 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and I want to do a quick test on PopOS 20.04 and does it still support Linux gaming very well? Well, I'm not going to click bait so I'll just answer yes as long as it supports the game that you want because not all games are compatible with Linux. But if you want to hang around and look a little bit at the performance benchmarks we got a couple games I wanted to try on here real quick and to see how they worked. Stick around for that. But first, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project there's a hires button right at the top. If you want to support this channel in other ways there's the affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel including a link to our Patreon if you'd like to become a Patreon supporter. We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time what's available and what's not. So go ahead and check that out frequently. And finally our forums. If you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos or just reach out say hi and talk tech our forums are a great place for that. Alright now back to the content. This system's running PapaOS 20.04 has a AMD Ryzen 93900X and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Super. Now this has got Proton on Steam on here and one of the things I want to emphasize is that this is a very default installed. Nothing special, no tweaking, no going behind the scenes and a bunch of commands or anything like that. I wanted to start it from that basis and see how it worked. I think that's important because you know you don't want to try to switch to another platform for gaming and go oh it's so much harder because I have to do all these extras. I can't just load the game and go. And it's not as though Windows has been as friendly to gamers as they could be with updates and some of the challenges people face with Windows 10 and inopportune times happening. I think more people are looking at alternative desktops and Linux gaming. Well I don't know that 2020 is the year of the Linux gaming desktop but I think we're getting closer to it. Now back to my caveat that I always like to say, it depends if the game you want has support. Now it's a pretty outstanding list of games that do support Linux but it's still not 100%. There's not 100% compatibility across the board but we're definitely getting there. And the first game I want to talk about and we can just run the benchmark and we'll walk through it is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. So we loaded this on here and ran a little benchmark and the results were pretty smooth. It ran pretty well and I didn't really see any hiccups glitches or anything like that. No problems with the shading, it was nice, smooth, great frames per second on here. Of course this is a reasonably specced system so that's kind of to be expected. Now the next game we're going to talk about is Doom. I'm just not really good at games but I do like Doom and so that one's an easy one to give it a go here and try it but once again no problems. Doom has been really good for Linux support. I've tried it on a couple different versions of Pop OS and I've never had a problem with it. It seems to work pretty well. Once again good frame rates, no problems running it and pretty smooth gameplay overall. Now one of the other things I wanted to point out about running games on Linux is the multitasking works quite well. So here we have our spreadsheets, we can pretend to be working over here and we can quickly jump back to our game and it does pause the game when we switch from it but that's to be expected but it's no problem jumping over here. So I can pretend like I'm actually editing a video and this is some 4K video and I do have the Nvidia turned on as far as the rendering for the video processor rendering on here and it seems to work pretty well. So it does detect, we'll go over here, settings, check for hardware acceleration and Nvidia hardware acceleration encoding found and enabled. So I'm able to scroll back and forth over here, I'm able to jump to a spreadsheet, I'm able to easily go back over here to the game and resume. It pauses it like I said but it's still right where I left off. So as far as playing the games and everything, I'm pretty impressed with it for multitasking, even the smoothness of the graphics while other things are opening here and it's not been really a problem to do all this testing on here and open this up and we'll even open up one more thing in the games list here. Something native to Linux is a little 3D billiards game that's built into, well not built into, it came with the pop shop on there so we can have this going here, not that this is anything complex or nearest complex is running DOOM but we have that, then we have DOOM over here and at the same time we have the video editing open and all of these so multitasking still works pretty well. Now back to the topic of gaming, when will gaming be is completely the same on Linux as it is on Windows, it is going to depend on you as an audience. The enough people really demand it when there's more and more of the gamers of the general public that uses and plays games, uses these systems as there's more demand the developers will simply start writing for that platform. It's not that I think there's any love affair that people who are using computers have specifically with Windows, they just go with whatever platform works and I think that will start changing as Windows becomes whatever it becomes as these major updates and some of the disruptions. I've seen many gamers express their aggravation with underlying problems of having Windows and I think that something will keep seeing a shift towards in the future. It's not going to happen today, it's not likely to happen 2020, I'm still a realistic person here but I like seeing that if you are a Linux enthusiast that you don't have to sacrifice 100% of the games and as long as the game you want runs inside of Linux, well it runs pretty well so any of the ones that do support Linux out of the box are working perfectly fine. Now what other comment I'll have that I know there's a challenge of when you do things like running wine and some of the other emulation, I know wine's not an emulator but someone's going to split hairs of me on that, when you run things under the wine system the other challenge I've seen a few people talk about is that the anti-cheat systems that are built in some games have a lot of compatibility problems running on Linux sometimes the game runs fine but the multiplayer does not because they specifically designed some of the anti-cheat not to be compatible well just they didn't really design Linux in mind is the simplest answer but nonetheless like I said there's a link to the entire build of this in terms of what parts we use but POPOS is pretty solid in terms of gaming support it they did a lot more polish on it it's out of the box work perfectly fine no special tweaking that's one of the things I wanted to highlight the games work well the multitasking works well even while the games are running so my overall is I think POPOS 20 is a solid distribution I'm still going to do a longer video at some point like a whole getting started from start to finish for people who are interested in getting onto POPOS and getting off of you know any other platform probably Windows for a lot of people and bring it over to that side from a business standpoint I find extremely useful from a gaming standpoint I think it's coming along pretty well but like I said someone's gonna call me out and say don't you use a gaming system at home that uses Windows yes I do unfortunately a couple of games I like at this moment just don't run on there but soon as all the games that I'm playing which isn't very many of them do support Linux well I'll probably end up reloading my gaming system and home that runs Windows and I'm excited to do that I would I'm really looking forward to when that day comes so I can say I don't use Windows at all but for now I guess I'll still have to keep playing some games at home and Windows and probably a lot of you are as well but it's coming along that's kind of the point of this video and that's what I wanted to highlight people thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to Lawrence systems dot com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums dot Lawrence systems dot com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time