Lenovo Legion Go S gets better frame rates running Valve's free operating system.
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Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
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Yeah, I just wrote a short tome on my appreciation for what they've done. I imagine we'll see some nasty words out of Windows on this, but some developers already seem to be recognizing that something is happening and following Valve's lead.
I'd have stayed on Windows, but with Recall coming back, and stuffing CoPilot into everything without any clear restriction (including the trust that 'Off' means 'Off'), I'm done.
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You don't have to turn on Proton for each game individually. Go into Steam's settings (on the desktop if you're using a distro that includes game mode) and under "Compatibility" make sure Steam Play is enabled. Set it to use either the latest Proton or Proton Experimental. Only if you run into issues with a specific game should you need to select specific Proton versions on the properties page for that game.
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Maybe try Bottles or Lutris? I haven't tested those, yet, but I run pro GIS software. The vendor I use already has Linux options for their enterprise tools, so when the desktop is handled, I'm considering moving everything.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Praetorian
I hard wipe my PC after every major upgrade round. I'll likely be swapping some components around the Major Winter Cultural Purchasing Event, including my current boot drive. If I'm going to go, I'm going whole hog.
I stuck a Mint bootable USB in after my last build. My Steam library compatibility was still meh at the time, around a third of all titles. Even without Valve leaning in hard, this next upgrade was already likely the end of 35 years of putting up with MS OSs.
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If it doesn't start to support Nvidia, it'll never be popular. On Steam, more than 90% of people use Nvidia.
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It's not that black and white, Nvidia works fine on Linux so you just need to go the Proton route rather than SteamOS.
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If you're only looking at titles with direct Linux support, then you're missing out.
At this point it seems like it should be the default, but Proton is NOT enabled by default. You need to click:
Steam > Settings
Compatibility > Enable Steam Play for all other titles.
It should default to: Run other titles with: Proton Hotfix, which is probably fine.
Once you do that your library is going to go from like 1/3 to like 80% of your games just work. I actually haven't come across a Windows only game yet that didn't work via Proton. (I don't have the latest and greatest Triple A games, but some of the more popular ones are supports)
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This has been my experience too, however in my case it's more like 90% work without direct intervention and the remaining 10% worked with mostly minor tweaking (check on ProtonDB to see which version of Proton or which launch arguments are needed). Most games work day one these days and Black Myth Wukong was even 10% faster on Linux than Windows out of the gate.
One thing to be aware of is DRM. Denuvo detects each Proton version as a new PC install and they'll lock you out for 24 hrs after 5 installs so if you're troubleshooting you need to beware of Denuvo titles. This was a major problem for me when I got Dragon's Dogma 2 and was trying to get it to not run like dogshit - turns out the game just had dogshit performance, not an issue of running it through Proton.
Denuvo itself will run fine on Linux but as usual the ones most impacted by DRM are the paying customers.
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If your primary use case is using the OS as a desktop OS, then you want to pick an operating system that is designed for that task. Steam OS / Gaming OSes like Bazzite are designed specifically for playing games.
Steam can be installed relatively easy on most Linux distros, so that part is actually one of the lower considerations when choosing an OS. You really want to focus on core functionality like the default software that's loaded and the simplicity of getting more software and how easy it is to find support.
I generally recommend Linux that falls into the Debian branch because there are versions more focused on usability and polishing some of the rougher edges on Linux. If you like some of the features of Bazzite you might also just consider Fedora as it's probably better suited for general purpose.
If you want another attempt at Linux I can strongly suggest Linux Mint. For your example hurdle, opening a network share, you need to do this on Mint.
Open Files (File Explorer)
Click File > Connect to Server
Put in the name or IP of the server you want to connect to, put in your user and password. Click connect twice (Don't ask me why it seems like it asks you to verify and requires another click to actually connect) and you should see the shares.
If your server is set to broadcast it should show up in "network" the same way it would in Windows. Also if you have a network printer that supports the Internet Printing Protocol it should just automatically show up as a usable printer if it's on the same network as your device.
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That change is coming.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/...n-on-linux-fully-making-linux-gaming-simpler/
It doesn't default to anything per se. The first item in the list is the first item in the list. Whether that's some version of Proton, Luxtorpeda, Boxtron, or whatever. You shouldn't habitually use Hotfix. You shouldn't habitually use Experimental, either. The latest stable version is a sensible pick.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Praetorian
This would've been late '21, so I wasn't really familiar with Proton. Nowadays it's a foregone conclusion. Win12 would have to be a ground-up rebuild focused around performance that retained a lot of legacy functionality while violently rejecting spyware and data harvesting before I'd even consider it. That's about as likely as it being delivered to me on 5 1/4" floppies by a wood nymph riding a unicorn.
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I wish. In the dental world, you are pretty lucky if there's even a mac option for dental specific CAD. There's a team of dental lab techs modding blender to mimick dental cad suites, and that may become an option. Over the past few years they've made major progress, but it's still a bit complex for a filthy casual like me.
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I've scanned in THOUSANDS of old photos with this software, and it is honestly amazing. Fill up the scanner bed with photos, and it is smart enough to separate and unskew all of them.Ty for this
It is a paid program, but if I find value in something I don't mind paying for it; which is why I no longer use Windows
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I agree with a lot of the points you made. This isn't a scientifically rigorous test where a lot of attention to detail was made to ensure it was a solid A / B test. It would be helpful to know what driver settings, versions, game settings, etc were used so if someone else wanted to attempt to reproduce the results they could. The point about unplayable settings is also equally valid because hopefully no one is playing their games at 18fps.
My counter point is that the old days of in depth rigorous testing are hard to come by now. All of the big publications who made articles which would get very granular and through about methodology have gone away. The new reality is that people are not optimizing their computers the way things used to be, so this article is probably more relevant to the average gamer and how they work. I think the data clearly shows that in this case they saw equal or greater playability in the way that I'm guessing Kyle would approach gaming. IE: Install OS, Install game, play game. So while not scientifically accurate, I think it still has merit because it shows that in this instance there wasn't a loss of performance and helps show this may be a worthwhile option for others who could follow.
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I love my SteamDeck but would love higher end hardware even at a ridiculous price and even with a poor battery life - I typically play on a plane or somewhere remote where I don’t want to haul a full size pc or a laptop but there’s a power outlet nearby all the time.
Is there any hope for a mobile nvidia 5xxx portable deck anytime soon?
Is there any hope for a mobile nvidia 5xxx portable deck anytime soon?
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Avg FPS means a lot less than 1 and .1% lows. 120fps means nothing if you keep dipping to 40 and have all that stuttering. Test on a desktop against Win10. You'll find, that yes, a lot of games do run better on linux, but you'll also find a lot of games that avg better on linux, but yet play smoother on windows 10. We aren't past dual booting for rhe best experience yet. Windows 11 is absolute garbage for games, and it doesn't surprise me at all that performance suffers with it. I'm personally going to continue to dual boot 10, official support be damned, until all of my games run better on linux.
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Not unless you're willing to buy an Ally/Legion Go and an eGPU enclosure and haul that around.
Also, while I'm not entirely up on newer laptop GPUs, I remember trying to plug in my GTX 1060 laptop while on a plane, only to find out that the outlet wasn't powerful enough to charge my laptop. I doubt that the plane outlets are going to be charging a 5xxx GPU in use unless nVidia's made some serious leaps in efficiency.
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Hardly news. It's been the case for years that anything that will run okay in wine typically runs "faster" with less resource requirements than it does on Windows...
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You appear to be confused about what SteamOS is for. It is for handheld PCs which excursively use AMD APUs. It doesn't support Nvidia because there is no Nvidia hardware to support.
If you're not installing it on a handheld PC, good luck! You're going to need it.
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Anyone actually testing true FPS? - Via external FPS capture?
Last time we did testing of SteamOS, Steam was padding FPS numbers. Overall lower FPS actually going to display. With significant misreporting of drops and latencies. This is why some games with a good FPS feel 'spongy' and not as responsive. ie. Forenza had good reported FPS, but was severely latent with huge FPS drops not reported by internal FPS monitoring, even sampling Proton and Vulkan directly, with external capture FPS showing the drops in time with user's experience, as well as overall lower MIN/MAX/AVG FPS.
I don't know if this is ibtentionally being misleading by Valve, or if this is due to how Proton works internally.
Anyone do image capture quality properly?
By design Proton lowers graphics features to boost FPS, so even actual FPS captured will be higher as quality settings are maintained on Windows, and are not on Proton. ie - Things like aniso set to 16x on games 'high' setting in Windows, and on Linux, the same game 'high' setting only using 4x or fully OFF. -Explained misleadingly as Proton 'optimizing' games by devs. So, testing requires engine polling when running the game to see setting GPU is using. Then on Windows trying to match the setting used in Linux, which is always lower than the game's setting. This can be tricky as Proton throws in lower settings that change.
All for faster gaming, but these sensational reports are not showing us that yet. At the end of the day, Microsoft can sloppily code things Proton does like lowering rendering quality. Go look at Vulkan and Proton code, we can see the extra work it is doing, even if tiny. End of the day . . . - the smartest person in the world cannot overcome translation and emulation (additional calls) compared to a game pr framework running natively.
Last time we did testing of SteamOS, Steam was padding FPS numbers. Overall lower FPS actually going to display. With significant misreporting of drops and latencies. This is why some games with a good FPS feel 'spongy' and not as responsive. ie. Forenza had good reported FPS, but was severely latent with huge FPS drops not reported by internal FPS monitoring, even sampling Proton and Vulkan directly, with external capture FPS showing the drops in time with user's experience, as well as overall lower MIN/MAX/AVG FPS.
I don't know if this is ibtentionally being misleading by Valve, or if this is due to how Proton works internally.
Anyone do image capture quality properly?
By design Proton lowers graphics features to boost FPS, so even actual FPS captured will be higher as quality settings are maintained on Windows, and are not on Proton. ie - Things like aniso set to 16x on games 'high' setting in Windows, and on Linux, the same game 'high' setting only using 4x or fully OFF. -Explained misleadingly as Proton 'optimizing' games by devs. So, testing requires engine polling when running the game to see setting GPU is using. Then on Windows trying to match the setting used in Linux, which is always lower than the game's setting. This can be tricky as Proton throws in lower settings that change.
All for faster gaming, but these sensational reports are not showing us that yet. At the end of the day, Microsoft can sloppily code things Proton does like lowering rendering quality. Go look at Vulkan and Proton code, we can see the extra work it is doing, even if tiny. End of the day . . . - the smartest person in the world cannot overcome translation and emulation (additional calls) compared to a game pr framework running natively.
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