How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton? Is it so big or just small? Hows the performance of cartoonish Windows only games? And whats your hardware and how much is the price? I’m sorry but I cannot test it myself because I’m still on my mobile. Can you also tell about how many games are compatible with Proton? What about non-popular games?

  • Mexigore@lemmy.world
    1·
    3 days ago

    I see a lot of bazzite recommendations but I think that is an outdated take. IMO CatchOS is the better choice, ofc this is personal opinion.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    56·
    9 days ago

    Some tips for you:

    • Check game compatibility using https://www.protondb.com/ this will let you know if the games you want to play run on Linux and how well they do so

    • Buy an AMD GPU, support for Linux is great on them, miles ahead of nVidia. If you already had an nVidia card it’s usable, but if you’re starting fresh 100% AMD.

    • Don’t fret too much on the distro of choice, not sure how familiar you are with Linux but because of the questions I assume not much. If this machine will also be used as a normal computer prefer a general use distro (my recommendation would be Mint), if you’ll plug it on the TV and use it as a console prefer a gaming distro (I’ve heard good stuff about Bazzite but never used it myself). You can have / and /home be different partitions, this means that you can distro hop and maintain your games, saves, and most configs from one distro to the other, or even when reinstalling the system, I strongly recommend people to do that.

    • Linux is not windows, things are done differently and that’s okay. A lot of the frustration of new users comes from trying to do things the windows way and failing miserably, e.g. trying to install programs/drivers by navigating to a random web page and downloading a binary.

    Good luck, and ask any more questions you might have.

    • Peasley@lemmy.world
      23·
      9 days ago

      Mint is a good suggestion for a new user. An underrated distro, but solid, simple, and works well for any purpose.

        • throwaway403@programming.dev
          10·
          9 days ago

          I don’t agree with the sentiment that Linux Mint is underrated either. As you note, it is quite popular and is mentioned a lot in the discourse.

          However, I don’t think that CachyOS and Linux Mint are the most popular distros; that undoubtedly goes to Ubuntu. And, if anything, I’d think that Linux Mint is more popular than CachyOS.

          Yet, if we’d limit it to the distros used by gamers, then CachyOS probably does take the crown for most used distro (aside from SteamOS). At least, there are metrics that suggest as such.

            • throwaway403@programming.dev
              2·
              8 days ago

              Ah okay, thanks for clarifying!

              FYI, DistroWatch isn’t a very reliable metric for gauging the user base of any given distro. Heck, strictly speaking, I’m unaware of any metric that does this any justice besides the opt-out DNF Count Me found on Fedora-based distros. And we will use exactly that to discredit DistroWatch!

              So, Fedora (1112[1]) has put out a number (relatively) recently; 961k users. And Bazzite (770) outright displays it on their website; 90.8k users. Like, Fedora is roughly 10 times as big as Bazzite. But their respective DistroWatch rankings don’t quite reflect that.

              1. As per DistroWatch’s 12 months, I’ll use the same table for Bazzite*. ↩︎

        • melfie@lemmy.zip
          3·
          8 days ago

          “Top 10 most popular Linux distro” type articles I’ve seen usually list Mint near the top.

    • Corgana@startrek.website
      6·
      8 days ago

      I tried out Bazzite with an Nvidia 40-series card last year and performance was the same as Windows for everything I tested

      All things being equal I would go with AMD too, but if I was OP I certainly wouldn’t turn down a good deal on an Nvidia card if one presented itself.

  • BartyDeCanter@piefed.socialEnglish
    37·
    9 days ago

    For the most part you would just build the same machine as if it was a Windows gaming machine. That said, there are a few things to know:

    • AMD has historically had better video drivers on Linux than nVidia, though nVidia has made some changes that has improved things quite a bit
    • You want a basic, well supported common distribution if you’re not extremely familiar with Linux. Don’t go with some weird niche distro because you heard it will get you 1% better frame rates. Things like Steam and Lutris are well supported on the common easy distros. I would suggest Mint as it is Debian based, and basically everything supports Debian derivatives.
    • Not every game will work, but a whole lot will. The things that are most unlikely to are competitive online games with anticheat root kits. If those matter to you, then unfortunately you’re better oft in windows.
    • Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ for a list of what is well supported and any information if they need some trick to run.
    • First_Thunder@lemmy.zip
      132·
      9 days ago

      For a new PC I’d probably recommend fedora, purely due to more modern kernels with better hardware support, though Mint now has the Hardware Enablement Kernels iirc

  • osanna@lemmy.vgEnglish
    34·
    9 days ago

    How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton? Is it so big or just small?

    Honestly, in some cases, proton is faster than games directly on winblows. Microslop even said they’re going to try to make windows faster than proton again.

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
        8·
        9 days ago

        It is more or less the same. There are countless comparisons and Linux usually wins by a small margin but not always.

  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    30·
    8 days ago

    How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton?

    The speed drop is negative. That is, it’s often actually faster.

    Yes, I know it doesn’t seem to make sense.

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 days ago

      Someone explained it in laymans terms as “imagine it not as a virtual machine, but more like a translation program converting windows-specific code into linux.”

      I did not fact-check if they are just pulling the explanation out of their ass tho, so please correct me if inaccurate.

      • AnAmericanPotato@programming.devEnglish
        7·
        8 days ago

        That’s correct. Wine, which is what Proton is based on, is not a VM or emulator. It is a re-implementation of key windows APIs so Windows EXEs can run. Assuming you’re on a x64 PC, the code is executing natively.

  • Sanctus@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    13·
    9 days ago

    Most games I just click play and they run.

    Ryzen 9 x3D, XFX Radeon 9700 XT, 32 GBs RAM, with some flavor of MSI mobo I am too lazy to get the box out to look at.

    It took me like a year to build as I was saving for all the parts (and the everything crisis began, at the time called the RAMpocalypse). I think it was around 3K to build then including the 2TB M.2

    I’m never going back.

  • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    9 days ago

    I get better performance on Linux than Windows.

    The significantly lower system overhead more than makes up for the translation layer.

    I mostly game on Steam, occasionally Lutris. The only thing that just plain wouldn’t work was Control from Gog - I probably could have gotten it to work if I played with the configuration. But I didn’t really care that much.

  • wax@feddit.nu
    8·
    8 days ago

    Apart from other things said here (e.g. AMD GPU), if you are planning on using wifi check that the adapter works well. Intel wifi usually works very well on Linux (although I have read that there are some issues with their newer wifi chips). AMD mobos usually use some kind of mediatek chipset. It might be better supported now, but I ended up replacing mine with another m.2 wifi (intel ax200).

    A quick search for general support from the mobo vendor is probably a good idea too.

    • Horsey@lemmy.world
      2·
      8 days ago

      I got a good bundle deal from Microcenter on a mobo with a wifi card that took over a year to be properly supported by the Linux kernel (or whatever relevant entity). This is good advice, but it’s likely that since we’re at the end of the AM5 generation, no new mobos should come out needing updates to function properly.

      Tap for spoiler

      In my case, it was that I needed to hard power cycle (unplug, replug) sometimes to get Linux to initiate the networking card.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    7·
    9 days ago

    Games that run on Linux are about as fast on Linux as on Windows. In fact they tend to run a little faster on Linux.

    Use AMD CPU and AMD GPU for the smoothest experience.
    AMD CPU is more reliable, and Radeon graphics have the best support for Linux.

    It is estimated that around 12000 Games work on Linux, or about 90%. For specific game compatibility you can always check protondb. Notice though that some games that have native Linux versions are also on ProtonDB, so you should check on the steam client first if there is a native Linux version.

    https://www.protondb.com/

    PS ProtonDB state the number of games that are verified to work as almost 9,900, and playable as almost 30,000 😎
    But Platinum or Gold rated games are only 60%.

    Personally I generally check ProtonDB before buying a game, but it’s been quite a while since there was something that didn’t work.

  • strawberry_enjoyer42@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    81·
    9 days ago

    Not sure if you’ve chosen a distro, but I can vouch for CachyOS being pretty decent. There are more stable (i.e. non-rolling) gaming distros, but CachyOS doesn’t take a huge amount of tinkering, and most things truly just work (I’ve actually had some games be less buggy on Proton than native Windows).

      • strawberry_enjoyer42@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        I went to pure Arch because I’m a computer masochist I prefer it’s minimality. Now, I’ve migrated to Artix, and I’m considering NetBSD.

        I am speedrunning Unix-like OSes.

    • CarlLandry357@lemmy.worldOP
      22·
      9 days ago

      Can you afford CachyOS? I’ve heard you must be always up to date with Arch, its base distro, so it’s like Windows 11.

      • just2look@lemmy.zip
        11·
        9 days ago

        CachyOS is free, so unless there is another meaning for afford that you meant, anyone can afford it.

        CachyOS is Arch based, but is its own OS. So you don’t have to do anything with arch. You just need to run updates the same as you would any OS. It is not really anything like Windows 11, so not really sure what you mean by that.

        I also run CachyOS and it has been fantastic. No issues at all, and they have easy to follow instructions for installation and how to add their gaming package which includes Steam.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
      46·
      9 days ago

      I’m very weary of recommending Arch distros to new users, Arch expects you to read the news and breaks stuff. 99% of the time for experienced users it’s fine, but new users tend to touch random configs when exploring which prevents pacman from upgrading them, and they won’t read the news to know about possible issues.

      And before someone says Cachy is not Arch, it is, for this purpose it is, it suffers from the same thing by reason of being a rolling release that uses the same package manager. Just because YOU haven’t experienced a problem doesn’t mean it’s not there, I also have never experienced a similar problem with over a decade of Arch as my main distro, but it happens and you have to be blind to say otherwise.

      • kurcatovium@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        8 days ago

        The cool thing about default CachyOS is it has preconfigured snapper built-in. So in case something breaks during update, it’s couple minutes to restore to previously working state. I use openSUSE and this is a godsend for rolling distros IMO. And having it working out of the box is a win for newbies.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
          2·
          8 days ago

          That’s good, didn’t knew that but that’s a very smart move from them. Even so, that’s IF they know about that, also it only fixes the immediate issue of broken system, not the fact that you need to know what to do to not break it.

          Cachy works great, it’s essentially a preconfigured Arch, but Arch issues for new users was never the installation process.

          • kurcatovium@piefed.socialEnglish
            2·
            8 days ago

            Not sure how it’s with CachyOS, but I update once I feel like it on openSUSE Tumbleweed. Sometimes twice a week sometimes once in months. It works flawless most of the time, but couple times it pooped me out I rolled back, waited another week and updated again without problems. It just works (for me at least).

      • strawberry_enjoyer42@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        9 days ago

        I agree wholeheartedly. I only recommended it because it’s the only gaming-centric disto that I’ve used, and I wasn’t sure what OP’s technical skills were like.