Linux is good now

Not really. Measured boot and remote attestation are a thing. Couple with reproducible builds to address security and privacy concerns.

Hardware support would inevitably be somewhat limited but that's still better than the situation with either consoles or kernel anticheat.

Let me put gaming aside for a minute.

Linux is not good. Some hardware support is still reverse-engineering-based, or based on a few individuals best effort activity. Linux needs manufacturers' first hand commitment to quality opensource to be truly good.

Linux is not good. Some software is not on feature-parity among operating systems. With Linux being the software kingdom poor Cinderella. Linux needs software feature parity to be truly good.

Linux is not good. Because too much mainstream new PCs comes with some other operating system pre-installed (and paid for) even if you won't need it. Linux needs freedom of choice sing first PC power on, like a stub to download whatever OS you want (to pay for) or to boot from removable media for Linux to become truly good.

Linux is not good. Because there is still "stuff" that require some specific non-linux software running under some specific non-linux operating system to be made useful things. We need manufacturers to ditch this for linux to become truly good.

I am a happy user of Linux on my primary PC since 20+ years now. But I still have to fight for my freedom every now and again because of one or more of the above points.

Now let's jump back to gaming.

Linux is not good because game industry thinks proprietary platforms and operating systems are better for their business. There is only 1 platform fully supporting Linux and too few titles. Gaming Linux hardly hits 5% of the market share, basically the same as Desktop Linux. While Server Linux is beyond 75%.

I think reasons could be two-fold.

On one hand, Linux is not perceived by industry as attractive as other proprietary platforms. Maybe industry can squeeze much more money from the latter.

On the other hand, it could be that most of the development resources are NOT ORIENTED towards gaming and desktop, so these markets simply lag behind.

Of course, I could be totally wrong: these are my humble opinions with some facts backing them.

Live Long, Linux!

AFAIK this comes down a lot to NVIDIA not doing enough efforts for the Linux drivers. There is a pretty well documented and understood reason for the perf hit NVIDIA GPUs get on Linux.

Honestly, considering where we came from, a 10-30% perf drop is good and is a reasonable tradeoff to consider. Especially for all the people that don't want to touch Windows 11 with a 11-foot pole (which I am), it's a more than decent path. I can reboot into my unsupported Win10 install if I really need the frames.

Really, Linux benchmarks need to be split between AMD and NVIDIA. Both are useful, as the "just buy an amd card lol" crowd is ignoring the actually large NVIDIA install base, and it's not like I'm gonna swap out my RTX 3090 to go Linux.

Thanks for the comparison! Would you have an apples to apples, or rather an NVIDIA to NVIDIA comparison instead of "across the board"? I'd suspect the numbers are worse for the pure NVIDIA comparison, for what I mentioned above.

Did you use the proprietary AMD drivers? You need to use the open source drivers. As far as I know these should be the default on all distros, so just click through the OS installer, install Steam, and start gaming. Don't touch the drivers.

As an Arch (btw) user myself, yes, you're doing something wrong.

Arch won't hold your hands to ensure everything required is installed, because many dependencies are either optional (you have to read the pacman logs) or just hidden (because it's in the game itself). Valve actually does a great job providing a "works everywhere" runtime as their games are distributed in a flatpak-like fashion, but things can seep through the cracks.

The compositor can have an effect. The desktop settings. The GPU drivers. What's installed as far as e.g. fonts go. RAM setup, with or without swap.

As for steamOS, the real difference, is that despite being Arch-based, you're not installing Arch, but steamOS. A pre-packaged pre-configured Arch linux, with a set of opinionated software and its set of pre-made config files, for a small set of (1) devices. It's not really Arch you're installing, but a full-blow distro that happens to be arch-based.

That said, I understand your frustration as I've hit this many times on a laptop with dual graphics. Getting PRIME to run with the very first drivers that supported it was fun. Oh and I'm likely to hit the same walls as you since I just switched my gaming rig to Arch. GLHF!