I want to know if you guys are dual OS user and play osu! on both OS.

I'm sharing my experience here so, here it goes.

I've been thinking if latency on each OS has difference. I noticed something in Linux that it has less latency on the keyboard input to me than on Windows which I use 25ms on universal offset than on Linux which I have around 0-5ms. Even though osu! on Linux is being translated from Windows code to Linux code on-the-fly, it's weird to find that it manages to have less input lag than on Windows.
On the audio side, things get pretty wild but I'm not gonna discuss about it because lot of things happening on the audio side.

So guys, what's your experience with osu! using on two different OS?

I had some pretty unpleasant experiences with Linux gaming, including trying osu, to get me to the point where if it isn't compatible with Linux natively I don't play the game.

Linux is a great OS, but you really need some more modern hardware if you want to get the gaming experience close to Windows and I just don't have that. many games that I tried on Linux, either through Steam or going freestyle with Wine, had a noticeable performance drop of around 20%. it is to be expected, but it's still sad. osu has massive amounts of audio lag and the input lag, alongside the mouse accel and the screen tearing issues and the noob I was at the time made me say 'nope!' and I backed out from gaming on Linux. I still have PTSD from that era and I think I saw everything Linux had to offer on the computer I currently own.

there are some good news, whatever. I tried Touhou 6, 7, 10 and 10.5 on Wine and it works without even using Lutris. just get Wine, get the game and run it. emulators also works perfectly on Linux, in some places being more smooth than Windows, but that could be a placebo effect. what isn't a placebo effect is with games that work natively. Minecraft works natively with a 20% performance drop, but that 20% performance drop is hardly noticeable when you've Optifine installed. I play Minecraft like I'm on Windows: without any problems. if a game works natively, it just works more or less close to Windows. Portal 1 works great on Linux, although I also experienced problems there with the game having massive input lag on fullscreen mode, but those could have been done by the desktop environment I was using.

but the biggest advantage of Linux, for me personally, is the software library. almost all of my work for school or for personal project is mostly done through Linux tools. these tools can be installed on Windows, but the better experience I had was on Linux. Vim/Nvim, NNN, MOC, Cat, Grep, all of these tools are the ones I use pretty regularly. I almost dropped Windows completely and I have plans to get a computer with only Linux on it.

Winnyace wrote:

osu has massive amounts of audio lag and the input lag...

So I can see that I'm not the only one having the audio issue. Like I said on my last post, lot of things happen on my audio side where latency is really an issue for rhythm games because of how Pulseaudio work. But what I can tell about Pulseaudio on Linux is that out-of-the-box, the measured latency without configuration is around 95-110ms which is a lot. To lower the latency, you have to configure the ALSA module until it begins to crackle and then back it up to the most stable value. My audio latency on Linux when configured is around 8-12ms which did improve a lot better.

Also, I don't know if Lutris plays a role on improving osu!'s way of code translation in realtime and the latency because it uses custom WINE library but I can tell that it's less hassle to install osu! on Linux right now.

I can feel that you are going to drop Windows completely but most software and games will have problems running in Linux without setting up a fix. To me, I didn't dropped Windows completely because of reasons like incompatibility with online games and my school uses Windows for programming for my class while I'll be doing it soon.

SilentVoice wrote:

I didn't dropped Windows completely because of reasons like incompatibility with online games and my school uses Windows for programming soon.

my school uses Windows for programming as well, but I completely switch my programming work on Linux. but the good thing is that Linux has most of this stuff preinstalled. gcc and g++ is preinstalled on Arch based distros and can be easily installed on Debian based distros. Python is already installed for ya and many IDEs and text editors are available for Linux. unless you guys use a special IDE or compiler or to send your compiled program to your teachers, then you might be interested in switching to Linux for the environment it gives and some of tools you get.

When I first tried out Linux, the first thing I noticed was that my framerate was nearly 3 times higher than it was on Windows (600fps vs 1500fps). I run a Ryzen 1600 with a rather suboptimal memory, so I guess the vastly reduced overheads and better scheduling in combination with superior OpenGL AMD drivers resulted in such a difference.

Audio indeed gets really complicated. Right now I'm running pure Alsa with modified winealsa.drv, which results in 10ms click-to-audio latency, one fifth what I had in Windows.

_kosshi wrote:

Right now I'm running pure Alsa with modified winealsa.drv, which results in 10ms click-to-audio latency, one fifth what I had in Windows.

That's nice, running directly on ALSA. Me right now, I'm using PulseAudio with PulseEffects as the equalizer for PA. osu! is blacklisted on PulseEffects because of the latency overhead that is created by PulseEffects which adds up 45ms of audio latency. It would be nice if I use ALSA completely but I will be sacrificing audio quality for multimedia.

One thing I add up to my Linux experience is that. My tablet input latency (CTH-490) in elementary OS was way faster than on Windows, but in Pop!_OS (currently using) it's the same as Windows. I dunno if elementary OS was way optimized with the `xsetwacom` than on other distros.

Winnyace wrote:

but the good thing is that Linux has most of this stuff preinstalled. gcc and g++

Yeah, that is one good thing about Linux. But to prevent any complications during my class, I'll just have to stick with Windows and their way.

SilentVoice wrote:

I'm using PulseAudio with PulseEffects as the equalizer for PA.

I have an equalizer in the mix as well, alsaequal. However when I run osu!, I make it use hardware directly, skipping all mixers and such (every other program goes thru a loopback mixer pcm I can disconnect at will to free the hw pcm).

SilentVoice wrote:

My tablet input latency (CTH-490) in elementary OS was way faster than on Windows, but in Pop!_OS (currently using) it's the same as Windows.

Have you adjusted the RawSample property in xsetwacom? Also make sure you don't have compositors etc running.

I used to have two machines (instead of two monitors running the same machine but eh), one is for gaming (Windows), while the other for programming-related work (MacOS). I had this setup for awhile until I sold the MacOS and got another monitor to just keep it clean and organized as I don't really need it anymore.