not their primary focus.
Bazzite is part of the Universal Blue project, which is basically three distros based on Fedora Silverblue.
Bazzite - gaming focus Aurora - KDE desktop Bluefin - Gnome desktop
Look up the universal blue site and you’ll see more about them.
TIL helpful
as i understand it, bazzite is very gaming-oriented.
See also:
Bluefin and Auroa are for you, changed how I program and organise, our you can make your own template and just pop everything you’re missing in the containerfile similar to how nix pkgs works
I’m a huge fan of Aurora, the least popular ublue desktop OS. Bazzite is great, too. But I prefer Aurora.
Hell, even my wife uses it and has no complaints.
I use Bazzite for devwork too, I do use distrobox though which allows me to get proper dependencies without layering more onto the system image.
I have Bazzite on an HTPC. It’s Fedora but you can’t use DNF only Flatpak. I personally wouldn’t use Bazzite on my main PC. The gimmick with Bazzite is it’s ideal for entertainment appliances, it’s as close to SteamOS you can get forking Fedora Kinote.
I’m not us gaming though I do dev work and what have you
Bazzite isn’t really for you. Bazzite is a gaming 1st distro. You probably want a more normal general use distro.
Don’t agree with this. I do dev work in bazzite without any issues. Just spin a distrobox and that’s it. Also it’s better that usual dev environments, just like a python env is better than using native os python.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. There’s better distros out there.
Especially when you have no interest in gaming.
If you have no interest in gaming and want a modern development environment there’s Aurora/Bluefin. Bazzite is just those with gaming bits added on.
Not true. I can even develop Linux device drivers on it after figuring out modules signing. Basic stuff if you ask me. Bazzite is as good for developers as any other distro.
If you don’t mind a learning
curvecliff, NixOS is great for development, and I haven’t had any issues gaming either.Recommending someone who’s curious about Bazzite to maybe check out NixOS instead is… Certainly something lol
We have Linuxbrew. Homebrew but for Linux. Battletested by countless devs previously using MacOS.
Come join us.
I initially installed Bazzite when switching to Linux, but the development experience made me switch to Kubuntu after a few days. I’ve had various problems with development tools which probably related to Bazzite’s immutability. For example I couldn’t get Godot to connect with a code editor. I’m sure there were solutions to those problems, but I haven’t regretted switching. Development works great now and gaming feels just as good to me as it did on Bazzite.
Look up Bazzite DX. Its a developers oriented version. Other than that, distrobox is amazing for creating containers for your projects, allowing you to have a sane and stable dev environment
Bazzite comes with no dev tools pre-installed and a lot of gaming-related stuff.
Of course you can add what you need through flatpaks, containers or image layering, but why not choose a distro aimed at dev work in the first place?deleted by creator
I appreciate the work they are putting into this. I think we will see more linux adoption in the future as microsoft keeps doing all the things it has been with windows 11.
How is Bazzite with Waydroid?
I am looking to change my Sons laptop from Mint; he is using Minecraft education for some things at school. It is an older dell laptop; but has plenty of power for a 10yo kid.
Not very difficult to find, it is supported https://docs.bazzite.gg/Installing_and_Managing_Software/Waydroid_Setup_Guide/
I’m of a few minds on this.
First and foremost: I am a huge Gamers Nexus fan and think Steve et al are a great complement to Wendell when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop. And I love that they actually addressed the elephant in the room where… quite often you actively don’t want to use the linux binaries for a game.
But I do think that having Linux as the second class benchmarks are inherently going to cause problems. Assuming they stick to doing a batch every couple months, that… okay, ain’t nobody actually buying hardware unless they have to. But still. And this was apparently collected during one of the months where nVidia was a complete shitshow. But Dragon’s Dogma 2 completely breaking is the kind of thing where… look, I became WAY too aware of exactly how denuvo registers a machine while I was debugging that. I was able to get DD2 to run beautifully on my PC but… as a HUGE DD1 fan even I think I wasted my life doing that (would do it again though).
But I keep thinking of how many Influencers have done a variant of “tech isn’t fun anymore”. And… it kind of isn’t. But from the editorializing from Steve et al over the past year or so, it is clear they are excited that things are actually changing sometimes week to week and so many of these problems are ACTUALLY solvable by users. Sometimes it is trivial (check protondb for what settings) and sometimes you find yourself going down a rabbit hole of just how bad the Nioh 2 PC port actually was.
I suspect this ends with the vast majority of outlets embracing “XBOX For PC” in a year or two… and Steve looking even more like the crazy old man of PC reviews. But I do think this will go a long way towards helping the fence sitters get away from MS.
when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop
🤣🤣🤣
Quarter century, but who’s counting really 😆
solving anti-cheat would basically seal the Dingus
The way I solve anti-cheat is by never playing games that require it.
i want to play dayz tho
Just play something else. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of games out there that require no anti-cheat.
Just play something else
no thanks I’m good
DayZ runs fine on Linux though
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Weird you gotta spew blatant lies and misinformation just to service corpo dick.
Plenty of multiplayer games and MMOs are playable on linux. and they prove you don’t need invasive, spyware level access for anticheat.
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I’ve never seen someone buckle under so little pressure
So what? I’m at work and I don’t have the mental energy to address all this shit, on top of my job duties.
I’m not required to engage if I don’t feel like it. You’re just a bunch of random sticklers and pendants on the internet, and as such, I don’t owe any of you a god damn thing.
My own mental health comes first. I regret even opening my mouth.
So what? I’m at work and I don’t have the mental energy to address all this shit, on top of my job duties.
Guy spends time arguing pure bullshit and propaganda, but doesnt have the mental energy to handle being called out and suddenly pretends hes such a poor, oppressed victim.
what a fuckin joke, lol.
Just don’t take Internet discussions too seriously, friend. Sometimes I’m like you. I will force a topic, it doesn’t go the way I didn’t expect. So I have two options: continue, because the activity is interesting, or just say “fuck it, life is too short”, and move on. Both are okay.
You could have just said you were wrong and moved on. Getting all worked up seems to be taking up a lot more energy.
The majority of multiplayer games do not require kernel level anticheat. I play almost exclusively multiplayer games I just don’t play the dumb mainstream ones like fortnite or destiny
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Kernel ac is pretty much the only one that doesn’t work. The vast majority of other anti cheats work perfectly fine under proton.
Like I said I play almost exclusively multiplayer games on Linux if that wasn’t clear, the only ones that don’t work are things like valorant, destiny, fortnite that are using kernel ac
No, plenty of multiplayer games dont have anti cheat systems on the client side lol.
You’re going to get dogpiled because you’re generalizing and people are calling you out for that. All your edits and bluster, when you could go back and just say you like a specific subset of games that are made by devs that are just lazy/shitty. Voila, maybe then everyone would stop replying with the same comment!
Or, ya know, just keep digging that hole. It’s funny either way.
Has an uninformed, awful take, that belittles someone else… then cries the victim when people call him out. Nice
If you need to clarify something to someone in a reply… Also add your clarification as an edit instead of “Edit: OMG read my reply to that other guy”.
Might save your inbox from the… ~3 replies that you apparently can’t handle.
Sidenote: I’d hate to play multiplayer games with someone so fragile.
What? You can play multiplayer games np lol. It’s just shitters like riot games, tarkov, GTA, and those other corpo fucks you can’t play on because they want to harvest your info.
I’m about to delete my comment cause you’re the third person now to respond with basically the same thing and I’m tried of clarifying myself. So just go read my reply to the first person who said something similar to what you did.
I am just replying to annoy you. ily
It’s solved, they just refuse to enable it
What I don’t get is “easy anti cheat” seemed to work fine for elden ring (provided you created an empty file when SotE dropped and you didn’t have it). I have seen next to zero cheating in my experiences. Although I do realize souls type multiplayer is very different than competitive FPSs.
cheating absolutely ruins a lot of my favorite fps games. many of them are unplayable unless you have some well moderated private server to play on
souls type multiplayer is very different than competitive FPSs
extremely so. yes good talk thank you
Enabling anticheat means the user must sacrifice many of their core freedoms just to play a video game. And in principle anticheat will never fully prevent cheating short of pointing a camera at the user and watch them the whole time they are playing.
I hope Linux community can push back. This whole thing is idiotic and harms the consumers.
Enabling anticheat means the user must sacrifice many of their core freedoms just to play a video game.
Lots of games support anti-cheat in Linux. It’s critical to note that anti-cheat in general is not the issue.
Kernel-level anti-cheat however is. It’s a massive security issue and something that everyone, including Windows users, should roundly reject.
No, all client side anti cheats are bad and won’t work. The user space ones are still privacy risks and most importantly is absolutely useless against someone who is determined to cheat.
If the anti-cheat is client-side, that’s a solved problem, thanks to avoidance.
Gaming will be the drive to get more people to use Linux and I’m enjoying the trajectory it’s on.
Damn Wendell actually got me thinking of CachyOS with his shameless plugs 😁.
I would mostly do gaming but there are those occasional times where I just need some random functionality which I perhaps may miss with Bazzite.I’ve been on Cachy forever, across two PCs.
It’s fast. Its maintainers are great. It has everything, preconfigured sanely. It Just Works.
…I don’t see myself switching distros ever again. I can’t think of a reason to, nor anything I’d want from others.
I enjoyed cachy os when I tested it out. I’d like to see how it compares to Bazzite tho. I thought I tried an immutable is years back and it annoyed the hell out of me but I can’t remember.
What kind of functionality do you use on bazzite specifically?
AMD is more stable in games where Proton/Native Linux builds have weird issues, sometimes leading to a 9070xt leading a 5080 (even beating a 5090 in like starfield but like, lol.) Raytracing still heavily prefers Nvidia.
Does not directly compare to windows benchmarks. Low V-ram causes failures. Some native versions for linux are actively worse than running windows through Proton Loading Shaders before launching game can take long (longer on Nvidia cards), and can be required very often.
Suggest watching the last 10m where they talk about these issues if you don’t have time for the whole video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovOx4_8ajZ8&t=2746
I’m not sure I quite understand the issue Steve has with things updating when adding new cards.
Sure, updates during a single benchmark series is a problem but what is the issue with the system being updated for the next benchmarks?
Proton/amdgpu/Mesa receiving updates is no different than installing newer “Game Ready” drivers when a new GPU comes out.
I assume they don’t go out of their way to install older (potentially incompatible) drivers on Windows just so they can compare two separate benchmarks.
Besides that, after disabling Flatpak and rpm-ostree updates in Bazzite, the only remaining variable is Proton. Which should be easily fixed by manually copying a fixed Proton version to their compatibility tools and using that.
Without re-testing their entire suite of cards for every new card review (which is cost prohibitive), performance changing from updates would make the comparisons between cards less useful, as it cannot be determined if the newer card being tested is better or worse purely on the merits of the hardware itself, since newer software may be artificially making it look better or worse than the tested cards that came before, and thus the actual integrity and usefulness of the testing comes into question.
They are trying to assemble a like-for-like dataset that doesn’t require their entire catalog of cards to be regularly retested to ensure that it remains like-for-like. Keeping all the software the same across tests ensures that they can add new data piecemeal and still retain an apples-to-apples comparison.
That makes sense.
So the best option seems to be to note updates for newer cards down until the automated testing can be done on Linux as well.
AFAIK, It’s not an issue of automated testing, and I don’t believe they re-test all their cards on Windows with every new review either. Instead, they maintain the same versions of software on Windows as well until enough time has passed and enough updates have piled up that they do finally re-test everything with new games to create a new dataset to compare against. They’re trying to do the same methodology on Linux.
Instead, they maintain the same versions of software on Windows as well until enough time has passed and enough updates have piled up that they do finally re-test everything
I’m not that involved with their testing procedure but doesn’t that put newer cards at a disadvantage?
They lack any sort of driver optimization if the release drivers are never installed.
That’s a good point. I went back to the video to rewatch it, and turns out I totally missed where they said they only freeze things during a testing phase, then unfreeze it after they’re done and allow updates to commence as normal.
They mentioned that due to Linux receiving more frequent updates often with meaningful performance improvements, they’ll have to throw away older data and re-test more often on Linux, as Windows doesn’t really change much in performance between updates. So I would guess that they would use release drivers with new cards, and likely would only re-test their entire suite if the release driver also gave a big performance boost on older cards.
