this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Maybe wine/proton is just better at Windowsing than Windows is.
It is in some ways. I can tell you I tried to run Prototype 2 on a handheld today and it didn't run natively on Windows 11 because it's old but putting it into a Proton session and keeping it contained did wonders for it and the Deck ran it maxed out at 90fps (you forget it can do that if you insist on playing modern games on it, but man, does it look nice on the OLED).
So hey, it certainly Windows 8s better than Windows 11. There is that.
But it's not magic, so I'd still like to figure out what we're seeing in these examples.
1: SteamOS don't run unnecessary services in the background. (especially stuff like print services and other random shit)
1b: Even regular Linux, which does run a bunch of extra services, still generally has less overhead because it's still being optimized for lighter weight systems, and it idles more efficiently too. Meanwhile Windows doesn't have a good way to tell your printer driver and its corresponding services to shut up when you're gaming.
2: Antivirus programs
3: Drivers, graphics system. This is both a plus and minus, but for performance mostly plus. More efficient driver model, less overhead again. Sometimes the performance comes from lacking features which doesn't get executed fully, though. Sometimes it comes from translating to Vulkan, because DirectX has some more overhead (and in these specific cases you can get the same performance boost on Windows by switching to Vulkan).
I mean, this is wrong. The CUPS daemon literally is a print service and does exist in Linux. It's just socket based so tends not to use resources until asked.
The CUPS daemon does not get killed during games. It wouldn't be needed anyways