What a shock

Shitty OS is shitty.

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.

I guess things run faster without the spyware, logging, and other general bullshit running in the background. Who could've guessed?

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.

But what you gain in performance you lose in data mining. Imagine not being graped for personal information after you paid extra to get 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.

Running a windows game using Proton-GE 10.4 and a Wayland desktop is even faster still.