It helped that the DOS executable format was the same as the CTOS format - because we had traded Bill Gates our linker (which produces executables) for his BASIC compiler.
What does this mean? System calls?
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/operating-systems/traps-and-sy...
This NTSync stuff is very impressive, but I haven't seen a lot of end-to-end numbers versus Windows. The last comparisons I saw showed pretty much every distribution on the order of 5-30% behind Windows, varying on the game. And Nvidia GPU support was still not great.
I WANT to swap. Please give me cause to do so. I'm sitting here with my finger on the button waiting for it to finally get good enough to make sense.
If you need every last bit of FPS maybe it is lagging, but 5-30% slower is roughly on par at a large sense, it's less than the difference of e.g. one NVidia GPU generation to the next, so it makes it playable.
Fixed in Wine 11.0. Thanks to the Wine team.
Not sure if this was related to NTSYNC, but Wine's locking infrastructure definitely got an overhaul.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513667 [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f4cc1a38-1441-62f8-47e4-0c67f5a...
What do you mean? SRWLock (or the older CRITICAL_SECTION) cannot be shared between processes. A (Win32) Mutex does work across processes, but that's its entire purpose. So Windows does have different tools for different jobs.
In fact, it's really the other way round: on Linux, a futex also works across processes, but there is no equivalent in Windows. (Sadly, WaitOnAddress can only be used in a single process.)
That seems hugely useful for interprocess communication and I can immediately think of reasons to use IPC in a game. Having a separate voice process for one.
I don't know what they could do spanner tossing wise to really screw w/ Linux gaming at this point that wouldn't just drive more frustrated customers off their platform.
I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.
What benchmarks are you talking about? CPU-wise the A15 Bionic just barely beats the Ryzen 3700X in single-core and gets absolutely destroyed in multi-core (Geekbench). As for the GPU, the Radeon RX 7600 (closest thing I can find to a "modern console") does >10x the TFLOPS in FP32.
The only reason why they look like they're "in a similar tier" in ported games is because the A15 Bionic is usually tested on 5-6" screens that can be upscaled from 360p without any measurable loss in visual quality, with a massive downgrade in model and texture quality for the same reason. The only modern console the Apple TV "may be" similar to is the Switch 1
Me and all my dad friends are all signing up for XBox accounts so our kids can play Minecraft. So IDK about that.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/944362954/bapaco-the-wo...
Interesting, but I wish it was half the size folded...
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/further-expanded-amd-h...
That is, more people being subtly pushed to using display port is not a bad thing.
I have a dumb-ish Samsung Hotel TV / commercial TV at home. It has DP.
And then monitors released during this time generally do the same too.
Also if you want to use it through a capture card, HDMI ones are way more common and cheaper
HDMI goes 25'+, no problem.
Don't all USB-C video outputs use DP alt mode too, with an HDMI adapter at the end? And they can do HDR.
and displayport 2.0, since 2019, has supported all the same variations (hdr10+, dolby vision) that HDMI does
Heroic because the amdgpu driver is strangely huge, more code than the rest of the obsd kernel combined, It has something to do with gpu's having no isa stability and the generated code for each card present in the driver.
AMD is much better. Nvidia has been improving but stuff "just works" with AMD because the kernel (amdgpu) and userspace (RADV) drivers are open source. Valve is a major RADV contributor too.
I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything with my 9070 XT. Performance is great.
Still, if you don't absolutely need CUDA, then AMD provides better value anyway.
Its an old card so I have no idea why I'm still struggling to get it to work. Is it perhaps because I'm using Xfce? I heard that Nvidia cards play better with Wayland although I haven't tested this myself.
But their happy path hasn't included proper wayland support for a long time.
Nvidia on laptops? Insert the famous Linus Torvalds meme here
I have an RTX 5070 (whatever the laptop variant is) and it absolutely rocks with almost everything I throw at it, running Ubuntu+Steam+Proton. I no longer worry whether a Windows game is going to run, because almost all of them do with good performance.
Or does your laptop have no other igpu?
My last Nvidia laptop was a Hybrid optimus laptop. I almost always ran it on the built in Intel igpu because of the really bad issues with the Nvidia cards. Video tearing, bad power management etc... I remember even switching the GPU wasn't easy... And performance wasn't as good either ..
I used a recent nvidia blackwell GPU with linux, periodic crashes. Blackwell generation is shit.
Used recent builtin AMD GPU... Even worse, super reproduceable X crashes when using firefox
I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
It runs super smooth, with the build in 'wayback machine' and 'curated' Arch distro (7.0 zen kernel just dropped a week ago) pretty much bullet proof for beginners or as a daily distro if you want to get stuff done w/o caring much about it - just loving it. On the other hand side you have cutting edge gaming tech like wine/proton staging versions per default, so I'm playing Blizzard games with NTSYNC (the tech from the article) for several months now :) Forgot about most of the flashy default UI though :D
Tom's Hardware is a bit before my time, but I remember it being well regarded. I've seen a lot of similar articles under that name lately. I wonder if they've undergone similar fates.
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/08/27/usin...
A good example of this is the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which were so lazily ported that most fans advocate for pirating the originals instead. Why should anyone pay $14.99 for the bad version of FFVI?
all that said, they view this as enabling the consumer by supporting their hardware better, they have an antagonist, mafia-like relationship with game developers.
Seriously, is it really a victory if you have to adopt the architecture of your sworn enemy?
To quote Linus Torvalds from 1997: "I don't try to be a threat to Microsoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows - the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different."
This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.
> the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
A control panel (or cross-distro YaST) would be very welcome in the ecosystem I think.
That's not "more accurately", that's just a completely different thing. When I'm on Mac, my muscle memory is thrown off. I'll be typing and my ctrl+s, alt+tab, win+4, ctrl+left* all cause wildly unpredictable (to me) things. I'm currently using Linux, and all of those things work how I expect (with a tiny asterisk on win+#). When I want a control panel, I press the windows button on my keyboard to open something functionally equivalent to the start menu, and open System Settings to get something functionally equivalent to the control panel.
I have no doubt that I could learn the deep differences between Windows and Mac over time, but the initial muscle memory causes me stress before I get to that point. When I switch to Linux I don't have that stress, and so I've been comfortably learning those differences.
* - save, switch to the previously in-focus window, switch to the 4th program on the taskbar, move the cursor one word to the left
Windows copied futexes from Linux first, anyway.
It is no different from arguing how Linux is getting better GameCube games with Dolphin.
Also Valve is only as good as its current management is still around, eventually like any other company time will pass, and new warm bodies will take other decisions.
Decades ago I ported some games to linux but I do think proton is the correct approach now. One underappreciated advantage is you get most of the mod environment too. In ESO for instance, there is an addon (tamriel trade center) which lets you download item prices, but it requires a windows client exe to do that. That client works on proton.
I also do some modding myself and can cross compile my rust code to windows with cargo xwin, and run it right away in proton, which is fairly amusing to behold.
I actually don't mind windows generally (been a MS user since DOS 5), but Win11 is a game changer, pun intended, and not in a good way.
I have a couple more things to figure, I need XBox authentication to work for Halo Infinite and Sea of Theives, among others, and I need to figure out some solutions for some ancient software I have to run, which will probably end up being a Windows 11 VM. But as for my daily driver OS, I am so excited to get off Windows once and for all.