If you're a PC gaming enthusiast, you've probably spent countless hours researching and arguing about performance bottlenecks and how you can combat them. Choosing the right combination of CPU and GPU is certainly important if you don't want to waste money, though one could argue it's also a fruitless pursuit. Hardware bottlenecks are, for the most part, unavoidable, and you can only minimize them.

But sometimes, the biggest bottleneck isn't your hardware — it's Windows 11. If you're chasing the best performance, maybe it's time to consider a change of digital scenery, so to speak.

SteamOS and Proton do miracle work

We've seen it already

Before the Steam Deck and SteamOS, it was easy to dismiss Linux as a viable option for gaming because, realistically, it wasn't. Very few games are designed with Linux in mind, and Proton didn't exist until 2018, plus it didn't initially support a ton of games — though it steadily improved over the next few years until the release of the Steam Deck in 2022.

In the current day, Proton has become fantastic, and that's not just some hypothetical. With SteamOS now being on the Lenovo Legion Go S, which officially supports both SteamOS and Windows, we can finally draw a fair comparison between the two operating systems on each device, and in fact, we've done just that here at XDA.

Comparing the performance of this handheld playing the same games in SteamOS and Windows showed there's potential for massive performance gains. At the same graphical settings, Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered ran between 19FPS and 20FPS on average on Windows. On SteamOS, it hit 35FPS — a 75% increase in framerate when compared to the 20FPS measurement we got in our testing. And this isn't a title that received a native port to Linux. It's running on SteamOS via Proton, yet the performance still pulls ahead significantly while using the same hardware.

The exact percentage uplift may vary across games, but the advantage for SteamOS was consistently there across different games and power modes. Cyberpunk 2077, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Guardians of the Galaxy all gave SteamOS the edge, whether it was on battery power or plugged in. The difference may only be a handful of frames per second in some games, but when you scale that to much more powerful hardware, you could be looking at a very significant difference in smoothness.

If you have a laptop or gaming handheld, that difference could be even more noticeable. Based on our testing (shown in the last image above), Windows' performance dropped harder when the computer is unplugged from AC power compared to Steam OS. Games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider were an exception to that rule, but then titles like Cyberpunk 2077 showed a massive difference, where SteamOS kept performance much closer to what you'd get by being plugged in.

Our findings aren't an outlier, either. Other outlets like TechSpot, Ars Technica, and Tom's Hardware have all reported similar findings. I haven't conducted a rigorous test myself, but I do recall also getting better performance when using Bazzite on a different gaming handheld, despite not being officially supported.

Linux support is only getting better

OEMs are getting behind it

The big potential drawback with switching away from Windows is the hardware support on Linux, with drivers often taking longer to arrive there, especially on specific distros. However, this isn't nearly as big an issue as you might think it is. Unless you're buying new hardware as soon as it comes out and there are big architectural changes, the Linux kernel generally keeps up fairly well.

Perhaps more importantly, though, support for Linux-based distros, especially for gaming, is ramping up significantly. Of course, the Lenovo Legion Go S already ships with SteamOS as an option, but you also have desktop PCs like the Framework Desktop shipping with Bazzite as an option, offering a similarly optimized experience for gaming. Bazzite itself is also frequently testing for new gaming hardware to ensure an optimized experience, so you're not that likely to run into major issues.

You can make Windows better, but...

There's only so far you can go

Of course, you can try to optimize Windows in various ways to improve performance, but there's only so much you can do with that while still having a fully functional Windows install. I recently tried out Atlas OS, which heavily modifies Windows to reduce invasive features and deliver improved performance, and while resource usage while idle did improve, benchmark results weren't significantly different between a regular Windows 11 install and Atlas OS. Any other tweaks you can make to Windows 11 are likely to be even less significant in terms of performance.

Even if Atlas OS does deliver performance improvements for your particular situation, that means giving up a lot of what makes Windows what it is. Atlas OS requests you not to use a Microsoft account; it'll disable animations, and you might end up disabling things you're accustomed to using. Plus, the only way to remove all the Atlas OS changes (if you so choose) is by performing a full clean install of Windows with an ISO.

Windows is designed around all the background tasks and features Microsoft makes for it, and disabling them will not only not provide the same kind of performance improvements, but it can also break other parts of the experience. If you're looking into a solution like this, you might be better off just using a Linux-based operating system.

There is still one big hurdle

Anti-cheat is always going to be a problem

As much as I want to say that, though, this is all dependent on the fact that you don't play online games competitively, or at least most of the major ones. Easy Anti-Cheat software, and other kernel-level anti-cheat implementations, currently don't support Linux in any form, which is a major problem for games such as Fortnite or Apex Legends. These games simply won't be playable, and of course, that might be a deal breaker for you.

The worst part is, you can't really expect this to change at all, as explained by my colleague Adam Conway in this piece. Because of the way the Linux kernel is developed and can be adapted by anyone, there's no way to guarantee that any particular Linux install isn't prone to cheat. Any potential approach towards addressing this would inevitably open up the possibility that someone will find a way to cheat anyway. If you want to game on Linux, you simply have to give up your right to play certain games, at least until a better implementation is found.

It might be time to ditch Windows

Ultimately, I know that moving from Windows to Linux won't be for everyone, but if you're considering spending extra money to optimize the performance of your PC down to the last frame, I think it would be foolish not to consider switching to Linux. The work done on Proton, combined with the lighter nature of Linux distros and Steam's Gaming Mode, has made the gaming experience much better than you might expect. It's often better than Windows, and I highly recommend at least giving it a shot.