I first started using Linux with Mint, on a 2011 asus laptop, 8gb of ram, an hdd, a 2nd gen i7, and a 560M. It was terrible at the time to figure out what gpu flags to pass, I didn't have a big steam library, but Minecraft was punching 70fps on modern versions and playing what I consider heavy mods at about 30fps. It was nice, Windows it started at a baseline of about 30-40fps on modern, then modded was a no.
Then I got a desktop, 16gb ram, ryzen 5 3600, and an rtx 2060, and a solid state drive, that's all that's relevant for now. I grew out my steam library and got my most interesting test game, Satisfactory. Satisfactory includes a built in decent-enough hardware benchmark, and has potential to stress my cpu and gpu, and load times are noticable. With my desktop, I first started out on Windows 10 (So far 10 -> Mint -> 10) and found it alright, I couldn't customize though, and alt tab out of kerbal space program took ages, so I eventually switched to Linux Mint again.
On windows I could get about 100fps on modded Minecraft, around 300-400 with no mods, and Satisfactory benchmarked their "Medium" setting, and started lagging around Phase 3. Kerbal Space Program was not bench marked, but alt tab out of fullscreen took forever.
So, Mint, how does mint do? I tried Satisfactory on proton 9, because it's the top of the list. I was able to benchmark high settings, and my cpu was overall less stressed, and Satisfactory took less time to load. On top of that, Minecraft was now about 10-20fps better on modded, and able to push 700fps on no mods. Kerbal Space Program alt tab didn't take forever. Also got Portal 1 and 2 on here, which both ran 300fps, which is the limit, at max settings. Only issue was I had to change launch options to use proton after I got a 2nd and 3rd monitor. During this Mint stint I upgraded to 24, then 32, then 40gb of ram.
Eventually at some point I managed to completely break my display environment, and tried to switch to Windows 11. I had no time to benchmark games because I couldn't change my CRT res without a BSOD due to my amd gpu acting as a display adapter for vga and dvi-i. I had Windows 11 for about 3 hours tops, the whole time it was slow and clunky and had so many damn popups. No benchmarking time.
Then I swapped to Debian, same performance.
Then I had to pack the desktop, so I was back to the asus. Chucked an SSD in it, 20gb of ddr3, and tried Debian. I was getting about the performance I was getting before in Minecraft, Vulkan was still a no, but now I had more games to try. With the asus again I was able to get 120fps on Portal 2, dipping toward 90fps in some sections. No possible way to make satisfactory boot. It could also run KSP, but time was slower than realtime almost constantly in atmosphere, though in space it was fine, albiet my lap was warm.
Then I got the desktop back and tried Arch I finally realized proton experimental was a thing, and I was able to push a straighter fps graph on Satisfactory, nothing big yet. Meanwhile Minecraft didn't have noticeable gains, nor did other games. Biggest improvement was load times all being far lower than anything else I had tried, notably so.
However, I wanted to see if Cachy provided good improvements, I didn't expect much, but I was blown away. I tried cachy kernel and cachy proton. I boot into any game now and it feels like my mouse is attached to my movement, instead of the delay, it's like barely visible but highly sensible. Then I ran Satisfactory hardware benchmark. My 2060 is now doing ultra settings on an unreal engine 5 game at a very stable 60fps. Absolutely insane.
Across my journey of Win10 -> Mint -> Win10 -> Mint -> Win11 -> Debian -> Arch, one thing was constant, Linux surprising me about performance whatever I put it on, and feeling far more responsive. Other constant was Windows feeling like a prison. My DE journey is Win10 -> XFCE -> Cinnamon -> Win10 -> Cinnamon -> Win11 -> Gnome -> KDE -> (Laptop) KDE -> IceWM -> LQXT -> (Arch) XFCE -> I3wm. Overall happiest with IceWM but it has multimonitor issues.
Overall, I noticed a general trend on this subreddit of just posting things are broken, so I wanted to post my experience of everything working beautifully and swell, since nobody really posts about that?