Yeah, but they were also still making new standalone gaming boxes with a dedicated OS, and they didn't have the Xbox division take the lead on game mode. Linux and Mac gaming also weren't a threat, and the solution to a bloated Windows installation was more horsepower, which was relatively cheap. Now the market is completely changed. The Xbox Series S and X have had their lunch eaten by Playstion and Switch. Linux gaming is exploding because of the Steam Deck, while more-powerful Windows handhelds are performing worse with worse batteries than the Deck because of Windows bloat. Mid-range GPUs cost more than an entire high-end gaming rig from 5 years ago, so high-end gaming PCs are rarer than ever. Microsoft *has* to do something. And what they've chosen, for now, is to partner with Asus to launch a true Xbox-branded competitor to the Deck. To do that, they have to actually be competitive. There's 2 keys to that. One is Gamepass, and the other is moving Windows out of the way of the game experience.

> With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers. Yes, from what I've been told that actually does improve performance in many games.

Biased to what? Point of comparison is to figure out why things are the way they are and use that information to get the best of both worlds? It's not very helpful if the conclusion stops at "x is better than y". Going deeper into "why" Proton is doing better in 3/5 games but not in 2/5 will only help users of both operating systems to make better informed decisions and get everyone closer to root cause other than "bloated windows" or "just use linux", potentially even leading to improvements to both sides.

Because I'm more curious about why things are the way they are just like the author, and would like to understand this with more data points, only making the comparison more helpful. I'm not saying author "should" consider impact of shader compilation, but I'm saying had they done, we'd understand the difference better. Saying "RTX 5060 is better than 9060 XT" with 5 games tested is one level of comparison, but if they are grouped into RT and non RT games, games with 8gb and 16gb VRAM requirements, games with and without nVidia partnership, isn't that just more detailed and an even better comparison point?

Preach. Studios that make games with anti cheats and what not should reconsider how they handle Linux as they'll only get even more players, who'll probably be even more loyal due to their Linux compatibility. I know cheating is a big issue in online games, but adding invasive kernel level code to detect that is just adding system level vulnerabilities just to prevent cheaters from cheating seems like an overkill. It's not like cheating mouse and keyboards don't exist and cheaters have evaporated entirely due to anti cheat.

Tarkov runs on Linux!? I thought they had kernel anticheat that didn't work

I heard they are irrelevant for Proton as it has its own fsync.

Pvp doesn't work yeah, everything else does

Unless you use an RT kernel, Linux is not a realtime OS and certainly not a true one. Because, you know, terms have a meaning.

> The reality is that mostly people aren't going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it's still a win. While I mostly agree with this, every time I see this mentioned it reminds me that MS-DOS was not very popular, until a Microsoft employee offered to port Doom to DOS, because he saw that if games ran on a platform people would use it and migrate naturally, that employee was called Gabe Newell. So I do have some hope that there's some bigger migration, and in fact we've seen the numbers steadily rising, and these sort of things tend to be exponential, so I wouldn't be surprised if it picks up speed.

DOS was the most popular OS for gaming at the time and Doom was released first on DOS by id. Gabe Newell and team ported it to Windows 95.

Oops, thanks for the correction I'll update the post

Are you saying we should run Linux Subsystem inside Windows inside a VM on Linux for maximum performance?

They're not only being better optimized on Windows which results that running them through Proton is better. In a lot of cases Windows versions actually run, while native Linux don't, because there's no single stable API (ABI? Idk) on Linux and games break when you update your system.

There is overhead but Vulkan allows you to batch draw calls in a far more efficient manner. It can also generally use multi threading to feed a GPU even if the game isn't coded with that in mind. Basically Vulkan offers so many improvements to efficiency and parallelization that the overhead is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall speedup in draw call optimization alone.

Windows was wildly popular prior to Doom. Doom for Windows 95 was a showcase for DirectX, not Windows. Doom was on more systems than Windows 95, yes, but that's a little misleading. First off, it was released several years before Window's 95. Secondly, people upgraded computers less often back then, and Windows 95 wasn't packaged with most systems and wasn't distributed online. You had to actively decide to go to a store and buy it. Third, the vast majority of Doom copies were the shareware version of the first campaign. It was tiny and free. People would bring their floppy to a friend's house, or they'd post it on a bbs for download. The port to Windows 95 was a technical showcase of the advantages of using DirectX. It showed that Windows had integrated features that could be used to enhance games with minimal development cost, and that games could be run without having to exit Windows to DOS, which was a huge hassle required for most games at the time.

Still more consistent out of the box than the dozens of GUIs of Linux.

Windows 95 launched like a rock concert and since computers came with Windows, everyone's experience was the same so you did have KDE installed then go look for help and have people say "no no no. Install Gnome" like you get with Linux. You want linux to be mainstream, you need to appeal to the average dumb person which means ditch all but 1 interface.

Lol. Lmao, e--

Imagine if Valve decided to ship HL3 only on SteamOS