Part 2: https://www.lttlabs.com/blog/2025/06/30/is-2025-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-part-ii
LTT Fourm discussion as well https://linustechtips.com/topic/1616595-lttlabs-article-is-2025-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-part-i-ii/
They approached this from a noob perspective and the benchmarks seemed pretty rough. The blog has an overall positive tone on linux which is nice even though it got murdered in performance.
I’d like to see a follow up with optimizations, get some of the linux community involved to help setup an optimized linux test bench to go toe to toe with their “golden image” windows 11 benchmark setup.
They benchmarked a few distros against each other and it was very samey which I expected, the real difference is between the drivers/kernel and desktop environment since most distros come very light in terms of installed software.
Ubuntu 24.04? If you were to try to pick the worst, still supported distro for gaming that might be it. Maybe RHEL could be worse? If they chose it for stability like they claim they did they should have also used an LTSC version of Windows and the Pro drivers to compare to.
I just saw the part 2 has a distro comparison at the end. Thry claim different distros don’t matter, which is not what I’ve read in other publications. Anyone have an idea what might be going on here?
Also, where are the 1% lows?
Go away, LTT is infamous for sloppy testing.
And dropping things, expensive things. And selling items that are on loan to them, after misusing said item on loan. And not knowing basic server maintenance like file scrubbing. And letting the staff trash talk other creators, and then doubling down when called out for it. And…
E: and ignoring terminal warnings, and…
Thumbnails like this are the worst.
Seeing them take off in popularity has degraded my hope for humanity a little more.
I think the results look pretty solid for Linux. Some games seemed to run much better on Windows but most seemed pretty comparable. Considering many of these games were not built targeting Proton it’s not surprising that some stuff might not be optimized.
I first got into Linux in 2014 when gaming on Linux was very limited. The fact that I can run most of my Steam library on Linux these days still blows my mind. It doesn’t bother me much if windows still gets a couple more FPS.
If you are benchmarking between Windows and Linux dont use Ubuntu with the gnome desktop, it’s fucking aweful, use Kubuntu with KDE Plasma 6.4 instead running a wayland session, it’s so much more performant and even gives my games a boost.
