Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that’s a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.
In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.
Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,
The OS would autoremove them?!
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The thing that confuses me is that Microsoft is no stranger to Linux. They use it in their data centers. It’s plainly obvious if you know what other offerings are doing.
Their entire front end stack for azure virtual machines is OpenStack. Some years back they integrated with OpenStack to allow it to manage hyper-v, but OpenStack can also natively manage KVM hypervisors, as it was originally designed to do, and also VMware.
Hell, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a Microsoft distro of Linux floating around (not available to the public… Not yet at least).
The people who seem to be pushing Microsoft, more than anyone, are game studios. Their garbage Anti cheat rootkits work best on Windows. So use Windows so they can low jack your PC.
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux is a thing, yes. Public and fully open source.
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lol, what is this ‘Xbox Exclusive Game’ you speak of, in 2025?
Microsoft has plenty of console exclusives, so they are on PlayStation and Switch but not Windows for whatever reason. Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is one I’m confused why they don’t trust their own platform with.
That said, they don’t trust their own Windows on ARM devices either and those should definitely be capable enough to run games that come to Switch.
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This is good. This data will eventually help influence game developers to support Linux. It won’t happen over night, but we this trend continues, it’ll eventually start getting some attention.
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Developers already care about it. Not all of them, not all the way, but many are aiming for steam deck compatibility via proton. It’s not perfect, and some devs are vehemently holding out, but it’s progress!
That doesn’t seem to take a lot of effort. It’s still a windows binary. And it’s unfortunately simpler than figuring out if the user runs X or not.
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https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux is a thing, yes. Public and fully open source.
Well, would you look at that…
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Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,
The OS would autoremove them?!
It’s probably Windows update “fixing” you drivers by updating them to the Windows version because it is newer. I had to turn off Windows driver updates, because it kept updating my already fully working 5.1 Dolby digital driver to a newer one that only has dual channel audio, and it also broke the optional optical out my sound card supports (and has installed).
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Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.
But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual
drive?).I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.
Welcome to gaming on Linux!
how to manage the games installed in Proton (virtual C drive)
They can be found in: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/<game app id>/pfx/drive_c/ For Elden Ring for example the path is: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1245620/pfx/drive_c/
Biggest blockers are games with invasive and unsupported anti cheat or very new games. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for the latest reports on games.
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Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.
Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don’t have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).
Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives… but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB… sigh.
Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it’s odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you’re trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can’t natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.
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Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it’s odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you’re trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can’t natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.
if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems
What kind of problems? I REALLY don’t want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.
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Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,
The OS would autoremove them?!
Yeah, it was super fun. I tried reformatting, I bought a new drive and put new Windows on it and the same thing happened.
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if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems
What kind of problems? I REALLY don’t want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.
They just won’t function properly. There are permissions problems and while some games might work, you will run into games that simply won’t launch, or that have regular crashes, among other issues. I recommend installing the games you want to play on Linux there, and the ones you can’t on windows.
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I actually watched the prices increase by about 10-20% while ordering computers from work. This was through Dell so clear as mud normally for any given computer but the value of my invoices jumped by a clear 10-20% after the tarrifs started biting back in April
Seems like an increase a bit in preparation. Who knows what they’ll be/what shortages will occur over the next couple of years. After all, the current bluff is a 100% tariff on chips. Which is why if you’re planning to upgrade in the next year or two and have the money, it might be a decent idea to pre-emptively update your parts before they jack up further.
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Also, you might be able to fix that!
I clock limit my 3090 to like 1700MHz-1750Mhz with Nvidia-smi (built into the driver) since any faster is just diminishing returns. You might check what “stable clocks” your 3070 runs at, and cap them slightlt lower, and even try an under volt as well.
Be sure to cap the frame rate too.
Do that, and you might be able to handle RT reflections and otherwise similar settings without much noise. The hit for just that setting is modest on my 3090 but much heavier with full “low” RT
I’ll have to look into seeing if I can mess with that! It’s a laptop 3070, so they:'ve already made some changes (fewer cores, lower boost clocks). My laptop sets a 100 W max TGP for it.
TBH though I’ve found myself caring more about the convenience of playing games (comfort, portability, ease of interrupting) more than graphics settings. Yeah it’s very pretty with ray tracing and all, but I’m totally fine with playing on medium or high.
Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.
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I’ll have to look into seeing if I can mess with that! It’s a laptop 3070, so they:'ve already made some changes (fewer cores, lower boost clocks). My laptop sets a 100 W max TGP for it.
TBH though I’ve found myself caring more about the convenience of playing games (comfort, portability, ease of interrupting) more than graphics settings. Yeah it’s very pretty with ray tracing and all, but I’m totally fine with playing on medium or high.
Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.
Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.
It’s far more efficient to just TDP limit your GPU rather than lowering settings to try and get power consumption (and laptop fan speed) down. It will stick to slightly lower clocks, which is exponentially better since that also lowers voltage, and voltage increases power consumption quadratically.
Otherwise it will always try to boost to 100W anyway.
You can do this with MSI Afterburner easily, or you can do it in Windows with just the command line. For example,
nvidia-smi -pl 80will set the power limit to 80W (until you restart your PC).nvidia-smiby itself will show all its default settings.I do this with my 3090, and dropping from the default 420W to 300W hardly drops performance at all without changing a single graphics setting.
Alternatatively you can hard cap the clocks to your GPU’s “efficient” range. For my 3090 thats somewhere around 1500-1700 MHz, and TBH I do this more often, as it wastes less power from the GPU clocking up to uselessly inefficient voltages, but lets it “power up” for really intense workloads.
FYI you can do something similar with the CPU too, though it depends on the model and platform.
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Thanks for the ideas! Hopefully I can push the graphics up without turning into a pile of lava. I need to figure out how to record graphics power consumption for me to reference to evaluate changes.
It’s far more efficient to just TDP limit your GPU rather than lowering settings to try and get power consumption (and laptop fan speed) down. It will stick to slightly lower clocks, which is exponentially better since that also lowers voltage, and voltage increases power consumption quadratically.
Otherwise it will always try to boost to 100W anyway.
You can do this with MSI Afterburner easily, or you can do it in Windows with just the command line. For example,
nvidia-smi -pl 80will set the power limit to 80W (until you restart your PC).nvidia-smiby itself will show all its default settings.I do this with my 3090, and dropping from the default 420W to 300W hardly drops performance at all without changing a single graphics setting.
Alternatatively you can hard cap the clocks to your GPU’s “efficient” range. For my 3090 thats somewhere around 1500-1700 MHz, and TBH I do this more often, as it wastes less power from the GPU clocking up to uselessly inefficient voltages, but lets it “power up” for really intense workloads.
FYI you can do something similar with the CPU too, though it depends on the model and platform.
Thank you very much, kind graphics wizard. I will put this knowledge to good use saving my ears from that fan. This is exactly what I was looking for!
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Seems like an increase a bit in preparation. Who knows what they’ll be/what shortages will occur over the next couple of years. After all, the current bluff is a 100% tariff on chips. Which is why if you’re planning to upgrade in the next year or two and have the money, it might be a decent idea to pre-emptively update your parts before they jack up further.
While I was working at an MSP that was one of the talking points regarding computer upgrades, that and Windows 10 EOL looming in October
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While I was working at an MSP that was one of the talking points regarding computer upgrades, that and Windows 10 EOL looming in October
Yep. If I didn’t think it was stupider, I would almost think it was a plan to increase consumption of bs computer upgrades given how they’ve basically gotten to the point that people don’t really need to upgrade for the most part, outside of operating system changes.
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Yep. If I didn’t think it was stupider, I would almost think it was a plan to increase consumption of bs computer upgrades given how they’ve basically gotten to the point that people don’t really need to upgrade for the most part, outside of operating system changes.
Windows bloat does a pretty good job of making fairly recent computers feel sluggish though. I just updated my work laptop with a 12th gen CPU to Windows 11 and things are noticeably more sluggish immediately following applying the update. Which is sad since its about 8 years newer than my Linux laptop with similar (but older of course) specs and the Linux laptop is significantly snappier-feeling when in use.
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Anyone know if CP2077 runs better on Linux than Windows?
By much? With HDR?
Sorry for the drive by comment, but this is like the one game my 3090 can’t quite handle to my satisfaction. I’ve thoroughly disabled the thing from rendering in Linux and don’t want to undo all that… But if I could get like another 10% over Windows, that would be incredible. Even 5% would be awesome.
As I promised, my own Cyberpunk testing of Windows Vs Linux on mostly the same hardware (they are on different SSDs, but I don’t think that’ll have a drastic impact).
TLDR: Windows framerates seem inconsistent, it’s first benchmark I ran (the first Ultra without DLSS) was way faster with no explanation. Aside from that and Ray Tracing: Overdrive, Linux seems to win, and by a large degree (+28 FPS average on the Low preset seems ridiculous).
I don’t think these results are broadly applicable to more machines. You probably won’t get +28 FPS by switching to Linux.
My best guess is that the performance difference may have a lot to do with different power/thermal targets, or that Windows was doing a lot in the background (it was running an update, but I didn’t expect a huge impact).
I’m guessing that on most hardware the performance difference will be pretty small.
Hardware: ROG Zephyrus G15 GA503QR Laptop Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16 GiB DDR4 RTX 3070 Laptop GPU 2560x1440 screen, up to 165 Hz
All benchmarks: plugged into OEM power supply. I held the laptop vertically so there were no restrictions to its airflow.
Game: Cyberpunk 2077 V2.3 with Phantom Liberty DLC, fullscreen 2560x1440. Values are given as Min / Average / Max FPS displayed by the game’s built in benchmark.
Linux (Bazzite 42): NVIDIA driver 575.64.05 Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD Performance power profile
Low Preset ( no upscaling): 57.49 / 68.42 / 83.86 FPS
Ultra Preset(no upscaling): 32.91 / 39.27 / 49.71 FPS
Ultra (DLSS Transformer model, Auto): 41.11 / 48.70 / 61.30 FPS
Ray Tracing: Low Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 44.12 / 51.70 / 61.63 FPS
Ray Tracing: Ultra Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 29.24 / 34.26 / 39.81 FPS
Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 15.03 / 17.71 / 20.45 FPS
Windows (Windows 11 Home 23H2): GeForce Game Ready Driver 580.88 SK Hynix HFM001TD3JX013N SSD “Turbo” power profile (in ASUS Armoury Crate)
Low Preset (no upscaling): 35.68 / 40.68 / 45.17 FPS
Ultra Preset(no upscaling): 40.53 / 52.88 / 65 FPS
Ultra Preset (no upscaling, Round 2): 29.68 / 35.63 / 39.94 FPS
Ultra (DLSS Transformer model, Auto): 36.71 / 47.20 / 55.32 FPS
Ray Tracing: Low Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 28.55 / 32.41 / 35.85 FPS
Ray Tracing: Ultra Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 22.23 / 27.25 / 30.86 FPS
Ray Tracing: Overdrive Preset (DLSS transformer model, Auto): 17.74 / 19.96 / 22.64 FPS
