Why Windows 10 Gaming Still Reigns Supreme Over Linux

Through the lens of an enthusiast, Linux gaming is healthy. Valve and Codeweavers (the company behind Wine) have boosted its profile significantly since introducing Proton, a compatibility solution that lets you play literally thousands of Windows-only games across dozens of Linux distributions. Ditto that for great services like Lutris, which employs Wine and pre-configured scripts to make installing games from Epic, Origin and Blizzard a mostly painless click-and-go affair. But the real problem with Linux gaming in 2020 has nothing to do with actual games.

In fact, I’m going to make a bold claim: Imagine for a moment that the only purpose for PCs was gaming. Even if 100% of Windows-only games were perfectly playable on Linux and with comparable performance, Windows would still win the battle, would still dominate mindshare and marketshare. Because PC gaming is increasingly about the entire ecosystem surrounding the games we play.

Let me explain.

I’ve been doing the professional tech journalism thing here at Forbes for 8 years, and have reviewed a closet full of GPUs and PCs. I covered dozens of hardware launches and spoke at length to AMD, Intel and Nvidia engineers. And over the last few years I’ve seen consumers place far more importance on the “complete package” when they purchase a new graphics card from AMD or Nvidia.

Gamers aren’t merely looking at TFlops, clock speeds, pricing and benchmark charts. They’re savvy, and they’re evaluating the entire picture. G-Sync and FreeSync. The wealth of features offered by GeForce Experience and Radeon Adrenalin, the software companions to the hardware.

In turn, AMD and Nvidia have answered the call, placing heavy emphasis on the development of those software suites and adding a wide range of quality-of-life enhancements and seriously useful features.

Of course, when it comes to bringing this gaming tool chest to Linux, AMD and Nvidia aren’t even picking up the call. It’s particularly disappointing when glancing at AMD, a company who contributes greatly to the open source ecosystem and whose CPU and GPU drivers are baked right in to the Linux kernel.

If you’ve followed me here for the past 2 years, you’ll know I switched both my coverage focus and personal computing to Linux. But I believe in seeing how the other side looks from time to time, so I reinstalled Windows 10 this week and finally revisisted AMD’s Radeon Adrenaline software.

To put it mildly, I was floored.

Serious Windows gamers already know the following, but desktop Linux users need to know what they’re missing — in part, because we need to raise our voices and urge these companies to treat Linux as a first-class citizen. So, call it a tough love education.

Radeon Adrenalin provides so many fun and practical features I can’t even scratch the surface in a single article. Suffice to say, just the main dashboard provides a near-overwhelming amount of data and configuration options.

You can see the last game you played and the average FPS you experienced, check your current driver status, glimpse your current GPU, VRAM, CPU and memory usage, record a screenshot, instant GIF or begin recording a video. Or start streaming, balance your audio settings, or check out a tutorial on how to enable AMD’s Integer Scaling.

That’s just the main page. Dig deeper and you can auto-overclock your Radeon GPU, set up multiple scenes for streaming, tweak the graphics profiles for each game you have installed, and even set up custom power profiles on a per-game basis.

And I haven’t even touched on Radeon Chill, Radeon Anti-Lag or Image Sharpening, all of which offer enhancements under various gaming situations.

While I believe AMD has eclipsed Nvidia with a more complete set of features, GeForce Experience is no slouch, either. You can auto-optimize every game you install (which is valuable to people who don’t like to dig through a dozen+ graphics quality settings), auto-capture game highlights, stream, and activate Ansel, a seriously cool in-game photography tool.

Am I feeling intensely jealous right now? Absolutely. But this isn’t a pity party; this is a wake-up call.

Everyone (myself included) who’s screaming about how wonderful Linux gaming is now? They’re not wrong, and I still vastly prefer Linux to Windows — but they’re also dodging what I believe is the bigger issue.

You’ve heard the phrase “content is king.” Well, ecosystem is the kingdom and modern gamers put careful thought into which kingdom to occupy.

For Linux gaming to climb that next mountain and be taken more seriously it needs a similar ecosystem, replete with these system-wide, quality-of-life features. These power-user tweaks made easy (don’t @ me about having any of these tools available from the command line because 99% of gamers don’t care).

How do we get there though? Do we raise our collective voices and campaign for AMD and Nvidia to port these features (much like Linux users have successfully urged Microsoft to port Teams and other Windows software to Linux), or do we build them ourselves?

I’m not the architect of that answer, but I am the guy urging you to pay attention to the big picture — the entire ecosystem — and not just things like Wine, Proton and game performance.

Many of us want Linux — and by extension Linux gaming — to succeed and capture a larger audience. I believe what I’ve outlined is a vital piece of that puzzle.