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…
Oh my god, are we still going on about this?
Yes, we are. For a group that is supposed to be educating people on products, services, and how to use them, they are doing a really shit job at it. Being a dumbass with your own tech (not having file scrubbing setup on your production server for several years) is fine - stupid as hell, but fine, you’re only fucking yourself. But when they give people blatantly wrong information, misuse parts, and generally lead viewers astray - intentionally or not - they should be put in the spotlight, every time.
You can get your information from wherever you please, but I prefer mine to be accurate and useful. I’m a disabled dude who is managing tech on a shoestring budget, for home and the family business, and the fact that I know more than just about everyone on their (camera-facing) team is fucking embarrassing. For a seven-digit+ group to be outclassed by a dude with a couple grand a year, holy shit lmao. And the gall and higher-than-thou attitude whenever they get called out. History repeats itself.
I guess like home cooking shows and shopping networks, everything has an audience, but to pretend like they know what they are talking about, and that their viewers should soak up their wisdom, is just disingenuous.
The writing of this article was not the quality I would have preferred. The infotainment angle really makes it feel like their data can’t be trusted. With that being said,
“as long as you have a distro with an up to date kernel and the latest Mesa drivers your out of box experience won’t vary much at all.”
This is actually a greater challenge for the average user than they think it is. Its also why the universal Blue project exists. Using the OCI container model for the OS, they can easily upgrade and customize the kernel, drivers, and even upgrade to entire new versions of Fedora without batting an eye. This is the main reason I’ve switched over to Bazzite. The pain of updating is gone. Also, most images have the “-nvidia” version which alleviates the headaches of maintaining your Nvidia drivers.
Rant: If anything, this article shows that the nuances of the FOSS ecosystem is lost on them because they’re afraid of strange elitists imaginary neck beard criticizing them? I understand this is for comedic effect but it feels sophomoric and hacky; like they’ve missed the point. I would ask them to follow Jorge Castro a bit and understand the work he’s doing is specifically to make Linux for everyone else.
TBH they will be the last publication to come around to it. As Microsoft leaves us all no real choice in the matter, the future of the PC hobbyist is Linux, weather they like it or not so they need to stop complaining and start contributing.
::insert “money please” meme::
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.
