With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows

Valve doubling down on Linux as the default OS on the Steam Deck was such a great decision. It obviously has given them a massive competitive edge. Windows has become so horribly bloated, and Microsoft has almost zero interest in making it run more efficiently.
- Personally I feel what it gave them - primarily - was the ability to be independent of Microsoft, not beholden to them in any way whatsoever, and not having to pay them any license fees.
  The fact that after putting so much work into making Proton and that whole toolchain amazing it actually turned out faster than Windows, well, that's juat the delicious icing on the cake, from a commercial perspective.

Hmm, it's like having spyware constantly run in the background slows down the computer?

Goes to show how much bloat is in Windows that it kills hardware like this.
- Maybe I need Cortana, Microsoft Excel, and OneDrive while I play Doom Eternal. You don't know me.
  
  Me looking up from my speed-running Excel sheets: "what"
- Thibking bout that time a discord admin told me windows and linux use the same amount of resources and she knows cause she works in it.
  
  Well yeah duh windows and Linux use the same resources. I don't put more memory in my computer when I boot into Linux...

Valve won. Maybe it's lucky timing, or maybe Gabe is actually a genius, but it's only going to get worse for Windows as there is no way in hell Microsoft shifts resources from AI projects to make Windows better for PC gaming. Recently, Capcom announced that their PC gaming sales surpassed their console sales, and I don't think it's likely we'll see that trend changing, and it's also likely other publishers will make similar announcements soon (although idk if they count SteamOS as a console). The Switch 2 is coming out soon, but people already say it's too expensive, and there are controversies surrounding some of their product decisions.
Will this bring about the era of the Linux desktop? Idk, but the era of the Linux gaming PC is inevitable now.
- Will Steam do for the gaming PC what porn did for the internet?

i expected a small performance hit.
this is actually very impressive considering it runs through a compatibility layer.

That's interesting. But the second graph is designed to confuse.
- Why is it confusing? Maybe I’m confused, not sure.
  
  The Legion Go is on top and on the bottom, with the Deck in between. And the color scheme isn't helping.
  
  why is fps labeled with hours and minutes? what is "dead cells" and why is it also labeled hours and minutes?
  edit wow i was even more confused about it than i thought. what a terrible graph.

the gains come from the reduced overhead that linux has compared to windows
literally the next line
..the games here are being run through proton
I really hate the dismissal of the heavy lifting proton does. Proton is what makes gaming on Linux so great. So many native linux games perform worse on Linux vs their windows counterparts. Then again, I'd expect nothing less from Dave2D
- I mean, yeah, but if Proton is doing an absolutely flawless job, then it has 0 performance penalty compared to Windows. All the actual gains still do come from Linux having less overhead. So, both are true, that Proton is killing it and that the gains come from Linux.
  
  DXVK (which also runs on windows) alone gives you a huge performance benefit. Playing world of warcraft on windows I'll see about a 30% reduction in CPU usage and higher performance.
  Proton doesn't just get you to almost matching Windows' performance. Proton easily outperforms windows even on higher end hardware where windows bloat isn't a concern.
- Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.
  I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.
  
  I do think Proton gets a little too much credit.
  Why? Valve has been sponsoring all these projects for a really long time. While wine existed before that, it wouldn't be anywhere near the shape thats its currently in because gaming was not its main focus. There have been loads of gaming bugs and sharp edges that have been around wine for a long time until Valve put in the money and devs to fix them.
  
  Agreed. Proton is important as a bit of an "iPhone moment" where all this tech comes together in a way where non-techies "get it" in the sense where they understand why it's useful, even if they'll never bother to learn the details of why or how.
- What does proton do?
  I only vaguely understand it as "thing that makes game playable on other thing."
  (And also I have six versions installed on my steam deck whydoIneedsixofthese?)
  
  Proton is the compatibility layer that valve makes that lets you run games on Linux. Proton uses DXVK a program that converts Direct X API calls (windows only) to Vulkan API calls (runs on anything). DXVK alone gives you huge performance benefits (especially on older DirectX 11 and older games) and you can run it on windows.
  Proton gives you a ton of other tools that can make huge performance differences.
  
  Most simply put, it's a layer that allows a computer program expecting windows to run on Linux. It isn't emulating anything, just sorta like translating.
  Think of it like a language. Windows speaks English, so a program expects to talk in English. But let's pretend like Linux talks Spanish. Proton translates the English commands to Spanish for Linux to understand and execute, and then Proton converts the responses back to English for the program.
  
  I think it's what Valve has branded their fork of Wine. It translates win32 calls to Linux ones, and DirectX to Vulkan. Probably some other stuff too idk
- I really hate the dismissal of the heavy lifting proton does.
  What part of this did you interpret as a dismissal?
- I also wonder how much of it is RADV vs AMDGPU drivers. Wonder what the result would have been if the Deck used the AMDGPU drivers instead. Saying it is just "the magic of Linux" papers over a lot.
  
  I think it doesn't really matter, in the end the question is, do I get a better experience as a consumer on Linux or Windows?
- For every game that you claim runs worse on Proton you can find dozens that run better or at least as well as Windows.
- I'm not sure what you're saying. Proton is incredible obviously, but by itself it doesn't make games run better. Using vulkan instead of DirectX could improve performance, but presumably most of the performance gain is from not running windows in the background.
  
  It's a bit of both, along with the Linux AMD drivers being superior in many cases to the Windows drivers.

A performance uplift plus double or tripled battery life compared to running on Windows.....hot damn that's impressive.
Get rekt Windows.
- What's nice is that Microsoft today doesn't have capability to improve in the short or even medium term. They could drop a billion dollars into it and it would still take them years to improve their offering, if they can at all.
  
  It's worse than that. MS could quickly turn the boat around. They have the cash. They have the manpower (well, have recently fired). The only thing they don't have is THE ABILITY TO THINK ABOUT ANYTHING BUT AI AI AI AI GOTTA HAVE AI AIIIIIIII. The brainrot has eaten Nadella, and eaten the whole board.
  
  And why would they? They're printing so much money, this niche probably doesn't make a dent.
  It doesn't matter if Windows is the best system for gaming. It just matters if people believe it is.
  You can always justify using Windows. "How do I get Game Pass to work on my handheld?" is probably something people care about.
  Granted this is an expensive way to lock customers into your platform, but they're already doing it anyways, so no need to pour money into the OS experience when you can just sell services building on customer data.
  
  Because they aren't just optimizing for gaming.
  Any change they make would influence their other markets as well, like general and office use.
  
  I'd wager they could cut a lot of cruft from a handheld gaming device specific version of Windows.
  I bet Antimalware Service Executable is still randomly springing it's way to the top of task manager in this build. All sorts of crap that just doesn't need to be running. On my PC right now I can see Service Host: DNS Client at 1-4% all the fucking time. Random driver update checks that run in fucking Electron for some godforsaken reason. That kind of shit.
  
  I disagree. Take Windows, remove the bloat, slap a game-focused GUI on it, call it XBOX and Bob's your uncle.

Windows Gamers (who will never switch to Linux): Linux still isn't ready for mass adoption
- Windows Gamers (who will never switch to Linux)
  So you accept that Linux is not the problem. We are litterally at the point where it will get mass Adoption in the next few years. That is what this post is about. That you can litterally go out and buy a fully complete gaming system preinstalled with Linux that performs better than the same system with Windows.
  We are very close to the point where the only thing holding Linux gaming back is marketing.
  
  Marketing and market availability are the biggest problems. People need to be able to go into any store, buy a handheld/laptop/desktop and have it include Linux without them asking.
- My partner and I have been transitioning to Linux over the past month or so, dual booting for now.
  Linux still isn't ready for mass adoption.
  
  If you don't mind me asking: What problems did you run into? And what distro were you using?
- Even gamers do more than just game on their PC, though.
  
  Most people dont use Windows because its compatible with more software, they use it because thats what their computer came with. If computers just starting shipping Linux then software will come.
  
  It's gotten so seamless now, and wine has gotten pretty good. I can download a Windows executable, double click it, go through the regular Windows installer, and then have it make a shortcut on my desktop which will launch it.
  Your average user won't even know all the Dark Magics making it possible, or that they were supposed to have looked around for a Linux alternative, it just works
  
  That's fair, but unless what you do requires windows in some way (like, say, Photoshop), Linux tends to be better for productivity as well, if you learn it
  But of course, I understand that it takes some upfront work and learning to change your workflow, so I don't blame people for not doing it
  
  Most people just need a web browser for most of their needs, unless you have a need for a specific software that's Windows only and doesn't have a good Linux alternative,
  
  I personally like using my Legion Go for LLM training /s
- I’m still waiting for games with big anticheats to run on Linux. Until I can play Fortnite with my nephew on Linux I won’t swap over.
  
  Unfortunately the Epic CEO is explicitly blocking Linux. Fortnite runs, but he doesn't like Linux.

Battery Life:
- Battery life doubled in some games? Now that is even more impressive than 10-20% performance gain.
  
  I also find it interesting that the Steam Deck OLED has a smaller battery but gets longer life on the same OS

So I'm not insane. Monster Hunter Wilds and Helldiver's II both run better on my Ubuntu image with the same hardware than my Windows 10 image.
Does that mean that Proton and Vulkan are far more efficient than Direct3D?
- I think there's in play also background activity from Windows' bloat.
  
  Probably this. Especially on low end hardware that doesn't really have a lot of background resources to give.
  Just open task manager and see all the shit windows thinks is essential to run all the time. Scanning the drive for viruses, downloading updates for shit you've never even looked at...
  
  They say I/O schedulers on Windows are weird.
  Edit: or was it CPU schedulers? I'm sure i've read something about this forever ago.
  
  You'd think anyone techliterate would disable the bloat.
- My understanding is that vulkan is generally more efficient than directX.

Holy shit triple the hours
- Finally an extra 3 1/2 hours of... dead cells? 3 more hours of... FPS? the hell is this graph?

They said make electric cars fast, and you'll get car guys to buy in. It was true.
Now they're making linux make video games faster and prettier...
I dont know if there will ever be a year of the linux desktop, but this is the kind of stuff you gotta do to get there.
- I dont know if there will ever be a year of the linux desktop
  There won't be. It won't happen that quickly. If anything there will be a "decade of the Linux computer".
  
  Which I feel like were are at the beginning of, steam and proton are catalyzing the decade of linux right now.

Linux Dev's anti Sony bias shows front and center
/s
- Sorry, what's this got to do with Sony?
  
  The only game in the main post photo where Windows beats Linux is Spiderman 2, published by Playstation Publishing, owned by Sony.
  
  Read the charts?
  Notice any difference in the results?

Back in ~2010, my first dual boot was an Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to run WoW from Linux and it gave me a solid >15fps while Windows ran at less than 10fps.
I was very young at the time but still aware that this was super impressive with extra compatibility layers. That definitely took part in selling Linux to me.
- I could barely get Minecraft to run 20fps on this old laptop I had given to me a few years ago. Loaded Ubuntu on it and Minecraft ran near 60fps. Blew my mind.
  
  Pull the DE out and you could probably squeeze that performance out on a modded instance

makes a lot of sense honestly. I never knew the numbers behind it (tks for sharing). when I was ripping witcher 3 on nobara and then changed my OS back to Windows due to work related issues, I felt a SIGNIFICANT performance drop. the game became laggy, when it used to run top on Linux with the same settings. good share - the time for Linux gaming is now.

I am a little curious how something like Ubuntu would do on one of these gaming handhelds. Steam OS is a nicer user experience but I always wonder if it also adds any significant optimization.
- I think you're a bit better off with SteamOS's gamescope rather than going through gnome-shell.
- iirc the original SteamOS for the SteamBox was Debian-based (like Ubuntu), i think they switched it to Arch since it moves a bit faster and offers a bit better compatibility.
  
  No, they switched because Arch has a rolling release
- What do you mean? It's just steamos is arch linux with a fancy suit.
  
  Arch can be configured many different ways.

Spoderman no

I’d love to know what windows figures would be like with a stripped down guts ripped out windows, such as revi.cc.
- How does revi compare to AtlasOS?
  
  Very similar. I preferred Revi in my testing last year as there was less added stuff and wasn’t as “gamers fuck yeah”
- pls dont suggest this blatantly obvious russian/us/chinese surveillance tool jesus chriat pls dont tell me people actually use this... if youre worried about security use a hardened linux distro this is just crazy
  
  No, this one is different. It's not an ISO you download (those are extremely sus and you would be right to be skeptical of them), but instead an open source set of scripts you apply to an existing Windows OS.
  Edit: see my comment below, it seems to be partially closed source.
  https://programming.dev/comment/17189096
  
  Care to explain ?

The speed of Linux is unmatched!

Can it play MH Wilds?
- If you want something capable of running at an actually steady frame rate I'm not sure any computer can accomplish that without some serious tweaking.
  Also if you're wanting to play on deck you might try this guide.
  
  thanks, bookmarked for when it goes on sale. none of my hardware is acceptable enough for the specs.
  
  "any computer"? Come on, what is that hyperbole? My desktop runs Wilds stable just fine.
- The processor is not terribly power, so probably not.
- So for real though, while it's disappointing and I am nowhere near the 500+ hours i have put in previous titles, the hardware is not going to do it. The game eats VRAM like my brother's ex ate cake.
  But, I get about 5 fps @2k and 9FPS@1080p better on my Ubuntu image than my Windows 10 image.
  Ryzen 9 5900x Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB 32GB DDR4, both images are on different 1TB nvme drives
  So while, no you can't, it's closer.

I'd still take this with a grain of salt. Not many games tested, and the SteamOS build might've been tweaked and worked on more to be more optimized.
- "Xbox OS" isn't any better, while the XBox Series X is more powerful than the standard Playstation 5, it still ends up being outperformed as Digital Foundry found.
- Does this look optimized to you, Windows side?
  
  While I get it, it does look pretty damning, skepticism when we haven't been presented with rigorous documented testing is always good. I don't think ex: gamersnexus is going to find different results, but I'm pretty damn sure they'll at least be comparing chipsets to ensure the hardware actually is identical (and making sure that things like system settings are configured to be as fair as possible). Lets not be apple fans and leap to the top of the superiority heap just because a good looking infographic said we should.
  
  No, because Windows isn't optimized for games. It is for general use, including games.
- SteamOS build might've been tweaked and worked on more to be more optimized
  What does that mean? Of course it was. Why would I take that with salt?
  
  Well, SteamOS vs base Windows isn’t really a good comparison. Best would be optimized Windows vs gaming only distro, or base windows vs base distro

Now what about windows 10 ltsc iot, the ONLY version of windows worth comparing to linux.
- IMHO you shouldn't have to run a stripped down Windows to get good results. It should just work that way out of the box. LTSC is not supposed to be a consumer OS.
  
  I think it's a valid comparison request due to some things just flat out not being compatible with Linux.
  
  Why? Isn't SteamOS a stripped down version of Linux?

So a specialized OS wins over a general OS in their specific tasks?
Amazing ...
- It’s impressive that’s still the case when SteamOS is running a translation layer that Windows doesn’t have to.
  Also, SteamOS is actually a pretty fully-featured OS, and it’s based off of Linux, so it’s not that specialized, besides the UI.
  
  Yeah it's basically Arch with KDE Neon/gamescope that runs Steam in Big Picture mode with an immutable file system. That's why Bazzite is able to make a StramOS-like experience. The hardest things are the hardware-specific tweaks.
- SteamOS is able to launch a desktop environment where you can do anything you want. It is just an OS like Windows, but better.
  
  Cool, can you run video rendering software on it? How about some cli? Can you delete packages? Or even remove the french language?
- If I had a trillion dollars, and no desire to add telemetry bloat to my OS, and I'm incentivized to compete in the market...