It may not be windows, but I’m still very happy with it overall. I’m willing to turn off my laptop completely to save battery because of broken sleep, and the nice thing is it boots faster than Windows for me!
It’s actually noticeably slower for me, but both are… not fast having to go through Grub first, since I’m dual booting.
That makes the power management issues MUCH worse in my book. Windows hibernates very reliably, so once it goes to deep sleep, even if I boot back into Linux before coming back to Windows my session is saved. Bazzite won’t do that with hibernation turned off, and if sleep is broken I end up having to do a whole bunch of manual resetting on every single session, because even with Plasma’s baby steps towards session saving it’s nowhere close to remembering what apps you had open.
And there are the usual issues. Gaming performance is worse on most desktops with dedicated GPUs (don’t believe the hype, you’ll only get better performance in heavily memory-limited systems like handhelds, and definitely not with Nvidia cards). Software compatibility is still spotty and stuff breaks more often and is fiddlier to fix, as shown in this whole conversation.
So am I happy with it? There are things where it’s mostly on par, it feels snappier on the UX side and it’s good to have an alternative. In practice there are still more downsides than upsides, I’d say, so it strongly depends on how actively you want to enforce change in this space.
It’s… viable. Is that fair? Viable is better than whatever it was a decade ago, so… progress?
Performance wise, I actually did a benchmark in Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows vs. Bazzite on my laptop (Nvidia graphics card) and came out a bit ahead with Bazzite for most settings. Windows framerates were all over the place.
I guess I’d ask which card and with how much VRAM.
Linux has a significantly lower memory footprint and that is even more so if your Bazzite install was on game mode. For modern games that REALLY want more than 8 GB that can make a huge difference on stability, average fps or both unless you are fine tuning your setup. Most portable hardware tops out at 8GB of VRAM, and APUs tend to dedicate 3 or 4 to the GPU at best.
Balls-to-the-wall on desktop hardware, though, if you’re not constrained by the hardware you get more fps on Windows. Sometimes dramatically so. Not because of anything wrong with Linux, it tends to be some combination of having a conversion layer and less cherry-picked, optimized drivers. Stuff that really relies on GPU-specific features in particular, like the Spider-Man games, can grind to a halt with high end features enabled on Linux. At least that’s my experience dual-booting Linux and Windows across a bunch of laptops, desktops and handhelds for the past bunch of years.
On the flipside some games that have broken or inconsistent performance on Windows can get those same types of optimizations directly in Proton and get smoother performance (although rarely outright higer averages). Elden Ring is the one everybody knows about, but there are a few more out there.
Being very OS-agnostic, I’m actually excited for Windows’ upcoming game mode equivalent. It could be the best of both worlds. This is a big part of why you’d want Linux to do well, it pushes MS to refocus on actually useful stuff, whcih in turn has a good chance of moving Linux in the right direction.
It may not be windows, but I’m still very happy with it overall. I’m willing to turn off my laptop completely to save battery because of broken sleep, and the nice thing is it boots faster than Windows for me!
It’s actually noticeably slower for me, but both are… not fast having to go through Grub first, since I’m dual booting.
That makes the power management issues MUCH worse in my book. Windows hibernates very reliably, so once it goes to deep sleep, even if I boot back into Linux before coming back to Windows my session is saved. Bazzite won’t do that with hibernation turned off, and if sleep is broken I end up having to do a whole bunch of manual resetting on every single session, because even with Plasma’s baby steps towards session saving it’s nowhere close to remembering what apps you had open.
And there are the usual issues. Gaming performance is worse on most desktops with dedicated GPUs (don’t believe the hype, you’ll only get better performance in heavily memory-limited systems like handhelds, and definitely not with Nvidia cards). Software compatibility is still spotty and stuff breaks more often and is fiddlier to fix, as shown in this whole conversation.
So am I happy with it? There are things where it’s mostly on par, it feels snappier on the UX side and it’s good to have an alternative. In practice there are still more downsides than upsides, I’d say, so it strongly depends on how actively you want to enforce change in this space.
It’s… viable. Is that fair? Viable is better than whatever it was a decade ago, so… progress?
Performance wise, I actually did a benchmark in Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows vs. Bazzite on my laptop (Nvidia graphics card) and came out a bit ahead with Bazzite for most settings. Windows framerates were all over the place.
I guess I’d ask which card and with how much VRAM.
Linux has a significantly lower memory footprint and that is even more so if your Bazzite install was on game mode. For modern games that REALLY want more than 8 GB that can make a huge difference on stability, average fps or both unless you are fine tuning your setup. Most portable hardware tops out at 8GB of VRAM, and APUs tend to dedicate 3 or 4 to the GPU at best.
Balls-to-the-wall on desktop hardware, though, if you’re not constrained by the hardware you get more fps on Windows. Sometimes dramatically so. Not because of anything wrong with Linux, it tends to be some combination of having a conversion layer and less cherry-picked, optimized drivers. Stuff that really relies on GPU-specific features in particular, like the Spider-Man games, can grind to a halt with high end features enabled on Linux. At least that’s my experience dual-booting Linux and Windows across a bunch of laptops, desktops and handhelds for the past bunch of years.
On the flipside some games that have broken or inconsistent performance on Windows can get those same types of optimizations directly in Proton and get smoother performance (although rarely outright higer averages). Elden Ring is the one everybody knows about, but there are a few more out there.
Being very OS-agnostic, I’m actually excited for Windows’ upcoming game mode equivalent. It could be the best of both worlds. This is a big part of why you’d want Linux to do well, it pushes MS to refocus on actually useful stuff, whcih in turn has a good chance of moving Linux in the right direction.