Windows Vs. Linux for gaming?

I know nothing at all about gaming, but do have a few observations.

Most software is written for Windows. That includes some proprietary drivers, and in particular Nvidia drivers. Back in 2009, I had to spend a solid week getting an Nvidia graphics card to work on a Linux (Ubuntu) box. Without the right drivers for the graphics card, you're just not going to get maximum potential out of the rest of the Linux OS - there's a bottleneck there. I personally would anticipate THAT will be where the most trouble lies in wait.

I finally got it going, but it involved some off-the-wall drivers AND going into the guts of Linux, coding to modify some obscure config files. Well, at least they were "obscure" to me at the time!

Right now, I'm writing this on Linux (Zorin), which is the best flavor of Linux I've ran across in some time. Ubuntu crapped their nest with me when they went to that ditzy "Unity" desktop. I have a cell phone in my pocket - don't need another big clunky one on my desktop.

I ran a telnet on the windows installation on this machine today and found that a "Zeus trojan" has been talking to someone in Pretoria, South Africa. Pulled the plug on Windows, and booted up Zorin off my USB stick. That's one of the advantages of Linux - Windows bugs don't make it sick, and they are easier to innoculate when they're not running. So I'm cleaning the Windows drive with Linux - at least to the point that I can shine it up after booting back into it. The downside is there is damned little antivirus software for Linux, because it just doesn't get viruses - everyone writes them for Windows, because Gates owns the Earth... or at least about 90% of it.

That brings me to another problem with Windows, particularly Win8 and it's spinoffs. My mom stays with us, and her computer is Win8. I don't know yet how I'm going to clean it up, because Win8 won't allow ANYTHING else to boot on their machines - not even Win7. I guess they saw the failure coming for Win8, and tried to hedge their bets by locking the market. Now I'm going to have to figure out how to disable that damned Clipper Chip or whatever the hell it is that keeps usable OS's from booting on it. I'm hoping poking around in the guts of the BIOS will do something to help - if it will even let me into the BIOS.

Linux seems to do file transfers a lot faster, too, which will probably affect gaming performance if the video card bottleneck can be overcome. I've also noticed that it handles memory usage a lot better, too - which was why I made the USB Linux stick to begin with. Running Linux off USB is slower than running it off of the hard drive, but it still seems faster than the Windows on the hard drive. that's anecdotal, just something I've noticed, but you might want to take it into consideration.

I managed to get a few of my more basic Windows programs to run via WINE today while I was waiting for the ClamAV to do it's scan thing (It did not find the Zeus, so there is still work to be done). If I can get a few more to run on it, some of the biggies, then I may not go back to Windows at all - unless they start outputting OS's for computers again. I run programs on my computers. Apps are for cell phones. As long as Windows stays with that stupid metro tiled up mess and "apps", I'll be off doing computing under a different OS.

The heck is "steam", anyhow? A game? an OS? A compatibility layer? I Googled it under "Steam for Linux", but after 15 minutes searching, was absolutely no wiser about it than I was before - all I could tell from the Google results was that it has something to do with gaming - just what is double super unclear.

adjensen, Ah! Thanks for that! it appears to be a method of commercializing Linux then, as far as the Linux aspect of it goes. That's the main gripe I have with Zorin so far - it's the fisrt Linux I've had where prices are listed when I went looking for software.

I reckon nothing is sacred when it comes to the almighty dollar any more - if it ever was.

Round #2 folks...and I never gave up. I just got more determined!

Slight change to the layout of this comparison. Linux is represented by Zorin 9, with Steam Installed, as opposed to the Steam OS. I wasted the better part of 4 nights and one day trying to get the Steam OS to just BOOT. ONE TIME. Nada...and goose eggs across the board.

They have some serious work to do before SteamOS is something I'd recommend to anyone but an accomplished Linux technical user or administrator level of knowledge. In other words...Linux may be game ready and Steam may be Linux ready ...but their attempt to mix the two seems a total disaster from my position and view while just attempting to get an initial working screen from it. 

They (SteamOS) have one "restore" image to use for installing the OS in addition to a "standard" Debian installer...and that alone should have rung alarms at a near deafening levels, in hindsight... but that one also demands a min. 1 Terrabyte drive to even attempt ..and I don't have 1 terrabyte drives just laying around to format and clear for a test OS. (Does anyone else??) 

So... In the end, we'll have Windows on an Intel SSD and Linux on a Toshiba SSD, allowing for the pure game performance as the end result to see and not hardware limitation (given the games chosen here).

In the final comparison, I'll be using:

#1. Borderlands 2,
#2. Salt 
#3. 7 Days to Die (Unfortunately, this one is ALMOST set to release with an upgrade to Unity 5..which this review will miss)

(The alternate #3 was Postal 2...and even in this context?? Probably not appropriate for school 'anything' hehe).

The formal paper turns in at midnight, and it will be after I have it submitted AND seen grade returned (In the coming days) before I post the complete result here. 

Impressions so far? Worse than before...and I am about 100% against using Linux for any form of consumer application at this point.

It is the best OS ever designed, and will be for the forseeable future, in terms of servers and industrial computer application. For GUI based (Graphic), funsie type play stuff? It loses commands, loses keys regularly enough to be infuriating (buffer overflow during intense gaming as likely as anything..but a little bug Windows fixed 4 version generations ago) (98 - XP fixed it for trivia).

We could blame Zorin as the distribution, but of course, that would be ignorant to the fact Zorin is a mere set of mods to a mainstream Linux distro, and the mods wouldn't likely cause or impact these issues.

Borderlands 2 is a good one to have checked, too, as I am seeing subtle and slight differences in the way menus and other things work. It's small stuff, like having to click twice on a specific class of object to open when it should be a single as everything else of that container type is. Its movement and mouse correct being off 'just a tiny bit' from a Windows norm, but in a way I also can't seem to adapt to. It puts movement and visual tracking just a hair off "phase" for lack of a better word ..but in a first person shooter, it's like trying to have a real gunfight on a beer buzz. It could work, but just won't be the best, no matter what.

I'm going to spend about an hour in the builder games for very specific data comparison points and hopefully, some objective numbers to show some of what seems so subjective for describing. In Borderlands 2, the game...is the same. I mean, to have it on the same screen and box, you wouldn't know Windows for Linux, just standing over someone's shoulder and watching them play it. Everything that is different is on the player and experience level, as I'd describe it. It's a BIG end result tho... Now, how to put that into words for a formal research paper.. Hmm...

Off to build a mini-bunny bunker and see how that experience goes. At last nothing is trying to kill me on slow reflexes there.

I'm with you on that - Windows appears as a locked steel door, in a steel frame, set into a rock wall in the side facing the user - and it's like a loose chicken wire mesh on the back side, facing the attacker, which only filters out the most inept attackers. In other words, it generally only prevents the user from doing whatever he wants, not an attacker.

The things that make Windows good are also, paradoxically, the things that make it BAD. Windows has something like 95% of the computer market share for operating systems - last time I checked, anyhow. Because of that, Windows is also the primary target of attack vectors. Why go to the trouble of writing a trojan or something for Linux when you know that at best you're only going to snag 3 or so out of every 100 computers? So Windows has the crosshairs on it - you can potentially get 95 out of every 100 by hacking against Windows. A much better average. On the flip side, most all useful application program packages (and games too, apparently) are also written for Windows, with very few being ported to Linux - not worth the effort for the programmers, I guess.

Also, Windows OWNS your machine in the effort to "secure" it. The "Trusted Computing Platform", for example. It means that Windows is harder to hack, but it ALSO means that MS can "trust" you not to use your computer (actually THEIRS if they are in more control of it than you are) in ways they deem impermissible. That's gonna bite us some day, and is already nibbling. As a projection to the future, these "trust" schemes can (and almost certainly will) be taken to the point that you will be unable to open a document on your own computer that "they" disapprove of - even if YOU created it!

Right now, it's not gone that far, but it's nibbling. For example, with Win8, MS started requiring the use of UEFI. that's cute, but it prevents you from booting anything else other than the MS approved OS on YOUR computer (you can't even boot a diferent version of Windows). Recently, I had to boot a Win8 machine into Linux to fix the Windows installation (spray for bad bugs, which won't run in a Linux environment, and are thus easier to kill). In order to do that, I had to poke around and disable the UEFI, which was NOT a "one step" process on this machine. Afterwards, I decided to leave the UEFI disabled to give the user more options in the use of their own machine, but lo and behold Windows 8 would no longer boot with the UEFI off.

This means I would play hell setting up a dual boot environment on it - MS wins, eh? maybe not - the user absolutely hates Win8, and has been pestering me to install Zorin instead, in place of, Win8... so MS loses in that battle. Instead of retaining the option, it seems they want to just ditch Windows forever. They only use their computer for net surfing and some document work, which could be handled just as well or better with the built-in Open Office as with MS Office. They wouldn't miss Windows at all - MS may be cutting their own throats as they go in some cases.

I would abandon Windows as well if Linux could actually run some of the programs I have for Windows - relatively high speed stuff for mapping, 3D work, and art, like landscape generation. As I mentioned, so far it's only running about 1/3 of what I attempt with WINE, and none of those require an actual install... come to think of it, that might be the problem with the other 2/3 - they may have dependencies on stock DLLs that I haven't dropped into the WINE "system" folders. I'll have to check for those dependencies.

Otherwise, I have no complaints with Zorin - animations run much better on this machine under Zorin than Windows, with less memory overhead. As a matter of fact, Zorin seems to be managing the memory FAR better than Windows does. Windows is always either 1) crashing, 2)mysteriously just closing programs, or 3) annoying the crap out of me to close programs because Windows is out of memory. There are 4 gigs on this machine - not a huge amount, but certainly no reason at all that Windows should complain about being out of memory simply from booting up, before ANY programs are running! Zorin just chugs along and says "Oh! This is nice! Roomy!"

Still, I can't abandon Windows altogether until Linux gets it's stuff together for running programs it right now has no capacity to run, which sounds similar to what you are running into with the games.