There’s a sadness in the technosphere right now, ain’t there? This overwhelming disappointment that sort of lingers at the back of your mind like unkempt cable management. Enough journalists have called out the enshittification of PC gaming (or platform decay as us sophisticated lot call it), I’m certainly not the first in that regard. But back in January of this year, I finally had enough of it in Windows, and sacked off the legendary operating system entirely in favour of Pop! and that’s a big bloody deal for me.
I’ve been using Windows since around 1998. At the age of seven, it was my first insight into the world of PC gaming. Since then, I’ve navigated the trials and tribulations of Microsoft’s best efforts day-in, day-out. From Win 98 all the way up to modern-era 11 and every service pack in between.
And the thing is, Linux now has so many distros dedicated to gaming, to privacy, to Nvidia compatibility, to productivity, that there’s a flavor for everyone. And better yet, they’re built from the ground up to not only be efficient, but to minimize that friction that often comes with being a Windows refugee. You’re not going to be sat in terminal for 22 hours a day, pretending you’ve travelled back in time to 1988.
So then. Pop! OS. Why? How? What are the drawbacks? That’s what I’m here to explain, very specifically, my experience with it. I’ll be clear, I’m not a huge Linux expert, I haven’t tried all the distros. I’m very new to the world of open-source OS’s, but I chose Pop! as it feels like a good middle-ground between the lot of them. It’s mature, the Cosmic UI is beautiful, and with the Steam Deck really normalizing Proton now, making gaming far smoother, it really is the perfect time to give it a go with an OS that kinda holds your hand a bit.
The setup
The good news is you can just try this out. You don’t need to fully commit and fry your entire Windows install to give it a whirl. Instead, we can use Dual Boot to effectively dabble with both, the only compromise being you’ll need to shrink an SSD and get a bit of partition space back. Admittedly a bit of a commodity these days, but y’know.
My advice? Back up anything you consider mission-critical, and make sure Windows is fully up-to-date first. Then you’ll need to identify what hardware you’re running. With Pop! OS, System76, (the devs behind it) has a wide variety of ISOs available, depending on if your GPU is AMD or Nvidia. If you’re running Big Red, grab the standard “Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS” ISO from its download page system76.com/pop/download/ or if you’ve got a big ol’ green GTX 16 series or above, nab the “Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with NVIDIA” variant instead. Then, and because I’m getting bored of these wee paragraphs, you’ll need to do the following:
- Download the Rufus bootable USB stick utility, ready to create your bootable media.
- Grab an 8 GB USB stick (it will get wiped, so do bear that in mind).
- Flash the correct ISO to your USB, and leave Rufus to use its default settings.
- Go into disk management on Windows, and shrink down one of your partitions, ideally by 250 GB or so. Leave it unformatted (Pop! OS actually uses a different file system to Windows ext4 vs NTFS).
- Ensure Fast Startup and BitLocker is disabled so your drives aren’t encrypted.
- Head into BIOS, find secure boot, and change it to “Other OS”. If Fast Startup is located here, turn that off too.
- Then boot from your Pop! OS Installer USB
- Follow the installer, choose Custom Install, and create a partition from your empty space.
- Let the magic happen, and finish the installation process.
- Then once you’ve logged in to the full desktop, open Terminal (Windows key + t) and type in:sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -yIt’ll ask you for your login password, type that in (you won’t see the input), hit enter, and then Pop! OS should perform a full update, including drivers, apps, the lot. Huzzah, that’s it.
Life of Pop!
Using Pop! OS is such a breath of fresh air. It feels so clean, responsive, and low latency compared to Windows; it’s uncanny. It’s actually one of the few things that makes Dual Boot challenging to stick to. Spend half your day in Pop!, then switch back to Windows for work, and everything almost feels laggy in comparison. Even the mouse. And that’s with a Ryzen 9 9900X, RTX 5080, 64 GB of DDR5, and a WD SN8100 at my disposal.
Most of this is due to how these operating systems are built. A very simplified explanation is that, effectively, Windows has decades of compatibility layers piled on top of one another to get it to work. Explorer, for instance, is critically interwoven with the shell and the OS, whereas Cosmic just sits on top of the OS, almost like an extrapolation layer. You could remove it or swap it out entirely for an alternative like KDE or Gnome, and the OS just doesn’t care. Try to do the same with Windows, and the whole thing comes crumbling down.
File systems, too, are massively different, with Linux opting for ext4 over NTFS, which is excellent at rapid file ops (predominantly what operating systems tend to live and die on). There’s zero back-end telemetry involved too, and updates don’t affect the entire OS just to get things running properly. It’s remarkable the difference that makes in day-to-day use.
Customization is a godsend as well. You can alter the UI directly by changing the style, edges, fonts, colors, border size, all sorts. And all the mod cons and window snapping are built in here, along with window stacking (at least with Cosmic, which Windows still lacks). There’s also an impressively built-out app store, with an ungodly number of apps you can directly install. Or alternatively, you can download .deb packages from official sites and install them like you would an .exe, or just direct download through the terminal with the right command. You can sandbox them too, installing them as Flatpaks. If you don’t want that program to have access to your entire system, effectively limiting what permissions you decide it has access to. Even VPNs are built in. Once you’ve got something like NordVPN installed, it lives in the networking tab as its own thing.
It’s not all smooth sailing, though. The biggest issue by far is ironically still that app availability. Despite Linux’s popularity increasing quite dramatically in recent months, there’s a whole host of apps that just don’t exist here, and never will. Adobe, Affinity, Battle.net, Office 365, iTunes, Notion, all conspicuous in their absence. And then there’s the RGB element too. There’s no Corsair iCUE or Logitech, Razer, Armoury Crate, NZXT Cam, Elgato software, none existent. The list is honestly quite large, and mostly because the marketplace here on Linux is still remarkably small.
That said, there are alternatives out there: GIMP, Krita, OpenRGB, LibreOffice, as a huge army of dedicated volunteers keep the software alternatives up and ticking. Plus for software with a web interface, like Tidal or Google Drive, you can install them directly from your browser as PWA apps anyway, so they sit there on your desktop behaving pretty much identically to any modern program anyway, so it’s not quite as bad as it sounds.
And that’s not to say it’s impossible to get those programs working theoretically, either. You can use software to do that through translation and compatibility layers. Things like Lutris and Wine effectively translate Windows API calls into their Linux equivalents on the fly; you can get Lutris to effectively run Affinity and Battle.net, too, but the implementation is quite clunky to get right and it can break, particularly with authentication.
Valve’s spent a lot of time and energy working on Proton as well (its own fork of Wine designed to translate DirectX to Vulkan), which is by far the biggest contributor to modern gaming on Linux, even being possible.
Nvidia sucks, all hail DLSS
The biggest issue for the longest time with Linux has been Nvidia compatibility. Linus Torvalds has “spoken” about this in-depth, but effectively, on the gaming side (not the enterprise side, because you know data centers run Linux practically exclusively), all of the GPU drivers were closed-source. Despite AMD and Intel moving to open source variants near decades ago.
In 2022, finally, Nvidia launched its open-source kernel modules for the GTX 16/RTX 20 series and above, and after a bit of a bumpy start, it’s at last matured into something that’s beginning to compete with its Windows counterparts.
Gaming results
Windows 1080p / 4K
- Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra No DLSS – 92.91 / 31.66
- Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra DLSS Quality – 111.35 / 53.03
- Total War: Warhammer 3 Battle Benchmark – 219.4 / 93.4
- Black Myth Wukong RT Off DLSS – 88 / 44
Linux 1080p / 4K
- Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra No DLSS – 81.29 / 28.18
- Cyberpunk 2077 RT Ultra DLSS Quality – 127.25 / 50.12
- Total War: Warhammer 3 Battle Benchmark – 173.1 / 70.5
- Black Myth Wukong RT Off DLSS – 73 / 37
Performance as a result of those open-source drivers is a bit of a mixed bag. So I took three games effectively and ran them through four testing scenarios.
Now it is worth saying straight-up that these benchmarks are completely isolated compared to the way we usually do things here at PC Gamer. Typically, we use Nvidia FrameView on Windows to analyze performance, as it registers the frame rate pushed to the screen, rather than the frame rate the in-game benchmark tools/game engine reports. Unfortunately, (or unsurprisingly), there’s no support for it on Linux, so for comparison’s sake, we’re forced to use the in-game engines instead for consistent results and a fair frame of reference.
I’ve also only listed average fps here, just to keep things simple, and they’re tested in identical conditions across both platforms. Cyberpunk 2077 on the Ray Tracing Ultra preset, with DLSS switched off, and then set to Quality. Total War: Warhammer 3, on the Ultra preset, and Black Myth Wukong, set to Very High, with Ray Tracing off, and the upscaling quality slider set to 100 (using DLSS). All games were tested for three runs, and then averages were taken from there, with results at 1080p and 4K.
What’s fascinating from these figures is that, on the whole, despite Proton effectively acting as a bit of a middleman and potential bottleneck, translating those DirectX API calls to Vulkan, the overall fps loss across all titles technically isn’t that high, and certainly not noticeable from an actual gameplay perspective, at least in two of the titles.
At 1080p, the performance drop is around 11.1% across all four scenarios, and 16.3% at 4K. There’s a couple of outliers here that need pulling, too. The biggest being Cyberpunk with DLSS at 1080p, where Pop! OS actually beat Windows, pulling an average fps score of 127 versus 111. That’s not bad by any means. It’s hard to know why that’s happening; my best theory is that Windows is facing a bit of a CPU bottleneck here, which Linux somehow jumps over, thanks to lower resource usage on the overall system. Or there’s some DLSS shenanigans going on with Proton that we can’t quite explain.
And then there’s Total War. Or as I like to call it, “oh god oh god why?” Compared to the other benchmarks here, it lost out to its Windows counterpart by a staggering 21% at 1080p and 25% at 4K. If you actually remove that from the results, the average difference drops to just 3.7% at 1080p, and 10.4% at 4K. Again, this seems to be a major API/CPU bottleneck predominantly, so if you’re a big strat gamer, Linux might not be the right answer for you. At least if you’re using CA’s game engines anyway, which are a bit notorious for API calls anyway.
Marry, kiss, format partition?
My time with Linux has been eye-opening, genuinely. Pop! OS is such a beautiful place to be. There was never a day when I got back to the office that I wasn’t looking forward to booting up my PC and getting to do some work in the Cosmic environment. It just runs so seamlessly. Yeah, I did have the odd bug here and there, but it wasn’t anything a quick Google search or terminal command couldn’t fix.
But, and here’s the annoying part, specifically for me, so much of my current work is dependent on apps and programs that only exist in Windows and not Pop!. Affinity and benchmarking software, in particular, and other programs like that, kinda forces me back into Microsoft’s clutches. The backwards compatibility that makes Windows so bulky, and grotesque, and inefficient at times, gives it such versatility that it’s quite hard to ignore that as a positive in a weird roundabout way.
I would say the performance drop concerns me a bit (particularly as I’ve got about 2,000 hours in the Total War franchise), but there are alternative distros out there that are far more adept at gaming than Pop! Is, particularly in terms of CPU performance. Pop! is effectively designed as this handholding Goldilocks build, almost perfect for a bit of everything and easy to manage, but if you want the absolute best performance, you can get, certainly in-game, something more advanced like CachyOS, or Bazzite, or even Nobara, might be a better fit.
I’m not done with Linux yet. Not by a long shot. Those cutting-edge performance distros have got my interest piqued, and I need to get my fingers dug in there too, but sadly, for the time being, I’ve just gotta stick with the burgeoning old beast that is Windows 11, if only to keep those bills paid. I suppose we should be thankful that at least we’ve got Chris Titus Tech’s WinUtil to get most of the crud out of the thing, but until major developers get their crap together, it looks like I’m stuck here until then.
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