topic Re: gRe: Linux gaming really has come a long way in SmorgasBoard

Linux gaming really has come a long way

crystal626 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 06:33:20 GMT

I installed CachyOS to test something else recently (if you know what Denuvo is you can probably figure it out based on the news in the last week but I'm sure it's not a topic we can discuss here). Hubby and I have been playing Palworld. Palworld multiplayer is old school direct connect stuff where my machine was hosting the game and he was connecting to it. It worked fine for days, no issues whatsoever.

Well today, we go to hop on, and he can't connect to me. We tried everything - rebooting the Xfinity XB8 gateway, rebooting our computers, port forwarding the ports Palworld uses, had Steam verify that we were both on the same version and the files were good, we even turned off Windows Firewall altogether. Nothing would work. So I said well, I have CachyOS installed, might as well give it a shot.

Rebooted, installed it, set it to use CachyOS' custom Proton, and opened it. Configured the graphics the same I had set on Windows, launched the save, gave hubby the code, and it let him right in.

Not only that but Windows ran the game like crap. I was having massive frame drops in some areas with high settings which shouldn't be an issue for my 9070 XT to handle and the graphics card was running hot and loud. Well much to my amazement, the same settings on Linux were totally fluid. I was able to crank the settings to Epic before I had the same slowdowns I had with High on Windows (but the game otherwise performed about the same as High settings in Windows did). Clearly the open source drivers fixed something AMD or Microsoft broke in Windows. We played for probably 5 hours and it was rock solid.

I still plan to play my games on Windows as my primary, they generally have better performance and obviously have better compatibility, but this was very impressive and honestly we would have had to shell out for a private server if this didn't work, which neither of us wanted to do. We plan to just keep playing on Linux now. Not going to even bother trying to fix it in Windows.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

TrapLine — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 09:49:22 GMT

@crystal626

Great information. It appears your work arounds become an actual solid base independent to themselves.

Like the 9070XT ... wow!

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

crystal626 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:45:58 GMT

@TrapLine wrote:
@crystal626

Great information. It appears your work arounds become an actual solid base independent to themselves.

Like the 9070XT ... wow!

I have to say, I'm very impressed with this card. I always had Nvidia before and that was not a great time with Linux. It's so nice not having to deal with the arduous install process of Nvidia drivers since AMD's are just built into the kernel as a fully open source solution. I was worried about FSR having less support than DLSS but the raw rasterization performance of this card is so good that it can power through most games without any scaling (Palworld does not support any version of FSR in fact, just DLSS) and the AAA titles where it can't are all launching with FSR support out of the box anyway.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

AndrewF — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:41:37 GMT

Saying "it runs better than Windows" is a very low bar these days.

There have always been so many reasons why Windows is slow, from crappy threading performance, to antivirus firing up and hooking the disk and processor at the worst moments.

I ran into an article where Microsoft is overclocking the processor to make the start menu move now.

They've totally jumped the shark on this. When your software is so bloated and slow that simple tasks like moving a mouse cursor and pulling down a menu are lagging, it's bad.

They haven't had people who actually knew what they were doing at Microsoft since the Windows XP era.

There's been no incentive to put Windows on a diet. The only way they sell more copies is if everyone thinks there's something wrong and the solution is to buy another computer every few years. In that environment there's no incentive to fix anything because optimization means fewer licenses get sold.

They've set up artificial compatibility checks like "Secure Boot on" and "TPM 2.0" so that people can't (by default) experience the horror of running Windows 11 on a laptop that was very fast by 2016 standards and still runs the current version of KDE on Linux without any trouble.

The "buy a new computer every few years" cycle is exactly the kind of manufactured necessity that drains budgets quietly. A $1,200 laptop purchase every 3-4 years because Windows made the old one feel slow is a significant lifetime cost — especially when the hardware itself is fine.

Linux removes that extraction entirely. Same machine, current software, no artificial obsolescence.

Even a $50 laptop from Goodwill that's been reimaged with Linux Mint is fast enough for most people. And it doesn't put a serious hole in the family budget.

In the rampant debt-financed world of computing upgrades, people are meant to see the $599 Macbook Neo as a bargain, at only 12x more.

When you anchor the price at $1,200 and call $599 a deal, you've already won the psychological game. The comparison isn't "$599 vs. $50 Goodwill laptop" — it's "$599 vs. the $1,200 one." The $50 option has been removed from the conversation entirely.

"No payments until 2027" turns a $599 discretionary purchase into something that feels free today and expensive later with interest.

One of my exes, Glenn, went to the Rent-A-Center and got a Macbook. They got one payment out of him and eventually called the police. They never got the Macbook back but he did spend a few months in jail over it. (Criminal Conversion, Indiana)

Rent-A-Center makes "It's not credit!" sound like a feature, but Rent-to-own isn't a credit transaction — it's a rental contract. That distinction matters legally. When Glenn stopped paying, he wasn't defaulting on a loan. He was retaining property he no longer had the right to possess. In Indiana, that's Criminal Conversion, and it's exactly what happened.

Rent-A-Center prices that MacBook at roughly 2-3x retail over the life of the contract. Glenn was never going to own it at a price that made sense. The product is designed for people who feel like they have no other option — and then the legal system becomes the collections department when payments stop.

They make people who can't access credit and would have just been hounded and possibly sued if it had been a credit card into convicted criminals, over a computer of all things.

A $50 cash purchase has zero criminal exposure. A Rent-A-Center MacBook contract carries criminal liability in Indiana if payments stop. The "affordable" monthly payment came with a risk profile that a cash purchase never could, or even a default on a credit product.

Proving that some people are always trying to iceskate uphill, when Glenn got out of jail, he went back in a couple years later for Conversion, this time with a rental car.

I have a lot of Rent-A-Center stories for only having worked at one for weeks. I went over some of them in a recent post.

I think my favorite was the day the phone rang and it was a guy angry because a portable washing machine we delivered to the tenant upstairs overflowed and it destroyed his bed.

He wanted us to bring him a new bed. The problem was we were actively suing him for getting the bed from us and not paying for the bed.

Most landlords don't allow these because they know what happens when the drain hose falls out of the sink with the inlet hose hooked up to a faucet that's on.

It's total mayhem with Rent-to-Own customers because they're usually incapable of learning.

Rent-to-Own creates a collection mechanism that's not tied to any civil proceeding. They ask for the full value of the contract to be tied to criminal restitution. You don't get off probation until you pay for that inflated price on the Macbook.

Buy Now Pay Later apps are a product so predatory, so deeply subprime and harmful, and they managed to figure out how to call it "0% interest". Most people who use them eventually miss payments and trigger the built-in traps like deferred interest and late fees, but you don't go to jail.

When a product is so bad that the only good thing you can say about it is "at least you won't go to jail", you know you shouldn't touch it.

I think that I saw my first sign for Affirm at Best Buy and that makes sense because there's probably no other retailer other than a big box electronics store where the purchase-to-regret ratio is that high.

A $2,000 laptop feels impossible, four payments of $500 feels better somehow.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

crystal626 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:24:43 GMT

I know you're a big Windows hater, and honestly in many ways I am too (or I wouldn't have a Mac with my desktop PC just for gaming), but Windows has always done gaming a lot better. It still does in general. Linux gaming usually has a 10-20% performance penalty compared to just using Windows because translation adds overhead, sometimes quite significant overhead. In this one situation, for whatever reason, Linux is doing better, but that's not the norm, and I would imagine that AMD will eventually fix the performance for Windows (although who knows about the networking issue and Microsoft).

I do agree that for older machines, Linux is the best choice, but that's not always ideal for every situation. There are still so many things that drive me nuts about Linux and I'm still seeing people posting that simply updating the kernel or Wayland borked their system so it's not like Linux is all sunshine and roses either.

Of course, I may not have much of a choice for long. This age assurance nonsense seems increasingly likely and I'm not going to be giving out my info to use the net or boot my machine just so the companies can get hacked and I have to deal with identity theft nonsense so I may well have to opt out of the mainstream OSes completely but that day isn't here yet and I'm going to resist making a full switch to Linux until it gets here.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

TrapLine — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:30:39 GMT

@AndrewF

Yes, the sticker shock on purchasing computers is over the top! The blame is being laid on the avalability of computer chips and that data centers are sucking them up and an ever increasing rate. Read yesterday it was reported there were over 4000+ of them sucking electricity and computer chips (not sure I believe it but - unknown).

Now I do know the world tariff situation is having an affect too.

Purchased a large lap top and got it through the customs one day before tariffs went on around March 2025. It cost me net $1200 (one of those sales as it supposedly retailed for $1700) and it was a custom build. Today, I cannot find an equivalent to build and anything close is showing $2500 to $5000 ... for real?!

Now your example of paying four installments of $500 each looks workable but what is the carrying cost (interest) for such an action?

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

FicoMike0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:31:30 GMT

I got tired of windoz years ago. You have to join their club. Then they always want to do an update.

I use mint mostly. I also keep fedora scientific bootable, because it has tools like maxima pre installed. I'm too lazy to install the apps, I just find a distro that has what I want pre installed.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

TrapLine — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:46:06 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
I got tired of windoz years ago. You have to join their club. Then they always want to do an update.
I use mint mostly. I also keep fedora scientific bootable, because it has tools like maxima pre installed. I'm too lazy to install the apps, I just find a distro that has what I want pre installed.

Do you think we have too much time on our hands?

gRe: Linux gaming really has come a long way

FicoMike0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:08:11 GMT

Nothing works all the time. I worked a project that required us to do a big compute job only every year or two, but we needed it done quickly. We were doing a 6 degree of freedom monte carlo flight simulation, we needed millions of runs. We tried everything over many years, ibm mainframe, vax, cray. On time we dedicated several sun clusters for nearly two weeks. Went through big endian, little endian conversions. We got it to run on 486 desktops, it ran minutes for seconds. A 99 second time of flight took 99 minutes to simulate. One time, some bright guys analyzed the program instruction mix, found it ran much faster on the M68000 processor mac was using at the time, than the Intel in the pc. Got our customer, usaf, to buy us 20 top of the line mac towers for the job. Now, even back then, this was an old program which had been updated periodically over a decade or two. It was written in Fortran. Imagine our surprise when we found no compiler available for the Mac! They were great for running ms word, could repaginate a 1000 page doc in no time.

The best solution we finally arrived at was to run it as the screensaver on everyone's PC. We had several hundred PCs to work with, everyone was instructed to leave their desktop on, so we got a lot of run time.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

AndrewF — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:14:22 GMT

Microsoft used to be a member of the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) until they realized that making a proprietary version of it called Direct3D (part of DirectX) would be advantageous as a Windows lock-in tool.

It's not that Windows is better for gaming in that it's a competent efficient system. It's not. It's that Direct3D became the vendor lock-in tool. It teaches developers Windows-only development and then when they go that route, the idea has always beeen that customers no longer have a choice and if they leave, the game stops working at all. So you don't need to optimize, you need to trap those customers. That way no matter how hideous the performance drag of Windows gets, it's irrelevant. They'll buy new hardware to run inefficient software faster.

To be fair, OpenGL was not designed for gaming, and OpenGL did improve a lot when it started taking some of the ideas from Direct3D like ditching the fixed function pipeline for GLSL.

And now we have Vulkan.

Proton is a variant of Wine that is maintained by Valve for Steam. The patches eventually end up in Wine because of the LGPL license.

We're getting to a point where Linux can just run all of these games at high performance levels because of Direct3D<>Vulkan support and the NTSYNC driver in the Linux kernel.

It's often faster to simulate foreign Windows APIs because the underlying system is more efficient. The abstraction layer has an overhead, but it's not enough to be notable considering that the Windows OS is bloated and, deliberately designed that way to promote new PC sales and more Windows licenses. Higher turnover. More frequent upgrade cycles.

There's nothing Linux distributions gain by not optimizing. They're not collecting a license fee on mid-cycle upgrades like Microsoft is, so Microsoft has perverse incentives that keep Windows getting worse every release.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

TrapLine — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:17:20 GMT

@AndrewF wrote:
Microsoft used to be a member of the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) until they realized that making a proprietary version of it called Direct3D (part of DirectX) would be advantageous as a Windows lock-in tool.

It's not that Windows is better for gaming in that it's a competent efficient system. It's not. It's that Direct3D became the vendor lock-in tool. It teaches developers Windows-only development and then when they go that route, the idea has always beeen that customers no longer have a choice and if they leave, the game stops working at all. So you don't need to optimize, you need to trap those customers. That way no matter how hideous the performance drag of Windows gets, it's irrelevant. They'll buy new hardware to run inefficient software faster.

To be fair, OpenGL was not designed for gaming, and OpenGL did improve a lot when it started taking some of the ideas from Direct3D like ditching the fixed function pipeline for GLSL.

And now we have Vulkan.

Proton is a variant of Wine that is maintained by Valve for Steam. The patches eventually end up in Wine because of the LGPL license.

We're getting to a point where Linux can just run all of these games at high performance levels because of Direct3D<>Vulkan support and the NTSYNC driver in the Linux kernel.

It's often faster to simulate foreign Windows APIs because the underlying system is more efficient. The abstraction layer has an overhead, but it's not enough to be notable considering that the Windows OS is bloated and, deliberately designed that way to promote new PC sales and more Windows licenses. Higher turnover. More frequent upgrade cycles.

There's nothing Linux distributions gain by not optimizing. They're not collecting a license fee on mid-cycle upgrades like Microsoft is, so Microsoft has perverse incentives that keep Windows getting worse every release.

Amend!

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

crystal626 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:22:02 GMT

@TrapLine wrote:
@AndrewF

Yes, the sticker shock on purchasing computers is over the top! The blame is being laid on the avalability of computer chips and that data centers are sucking them up and an ever increasing rate. Read yesterday it was reported there were over 4000+ of them sucking electricity and computer chips (not sure I believe it but - unknown).

Now I do know the world tariff situation is having an affect too.

Purchased a large lap top and got it through the customs one day before tariffs went on around March 2025. It cost me net $1200 (one of those sales as it supposedly retailed for $1700) and it was a custom build. Today, I cannot find an equivalent to build and anything close is showing $2500 to $5000 ... for real?!

Now your example of paying four installments of $500 each looks workable but what is the carrying cost (interest) for such an action?

I bought a bundle from Micro Center a few years ago. Was $560 for a CPU, motherboard, and 32GB of DDR5. That RAM alone is now $460. Micro Center does have a bundle with my processor, another 32GB kit, and worse motherboard for $660 but I don't see how they're not taking a bath on it considering RAM prices right now. PC Part Picker shows comparable parts to that bundle for ~$900.

I'll probably not be upgrading any time soon.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

crystal626 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:38:43 GMT

@AndrewF wrote:
Microsoft used to be a member of the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) until they realized that making a proprietary version of it called Direct3D (part of DirectX) would be advantageous as a Windows lock-in tool.

It's not that Windows is better for gaming in that it's a competent efficient system. It's not. It's that Direct3D became the vendor lock-in tool. It teaches developers Windows-only development and then when they go that route, the idea has always beeen that customers no longer have a choice and if they leave, the game stops working at all. So you don't need to optimize, you need to trap those customers. That way no matter how hideous the performance drag of Windows gets, it's irrelevant. They'll buy new hardware to run inefficient software faster.

To be fair, OpenGL was not designed for gaming, and OpenGL did improve a lot when it started taking some of the ideas from Direct3D like ditching the fixed function pipeline for GLSL.

And now we have Vulkan.

Proton is a variant of Wine that is maintained by Valve for Steam. The patches eventually end up in Wine because of the LGPL license.

We're getting to a point where Linux can just run all of these games at high performance levels because of Direct3D<>Vulkan support and the NTSYNC driver in the Linux kernel.

It's often faster to simulate foreign Windows APIs because the underlying system is more efficient. The abstraction layer has an overhead, but it's not enough to be notable considering that the Windows OS is bloated and, deliberately designed that way to promote new PC sales and more Windows licenses. Higher turnover. More frequent upgrade cycles.

There's nothing Linux distributions gain by not optimizing. They're not collecting a license fee on mid-cycle upgrades like Microsoft is, so Microsoft has perverse incentives that keep Windows getting worse every release.

Vulkan games also have a performance hit compared to Windows despite not needing graphics translation. It's not just DirectX that suffers in Linux. Even native Linux games not using any translation tend to have a 5-10% performance penalty compared to Windows. Windows is still the best experience for gamers and that's unlikely to change any time soon.

Proton is also not developed by Valve. Valve pays Codeweavers to develop Proton for them and since Codeweavers is also the single largest contributor to wine, enhancements end up in both wine and their commercial CrossOver product as well.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

AndrewF — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:20:15 GMT

Like I said, the best place to get a laptop is probably shopgoodwill and look for one with Linux Mint.

What is that? $50 maybe. It'll still outperform a RPi5 which MicroCenter recently added over $100 more to because of RAM prices and tariffs.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

FicoMike0 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:25:11 GMT

@TrapLine

I definitely have too much time on my hands! I needed maxima to do some calculations using numerical methods. First, I wrote a program to do it as an excel macro in basic. I thought it would be simpke, since I already had excel and knew how to use it. Then I decided I wanted 100 decimal places of precision. I couldn't find any way to get excel to do that. I gave up and went to maxima, which I then had to learn how to use. Since then, I found another computer algebra system, pari/GP which not only will do the job, but has a phone app,

https://f-droid.org/packages/fr.ubordeaux.math.paridroid/

Hard to believe what a phone can do.

Re: Linux gaming really has come a long way

TrapLine — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 02:56:23 GMT

WOW Hats of to your ingenuity and use of the pocket computer called a Smart Phone. You leave me in the dust.

Got'ta love your drive to get the program you want!

Re: gRe: Linux gaming really has come a long way

TrapLine — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:15:23 GMT

@FicoMike0

In reviewing your posting, I missed the part about not finding a software compiler.

Brought back memories of using Fortran, Basic and Cobol. Slipping into RPG and lots of computer brands such as Univac, IBM, Compac, Burroughs and so on. Felt like a lesson in history. Noted you used a Cray ... not to shabby.

Worked on the Burroughs for public school administrative reporting. Tried a Burrough for use in our counties but they ended up more useful as a boat anchor. So we switched the counties to IBM 34, 36 and AS 400. Today, many of the counties are still using IBM AS400s. Our largest state county by population is still using Cobol in their systems, old adage never say never and they needed to find an IT Analyst to work and write Cobol which tooks months ... called out an old timer to get the job done.

If that is not enough ancient history, as I understand it many of our Federal Computer Systems are using modern front ends with old architecture still running in the background ... my comment "say what"?

Now where is my Quantum Computer using Laser Light and Xeon for cooling (if even necessary)? Know it exists ...!

Re: gRe: Linux gaming really has come a long way

FicoMike0 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:19:20 GMT

Yeah, one time we contracted with Hughes aircraft for time in their cray. Turned out our program didn't run well on the cray! You really need to match the tool to the task. It did run well on the sun clusters, but they had to be dedicated.

The sun's ran Solaris, their Unix brand. I remember they could handle larger files than ntfs could.I

Re: gRe: Linux gaming really has come a long way

AndrewF — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:32:16 GMT

@FicoMike0 wrote:
Yeah, one time we contracted with Hughes aircraft for time in their cray. Turned out our program didn't run well on the cray! You really need to match the tool to the task. It did run well on the sun clusters, but they had to be dedicated.
The sun's ran Solaris, their Unix brand. I remember they could handle larger files than ntfs could.I

Many unix/posix/linux file systems have larger limits than NTFS.

In addition to volume and file size limits, NTFS is very old and long in the tooth. It does support a compression algorithm, but it's a very slow one. There's nothing in the driver that intelligently detects if a file is compressing well and gives up on it if not, so you can only use it selectively. Microsoft uses that feature, mostly, to hide the size of folders with thousands of variations on each dll, which was their "solution" to dll hell.

The Alternate Data Streams feature should have been removed, in fact I think it was removed in ReFS, but they also removed ReFS in the sense that if you upgrade Windows past a certain build you lose the ability to create new volumes.

I don't think anyone at Microsoft knows or cares about file systems.

chkdsk's online repair tool has occasionally been catastrophic to the file system. In some cases it could even destroy the underlying storage medium.

The interesting bits of NTFS are actually that it was already ready for the WSL/WSL2 systems because of native POSIX space support leftover from posix.1 and Interix/SFU.

The posix.1 support landed (and was removed) only to get government contracts. It was never intended to actually be usable and their version of the Korn shell was said by David Korn himself to not be compatible with any version of ksh in actual use, although I think SFU later fixed this.

II used Solaris on two systems as OpenSolaris, it worked very well on my Phenom II X4 system. And OpenIndiana supports that too. It still runs very well because MATE Desktop's requirements haven't changed much since being forked from GNOME 2.32.