I don't think the issue is performance though. The unspoken part of this comparison is in bold:
"Linux vs Windows tested in 10 games. In the games we could find that work on linux, the performance was 17% faster on average. In all the rest of the games, Windows worked 100% better."
Fortunately majority of games work on linux. The major pain point now is the anticheat used by multiplayer games. Single player games more or less work out of the box
To add on here, you can use the Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? site to track which games are not working due to anti-cheat. In my experience it's extremely rare for "Linux" (aka Wine/DXVK/VKD3D/et al) to not support arbitrary games. If a game is not working on Linux it's almost certainly because of an anti-cheat or some bloated/obscure DRM telling Linux "no you cannot run this".
I really want to switch to Linux, but I’ve been told this before and then ended up spending hours trying to get everything to work, and usually give up … but it’s been a couple of years since I tried the last time, so is this the right time?
I have zero interest in the technical parts of Linux or setting things up. I want things to work out if the box. I may have to dual boot because of WoW and MS Flight Sim, but if everything else works it may be worth it.
Edit: wow thanks for the answers. You may have convinced me to try again.
I'd argue that the idea that most games don't work on Linux is a flat-out misconception in 2023.
It's hard to quantify, but Valve's own Steam Deck (=running on Linux) verification stats have 70% of games either Verified or Playable (Playable generally means that it runs but text is small on the Deck screen, or it needs a lot of keyboard input -- nothing that matters on the desktop). Crucially, "Unsupported" doesn't mean it doesn't run -- it means untested, and in my experience at least, many of those just work too.
Protondb shows 80% of its catalog with a Platinum, Gold, or Silver rating -- 70% are Gold. Silver generally corresponds to e.g. switching to Proton Experimental, which is a single-click process.
Anecdotally, after being gaming only on Linux for more than a year, with a catalog of 500+ games, I've had one (1) that gave me any more trouble than that Proton Experimental switch (Assetto Corsa, first one).
So there is no "unspoken part" here. The experience running Windows games on Linux isn't what it was even 2 years ago. It is, for many people, an entirely seamless experience now.
PS: seeing Windows games running better on Linux isn't a new observation either. Elden Ring was a great example where Proton shader precaching eliminated the stutter that plagued that game at launch, so it didn't happen on Linux.
Wait...so, if i understand this correctly yeah...the Deck might upen us all up to a future of Linux as our operating system as gamers?
Seeing how popular it is etc, might that actually be on purpose? Excuse me being dumb, i just play games and that's it basically no real computer tech knowledge.
IMO that is a disingenuous way to state that. It makes it sound like they had to work to find games that worked on Linux at all and suggests that most games do not. Which is far from the truth. Most games just work these days and it is only a handful that don't, so only a handful work 100% better. Then it all really depends if you care about those few games or not.
This seems a little exaggerated. For example, over 10k games are Steam Deck playable/verified. About 75% of the games that were tested were compatible with the Steam Deck, so probably many more will follow. Also, all emulators work on Linux too and sometimes even better than on Windows. The number of games that are available to you on Linux is simply massive.
Aside from performance, I also noticed that older PC games work better on Linux than Windows nowadays. I really enjoy playing games from the late 90's to early 2000's, and they tend to run great on Linux with proton. Just the last year I've played all of Baldurs Gate 1, Icewind Dale 1 and Icewind Dale 2 on my scrappy Lenovo laptop and it's been great.
It does indeed work. I've been playing ffxiv on linux with plugins since the release of endwalker.
If you're on arch, you can use the xivlauncher package from the aur. Or if you're not on arch, there's a flatpak for it (which is what is recommended for the steam deck for example)
Yeah, I plan on guying a new SSD card and plug it in with a USB 3.0 adapter to hack a new SSD slot for my mobo and test linux without losing anything. There's more games I'm doubtful but I'll admit that I haven't looked it up yet.
Yes, plugins work really well on linux. Use xivlauncher, available through git or aur. Every addon that i have tried has worked flawlessly. Use IINACT for parsing, it's a plugin version of ACT that is much more stable than standalone ACT in my experience, albeit with fewer config options
With proton the benefit can be +/- by quite a large margin to the point where I wouldn't rely on this data to say that Linux is faster by default. Though it's promising that Linux CAN compete with windows in performance despite the added layer of abstraction necessary to run many titles.
So then buying a brand new 560hz monitor must be cheating to you as well then? I'd say mayyyybe 2% of players, at most, are running 560hz monitors right now.
Are they cheating because some people are still using 60hz hardware?
I'll boldly say that unless you have a multitude of games relying on anticheat, 90% of your game library works out of the box or just needs a little tinkering with Proton.
Most recently the pain in the ass games have been AoE4, and BeamMP. AoE4 crashes in muliplayer, there is a patch for that crash on protondb, but it seems I'm also impacted by an AMD related bug that happens intermittently and will restart X at a random times specifically due to playing AoE4. Tried various kernels and video cards, still crashes.
BeamMP, looks like a lot of people have this issue, some have been able to resolve it.
Civ6 used to have stability issues, the Linux client is a joke, I use the proton version because it's more stable.
Ummm, I say that because I'm the friend in the friend group where the games don't work sometimes, and I'm not going to pretend like that isn't the case simply because I'm a FOSS advocate.
I own a steam deck, I have decades of experience with Linux as a Desktop, server, and even some years doing game development, so it's not for a lack of effort.
It's undoubtedly a fact that some mainstream games don't work at all, or well enough that you'll play seamlessly with your windows friends. Even protondb admits hundreds of outright borked games. Being dishonest about this does more harm than good.
It's amazing what Steam, Valve, AMD, etc, have done recently for Linux gaming, but it's not the YotLD yet.
This might be helpful to someone that hasn't done a dual boot gaming benchmark to know that they can now stop dual booting and just run Linux. It has been years of conditioning for some being told that for best performance you had to play in Windows.
It's rather important to understand the performance characteristics for people to know what to expect if they want to switch to Linux.
If games ran at half the FPS on Linux as they would have on Windows, then pretty much no one would be gaming on linux.
If you got 90% performance on Linux, only Linux enthusiasts would take the performance hit.
At 100% performance the choice is completely free, people that got fed up with windows could just switch.
When Linux outperforms Windows, this puts us in very interesting territory, as this might even entice a bunch of people to give Linux a try to see whether the switch is worth the performance. I'm personally quite interested in seeing whether this could be the tipping point for Linux on desktop and laptop to really start taking off.