CSGO linux seems to perform better than Proton or natively on Windows as well. In the past Linux version had an issue of not having useful anticheat but these days they seem to be able to detect cheats on Linux as well.

Some games are quite dramatic, like Stellaris/Rimworld with TPS drops of ~30% or more.

And these are game ticks, so it actually affects the rate you play the game rather than just FPS.

Proton is not a silver bullet. Starfield, for example, works with Proton but if you look at ProtonDB you will see that it does not work for many users.

I know little about Proton or if Bethesda targeted it - is it fair to judge it with an AAA game that's been out for <2 weeks? I see Steam doesn't list it as Steam Deck compatible.

I don't mean this to be a judgement of Proton but rather a reiteration of the fragmentation problem with Linux.

Most of the issues users have with Starfield are the product of having a set incompatible software. Nvidia users often fail to run the game when their driver is too new. AMD users often fail to run the game when their driver is too old.

There's a broad range of issues like this in Linux land that are very difficult to track and understand. Users seem to understand that its a package management issue but have no clue how to fix it. So they end up reiterating pointless "rolling release bad" or "stable release bad" rhetoric.

Well, people shouldn't be gaming on stock Ubuntu LTS. It would be like gaming on out of date version of Windows with ancient drivers, and expecting everything to just work.

And DIY maintenance on Arch Linux is part of the pitch (especially when running Nvidia drivers).

Distros that pitch themselves as gaming distros (like Fedora Nobara, Garuda, CachyOS) tend to offer a far superior out-of-the-box experience. Windows is in that category too, as Microsoft rather explicitly targets gaming more than, say, base Ubuntu or Fedora.

You do realize you're repeating the same "distro bad" rhetoric, right? It's not all helpful or even representative of the underlying problems. Every single distro has major issues. Whether or not they affect you is a crapshoot.

There are issues and there are out-of-scope uses, and cutting-edge software on Ubuntu LTS is definitely in the latter category.

If you need to run new things, you are not the target audience for LTS releases and shouldn’t be using them. Don’t expect time-travel compatibility from the backported bugfixes that an LTS calls “updates”.

That doesn’t make Ubuntu LTS bad. If you have a box that you intend to set up in a closet and forget for three years, but still don’t want to turn into a glaring security hole in six months, Ubuntu LTS with updates applied automatically or over SSH is a good choice. (Granted, I happen to think Debian is a better choice, but reasonable people can disagree here.) Just don’t expect the latest shinies from it.

Yes, this is a better way to say it. Some tasks or features are just out-of-scope for some distros, as they should be.

This game is an edge case as it's been handed out together with simultaneously released AMD graphics cards for whose drivers I think Ubuntu LTS doesn't vendor a fully supported version yet. Bethesda is also notorious for making incredibly buggy games on all platforms, though this one doesn't seem interesting enough to bother trying even though I have an activation key.

Did Starfield target/test on Proton? I would be kinda shocked if they did, as it is not even close to Deck compatible.

Starfield works fine with Proton. Few developers are going to test/target Proton and that's totally part of the pitch. The deck incompatibility is a function of poor optimization. Again I meant that this is a broader Linux issue. We can't just solve these problems with compatibility layers.

> Few developers are going to test/target Proton and that's totally part of the pitch.

I think they should though!

Targeting native linux is very difficult. Simply testing the game on Proton would be orders of magnitude easier for the developer.