I recently spent some time with the Framework 13 laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results!
…
The Framework 13 is perfectly capable of gaming even with its integrated graphics, provided you’re willing to compromise by lowering the resolution and quality presets for more demanding games. (It’s also a testament to how far AMD’s APUs have come in the past decade.)
Summary of results:
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Linux wins
- Total War: Warhammer III: Windows wins
- Cyberpunk 2077: Linux wins
- Forza Horizon 5: Windows wins
These results are an interesting slice of the Linux vs Windows gaming picture, but certainly not representative of the entire landscape. A few shorts years ago, however, I never would have dreamed I’d be writing an article where even two games on Linux are outperforming their Windows counterparts.
sometimes i still can’t believe i’m running every game i want on linux. like its still surprising and surreal to me.
thanks to all the contributors that made it possible for us to ditch microsoft.
I felt the same way, after dual booting linux and windows for a while, I stopped booting into windows so decided to just wipe both drives and do a raid0 install of linux. Finally I got to messing with games expecting to have to tweak settings and everything but nope it just booted up. even better running on raid0 now I dont even see load screens with games like starfield.
Hey genuine question what does everyone use for office apps these days? I’m extremely over being charged a yearly fee to use word and excel
I have been a user since the 90s. Back then it was still called StarOffice.
Its feature set differs from that of MS Office, and its performance could be (a lot!) better, but I strongly prefer the LibreOffice user interface, and the features that matter to me (like CSV import) are way better in LibreOffice. However, LibreOffice does not have all the features of MS Office, and some are notably worse (for instance auto-fill in spreadsheets, where Excel is way better at guessing the next value).
Sadly it’s not only a matter of preference, because file exchange between different office suites is not flawless. MS Office and LibreOffice don’t agree 100% on how to load each other’s files…
I’ve been trying OnlyOffice recently - seems pretty nice so far.
In addition to LibreOffice I often use standalone tools.
If I want a high quality document, I use LaTeX. Same for presentation slides. However, writing stuff in LaTeX is only worth the effort if the quality is needed. For non-important stuff I just use LibreOffice.
For calculations it depends on what I want to have in the end. If I just want to play with the data a bit, then LibreOffice Calc it is. However, if it is for something serious, I tend to write script files, or even full programs, that do the processing. That way computation and data is in separate files, and the used formulas are clearly visible and easy to debug.
@Lemonparty
Collabora Office, tied into an instance of nextcloud. So essentially like the Google office suite but self hosted. Then Libre office if I need to do anything offline.
@umbrella
One I quickly gave up on trying recently was Star Citizen. Failing myself with dumb errors I found out that you need to follow a rather elaborate tutorial. I decided that it was very much not worth it. Not sure how it is possible to fuck it up that badly.
The other I am bummed about is Talos Principle 2. Last time I played at release it worked perfectly. Now it runs so slow that it takes like 10 minutes to even get to the main menu. In the realm of tens of seconds per frame and I am at a loss how to even debug that.
One dumb thing for native (!) Unity games (at least Valheim and Shapez 2) is that they disrespect the default audio output device.
Otherwise, plug and play. It’s so nice!
I’ve run Star Citizen on Linux a few times (not a regular player), there was a Lutris configuration that Just Worked™ for me. There’s also the Linux Users Group for SC, which maintains some scripts for working around issues if you want to do things manually. They’re the ones maintaining the Lutris configuration too.
I did run into the same issue with Shapez 2 recently, though! A quick stop in qpwgraph to connect it to the right audio output and everything else about it worked perfectly, but it’s not a permanent fix.
When I started using linux 15 years ago, my friend recommended to keep a windows partition for gaming. At least for me, I have deleted windows a few years ago and I’m not looking back.
If you play DRMed AAA stuff, that’s still true unfornately (if you can’t do VM with PCIe passthrough).
Personally I just opt to not play these games. The market dicides in the end.
Some of the “anticheat” systems straight up decide not to work on VMs even with PCIE passthrough et. al. For example, I cannot run Elden Ring with its trash DRM because it says it cannot run under VM. I have PCIE passthrough, and the CPU id also passes through. Only the chipset reports anything VM, yet the “anticheat” decides not to run.
Fuck DRM. It has done nothing except push me to pirate more when I LITERALLY AM buying the games. Fuck those greedy actual morons (corporations who deploy DRM, not FromSoft specifically).
A little birdie told me there’s a fit girl on the internet who might be able to help
Suprised that forbes is reporting about linux
It’s their community blog. This specific person has been writing there about Linux gaming for a long time now.
It’s just easier to get old windows games running on Linux.
For some reason I just can’t get warcraft 3 and StarCraft 1 running through wine
Try Bottles! Available as flatpak so as long as you don’y have hate for flatpak, Bottles is there. All the normal flatpak benefit + a pretty great UI.
Not sure to WC3 suppose to run, but SC1 I owned on Bnet and I can tell, it works well with just a standard b.net install button in Bottles. SC2, HotS, D2R, D3 and so on I own run just fine, and fast too
I’ve tried lutris before never heard about Bottles. I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
I think it says a lot more about how much recent versions of Windows have bogged down the whole gaming experience.
Microsoft seems to have forgotten that people want an operating system that works, not something bloated with bullshit like telemetry, advertisements, tracking cookies and artificial intelligence. The only reason they even have a market lead in the desktop space is due to marketing and monopolistic practices.
I wonder how Windows would perform against Linux with all bloatware removed and telemetry disabled.
