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Would it be wise to not play Factorio on Steam?

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2020 4:50 am
by AustraliumEngineer
Would it be wise for me to not play Factorio on Steam, but instead, playing Factorio in standalone?

Also, is Factorio more optimized for Linux or is it equally good in Windows 10 Pro?

Re: Would it be wise to not play Factorio on Steam?

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2020 6:39 am
by Koub
AustraliumEngineer wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 4:50 am
Would it be wise for me to not play Factorio on Steam, but instead, playing Factorio in standalone?
Whatever floats your boat. It's the same game, there is no wisest choice in general. The one exception is if you want to freeze your game version forever, because you have a modded playthrough, and don't want an update to eventually break your save. With the zip version downloaded and updates disabled, you have an absolute control on the version you're playing on.
AustraliumEngineer wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 4:50 am
Also, is Factorio more optimized for Linux or is it equally good in Windows 10 Pro?
Factorio is not optimized for a platform, afaik, it performs the same on both sides. The only advantage linux has on Windows is with the transparent save feature, which doesn't work on Windows (because of OS limitations).

Re: Would it be wise to not play Factorio on Steam?

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2020 6:46 am
by Jap2.0
AustraliumEngineer wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 4:50 am
Would it be wise for me to not play Factorio on Steam, but instead, playing Factorio in standalone?
There isn't a huge difference, the benefits of the standalone are playing with multiple installations, multiple large mod sets, or a fixed (old) version. If you don't buy through Steam, the devs also get slightly more money, but you can do that and get a Steam key or buy through Steam and do vice versa.

Also, is Factorio more optimized for Linux or is it equally good in Windows 10 Pro?
There shouldn't be significant differences either way, as pretty much all optimizations are platform-agnostic; there are (as always) more options on Linux (I've heard good things about huge pages performance-wise), but I wouldn't worry about it until you run into any real issues (likely a long way off), and in that case doing a quick test comparison would be worth more than my opinion. The only other difference is that non-blocking saving (saving in the background) is only availble on Linux.

Re: Would it be wise to not play Factorio on Steam?

Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2020 8:29 am
by ondrii
I will share my experience as I'm playing Factorio both on Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 and in the past 16.04) and on Windows 10.
It works same on both systems. However I did not create "true" megabase that could drop my FPS under 60. Maybe then there will be any difference.

Oh, there is only one thing - now saving on Linux takes less time than on Windows, however it may be related with that I have each system on separate SSD (but bot have save/read around 500 mb/s, Linux is on SATA III SSD and Windows on M.2 SSD). What's funny around 2 years ago saving on Linux was longer than on Windows (it changed with Factorio 0.17).

To sum up - I recommend to use system that you are more familiar, there is no significant difference in playing Factorio on any of them :)