Gaming on Linux has improved a lot, but should you use it on your laptop instead of Windows?
To find out, Tuxedo Computers sent us their Stellaris 15 with Intel’s Core i7-12700H CPU,
Nvidia’s RTX 3060 GPU, and a 1440p 240Hz screen.
This is actually the exact same chassis as the XMG Neo 15 or Eluktronics Mech-15 G3,
so I already know that the hardware makes this an excellent gaming laptop.
What makes Tuxedo different is that they sell their laptops with Tuxedo OS installed, a
custom version of Ubuntu, but you can pick from a number of different Ubuntu flavors when ordering.
They can install Windows for you in a dual boot setup like I’ve got
if you’re not quite ready to go all in on Linux. This allows you
to pick which operating system to use during boot, so best of both worlds.
The laptop also has water cooling support, even in Linux.
Apparently Tuxedo computers reverse engineered what the
laptop and cooler were doing in Windows over Bluetooth and then incorporated that
in their own management software in Linux, which I think is super cool.
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Another cool thing offered by TUXEDO is you can get a custom image printed on the lid.
You can also laser etch the Windows key, aka super key for Linux, for extra customization.
The laptop was able to last a bit longer when running on battery with Linux,
but at just 2% longer compared to Windows, the difference is within the margin of error range.
Alright so the laptop itself is pretty cool, but what about gaming on Linux?
Right now, the RTX 3060 GPU in this laptop is limited to 115 watts in Linux due to an
Nvidia driver issue. So Linux isn’t able to use dynamic boost just yet.
By default in Windows, dynamic boost works perfectly fine,
so the 3060 can run up to the maximum 140 watts. Meaning we’d expect Windows
to perform better in games compared to Linux simply due to this GPU power limit difference.
Fortunately in Windows, the control center software for this laptop allows
us to disable dynamic boost, meaning we can run the 3060 at the same 115
watts in Windows to match what it’s doing in Linux for a fair comparison.
So Nvidia’s dynamic boost is just a legitimate advantage that Windows has right now over Linux.
At least until Nvidia fixes their drivers. We’ve tested games in Windows both with and
without dynamic boost, allowing us to fairly compare both Linux and Windows in the most
apples to apples way with the same GPU power limit. And also the way things
currently are with Windows being able to use more power, which will mean more FPS in games.
We did most of the game testing with Steam. For games that won’t run natively on Linux you need
to set the compatibility to Proton, which acts as a compatibility layer for Windows games to
run on Linux. We also had some success using Lutris to run Epic or Ubisoft games with Wine.
The Protondb and Lutris websites are great community resources to find out
how well games will work on Linux, definitely worth checking out. I’ll leave links below.
Overall, games performed better in Windows when compared to Linux, even with dynamic
boost off in Windows. In some cases it was close, while 1440p in at least two games was
unusable with Linux. I’m not sure why the performance was so much worse when
it was doing ok at 1080p. The CPU usage in Linux games was very low when compared with Windows,
presumably related to the extra overhead involved with the translation layer. The results were much
closer for games that have native Linux versions, but there aren’t as many of them available.
Control, which we ran through Lutris, was the outlier with far higher average FPS in Linux,
but the dips in performance, as measured by the 1% lows,
were much lower, and the game had noticeable stuttering when playing.
TUXEDO OS seems to be based around Ubuntu to give customers maximum stability,
however it is possible that a more bleeding edge
Linux distribution might have better support and performance for gaming.
It’s great to see gaming becoming more accessible on Linux, but with all the
challenges that we encountered, including inconsistent performance,
I don’t think that most people should make the jump over from Windows just yet.
Although we were able to get most games working with proton,
some games like Apex Legends just had way more hoops to jump through. By default after
installing it through Steam and attempting to run it, it would just sit there for over
an hour trying to process shaders. And by the time it got to the end it would just crash,
so we went through that process three or four times, a huge waste of time.
After searching for the problem, we found that it’s possible to download a shader cache for the
game that’s ready to go, which did speed up this process dramatically, but the game still crashed.
Fortunately enabling the proton log showed us that there was a simple permissions issue that we were
able to fix, but that wasn’t the end of it. We could now load the game, but then we started
getting anti cheat errors. But that was easily fixed by installing Proton EasyAntiCheatRuntime.
This is just a single one game example of what you might experience when trying to get a game
working on Linux. This definitely was not the only problem we had, there’s a reason we only
compared 6 games. Sometimes it feels like the problems just keep coming one after the other,
you fix one thing only to move on and find a brand new error that you have to troubleshoot.
In the end we really only got Apex to work
thanks to that community sourced cache file. Meanwhile on Windows,
I just run the game and it opens perfectly fine every time without a second thought.
To be fair, that was also the case with a number of the games on Linux,
but these sorts of random problems do come up and just sour the experience. Then of course
there are other learning curves associated with Linux if you’re coming over from Windows,
like getting familiar with the command line. Even simple things like opening a text editor.
My partner who tested all of these games isn’t familiar with KDE, so she didn’t know the GUI
based text editor was called Kate. Just simple things like that that you might take for granted
in Windows and then not have any idea how to do properly in Linux. Basically Linux is just
a bit less intuitive. Not everyone’s going to jump straight in for the first time and get into Vim.
Although the GUI is obviously available, the real power comes from the command
line. The GUI just isn’t as well polished when compared to Windows,
which I suppose is completely fair given Windows probably has a huge budget for UX designers.
Would I recommend that you put Linux on your gaming laptop? Honestly, no for most people.
Unless you really like tinkering or otherwise you’re after some other feature like better
privacy. For me personally, I just want things to work out of the box and not spend any time messing
around. That was a completely different story back in 2008 when I got my first laptop and put
Linux on it. I still actually own that laptop, let me know if you’d want to see a video on it.
Anyway these days my time is just too valuable to spend any time on that sort of stuff. I used
to work as a system administrator managing Linux servers for many years before I got
into this YouTube channel. And look, I think Linux is perfect for that sort of environment,
but as for Linux on the desktop, or Laptop in this case, personally I don’t think it’s
there just yet. Again, you can absolutely install it and get some games running. For
me personally it’s just difficult to justify when I could use Windows, but hey I suppose
that’s one of the cool things about having a dual boot laptop. If there are tasks that I
need Linux for then I can boot into Linux, and then if I want to game I can boot into Windows.
Obviously these aren’t issues that are specific to TUXEDO in anyway,
again overall I found this to be a great laptop. I’m just speaking about my experience with Linux.
A lightweight operating system might make more sense on less powerful hardware. Find
out how well the cheapest possible gaming laptop I could buy performs in games next!