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Comment by marinhero | Hacker News Reader

I only use Windows because of gaming purposes. Is there anything around the internet that can show benchmarks for something like Bottles vs Proton vs Windows? WSL works well but I’d personally want to stay stick to native and not dual boot.

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Honestly proton is really all you need at this point. I've completely switched over to Linux and have had absolutely zero problems. How Linux mint even found all of my drivers for me it took literally no effort.

That being said you can always check proton db to see if your games work with it

One exception is online multiplayer, which you'll still need a true Windows for.

Depends on the game, and the anti-cheat software it uses.

EAC for Linux works

If the publisher enables it, yes. This isn't universal yet.

plenty of proton games support online multiplayer (natively or otherwise), its just games which use EAC thats the problem. Even then it can be fixed with (what I've heard) minimal work from the developer, but sadly thats still not quite universal.

I think there are a few other anti-cheats which can be problematic, but again I think it can be worked around

Yes, the big AC's like EAC, BattleEye and a few others have optional support for proton and is simple to enable.

But many other AC's like EA's Ricochet, Vanguard or Faceit AC don't support proton at all.

Yeh see I was thinking of FACEIT because I heard reports that Battlebit (which uses FACEIT) wouldnt work on the steam deck, but checking protondb it seems it runs fine, so I guess there are workarounds.

Wouldn't doubt that Ricochet and Vanguard have no support for it at all though

You're right, they talked about adding Faceit AC, but they still need time. Once they actually implement Faceit and and thereby block Steam Deck/proton users. At that point Battlebit simply won't work anymore. (Hopefully Steam'll refund my game or BB will have good community servers.)

Oh, my assumption was that they either found a way to make FACEIT work with proton or dropped it due to the lack of support. Seems odd that they'd plan to update a game that actively eliminates a section of the playerbase, especially for a multiplayer game from a relatively small studio that relies on having a big enough playerbase for the game to function

Another is peripheral support. I have a trackir which doesn't really work right in Linux on the games I'd like to use it. It also takes a lot more fiddling to get even supported devices (like my Logitech gaming wheel) working correctly.

And that's without even considering vr goggles...

Same, it really is amazing coming from the days of using Lokis and WineX and Wine trying to make things work. It was often a struggle but still some triple A games would work out of the box back then, COD1+2, quake 4 had a linux installer, MoH: Pacific Assault.

No, the best solution is just to use protondb and see if it works there, and read some comments. Then try it. Performance really doesn't matter for most titles because generally speaking the first problem is "Does it work under Proton or not" and then "Does it work reliably." You can get the Proton build of Wine a number of ways like Lutris, from what I understand, or just install Steam on Linux.

Again, do not read what anyone says as gospel, check the games you have and want to play even if people say they're perfect. Lots of things work but a lot of high-profile stuff still doesn't, so it won't work for everybody. And if a game requires 20 minutes of fucking around to get working reliably, it's very possibly not worth it; but IME people who desperately want to use Linux will excuse any amount of issues except for literally not being able to boot.[1] For example, Dragon Ball FighterZ and Destiny 2 don't work well under Proton (for different reasons) but ultimately, I have to use Windows as a result, no matter what anyone says here. Lots of games do work on my Steam Deck though, so that's nice.

[1] You can find tons of reports on ProtonDB like the following: marked "Playable", but then it says "You must launch the game with a custom environment variable to boot it, then it will crash every 10 minutes, which sucks, but it's playable." Literally the definition of "not playable" by any metric...

It's hard to do a benchmark, as you have many variables.

- what kernel you used + which settings

- what CPU model you used? what security mitigations were enabled?

- GPU model, GPU driver version, GPU driver configuration settings

- what wine version you used (e.g.: wine stable, staging, devel? proton? glorious eggroll? custom?)

- what wine settings you used: overrides, Windows version, installed libraries, etc.

- did it use the gamemode launcher or similar?

Playing with those knobs have a big impact on performance.

Variables don't make benchmarking any more difficult. You should always record the variables.

On Windows, your specs will make most of the difference in benchmarks.

When running on wine, we could say that how you are running a game can have as much on performance impact as your specs.

Identifying the differences between setups is hard.

Specifically which part of "record the variables" do you not understand?

The amount of variables simply has no impact on the difficulty of running a benchmark. The amount of variables will impact the relevance or use value of the benchmark, but interpretation and application is the user's problem. The amount of variables has zero impact on the process of performing or recording the benchmark, and this matters because interpretation and application is easier with more benchmarks covering more cases, but your insistence that it's "hard" could only reduce that number, making you the only variable that is actually a problem.

It is not impossible, but it is easier said than done.

I have not done extensive testing and the testing I have done is only on the Steam Deck.

I found that when comparing a normal Windows 10 installation to SteamOS, SteamOS performed better (slightly more consistent FPS and better battery).

When I switched to the LTS version of Windows 10 (which doesn't have a lot of the bloat in it and you don't run the risk of screwing things up by running a debloat tool) I got slightly better performance on Windows than I did on SteamOS.

This is also not on a higher end PC. I choose to keep my gaming PC windows right now just to not deal with lower performance, I paid a lot for this computer since I value performance on it.

I will say however that I am finding myself using Windows on my Steam Deck more often. Like right now I am replaying through the Kingdom Hearts series. It feels like jumping through hoops to get that to work on SteamOS where on Windows I just installed the Heroic Game Launcher (alternate app for epic games), installed it and it just works.

you can always do it yourself? Pretty easy to split a windows partition into a Linux install and test it out

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