As a former RUST addict, I can tell you that Facepunch didn’t really know what they were doing initially with the game on Linux (although they gave an honest try).
Later, they basically said, “Look, we don’t really have the knowledge to support this, so you can ask for a refund if you exclusively bought the game to play on Linux, and if you are using Proton/Wine/etc, you can play on non-EAC community servers” (since official servers use Linux incompatible EAC). They aren’t hostile to the Linux community, but Gary and the team feel like they aren’t up to the task, so they don’t officially support things anymore.
I think the lack of EAC support is a red flag for some users that there may be more cheaters compared to windows (and more bugs). At least that was my perspective when I was reading the Reddit posts and forum posts at the time.
That loops back to the “Facepunch doesn’t believe they have the technical expertise/manhours available to support Linux users so therefore simply provides refunds to prior Linux customers and a ‘no support but not antagonistic approach’ to Proton/Wine users” problem that they’ve found themselves in. I would imagine internally, if they flipped that hypothetical switch, it would be seen as them committing to provide Linux support again (which they’ve admitted they aren’t prepared to do).
From their perspective, it’s better to just allow Proton users to play but not allow them to join “official servers” or community servers with the existing EAC so they aren’t accused by the community (I know, we suck sometimes) of “allowing Linux cheaters to fly under the radar”.
Seems about 40% working, I personally only have one game that doesn’t jive with Linux. If the game you’re playing doesn’t work that’s the fault of the specific anti-cheat developers because it’s obviously possible to do it right.
Sure, but from the end user perspective, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is - the result is you can’t play a game you otherwise just can in Windows. We know it’s their fault.
If you never play any games with anticheat that’s fine, but all it takes is one game, and then later another, and then later another, to make Linux a dealbreaker for many gamers. These are not unpopular games.
It can be the whole difference between someone sticking with Windows but itching to make the switch, and someone actually making the switch.
What good is 90% of games working if you have 3 games that you really want to play that don’t work?
I 100% get what you are saying. But I’m also 100% fine with voting with my wallet by not supporting game developers that demand kernel-level access to my machine.
Think about the EA stuff. You install one of their games, and now Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner* have kernel-level access to your machine. Why, why the hell is that worth it for just a game?
I used to be huge into Battlefield. Even on Linux, I played the shit out of BF4. But I will never be sad about avoiding kernel level anticheat. I don’t even feel like I’m missing out, quite the opposite really, especially after Saudi Arabia bought out EA. Why would I ever want kernel level anything from them? They’d have to pay me.
I guess that’s all to say that I just don’t play those games, and I’m better off for it. I think we should be educating other gamers on what they’re sacrificing to play these games for little reduction in cheaters (BF6 has them, I’ve seen videos of it). Is it really worth it to have a Saudi rootkit on your computer to play that game? Are they willing to sacrifice their security, privacy, and digital freedoms so they can play a game for a couple of hours a day or week? If so, that’s fine, but games that use kernel level anticheat tend to try to mask the risks of running them, which is fucked.
Probably a somewhat popular opinion in the Linux crowd already, but I think we should be pressing companies to find better ways to manage anti-cheats than kernel-level anti-cheat anyway. I’m glad I don’t play games like that because I don’t like how it works at all.
Absolutely. It’s completely possible too by using server side verification and not giving the client info they shouldn’t have, but that costs them slightly more in server costs (which aren’t significant).
It would also require designing the games code to account for this from the start, so not insignificant but definitely all reasonably possible, as in if there were magically legislation tommorow forcing all new multiplayer games to stop doing invasive anti cheat in a year, it’d be done in 6 months.
The implicit implication of your comment is that sever side verification etc inherently means unacceptable latency and I see no reason to believe it; only gut feelings
No, but it is a far more complex problem than what the other comment made it sound like. That it is only because they cheap out on server hardware and it could be perfect if they just wasn’t cheap.
According to the article the only significant FPS gains are in the Performance mode. In Silent mode Bazzite has two FPS more in KCD2, and… one less in Hogwarts.
In Turbo mode, the difference is 5 FPS.
And even in Performance it’s not like you’re running at 13 FPS by default - it’s 47 in KCD2 and 50 in HL.
They even provide a nice summary themselves - on average, Bazzite gains 6.6 FPS.
What do you get in return?
Not stability:
I have 512gb model and am running on low with FSR2 on balanced. The game keeps crashing during every play sessions
it has a xbox service that installs from the windows store, it is hella finnicky, ive had to do a full pc restore in the past to get it to work, no other option online helped
the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games. Reviews like the Phawks points out that microsoft kinda handed it off to the handheld makers to optimize for battery life. So in the instances such as getting 8hours of battery life running dead cells because the system doesnt really need to push that much to run the game, the Windows handheld is stuck on a higher performance clock and has a significantly shorter battery life time.
This would be extremely visible if more lighter games are tested, which typically aren’t for reviews like this because its not really fun to show a bunch of games all hitting 60 if you cap framerate.
the main thing you get back is a better cpu governor to manage power consumption on 2d games
Power consumption is handled by the power mode on the device. You get three modes - Silent (13W), Performance (17W), and Turbo (35W). You can switch between them at will, it’s not controlled by the game.
but a game may not necessarily need 13W, thats the point. youre using up more power than what is necessary because the CPU governor doesn’t know if its necessary or not to actually use all 13W.
The steam deck is controlled the same way(has wattage targets), but it understands when its being underused, to use even less resources to maximize battery life.
If you have a car that has gears, where gear 1 is 25, gear 2 is 50 (old cars), it doesn’t mean there aren’t usecases where you want to go 5/10. its unnecessary to always have to hit said target.
The article said the frame rates are more stable under bazzite with windows fluctuating a lot more even at low power settings
I think that, as long as the framerate doesn’t dip below 30, a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS. It’s something you’ll see in benchmarks, but not in real life. For example: a friend of mine was playing Elden Ring and and Halo on the ROG Ally X and didn’t notice any issues with stability or framerate. And he’s pretty anal about this kind of stuff.
I read through that thread you linked and I didn’t see bazzite mentioned anywhere.
True, it was about Steam Deck performance. But I had similar experiences on Garuda Linux on my PC with Hogwarts. Every now and again it would just crash and burn. Got better after a Proton patch or two, but that’s the problem with Linux gaming - you never really know what you’ll get. With Windows, you don’t have that issue at all.
You can complain about click bait all day, that’s fine, but you came in here misinterpreting the article and then posted a non-relevant link to support your argument, followed by another back-pedaling comment to say “frame rates don’t matter as long as it’s over 30fps” LMAO.
I think you’re arguing just to argue, seems a little more childish than anything I said honestly.
You definetly do notice the fluctuating fps if it’s more than 10 fps at these frame rates. It feels like it’s speeding up then slowing down over and over. That’s why you should just lock your fps to something the device can maintain.
You will notice “average” 30 FPS plenty when it fluctuates. If it STAYS above 30FPS the whole time then sure but if 30 is the average that shit is struggling and you’ll be getting like 20-40 FPS
They did, yeah. Stupid move, especially just before the Ally release, but shareholders must be appeased.
But, other than the price, it’s been pretty great while I used it. Lots of day one releases, lots of less known titles I would never have tried if not for GP.
Games don’t crash on Windows >because of Windows<. Games do crash on Linux >because of Linux<.
As in: games are inherently compatible with Windows, while on Linux you need Wine/Proton, which is just an extra layer of complication that can cause problems.
I think that, as long as the framerate doesn’t dip below 30, a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS.
This is complete bullshit, 30 fps is playable for most games, and I have in the past bumper graphics until fps dip to 30/45 because depending on the game 30 fps on high is a better experience than 60 on low for me. But to say that a regular human won’t notice it is bullshit. There’s a game I play on my deck, for some reason it’s very sensitive to disk usage, so if I’m downloading stuff it dips to 30, and I always have to go and stop the download, because if you’ve been playing at 60, 30 feels very sluggish.
Perhaps you should read what I wrote again, you clearly stated a regular human won’t notice fluctuating FPS as long as it doesn’t dip below 30, and I’m saying that is bullshit, I (and everyone else I know) can definitely see a deep to 30 fps even if it doesn’t go below it.
First of all, read again, no one is talking about below 30. Secondly, yes, you can definitely notice dips even if for a moment, it makes the game feel choppy, or more precisely like a weirdly encoded video that goes slow momentarily and then catches up.
it’s weird, and refreshing, to find someone who actually reads the article and don’t base his comments only on the header, and also provides some additional info.
my opinion isn’t based strictly on the header. because to argue that the default is silent mode, when its very reasonable to assume that the middle tier performance mode is the default usecase, because it has a 80W/h battery when compared to typical other handhelds. Steam deck for example uses a 40W/h battery. 17W, which is seeing the chunk of the performance gain, is a very reasonable target for a 80W/h battery. Because it would roughly be equivalent to a steam deck at 10W on its 40W/h battery.
Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.
Yeah, I was able to play through most of AC: Odyssey on my deck, thanks to Lutris. I also use Heroic just because I’ve never wanted to install Epic’s launcher.
My source is just an example of gaming experience on Linux.
I run Garuda (Arch-based) which is a distro “for gamers”. The experience is great, I love it. Everything works fine… most of the time.
But, until Proton got a couple of updates, I was just unable to run Mafia. Until Proton got a couple of updates, Hogwart’s would crash randomly. Right now Cyberpunk runs fine… until it crashes during loading sometimes.
That’s the gaming experience of Linux.
All that for a +6.6 FPS average, and no GamePass.
You lose access to Windows store
Windows Store is irrelevant, you lose the XBox (App)-installed GamePass games, which means that you lose access to a tonne of XBox games.
New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It’s the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren’t just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested. I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn’t mean that it’s still happening.
The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly
gets updates literally on the same day every month with 14 days time before a forced update
complains about getting interrupted by constant updates
Sigh… I’m not even going to comment on this. Can’t fix fundamentalism.
but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested
Because, overall, Windows 11 is badly optimised and MS already fired all the competent developers, so, yeah, it’s going to happen. But what Windows gives you, is the guarantee that if you have the hardware to handle a game, it will run. Any issues will be on the side of the game, not the OS.
I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews
That’s also part of the “Linux gaming experience” - with all the distros flying around, almost nobody will have the same exact experience. Sure, if everyone installs Bazzite on the Ally, it should be a relatively uniform experience, but - again - I fail to see the point in going through all this, losing the (apparently) excellent touch UI and a unified gaming library, just to get… 6 FPS extra. In one power mode.
Your source for stability issues in Hogwarts Legacy is a single user in the Steam community with other users in the same thread not having issues at all. Seeing that Hogwarts Legacy is one of the most played games on Deck (ranked 11th at time of writing ), I think many more people would report issues if crashes were common.
Furthermore, your TONNE of optional game stores is one. I can‘t really think of a game store, besides Microsoft’s, that doesn‘t work on Steam Deck.
These early performance comparisons definitely have limited value for comparing Windows/Linux performance on the device. But I’m sorry to say that your arguments have even less.
There is a PS5 version with no disc drive. You can even currently buy a disc drive for it, buy the disc version side plates, remove your discless sideplate, connect the disc drive, and then attatch the disc drive version of the side plates…and you have the disc version of ps5 that they would have sold you in stores.
That would be smart to support specific handhelds with consistent sets of hardware instead of all the random combinations of hardware that most PCs have.
The only ones that wouldn’t work are probably the ones with kernel level anti cheat. Maybe if I would be much younger, I might have had different opinion, but, as of today, I believe that all these games that wont run on Linux due to anti-cheat are cancer anyway.
You can run them alternative ways usually. Fortnite works with mouse and keyboard through gamepass, although gamepass is a shit deal just for fortnite.
I know a lot of people dual boot or use a virtual machine with windows on it too.
Kernel level anti-cheat is what’s probably going to keep me on Windows for a while. I get those games aren’t for everyone, but I like them well enough, and that’s what my friend group plays. Warzone, DMZ, and going to try RedSec tomorrow. Kind of a shame. Otherwise I’d love to make the jump. As it is I’ll probably see about dual booting when I get my next PC in a year or two.
I respect where you’re coming from, but a) “fool” is literally in my name. And b) you’re saying “there are other good games, leave those games you’re enjoying.” But you’re also saying “there are other people, leave your friends and family that you play with.” And that’s a little different.
You should try to strengthen your relationship so that they don’t spin around a specific videogame. What happens if you get banned or the requirements for playing the game becomes even more stupid?
Funnilly enough plenty (if not most) games which won’t at all run in a more recent Windows like Windows 10 and Windows 11 run just fine in Linux via Wine.
All in all if we consider the full or near full timeframe for “windows games” (say, all the way back to Win95) I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that a present day Linux distro can run more “windows games” as Windows 11.
One of the more entertaining (though hardly unexpected) discoveries for me when I moved from Windows to Linux on my gaming machine was that several of the games I owned which I could not get to run in Windows, worked fine in Linux.
To be fair it’s not just Microsoft doing that. I was looking at gym equipment the other day and some idiots were trying to sell a fucking home gym with AI. Everyone wants to sell it, nobody wants to buy it.
It’s not CEF that does most of the impact. It’s the contents web devs make it load and process. And web devs generally not being very competent in optimizing is just a sad reality.
web Devs aren’t ignorant to optimizing but the kind of interfaces used in web are very different to that of desktop. Cross platform technologies can work, but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.
Web tech was designed around the asynchronous and comparatively slow nature of the network. Now, those same layout and rendering engines are being shoehorned into an environment where the “server” is your local disk so it’s suddenly doing a bunch of work that was intended to be done iteratively.
Same goes the other way of course. Software designed for “native first” experiences like Flutter aren’t as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.
It would be like wondering why physical game disks aren’t popular on PC - it’s a fundamentally different technology for fundamentally different expectations and needs.
but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.
Hard disagree on “little”.
Software designed for “native first” experiences like Flutter aren’t as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.
Popularity should not be dictated by what web devs prefer. As long as they build for desktop, I won’t pardon excessive resource usage. And I’m not talking about Flutter. Better performance oriented frameworks exist, see sciter.
At that point, people were curious and decided to go deeper into the engine. Low and behold, it’s a game engine, based entirely on telemetry technology.
Since switching to AMD, I have found game crashes to basically be a thing of the past. It will happen once in a while, but much less than I was experiencing before. Just my experience, and one I’m grateful for.
My experience is similar now that you mention it. The only game that crashes on my AMD machine is Spider-Man 2 Brazil, but probably because it’s a literal PS5 game that was hacked and slashed together to run natively on PC, a full year before the official port was scheduled to come out. So I don’t blame it.
I picked a good time to switch to Team Red. It’s my first AMD build ever, and after fixing a “failing SSD” issue simply by re-seating it, the PC’s been running like a dream.
It’s hilariously pathetic that a bunch of lawyers convinced the people at Nintendo to waste their time doing this shit.
There is zero percent overlap between janky Garry’s mod custom assets with Nintendo sales of their polished AAA games except to probably drive sales of Nintendo games to a degree.
You also lose the trademarks you don’t defend. If Nintendo was found to knowingly not pursue those that infringe in their trademarks then they a court could allow someone else to use that trademark.
Nintendo game out hot at the start when people were referring to other consoles as “Nintendos” even though they weren’t NES’ or SNES’. Theres plenty of precedence already then why they had to stop that immediately.
They weren’t people or organisations they could sue.
If Sony said the new Nintendo system playstation, Nintendo would lose trademark rights over this. Because a large business like valve is involved they can sue and are compelled to sue to retain their trademark.
The emulator that recently got taken down was because an organisation was developing and distributing it. Individuals that copy and share the source code themselves won’t get any threats from Nintendo because they don’t need to find and sue them. Nintendo had to sue these other businesses, to retain their trademark.
The problem stems from the subtle ways in which language develops. It’s instinctive for us to pluralise product names in everyday conversation (Oreos, Jet Skis) or turn them into verbs (to photoshop, to tarmac). But by doing so we begin to erode the trademark. Companies can, from the outset, encourage us to use an alternative generic name; sometimes this works (Nintendo pushing the term “games console”), sometimes it almost works (Xerox’s fondness for the term “photocopying”), and sometimes it fails miserably (who has ever referred to the once-trademarked trampoline as a “rebound tumbler”?)
Nintendo had to start calling their stuff “game consoles” so their name wouldn’t be genericized to refer to all consoles. Its not always about sueing others. Theres lots of avenues they need to protect and they knew they needed to defend it from the start.
Yeah probably but literally that is so fucking insulting to me that companies/copyright behave this way, the human brain is extraordinarily complex, the idea that seeing a character recreated in a sandbox by a 3rd party modder could “warp” my thinking about Nintendo characters or games is basically a slap in the face by Nintendo.
Like… if you see a dumb meme with Mario in it, do you think “huh, maybe I shouldn’t buy Nintendo games, Mario is tarnished forever for me” …?. No, and what makes me think that is *this bullshit. I will never give Nintendo money because of the way they behave like this.
I mean I have a steam deck so I have no reason to get a switch or anything so whatever no big loss.
Ok, the intelligence of the most average person I know is still plenty intelligent. I don’t only know geniuses or something, it’s just I don’t feel like the normal human beings I encounter on a daily basis are deficient in intelligence. What makes people awful is usually their beliefs not their intelligence.
The human brain is FARRRRR too powerful of a biological adaption to get manipulated so transparently in this way by imagery in one context with imagery in another. It is an absurd ask to say that people would be “dumb” enough for their brains to do this and no except in neurodiverse cases (which is cool!) the human brain doesn’t work like this.
It doesn’t matter where you live, we are all the same species of animal and the brain in our skull that we like to lament as stupid when we make general statements about the intelligence of the public around us is an extraordinary thing.
I get people’s cynicism and I am kind of annoyed people think I live in a fairytale lol, I just see humans around me trying to live their lives and being mediocre humans…. and the intelligence of mediocre humans is nothing to dismiss.
People are smart as fuck, conservative and hateful ideologies do make people behave like idiots but I mean I don’t fault the human brain for getting brainworms when the brainworms are firehoused (one might say trickling down at a rapid rate) at everyone by the wealthiest people in the world 24/7.
Also yo are you seriously looking for me to give you the average IQ of the population around me? This feels like two steps from getting out calipers and measuring people’s skulls to determine their intelligence. I agree, let’s NOT stick our heads in the sand.
You said they are intelligent, so what are you basing that off of than? The only real tangible thing is IQ, so yes it is a fine metric in that case.
You’re in sciences it seems, so you would be around people with supposedly higher intelligence, but at the same time… damn can they be dumb, mislabeling chemicals, thinking if they drive with the top down they can’t get sunburn since the rays can’t hit them…. Yeah smart people are dumb too, some barely pass while other fly. So there is a large discrepancy right there. Yet you are clumping them all into the same “intelligent” category.
Thats obviously extremely disingenuous, but you’re not going to see this are you?
Look at how much work that sentence is doing! Damn, you just shut down several entire categories of science and culture devoted to understanding what intelligence is in all its complex varieties of form, well done!
So… what other options are there? And why are you not bringing them up to defend your point when asked?
You realize you’re making a fool of yourself and people in your field, yeah? You’re giving off a “I’m smart, why aren’t you” attitude, and that explains everything about your view.
So you going to defend and address any points? Or are you just gonna flout that you think you’re intelligent when you’re probably below the line and why you think everything is a okay….
I never said I thought everything was ok? My point is that things are not ok for reasons that have nothing to do with people being too stupid, it is a lazy lament with no foundation in reality in terms of describing why people are suffering.
Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.
It’s a known fact that Wii U sales suffered to a significant degree because people thought it was an addon to the Wii, not a new thing. There are a lot of other issues with it, but that is a knowm factor found by market research.
also to further back the statement, it wasnt because wiiu games were bad, in fact most of the wiiu games ported to switch are top sellers, so no one can make the claim it was a game quality issue.
Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.
I have, people are enraging sometimes but also people are fucking stressed as hell these days, I think overall people try to get along as best they can, even when working customer service where you meet insane people and need to rant about them after work because it breaks your brain how stupid they are from your perspective…. but that is life, a lot of people are hurting at least in my country (US). I don’t blame people for falling apart or making stupid choices because they don’t have the energy or alacrity left in their bodies after work to function.
Yeah there are assholes, I am not some naive fool who trusts everybody, but I am sorry I just aggressively don’t agree with this endlessly repetitive narrative that the average person is a lazy, dumb piece of shit. I know people like that, but the real ones, who could have lived a much easier life but chose to be an asshole just because, are actually pretty rare.
Plenty of people are landscapes of trauma (like me) even just from the trauma of always being stressed about money, and I just don’t feel like when that pushes people to do stupid irrational things that that really is an indicator those people were stupid, morally deficient or lacking in industriousness.
Nintendo’s one of the few game businesses you can be confident that their E content is okay for children. Many other businesses are using in game advertising, inappropriate content and predatory gambling in game purchases.
So it’s of great value to Nintendo to control their content and IP. Because the impression of children and parents are important to them.
Because children are exposed and familiar with Nintendo IP other people can (deliberately or not) use it to influence them. These children are unlikely to understand this is parody or see the irony in it.
If your child is too young to understand parody or irony (or just get that when you say “somebody copied your favorite character and is using them in a way that isn’t genuine to the character”) why the hell are they being exposed to…. Garry’s Mod?
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