What a shock
Shitty OS is shitty.
I guess things run faster without the spyware, logging, and other general bullshit running in the background. Who could've guessed?
Device made with software specifically for purpose performs better than generic machine with generic software designed to do a wide range of things. All of my machines are on Linux distros, but this just seems like a no brainer to me. It's like years ago when the mustang had a 4.6L V8. It was the same engine used in the Ford explorer. Will the Mustang beat the Explorer to 60, of course. But the Explorer will also transport 5 people to the beach with coolers and beach gear and drive in the sand.
It's good that SteamOS is doing well, but the variety of tasks people are using Windows for cannot be performed on SteamOS.
What?
SteamOS is just an immutable version of Arch Linux, with some Valve flavor and preinstalled apps.
SteamOS is a full fat Linux distro. I use the desktop mode every day
I assume you mean corporate workstations? The EU is currently on that.
Other than that a handful of games and legacy software/hardware.
Device made with software specifically for purpose performs better than generic machine with generic software designed to do a wide range of things. All of my machines are on Linux distros, but this just seems like a no brainer to me. It’s like years ago when the mustang had a 4.6L V8. It was the same engine used in the Ford explorer. Will the Mustang beat the Explorer to 60, of course. But the Explorer will also transport 5 people to the beach with coolers and beach gear and drive in the sand.
Exactly. I don't think the comparison is very good here. A better article would say - how to performance tune Windows 11 on a Legion Go S for gaming and compare the results to Steam OS, which is already tuned for gaming. I expect the results would be close enough that the OS choice is less of a concern about performance than what games you want to play and any other uses you might have for the device.
I can definitely believe this on low power machines.
I got a N150 Mini PC the other week, and it comes with Win 11. It thrashed around at 100% CPU doing updates and virus checks and fuck knows what other background tasks Windows considers more essential than whatever I tell it to do. Case was red hot.
So I popped the latest Ubuntu on it. Is it perfect? No. I had to mess around with Firefox "snap" for ages and type arcane commands to make it find the N150's tiny GPU. And it still can't play videos using the hardware. But other than that, it just works, just the bare essentials, and then gets out the way. Sits at about 2% CPU use when idle.
MS seriously need to cut bloat.
Just to be clear, this is testing the same handheld on both Steam and Windows and is in line with previous findings on a small set of AAA games.
Best guess, as someone who runs both Linux and Windows on both handhelds and desktop gaming PCs, the issue here is probably memory and driver optimizations around them. Windows is just heavier than SteamOS and, while the 32 GB in the Legion Go should be enough for at least some of these tested games, they are shared between CPU and GPU. I don't have a Go S, but I've seen significant performance improvements on Windows handhelds by manually assignign more VRAM in heavy games like these.
Shame, I've been waiting for more thorough testing (more games, desktop hardware references and a deeper look at memory management in Windows, but this is pretty superficial still.
EDIT: For what it's worth, and I DON'T have the time or the setup to do a full set of benchmarks, but running South of Midnight on both Linux and Windows, same settings, same PC, just dual booting I got almost 2x the fps on Windows. That's suspicious the other way, I'd expect the difference to be less dramatic, so there may be some resolution stuff going on here. Or perhaps the DLAA I'm running on both runs slower on the Nvidia Linux drivers? I'll give one more game a try with no DLSS before I call it an experiment.
EDIT 2: Damn, this is why benchmarking modern games sucks. I tried Marvel's Midnight Suns (just because it was there on both) and... well, the performance is the same on both, but Windows is clearly bugged and stutters for like a second every couple of seconds, consistently. So it's really nice on Linux but entirely unplayable on Windows (on this machine, at least).
If I'm learning anything from this is that despite modern advances PC gaming is still a tinkerer's game and that I really wish Linux/Windows drive sharing was less flaky because it's increasingly obvious that dual booting is a great tool for gaming, given how temperamental modern big games are.
Maybe wine/proton is just better at Windowsing than Windows is.
It is in some ways. I can tell you I tried to run Prototype 2 on a handheld today and it didn't run natively on Windows 11 because it's old but putting it into a Proton session and keeping it contained did wonders for it and the Deck ran it maxed out at 90fps (you forget it can do that if you insist on playing modern games on it, but man, does it look nice on the OLED).
So hey, it certainly Windows 8s better than Windows 11. There is that.
But it's not magic, so I'd still like to figure out what we're seeing in these examples.
Ever found a way around Lutris asking for a CD for games? I was using Lutris and one of the games I tried installing from a mounted ISO installed, yet I can't find any way to get Lutris to recognize the mounted drive as the CD. Tried adding it to Steam as a non-steam game as well and get the same result. Tried various versions of proton and wine, but I assume I need to direct it to the ISO somewhere... But couldn't find anyone who had an answer online.
I haven't tried, sorry. I use Heroic rather than Lutris for my non-Steam digital libraries and I haven't messed around with older physical releases too much, so I don't know what Lutris is expecting. Maybe someone else here can help?
Maybe I'll look into Heroic tomorrow, thanks for the info though, never used it before
Heroic is very straightforward, as long as what you want is access to your GoG, Epic, Amazon and Battle.Net libraries. Lutris is meant as a more general purpose launcher, so they're aiming at slightly different use cases that overlap.
Heroic won't solve your Lutris ISO problem, but if you want to play some non-Steam ways it works great, is easy to use and is very Steam-like.
Very unlikely that has anything to do with it.
This reminds me of when I got Spore on Optical disc for my (brand new at the time) Intel iMac. The disc was ISO9660 with both Joliet and HFS extensions, so if you put it in Windows, it would show up natively and if you put it in a Mac, it would also be native.
After a few games in MacOSX I was disappointed with the performance so I started to dig and realised it was the Windows Binary with some sort of WINE-like translation layer. I assumed it would run better natively in Windows.
I installed Bootcamp and a stripped-down version of Windows Vista and then installed the native Windows version. It installed a Root kit that broke most of Vistas security and the game ran even worse and crashed constantly.
I don’t think that Microsoft deserves all the blame for games running like shit natively. The users who pirate games and the studios who don’t trust Windows users to not pirate games deserve the blame as well.
Microsoft (and Post-Jobs Apple) definitely do deserve a lot of blame for allowing their platforms to get so bloated with so many features that users don’t want. Copilot should have been laughed out of the boardroom and Apple Intelligence is an underperforming, overly obnoxious know-nothing know-it-all.
Apple Intelligence is completely disabled on my Mac.
Me too, and Copilot is disabled on my work computer (and then magically reenabling itself)
Please tell me how to disable Data Detectors on MacOS, sometimes a number is just a numerical string and is not a Phone number; actually it it quite unusual for it to ever be a phone number. Even if it is a phone number, I would love to be able to just copy and paste it without it trying to connect to my phone and prank call some poor sucker.
Never had an issue with that... I didn't even know that was a thing on Macos. Maybe because I have enabled paste app? Or maybe never said ok to some Macos app in accessibility permissions?
I think a far more likely reason for any slow down is Lenovo's Windows drivers suck, or Windows defaults to a power saving mode that improves battery life but impacts performance, or Windows has antivirus or some other impactful service running that they didn't turn off. Since the article neglects to say if they tweaked Windows I have to assume they didn't.
It was already shown that SteamOS is way better in terms of battery performance than Windows. So if Windows uses power saving mode by default, these results are even more damning:
There might be some tweaks to mitigate some of the short comings of Windows, but that doesn't changed that the script has flipped. Before it was Linux that required tweaking and Windows would have a decent out of the box experience. Now SteamOS works great out of the Box while Windows needs tweaks. And at that point there is no reason for sticking with Windows unless your software specifically demands it.
This might be true, but at the end of the day I don't care. I just want things to work out of the box.
Duh
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