- You're gonna install Windows on that PC,
I'm gonna install Linux on this one.
- [Linus] So it's a race?
- First to a usable desktop wins.
Ready?
- Okay, come on, Three,
- You put obstacles in my way - two.
Okay fine, I'll wait.
- I'm going.
- Three, two, one.
- [Linus] Go Windows.
- Gave yourself a head start?
- I did not.
Video evidence we pressed it at the same time.
- You pressed Enter,
I hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete.
I've reset the board.
- This is not a useful progress bar.
- It's what's called a throbber.
- It's called a throbber, is it?
- Mm-hmm.
- I got another throbber to show you.
Actually, I'm just flexing my muscles.
No I don't wanna see what's new from Windows.
Come on.
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(upbeat tech music)
All right, though I lost.
But in fairness to me, I didn't get to pick a side.
I would've chosen Linux in an OS install race too.
- Yeah, I guess.
But I needed a way to introduce
one of the biggest improvements in Linux gaming
since our last video a year ago.
Thanks to the release of Ubuntu 20.04,
and distros based on it like Pop!_OS and Mint,
we finally got a truly pick-up-and-play experience.
It's at the point where I'd argue
that it's even easier to do than Windows now.
I mean, you saw for yourself,
this is fully usable, this has a driver and everything.
For real, if you give it a try,
you'll be up and running with a grandma proof
and gaming capable OS in a few minutes like I was.
- What about the elephant in the room though?
Support for your games and stuff.
I mean, it's not like everything runs on Linux.
- Yeah true, but significantly more stuff runs than doesn't.
I've got a pretty big library at home,
including popular titles like GTA 5
and lesser known ones like DCS and East Combat 7.
Pretty much all of it works fine.
Proton compatibility layer was super cool
when we first looked at it,
translating DirectX Windows-only games to Vulcan on Linux.
And between the official one and tweaked community versions
like those from Tk-Glitch and GloriousEggroll,
69% of the top 1,000 games on Steam
are actually rated gold or better on Proton DB.
And most of the ones that don't work
at this point are DRM or anti-cheat related.
- Right.
I mean, the problem is,
there's nothing that Valve or the Proton team can do
about deliberately Linux incompatible DRM,
like how Denuvo Anti-Cheat made Doom Eternal unplayable.
But the good news is that they actually came out and said
that going forward, Denuvo Anti-Cheat will support Linux.
One theory is that this change in stance
could have to do with cloud gaming services using Linux
as their platform of choice.
- Hopefully it won't have to matter too much why in the end.
But for now, Linux users are getting
a better experience than ever,
despite the occasional sidelining.
- There are still some other ways that Linux lags behind.
The community is so small
that issues tend to be lower priorities for game developers,
and newer features can take longer to roll out.
Nvidia's RTX ray tracing for example,
hasn't been enabled yet.
- Yeah, but to be fair to Nvidia, they have been rolling out
additional ray-tracing extensions here and there,
which is a key step to enabling the functionality later on,
and there's some other big news, too.
- For some gamers, check this out,
Linux actually meets their needs better than Windows does,
and not just by a little bit.
For 16-bit retro gamers for example,
Wine offers better compatibility and stability
without having to resort
to running games in a virtual machine.
And get this, we've recorded runs with less old games
running faster on Linux
than on an identical Windows machine.
That's not just some random game that no one plays,
like whatever this is.
Well, this is-- - Burn, sick burn.
- Go ahead.
- This is actually a game that Tim Sweeney published.
- Is it really?
- Well, it's an Epic MegaGames game.
- Okay, it's older than me.
- Yes. Well, 1993.
- So not quite, but I was seven.
- [Anthony] This was possible
thanks to Valve's ACO shader compiler,
which is designed to improve performance on GPUs
that use Mesa, like AMD's Vega and Navi based cards,
and that's even with Proton overhead.
- Don't believe it?
Let's take a look.
Linux GTA 5, woo!
Doesn't make you a better driver, that's for sure, dang.
Oh lucky, my car tipped over.
In all seriousness though, back when this game came out
I probably would've said,
"Ha ha, AAA gaming on Linux, get real, please."
And yet, here we are.
- It's worth pointing out that ACO
doesn't work with every game yet.
So, it's not yet the default.
But performance was already very good for the hardware
thanks to AMD's open-source drivers,
and doitsujin's ongoing work with DXVK,
which now supports DirectX 9 titles as well
thanks to a merger with the D9VK project.
All of that's been rolled up into Proton
and is supported out-of-the-box
in Ubuntu 20.04 and anything based on it.
- Hey, got 'em.
Did I die? Okay.
So, regardless of your graphics card,
you just install the OS, install Steam,
install games and play games.
If you're on AMD, enable ACO in Steam's launch options
for titles that support it and you're laughing.
As for Nvidia users, don't stress out too much.
- Nvidia drivers aren't as good as they could be
if they were more open like AMD's,
but they also aren't as bad as people make them out to be.
And both AMD and Nvidia support their respective
adaptive refresh technology on Linux now,
with no additional installs required.
- If you wanna quantify your Linux gaming performance,
even that is getting easier.
Windows tools like Fraps or FrameView won't run,
but MangoHud by FlightlessMango works absurdly well.
It gives you a configurable rivet-tuneresque overlay,
and you can upload logs to the website
and have it automatically generate graphs
for frame rates, frame times, 1% minimums,
pretty much everything you need.
Honestly, if it logged more information
like CPU and GPU temperatures,
we'd probably switch over to it
instead of what we're using in Windows.
- [Anthony] It's really good.
- By the way, guys, you might take for granted
the controller that Anthony is using over there,
but look closelier.
Controller support is nothing special in Linux.
Dualshock 3, DualShock 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, 8BitDo,
none of those require any configuration or special drivers,
even over Bluetooth.
But now, look at this.
Even the Xbox One wireless adapter has a driver for Linux,
allowing low-latency wireless operation
for four controllers off a single dongle,
just like it does on Windows.
and the DualShock 4's touchpad even works as a mouse.
- Speaking of DualShock 4,
we've actually got a video in the pipeline
where we play around with gyro aiming for games.
Get subscribed so you don't miss it.
- Hey, what is this?
- Nothing, get away.
- No. - Nope.
- Ha ha, you have to social distance.
So if I come over here, you have to move.
OpenRGB.
Is that RGB control on Linux?
- Yep, OpenRGB is available on both Windows and Linux,
and it supports RGB RAM, motherboard lighting, GPUs,
and even stuff like Corsair lighting nodes.
Despite all the work that's already gone into it though,
it's a little bit basic right now,
and it's a pain to get running on Ubuntu at the moment.
But for simple lighting effects, it's quite enough.
- All right, hot shot, how about VR?
If I wanna get in some Beat Saber action, Penguin Edition?
- That's tricky.
HTC Vive and Valve index have both worked for a while now,
because valve officially supports them in Steam.
But the Open HMD driver for Oculus and PSVR
is currently missing some rather major features,
and the virtual desktop experience and reprojection
are cited as major issues by all Linux VR users.
- That's a real bummer, 'cause I use virtual desktop a ton,
even if it's just to like fix something about my stream
while I'm playing, or whatever the case may be.
And if aside from gaming you're a content creator,
you might have a hard time switching to Linux full time,
even if all your games work.
The Adobe suite which, as we made a video about recently,
we're pretty much stuck with for better or for worse,
doesn't run in Wine
and there's no native version from Adobe.
Same deal with Microsoft Office.
- But for the second one,
there's at least a web version if you really need it,
and people like Tech Tangents
make good work with Linux alternatives to Adobe.
It's potentially a major change to your workflow,
depending on what you're doing though.
Some tools are great on their own,
like Krita, Blender and GIMP,
while others, well, are promising
but need a little bit more work.
Sufficed to say, there are a lot of alternatives out there,
but for some people it just won't be viable
to run Linux full time, and that's okay really.
- Yeah. I mean, it's frustrating,
but Linux on desktop has always been
this chicken and egg scenario where,
because it's not popular on the desktop,
developers don't care
because there's not enough people to buy the software.
Yet, because developers don't care and build that software,
it's not popular on the desktop.
- Yeah, some developers, (coughing) Epic.
- Oh, the cough.
- Yeah, get back.
(objects falling)
- [Linus] I'm good, I'm fine.
- Some developers are kinda dicks about it.
And I get the die-hard Linux veteran's concerns.
They think that leaning on Proton as a crutch
might disincentivize game developers
from creating native Linux games.
But for me, I see Proton and Wine in general
as more of a platform developers can support
that requires little additional effort
and allows for the user base to grow.
- And the more the user base grows,
the more accessible everything becomes.
So, at this point,
the call to action for you guys is really simple.
Where'd it go?
Ah, there it is.
Pick up a USB stick and give it a try.
You can run it right off the USB
without installing it on your main drive,
like I did in this recent video
where Windows just straight-up wouldn't run
my weird Chinese motherboard
that had a baked on graphics card, but Linux would.
Go check out that video,
and try it, and check out our sponsor, Micro Center.
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So go check out Micro Center, and this and other specials,
at the link in the video description.
Thanks for watching, guys.
If you'd like to get your feet wet,
why not check out our previous gaming on Linux video
that's a bit more of a tutorial-style noob intro.
Anthony and James are gonna see you guys over there.
- Oh, and thanks again to the Linux Gaming subreddit
for providing input on the topics
we discussed in today's video.
The Penguin Army over there
grew by more than 50% since last year.
We love to see it.