CachyOS Dethrones Arch As ProtonDB's Top Linux Gamer Desktop Distro (xda-developers.com) 35
Linux gaming "has gotten to the point where some people claim that Linux runs their games better than Windows does," according to the Android site XDA Developers. And there's a new surprise on ProtonDB, an "unofficial" community website with crowdsourced data about videogame compatability with the Linux software/gaming compatability layer Proton:
On ProtonDB, one operating system had reigned supreme since 2021: Arch Linux. And I say 'had,' because its streak has just been ended by [Arch-based] CachyOS in an upset that has slowly grown over the past two years. As reported on Boiling Steam, the number of reports coming from CachyOS has topped that of Arch Linux, which held the crown for the most number of reports since 2021...
[T]his isn't really a statement that CachyOS is the best gaming distro out there; however, it's seemingly attracting the largest number of gamers who are invested in testing games on Proton and reporting their performance, which is a pretty big milestone if you ask me.
[T]his isn't really a statement that CachyOS is the best gaming distro out there; however, it's seemingly attracting the largest number of gamers who are invested in testing games on Proton and reporting their performance, which is a pretty big milestone if you ask me.
Android (Score:2)
The Linux distro with the most gamers? Android. By several orders of magnitude.
But ya'know what? I'ma be called out because its "not a real distro" while everyone bickers and fights about right/wrong, there are literally billions of installs and a huge chunk of those people gaming while not giving two fucks about what kernel runs under the hood.
Re:Android (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Android (Score:5, Informative)
Leaving aside the fact you left out the word "desktop", calling people who play mobile click slop "gamers" is just disgusting. Right up there with calling people who read anti-vax stories on Facebook as scholars.
No you're not being called out because it's not a real distro. You're being called out because it's not gaming.
And with that out of the way let's not leave it aside, your entire rant is predicated on you leaving out key words in TFS. ChromeOS is more of a Linux desktop gaming OS than Android is.
Re: Android (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and what do you consider a gamer? Is it a specific genre? Is it a specific input-device usage? Have you actually seen the games on mobile these days or are you still stuck on solitaire only (which is a game).
How about any game that requires an active braincell. That precludes most mobile games. No I'm not being facetious here. Proper games exist on Android, but the reality is the mobile gaming industry makes the vast majority of their money from clickers (which you could trivially automate away - so not gaming), and "games" where the core requirements involves parting with money (pay to win is also not gaming).
Re: (Score:1)
Oh, and what do you consider a gamer? Is it a specific genre? Is it a specific input-device usage? Have you actually seen the games on mobile these days or are you still stuck on solitaire only (which is a game).
How about any game that requires an active braincell. That precludes most mobile games. No I'm not being facetious here. Proper games exist on Android, but the reality is the mobile gaming industry makes the vast majority of their money from clickers (which you could trivially automate away - so not gaming), and "games" where the core requirements involves parting with money (pay to win is also not gaming).
that would exclude most FPS games.
Re: Android (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
You could have made the distinction between immersive games and casual games without the weird 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.
Yes, "gamer" traditionally refers to someone who plays a bunch of console or PC games, but you still sound ridiculous getting on your high horse about it as if gaming is some sort of noble pursuit.
The OP was wrong and pedantic. You're just pedantic. I roll my eyes at both of you.
Re: (Score:2)
No thanks, just because an Indian-Australian guy with an American accent wears a kilt doesn't mean it's a fallacy to say no true Scotsmans. The vast majority of "gaming" on mobile involves games that have more in common with a fidget spinner than actual games. Yeah there are proper games on Android, but they aren't the ones defining its platform usage.
Sometimes we just need to call them out for what they are, fallacy be damned. Is it anti-intellectual of me? Yes, but fuck it, I'll die on this hill happy. Ro
Are the "people claiming" in the room with us now? (Score:1)
"...it has gotten to the point where some people claim that Linux runs their games better than Windows does..."
Article makes the same claim, unsubstantiated.
Genuinely curious to see which games these are and how edge-case the circumstances.
Even https://discuss.cachyos.org/t/... [cachyos.org], which is a pro-Catchy forum the best I can find is that one of them is SHOCKED it actually runs better on Catchy "all of those games (minus BL4 which runs about 20 fps less at least) have either been running the same as in Win 11 or
Re:Are the "people claiming" in the room with us n (Score:5, Insightful)
For the most part you don't need to cross your fingers on any game that isn't some online multiplayer game involving anti-cheat. Even Denuvo protected games have little trouble with proton now. It's not that "some" games run on Linux, it's that "most" games run on Linux.
Now as to whether they run better, some do, very objectively so. In some cases dramatically so (e.g. Monster Hunter Wilds happily cranks out 15% higher frame rate). But some also run worse. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to why some games work better on Linux (even with the emulation layer).
Re: (Score:2)
Linus Tech Tips is currently doing another Linux Challenge, and CatchyOS is one of the distros they are testing. It's been a very mixed bag so far. Some stuff does work well, other stuff is broken.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure broken stuff exists, but the majority of games are not broken on Linux. This is not something I would have said 10 years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the problem is that "the majority" is mostly older games that fewer people care about.
One popular example is Fortnite, but there are many other recent games that don't work well or at all on Linux. The closer to release date, the worse it tends to be too. Don't expect to be playing the latest AAA game on launch day.
Re: (Score:2)
Err no, not in the slightest. The majority here is modern games. DX11/12 translation works damn well, Vulcan translation is actually perfect to the point where Vulkan based games run better in Proton than natively in Windows.
It's actually the older games that have more problem. It's not 2010 anymore.
One popular example is Fortnite
The only example you made here is that you didn't read my original post. Fortnite would run perfectly fine on Linux, the only issue is the anti-cheat system, and that is something limited to a small subset of on
Re: (Score:1)
I think the problem is that "the majority" is mostly older games that fewer people care about.
One popular example is Fortnite, but there are many other recent games that don't work well or at all on Linux. The closer to release date, the worse it tends to be too. Don't expect to be playing the latest AAA game on launch day.
This is not exactly correct.
Most of brand new games work perfectly from the beginning. But, the problem is anticheat, which usually does not work, even if such anticheat is supported under Linux.
Few examples:
Resident Evil Requiem - works flawlessly
Monster Hunter Stories - works flawlessly
Diablo IV - works flawlessly
1348 Ex Voto - works flawlessly
Marathon - does not work, BattlEye issue
Re: (Score:2)
Compatibility list, sorted by player count: https://www.protondb.com/explo... [protondb.com]
It's a mixed bag. Some of the most popular games do not work at all, some are perfect. That's with a Steam Deck though, so with your own hardware the results will probably be a bit worse.
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, this is exactly what I mean.
Most games rated Borked or Silver on this list is because anticheat is not working, and thus preventing full game unplayable, or preventing multiplayer.
PUGB, Apex Legends, Delta Force, Rust as examples.
If you look up single-player games without anticheat, most of them (about 90-95% from my experience) will work well, at least with AMD GPU.
Re: (Score:3)
There is an OS overhead, but on gaming rigs it's barely measurable. And since these games run on Proton, some of the Windows overhead will still be there, so I'm skeptical about them being faster. Usually the games that run noticeably faster on Linux do so because they lack the aggressive DRM of the Windows version.
Re: (Score:1)
I'm skeptical about them being faster
Why? You think Windows is lean and mean? Games on actual Window needs to fight for resources against crap like search indexing, copilot, telemetry, ...
And then there are tons of crappy Windows drivers, written by people who don't know what they are doing and will be happy with anything as long as it appears to work.
And then there is the third-party apps required to use the mouse/keyboard/headset.
Most Linux drivers are written by the community, doing what they need to do and nothing more. Third-party app rep
Re: Are the "people claiming" in the room with us (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why? You think Windows is lean and mean? Games on actual Window needs to fight for resources against crap like search indexing, copilot, telemetry, ...
That just goes to show how little you know about Windows. No there's no resource contention. Search indexing is not done during user input or CPU load from other applications. CoPilot doesn't do anything continuously, it waits for specific keyboard input. Telemetry is collected for office applications and on specific events (e.g. crash reports).
Literally non of the things you list use any resources what so ever while you're playing games.
And then there are tons of crappy Windows drivers
This isn't a good discussion to have. If you want to talk about crappy
Wayland (Score:2, Interesting)
Arch's premature Wayland migration broke games. I understand that migration needs to happen, but it's very premature, distros should wait until the issues are ironed out.
I thought Cachy WAS Arch (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, how much of it do you have to change before you call it something else? You can't just keep calling it Arch if it's not actually Arch because all the differences might actually mean something.
Toolkit (Score:1)
Arch has many cool design decisions, but it is far more of a Linux-distro toolkit and My-First-Linux-distro-rolling (you were not quite ready for LFS) than anything else. So it is no surprise that gamers are going for something more turn-key.
Linux gaming still depends on Microsoft... (Score:3)
It makes perfect sense that CachyOS is dominating the ProtonDB charts right now. As the article points out, they are basically pre-packaging the tweaks, driver configurations, and heroic duct tape that the rest of us have spent years applying by hand. But while we're looking at these adoption numbers, we need to be honest about what we are actually cheering for.
The harder and more honest argument is that desktop Linux gaming is still, to a depressing extent, a compatibility story -- not a first-class commercial platform. Proton is not some triumphant proof that Linux gaming has arrived on its own terms. It is Valve's game-tuned Wine fork, wrapped in DXVK, vkd3d-proton, Steam runtime glue, and a thousand game-specific evasive maneuvers to keep Windows binaries from faceplanting on a non-Windows OS. That is technically impressive. It is also an admission that the center of gravity is still Microsoft, and their bloated OS.
Linux gaming advocates keep pointing at ProtonDB as if it settles the argument. It does not. It is a compatibility scaffold, not a native ecosystem. It exists because the commercial desktop gaming world still targets Windows first, last, and always, and gaming on Linux survives by translating, shimming, wrapping, and shaking a dead chicken in the general direction of Redmond. I am not speaking theoretically here. I built a high-end Ubuntu gaming rig around a 4090 a year ago, and spent weeks discovering that "runs on Linux" often means "runs after enough ritual incantation."
The worst bugs weren't even game-related. It was my audio stack. First, Linux did an embarrassingly bad job managing multiple audio streams at different bitrates, something native Windows apps have no issue with at all. Even with pipewire/pulseaudio, I had to do major surgery in both my audio stack and in my Steam launch strings to get clean audio when I had Spotify or Winamp running in the background instead of the game's native music. Second, my HDMI-connected soundbar vomited a bogus EDID payload into the DRM path advertising a phantom VGA display. Because EDID is an ancient compatibility sewer that still gets to vote, the kernel decided that the imaginary monitor hanging off the soundbar was the primary display, not my actual Samsung Odyssey G8 on DP-1. So on boot, the desktop went into the void until I physically disconnected HDMI. The fix was not a setting, not a package, not a friendly little checkbox. The fix was kernel surgery: patching drm_edid.c so the kernel would stop believing the lies my soundbar was telling it. That is not a consumer gaming experience. That is field-expedient systems archaeology.
And that is why I remain skeptical whenever people talk about Linux gaming winning the battle for gamers' hearts and minds on the general-purpose desktop. The article explicitly mentions Bazzite and Chris Titus. I saw both his review and JayzTwoCents' take on Bazzite on YouTube, and I honestly couldn't stop laughing. Their hearts are in the right place, but watching them attempt to frame Linux gaming as a seamless, drop-in replacement for Windows is both amusing and misguided. They are deliberately hiding the complexities of Linux-anything compared to the sheer ease of Microsoft Windows. They are promoting an illusion of parity, not championing parity itself.
Full disclosure: I got Doom running on a Slackware distro when I was an undergrad CS student way back in 1994, but it was an actual port. I got sucked into the compatibility world several years later, trying to get Diablo to run under wine on my Mandrake distro. I spent a lot of time surfing comp.os.linux and browsing tsx-11 and sunSITE for anything that would help. I gave up in frustration and I spent the next couple of decades contentedly gaming on Windows via steam. I switched away finally last year when Microsoft's aggressive telemetry became too much to tolerate, and I got hit by that borked windows 11 upgrade path last year that actually bricked my gaming box. It has become increasingly clear that the actual way forward for Linux is