Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Linux-July-2021

by bemmu • 5 years ago

401 354 5 years ago

Taek2• 5 years ago

I've been gaming on linux for almost a year now and I've had no issues at all. I've mainly been playing popular titles but Proton makes every game feel like it's a linux native game.

tapland• 5 years ago

And sometimes better (like Classic Wow).

I only ran into issues with Rust(which is getting support) and pubg because of anti-cheat and the fivem mods for gta5 (something about lack of support for shared resources).

But it's working so well and so much less weird stuff going on compared to windows and osx.

sen• 5 years ago

Regretfully most racing sims (and any other sims that use peripherals) are still a huge pain to get going, even with Proton. At most you can get the actual game "running" (with performance sacrifices over Windows), but you still won't get things like Force Feedback, and half your peripherals features probably won't work (or will work intermittently for no reason).

I'd love nothing more than to never use Windows again, and I use Linux for 90% of my daily use, but if I have to have Windows still installed for any major games at all then it's just easier to keep using Windows for all gaming, where gaming really does "just work", every time.

lnxg33k1• 5 years ago

i use g29 with force feedback on dirt2.0 and f1 2020 without issues, the module is built in the maintree kernel

hexa22• 5 years ago

Force feedback worked fine on project cars for me

skohan• 5 years ago

"running" (with performance sacrifices over Windows)

Has this been an issue for you? Since switching to primarily Linux/Proton for gaming, I've been amazed at how little performance penalty I have seen.

ubercow13• 5 years ago

I wonder how those force feedback wheels from different manufacturers all work on Windows, is there any kind of standardised API for that stuff? I had a brief look at sim racing peripherals on Windows and even there it seemed like each game you wanted to play had to support your specific model of wheel.

yosito• 5 years ago

I'm not a gamer, but annecdotally, the pandemic has given me enough screentime that I've finally been able to switch to Linux as my primary OS. I wonder how many others are in the same boat.

vardump6• 5 years ago

Nowadays OS matters pretty little.

Personally, on some level, I don't even notice difference working macOS, Linux and Windows. Other than platform specific development work, it doesn't really matter in the big picture.

Other than that, only Linux allows me true visibility to its innards. Fast to fix almost any issues, should they happen. And I say this as someone who has for example no problem debugging Windows kernel remotely. Or reverse engineering using Ghidra etc.

quijoteuniv• 5 years ago

I think it matters a lot, specially on machines that are not that new, with modest resources

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Maybe in developing countries this matters more, but RAM and SSD upgrades for older hardware are surprisingly affordable these days.

xxs• 5 years ago

Windows has no epoll(), but of course that doesn't matter for games.

lucian19002• 5 years ago

Windows has completion ports (IOCP), which are much better.

At least finally Linux is also getting completion based IO with io_uring.

vardump6• 5 years ago

Windows does have I/O completion ports, which is, frankly, superior. Then again, Linux has io_uring.

Again, pointless in the big picture. Most of the time these details are hidden by libraries.

encryptluks22• 5 years ago

Nowadays OS matters pretty little.
Other than platform specific development work, it doesn't really matter in the big picture.

Yes it does. It just doesn't matter to you.

vardump6• 5 years ago

Right. I can just talk for myself. I do think in the big picture what really matters for the most is really just a good web browser.

Thinking about this, I just realized I tend to pick OS according to device type.

For laptops, macOS for the best touchpad, security and speedy open-lid-to-machine-actually-usable time. But I'd sure like "upgradeability" and "repairability" over thinness, something 2012 Macbooks still had. But for now, practicality wins.

For desktops and workstations often Windows, sometimes Linux. Windows got good desktop performance and nice commercial software library. Freedom to choose your hardware, CPU and GPU. And of course gaming.

For servers, it's pretty much always Linux or possibly some BSD. Minimal, easy to admin, fast, efficient and secure if configured correctly.

londons_explore• 5 years ago

I find there is a lot of OS-specific knowledge for deep-diving.

Want to get symbols to debug the kernel? That'll be the microsoft symbol server on windows, or a System.map file in Linux...

Want to make something happen with every boot of the system? That'll be a system service on windows (and by the way they have all kinds of gotchas about what kinds of stuff they can access) or a systemd service on linux.

Want to make a file creatable, writable and deletable by a specific user, but disallow reading back the file contents? Thats easy with windows ACL's, but on linux you're going to have to mess with seccomp.

Need to script something quickly? Well thats either bash on linux or powershell/batch files on windows.

It turns out regularly using two OS's requires almost double the learning time to be as effective on both - there is overlap with concepts, but little overlap with implementations.

vardump6• 5 years ago

"Want to make something happen with every boot of the system? That'll be a system service on windows (and by the way they have all kinds of gotchas about what kinds of stuff they can access) or a systemd service on linux."

On Windows there's also numerous registry keys, Windows Task Scheduler, etc (ugh). On Linux, it depends. Could be also init.d or n+1 other options, including a single custom binary running as init process.

Need to script something quickly? Well thats either bash on linux or powershell/batch files on windows.

Or bash on Windows (WSL, cygwin, etc.). PowerShell is also available for Linux. Both come with their footguns, especially when used on a "foreign" platform.

But you could just as well use some suitable scripting language, like Python, JS or whatever.

Sure, there's complexity if you really start (or need) to look for it. I do think it's exaggeration to say double, maybe 20%, at most 50%.

rvz3• 5 years ago

Nowadays OS matters pretty little.

Unless you use iTunes to sync your music to your computer and iDevice or you're a music producer in need of using the best DAW software, or perhaps you're a creator that uses the Adobe suite to create the best media content you need, etc, then the OS does matter very much since millions of users still use this type of software.

The most important part of this is that the software must be officially supported; and not be at some 'experimental' stage, especially since these users do not play around with their computers and they focus on getting things done.

macOS and Windows users are the 'real' big picture and the 99% of users and that matters. Not the 1% of Linux users.

To Downvoters: So it makes business sense to ignore the 99% of users on Windows and Mac and target the 1% of your userbase running Linux and support as many distros as possible to cover the many users who could be running whatever distro they have installed?

Have you considered what the 'definition of Linux support is?' and the cost of testing for all of that is?

pizza234• 5 years ago

OS matters a lot.

The fragmentation on Linux is astounding; I have experience with maintenance of Linux-based projects.

You'll be surprised at how fragmented distributions are, even within the same family (e.g. Ubuntu-based).

The nature of Linux is a double-edged sword, and in gaming, this is a very serious downside - at least, when it comes to Linux-native gaming; Proton/Wine is another story.

bpfrh• 5 years ago

Would you say that the new flat and snap format alleviates some of these issues?

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 5 years ago

The fact that you're being downvoted for pointing out the objectively true statement about fragmentation in Linux Desktop says a lot about the community behind it. Which, incidentally, I think is another big reason people avoid using it.

threatripper2• 5 years ago

I would rephrase this: The share of users who could work well with any of the operating systems is increasing. The fundamental differences between the operating systems that impact user experience are decreasing.

I think 90-99% of users only use Browser+Office+Games which could work well in any of the big operating systems. Some software preferences are superficial and appropriate replacements exist on the other platforms.

As someone working with macOS, Linux and Windows I focus my workflow on the things that work under all of these operating systems so the impact they have on me is very little. People who are deeper into the UX of a single operation system may disagree completely.

vardump6• 5 years ago

I would rephrase this: The share of users who could work well with any of the operating systems is increasing. The fundamental differences between the operating systems that impact user experience are decreasing.

Thanks. This was indeed my main point.

Of course this doesn't mean there aren't a lot of niches that require a particular OS.

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 5 years ago

I think 90-99% of users only use Browser+Office+Games which could work well in any of the big operating systems.

Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying this sort of thing for about a decade now, only they used to exclude "games" from that list because Linux was so terrible as a game platform. Their constant underestimating of "average computer user" is, in my opinion, one of the big reasons they've completely and utterly failed to make significant headway in the Desktop market.

dtx13• 5 years ago

I'm so thankful that Valve is embracing Linux. They obviously have commercial interests behind it and fear the Windows Store [1] and vendor lock-in by Microsoft, but they have made gaming on linux better, even for non-steam games and embraced the open source ideals of linux, at least for their work on steam os and proton. I'm happy I don't have to have any windows systems for gaming anymore and I pretty much have valve to thank for that (and all the other great people working on wine, lutris and co of course)

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377

mhitza2• 5 years ago

Definitely the number is gonna increase dramatically next year with the Steam deck. Unless it's going to fail in some major way.

Cycl0ps• 5 years ago

It's Valve hardware, so more likely than not it'll flop and you can pick one up for $50 on the 2022 winter sale. Even then it might be relevant for enough weeks to make devs consider designing for native Linux and be in too deep to back out.

Speaking as someone with a steam link and controller floating around their house.

mhitza2• 5 years ago

I wouldn't mind it flopping an having the option to get it for 50 buckaroos :). But that's highly unlikely.

Even if it fails as a portable gaming platform the hardware sounds very decent and I wouldn't expect them to have Apple level margins on those.

I've skipped the link/steam machine because "livingroom entertainment" isn't my thing, but I was pleased with the quality of the Steam controller. Although I would have liked them to be bold with the design and keep just the original prototype (without thumb stick/face buttons) (wouldn't have minded a novelty controller that works well with just a few games).

toastal3• 5 years ago

The odd thing to me is how immediately people jumped to "you can install Windows on it", like one would need to. The other thing that was funny is people saying "with Windows, you can run emulators", as if Linux couldn't already do that and with better framerates.

rashil2000• 5 years ago

I have used the popular open source NDS emulator - Citra, and it runs like 15 times faster on Windows compared to Ubuntu (NVidia GPU).

dkdbejwi3834• 5 years ago

Lots of people (especially younger people who are used to consoles) don't seem to understand what Linux is exactly. To many, PC = Windows and !PC means there is no software for it. Many seem to be under the impression that Linux is just a commandline thing.

foxhill6• 5 years ago

i’ve been using linux as my daily driver for just over a year. steam on linux has been great, and proton (wine) has been indispensable. big title games i’ve played with _no_ issues at all:

* Cyberpunk 2077 (ok that has issues, but it has the same issues for windows users..)

* Dying Light

* Titanfall

* The Division

along with _many_ other indie/small games.

honestly the only thing left is titles that include invasive anti-cheat. when that day comes, i don’t know if most of my friends will have any reason to remain on windows.

and who could blame them? finally, they won’t need to deal with a company that collects data from them without their knowledge, runs ads in their taskbar, demands they have a useless microsoft account, restarts their machine on a whim for updates, etc.

i hate that i’m going to say this out loud, but could 2022 really be the year of linux on the des- why does it feel so wrong to say that? :)

go_elmo2• 5 years ago

Same here. Switched 2 months ago after using WSL all the time & being annoyed over many things, including "failing updates" on windows. Did a dualboot but haven't used windows since. Game to add to your list: - CS:GO

foxhill6• 5 years ago

well, strictly speaking CSGO isn’t using proton, it’s a native port, which is why i didn’t count it.

but i play that, too. probably too much..

aquir• 5 years ago

what distro? pop_OS?

OJFord2• 5 years ago

Why would it matter?

foxhill6• 5 years ago

i went for ubuntu, actually. i want to give arch and pop a try though.

Accacin• 5 years ago

99% of games I play work with Proton, or Lutris, which is great most of the time. However, it's the small amount of time when something stops working or needs small config tweaks that really annoy me, as they cut into my gaming time.

Also, setting up games can be a little bit of a faff. For example, wanting to play FFXIV, well, nothing worked at all. I had to go into the config file and skip the cutscene, and also change the launcher to the old launcher. Now, that doesn't seem like much, and it isn't, but the first time I had to do that took me hours to figure out.

0x0nyandesu• 5 years ago

Setting up FFXIV parser is also annoying on Linux

gravypod2• 5 years ago

The only thing I'm missing: streaming with audio from discord. If someone at discord could fix this I would be so happy. I'd actually pay for nitro.

foxhill6• 5 years ago

i've used discord without any noticeable issue (except that their "magic" noise cancellation algo is missing from the linux version) - what do you mean by streaming audio, out of interest?

dijit2• 5 years ago

The Division

Division 1 or 2?

Division 1 was built in a way that would be very hard to run on Linux, Division 2 however was ported to Stadia which is basically Ubuntu.

If it wasn't for Stadia that effort would never have been spent, I was a huge advocate for linux on those projects for years.

foxhill6• 5 years ago

https://www.protondb.com/app/365590

Division 2 however was ported to Stadia which is basically Ubuntu

the division 2 isn't on steam, because ubisoft. and hence - as far as i know - isn't generally available on linux. there's some irony there i think.

oliwarner• 5 years ago

Division 1 works fine.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

restarts their machine on a whim for updates

That's the thing, it's not their machine if they are running Windows on it. It's Microsofts. They can even wake up your machine to apply updates whenever they want.

_y5hn2• 5 years ago

For hardcore gamers, the added stability of Linux and choosing when to update, could be a big plus. Provided, hardware compatibility (there's always a caveat!).

Macha6• 5 years ago

The Outer Worlds is one of the big AAA titles I ended up playing on Linux. I've historically played a lot of them on Windows out of pessimism but The Other Worlds was dying in the opening cutscene on Windows for no explicable reason so I gave it a go on Linux and so far it's worked perfectly.

judge20202• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28035581

GeckoEidechse• 5 years ago

Ay, fellow Titanfall player o/

Noticed any difference between Windows and Linux for that particular game?

It's on the list of my most played games so making sure it runs properly is really important for me to make the switch ^^

foxhill6• 5 years ago

well, Titanfall is essentially a source engine game (although the engine is heavily modified), so i'm a bit annoyed there isn't native linux support - but afaik all source engine games do well through proton (this includes apex legends, but EAC is its only undoing).

i've never played it on windows, so i can't give you a 100% answer. i've never had any issue with it, and i don't think you'd be able to tell it wasn't a linux native game.

horlux• 5 years ago

speee is life!

ecocentrik3• 5 years ago

Steam also has a bunch of titles with native Linux support. I believe Dying Light is one of those titles.

nottorp5• 5 years ago

What hardware have you had that experience on? Probably going to build a new Linux box this year, and I'd like to pick hardware that's as hassle free for wine/proton as possible.

edgyquant2• 5 years ago

So far I’ve had no problem with my Ryzen+Nvidia 1660x.

I’d maybe try to find an AMD GPU but I bought one of those first but need tensorflow and AMDs GPU support for ML was almost non-existent.

edgyquant2• 5 years ago

I’ve played Cyberpunk, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Halo Master the chief Collection (games 1, 2, 3 and Fall of Reach) plus EUIV and Stellaris just in the last year. I haven’t used windows since the vista era

badsectoracula• 5 years ago

One issue i have with Proton is that it seems to run these popular games fine, but when faced with something more obscure there are issues left and right.

For example recently i installed Arch on my GPD Win 1 (which is essentially a much weaker Steam Deck that comes with Windows 10) and tried:

* RoboBlitz - it needed Ageia's PhysX installer which always failed to install at startup

* Clive Barker's Jericho - Didn't start at all

* Cherry Tree High Comedy Club - Worked fine (but it is a very simple 2D game so i kinda expected it)

* Mars: War Logs - It started but 3-4 in the game (actually during a cutscene but was rendered using the game engine) always crashed at random points

* Blood Knights - Worked fine

* Marlow Briggs - Didn't start at all

* Chaser - Didn't start at all

All of the above work under Windows 10 fine which makes me suspect that Valve is just going to make game-specific patches for the next Proton in Steam Deck. After all being able to play "the entirety of your library" sounds implausible when you can't do that even under Windows :-P (many games - especially older games - need custom fixes, etc).

qart2• 5 years ago

What is the point of these surveys when we know how many "level farming" operations[1] are going on in China, etc.? Casual CSGO has become unusable these days. Of course, apart from farming operations, cheaters come from across the world. And AFAIK, most cheats software is available only for Windows. Valve's esports-grade games like CSGO, and DOTA2 are free. There is no penalty for getting banned in such a context. It is easy for the "farmer" or cheater to create a new account, and start playing again.

I would be more interested in knowing what percent of paying customers run whatever OS. This info would be useful to new game developers too.

[1] I won't post links because my comment might get auto-flagged as spam, but interested readers can find them easily by searching for something like "Buy CSGO High Tier Accounts".

thegeomaster• 5 years ago

CSGO is free but has recently cut off drops for free users and grinding-based path to Prime accounts, leaving little incentive for farming as you mentioned.

sascha_sl2• 5 years ago

The survey has always been opt-in continuous collection. I see no reason why bots would opt-in.

Participation in the survey is optional, and anonymous.

First paragraph on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

qart2• 5 years ago

Level farmers and cheaters are not bots. While level farmers may be likely to ignore surveys, because it would waste their time, cheaters don't have that factor.

Flow• 5 years ago

The bots that plague TF2 runs on Linux. No VAC on Linux either so I suppose when they get VACd it’s a manual thing from Valve’s side.

deltasixeight• 5 years ago

Just to be fair and balanced I'm a hardcore linux user and gamer and I've tried gaming on linux and I've hit many issues. 365 games on steam and while some windows games work I've hit probably just about every possible issue you can hit with other games. Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots.

Sometimes I read this thread and scratch my head. I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to the point of delusion? Honestly, Linux is not up to par with windows in terms of running games that are basically designed for windows. Thus the experience compared to windows for these things is definitively inferior.

chevill• 5 years ago

I've had a similar experience. I would love to stop using Windows but I have found that ProtonDB wildly exagerrates the compatibility of games. I had game breaking issues with 50% or more of "gold" rated titles and even some with a "platinum" rating.

dkdbejwi3834• 5 years ago

ProtonDB is driven by reports/feedback from individual users, right? Did you submit your experience so that the ratings are more accurate?

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 5 years ago

That's unfortunately not unexpected. "Linux Desktop" is a ludicrously diverse not-platform for which Valve already has to bring its own runtime of basic libraries along just to ensure some minimum level of compatibility even for native Linux games.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 5 years ago

Just dual boot and only use Windows for games? That's what I do but I haven't booted to Windows in months now.

Taek2• 5 years ago

What games were you having trouble with? I haven't had this experience at all.

eloeffler• 5 years ago

I'm not a hardcore gamer but with some games that work reasonably well on a mid-class PC without an SSD drive I've noticed one thing in comparison. Windows keeps doing things that are hard to trace down while Linux (Mint in my gaming case) keeps its feet still. That is an important issue for me because some random System process may freeze up my games randomly. Not nice...

Overall I get a better performance on Linux at the cost of some graphics performance, which is a good deal for me. I'm really not playing the most current games to be fair. And I'm running on a 5400rpm HDD

gchamonlive• 5 years ago

Linux is surely not up to par with windows, but it is definitely getting better. Not only supporting more games but becoming more accessible.

Linus tech tips did a video recently on installing and gaming on Linux using pop_os which I think is great service for the mainstream user.

So yeah, long way ahead, but we are living the first step, becoming mainstream. If this trend continues, you won't have to be a hardcore Linux Fan to game in Linux.

josefx• 5 years ago

Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots.

I have seen similar on Windows. For example when Bioshock Remastered Freezes there is no way to exit it, windows still responds, but there is no way to close the game because everything you open is hidden by it. Also the amount of Graphical glitches I encountered in Skyrim is just hilarious. DotA 2 seems to sometimes glitch out when you hit alt tab while it loads. That is just the games I played the last few weeks, I think there is not a single game that isn't somehow broken on Windows either.

hpaavola• 5 years ago

For situation like this, make sure you have at least 2 virtual desktops available and then alt+tab and then ctrl+win+arrow key to switch to an empty virtual desktop and open task manager.

sevanteri• 5 years ago

For this kind of situations xkill is marvelous.

I've used Windows xKill [1] for years, but I can't find a download link for which you don't have to sign in...

Alternatively, SuperF4 [2] looks decent, also with a separate CLI only xkill found in the github issues [3].

[1] https://www.deviantart.com/suprvillain/art/Windows-xKill-100...

[2] https://stefansundin.github.io/superf4/

[3] https://github.com/stefansundin/superf4/issues/39#issuecomme...

unilynx2• 5 years ago

In the past (ie Win7 days and before..) I always made a point to set games to "Windowed Fullscreen" wherever possible as that vastly improved Windows' stability.

It was probably bad for graphical quality/performance/latency but being able to temporarily exit games without worrying about a crashing desktop was more important for me.

Apparently that's still an issue then..

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 5 years ago

I have seen similar on Windows.

Sure, but Windows is supported, so instead of going to a forum and being unhelpfully told to try a different distro, you can take up your issue with the developer and they're much more likely to pay attention. Granted, some of them still have shitty support, but you're a lot less likely to be dismissed out of hand.

nemetroid• 5 years ago

Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

dsego• 5 years ago

To add a datapoint, the bioshock games would crash while loading/saving on win 10, which seems to be a common issue. None of the suggested adjustments worked for me. Very little problems running on Ubuntu, there might've been graphical glitches but at least the games were playable.

bluecatswim• 5 years ago

I think at this point most of the issues (not all) that the average gamer experiences are caused by incompatible libraries and the like, it will be interesting to see how good linux gaming gets when the Steam Deck/SteamOS 3 release on which Valve will have better control on what users run.

fendy3002• 5 years ago

Agree. Updated os (and probably drivers) to support specific hardware seems easier to maintain.

Windows get the first class on drivers and it's update due to market share. If this one success we may find vendors to start focusing drivers for steam os after windows.

trotFunky• 5 years ago

To be fair, Valve already has a way to control mostly what is used by Steam and the game. They have their own runtime that uses (or can, can't remember if it's always the case) containers to create a controlled environment.

I have had issues sometimes with library/drivers versions on my rolling release preventing me from running everything natively, but each time using the runtime version of Steam allowed me to play.

They have information about it all over the place, I can't find exactly the page I wanted, but here[0] is some more information about it from their repository.

[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/d...

rvz3• 5 years ago

I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to the point of delusion?

Nothing wrong with being honest. We sometimes have to keep hiding the fact that when we use something on a system that is not officially supported and comes with tons of issues or bugs, we quietly fix it ourselves with hacks and workarounds and try to move on if possible.

Unfortunately with most users, they cannot tolerate 'Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots' and would simply give up and use something fully supported like Windows.

Honestly, Linux is not up to par with windows in terms of running games that are basically designed for windows. Thus the experience compared to windows for these things is definitively inferior.

If it says it is designed and optimised to run on Windows, then that's a hint that it will perform badly on other systems. You can 'try again' on other systems but obviously the help-desk guys will say: 'Sorry, that's unsupported.'

Better to go for something that has official support and move on, not half way there. Or wait until the other system has official support.

terlisimo• 5 years ago

I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to the point of delusion

I see your point but consider this: 20 years ago you could make the same argument for all aspects of linux, not just gaming. Why use some hobby level OS for serious work when you have Solaris, HP-UX, AIX?

Today we have a very usable Linux desktop and pretty much total dominance in the server arena, only because people were at one point "delusionally enthusiastic" about making it work.

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

Only because the owners of Solaris, HP-UX, AIX decided to outsource part of their UNIX development costs to Linux on one side, while others decided they wanted a free beer POSIX implementation to avoid paying for UNIX.

Except gaming culture is all about IP, something that FOSS don't seem to grasp on their quest for freedom über alles.

yyyk2• 5 years ago

Propriety Unixes always had very poor CLIs, to the point people would pay the FSF* to get to install GNU utils. No surprise people would flock to the (offering practically better experience) free OSs.

* Payment for CDROMs. Net distribution wasn't as common then.

AnonymousPlanet• 5 years ago

Less than 20 years ago, Windows was the hobby level OS compared to Solaris and AIX. Windows Server 2005 was a complete and utter joke compared to Solaris. The company I worked for in 2006 was moving their Solaris servers to Linux. Windows wasn't an option because it wouldn't even meet the specs in real life.

trasz3• 5 years ago

Proprietary Unix systems usually required equally proprietary hardware, which, twenty years ago, was quite a bit more expensive, and also quite a bit slower, than x86.

Also, those proprietary systems usually sucked from the usability point of view, due to being business-oriented.

fsloth2• 5 years ago

I don't understand why people insist on this shoehorning either.

It's like some obscene tribal topos that refuses to die.

KDE 1.0 came out in 1998 - 23 years ago (O god I'm old).

The discussion of "Linux to replace windows desktop" is over two decades old.

In computer age this is something geological. It's like... well, Macintosh came out in 1984. Xerox Alto came 1973. If we go back 5 years we reach Englebart's Mother of All Demos in 1968 which I think can be considered the intellectual precursor of those.

So there is 5 years from a tech demo on high-end research platform to a (more or less) commoditized consumer offering - even though Xerox had no idea what to do with it. Steve Jobs visits Xerox 1979 and five years later they deliver Macintosh.

So, with engineering talent PLUS business drive they copy the idea, implement their own hardware and software stack and are instant hit (well, let's say for the sake of this discussion they are a hit).

In FIVE years.

Linux is trying to copy the software stack, of an existing platform, and has been "attempting" this for two decades.

This is not an engineering problem. This is not a community problem. It's a "lack of business interest problem".

Honestly, the Linux desktop is quite usable. I'm quite sure two decades are enough for the open source software stack to find some local optimum for the desktop offering.

But really, copying and supporting a continuously moving target needs real capital and real business drive to sustain the boring, mind numbing support work that is needed to actually sustain an industrial quality platform.

Linux is fantastic in lots of things.

I'm not sure reverse engineering Windows stack on Linux is very effective way of spending our civilizations engineering resources.

I appreciate masochistic Rude Goldbergish feats of engineering as much as the next geek, but I just don't see the value of individuals detached from the corporations that are implementing the master stack trying to reverse engineer everything on top of a third party platform.

Native Linux support? That would be nice. Native drivers and all? That would be nice.

If it works for someone that's very cool and satisfying - but I still think reverse engineering based gaming stacks for modern platforms that are alive and well are not perhaps the best way to spend engineering effort.

heurisko• 5 years ago

I'm not sure reverse engineering Windows stack on Linux is very effective way of spending our civilizations engineering resources.

I don't think it is a question of a pool of resource that can be reallocated, however, as in a business.

The people who work on reverse engineering Windows presumably do so, because they are interested in doing so. They might not be interested in building something new.

The choice might therefore not be between doing this, and doing something new, but between doing this and not doing anything at all.

jokethrowaway5• 5 years ago

We don't collectively own engineers time, we are not under full blown socialism, yet and people are free to do what they want.

If individuals enjoy reverse engineering windows and making it work on Linux, that's great, actually I really need that. I wouldn't spend my time on it, but I'm sure I have equally suboptimal hobbies (from a "civilisation" point of view).

You don't get to spend someone else engineering effort.

paulryanrogers• 5 years ago

Games push an OS's limits. So a compatibility layer like Wine is more like trying to implement a browser that implements all of Chrome's API without forking it.

Darvokis• 5 years ago

What graphics card and which drivers? It's especially problematic with older GPUs, but with modern ones it's largely fine and none of these issues show up as much as they apparently did for you.

subjectsigma2• 5 years ago

After the hype related to the Steam Deck I decided to give Pop_OS with a GPU passthrough setup another chance. I got a single card setup functional but could barely get a dual-card setup working. Problems included:

* Needed a USB input switcher and two video outputs to use it correctly. I tried Looking Glass but it doesn't work well with NVIDIA cards unless you have one of those $15 HDMI dummy plugs which are all made by sketchy Chinese vendors... * Because I only have one USB controller, all USB 3 ports got stolen by the VM, leaving only USB 2 for Linux. * Weird audio pops that I thought I fixed but would come back on reboot. * Difficult to monitor certain temps. * Random crashes during long sessions, even on low graphics settings. Hard to debug - you have to pick through both Windows and Linux logs. * Random FPS drops, especially in LoL. * Lived in fear of getting banned from some games (Also LoL) * NVIDIA drivers would sometimes crash trying to rebind the cards when I closed the VM, so I had to reboot the computer anyways, might as well have dual-booted. * Setting up OBS takes extra work.

Gaming in Linux natively was, for all intents and purposes, the same. The games I play (mostly online multiplayer) are either unavailable or unplayable.

After over two weeks of my computer being semi-functional and my friends asking me for the fifth time when I was going to be back online, I decided it wasn't worth it. I see so many people in these threads praising Linux gaming, saying it's now functional and simple to set up. They must either only play single-player indie games, know something I don't, or are being dishonest.

Still want a Steam Deck though.

gpderetta4• 5 years ago

Very likely the former: the majority of proton users, by necessity, play only single player games (I'm one of them).

I'm trying VFIO at the moment, and so far (but it is very early) seems to be working (I also have an integrated video card which greatly simplifies things). I didn't pass through the whole USB controller, just the specific USB peripherals (mouse+kbd and bluetooth controller for audio). I assume this is not done by actual passthrough but there is some layer of indirection; what would be the disadvantage? more latency?

jokethrowaway5• 5 years ago

Windows and Mac are not great for productivity and not easily customisable so if I want to be productive I need to work from a Linux environment and a Linux UI.

I don't game that much and rebooting / having another dedicated machine is a PITA.

I honestly don't remember experiencing that many issues with proton or wine for that matter. Maybe having to follow a wiki or installing something and a few minor issues. Proton automated most of that.

Sure, it's not perfect but for an occasional gamer like me it's less than the hassle of rebooting.

martian42• 5 years ago

How Linux is more productive than Mac? I think it's true only if you use a lot of customization, like a custom shortcut to switch to a specific app/virtual desktop, and do some stuff. That would be extremely time-consuming but also really cool. I'm thrilled to try but with how prone I'm to falling into rabbit holes I'm really scared how much time it could consume. I already spent too much time on creating my own fork of Colemak and a lot of custom shortcuts with Karabiner elements.

weare1384• 5 years ago

No one is claiming all Windows games work yet. Why would you assume they did?

https://www.protondb.com

hn87882• 5 years ago

Because some people are claiming that they all work, and Valve is saying that they plan to have every game working with Proton by the time Steam Deck releases. I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen people point to the "15.5k games work" number on protondb since the Steam Deck was announced, even though "15.5k games work" only requires a single person to say a game worked for them, and less than half of games on the site are rated as platinum.

hn87882• 5 years ago

Yeah, people are definitely trying to oversell how well gaming works on Linux, especially now that the Steam Deck is coming out. I've had games rated Platinum and Gold on protondb be completely unplayable due to graphical issues, or fail to even launch. I've also run into Linux specific issues even for games that have native ports, for example, holding down a single key for a long time randomly causes the OS to stop sending signals for it until you release it and press again. It's gotten me killed quite a few times in fast paced shooters when holding down the movement key stops working.

Hello71• 5 years ago

full OS reboots

while it's theoretically possible for this to be caused by software, it seems more likely considering the other issues you've listed that there are some hardware issues here. linux drivers exercise the hardware differently from windows, and usually more efficiently. if your hardware is weak (particularly PSU), it can fail during intense loads. see: people blaming prime95 for crashing their computer.

msravi• 5 years ago

I made Linux Mint the primary OS on my son's first laptop some 3-years ago when he was around 12, and he's taken to it like a fish to water. He's even taken to using regolith as his (tiling) window manager now, and prefers to use vim for programming (python/julia/c) rather than any IDE.

Also have Mint installed on my mom's laptop - she only uses the browser and is ok with it - she has no idea of what an OS even is.

IMO, the only thing preventing Linux's more widespread adoption is the reputation that it's only meant for developers, and OEMs not providing an option to have it pre-installed.

evolve2k• 5 years ago

I did the same for my kids and now my son is 19 and is now quite the Linux pro and advocate.

He corrects me “I use Arch btw”.

Loughla• 5 years ago

Any time I have a family member who asks me to 'fix a problem' with their machine, my first step is to copy all important files, and then evaluate their use of the machine. 99.9% of the time, they use it for e-mail, internet browsing, and maybe home banking.

I put mint on everyone's machines and don't look back. It's just so stupid easy, and has drastically reduced the 'tech calls' I receive.

At this point, I have no idea what's holding linux back. Seriously, mint is so user friendly that it's sort of confusing why people don't use it.

iFreilicht• 5 years ago

Marketing and pre-installation on devices. Seriously ChromeOS and chromebooks have been gaining huge marketshare, Linux could've been that if there was any player interested and wealthy enough to put on a similar campaign to what google did.

jokethrowaway5• 5 years ago

That's a great idea.

It may be too late for me but my sons will be ninja developers who use vim like pros, instead of that Microsoft electron behemoth.

danShumway2• 5 years ago

Both of my nieces are running Ubuntu, it's been a big win in reduction of support calls and ease of setting things up for them.

My only regret is that I should have been braver and put them on Manjaro. I thought Ubuntu would be more "set it and forget it" and maybe have better documentation, but some of my most annoying support calls I've gotten have been dealing with driver issues that just weren't present on Manjaro at all. And I generally think the Arch documentation is a lot better than Ubuntu's anyway.

the only thing preventing Linux's more widespread adoption

I think I disagree with this in some ways; I think absent any support at all Linux would be difficult for some people. But if you have someone around who's good with Linux, I think it'll be more stable than Windows and have a lot fewer annoyances/problems.

I know that I would be debugging a Windows install more often and that it would be more annoying to do, because I have other family members who run Windows and I know what kinds of issues they're running into.

gentleman114• 5 years ago

I switched from manjaro to Ubuntu recently after an update made my system unbootable. Took me a week to find the time to sit down and debug it, and the manjaro live USB wasn’t working at all so I had to try my repairs with a live Ubuntu USB. I never had something like that with Ubuntu that I couldn’t fix in 15 mins

sascha_sl2• 5 years ago

I wonder how Epic feels about this recent surge and the massive interest in the Steam Deck, a device shipping Arch Linux of all things stock.

They have dropped support for Linux pretty hard for anything but Unreal as a build target itself, even with things they acquired. Might have been the wrong gamble.

grumbel• 5 years ago

Sweeney seems to be pretty happy with it:

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/141575567884990054...

unixhero• 5 years ago

I buy games and purely use Linux and Steam for this purpose. It works perfectly, including AAA titles! Love from here to the Proton team at Steam. Even Penguins want to have fun.

roody15• 5 years ago

I am in the 1 percent !

bantunes• 5 years ago

I hope Linux with this Proton compatibility layer doesn't go the way of OS/2 of being so easy to run Windows games that nobody writes Linux ports anymore and as a consequence the performance and overall experience is never as good.

AnIdiotOnTheNet10• 5 years ago

Honestly I'd argue the opposite: that because Linux Desktop is such a fragmented mess of a non-platform, "native" ports are likely to work at least as badly if not worse than those running on a compatibility layer. There's even some anecdotal evidence that this is the case with games that do have native ports and running the Windows version in proton being a better experience.

welterde• 5 years ago

The compatibility layer for the linux native games is the steam-runtime though. So fragmentation of the distributions matters to a much lesser degree already.

acomjean• 5 years ago

For me it had the effect of me being able to run Linux at home almost exclusively. and to be able to game occasionally with friends.

Tabletop simulator/ teriforming mars/ lords of water deep and a bunch of other games just work.

Getting that Linux percentage up should help the platform. I don’t want to go use my older machine and it’s non Linux. So I seek out desktop applications to drive Linux use up.

the_biot• 5 years ago

I don't see why it wouldn't have that effect. The obvious path to follow for gaming companies is write for windows and make sure it runs fine under proton.

q3k• 5 years ago

It doesn't help that the Linux ecosystem makes it really difficult to build truly portable truly native binaries.

Static builds? Well, that will work... But wait, you want OpenGL or Vulkan? You'll need a dynamic linker to load system .so's, as that's the standard API available to interact with these APIs on Linux. Want to load dynamic libraries? Well, you'll need to ship a dynamic ELF [1]. Shipping a dynamic ELF with glibc now? Hope you don't intend to run on NixOS or Alpine or any distribution that has an old glibc. Maybe also ship ld-linux.so, all of /lib you depend on and a wrapper shellscript that sequences startup accordingly via that ld-linux.so. That will work, but you still need to load the system OpenGL or Vulkan .so's. Have fun implementing that to work well on every distribution! Remember to respect terms of GPL/LGPL software you now ship. Oh, and I hope you don't use Qt.

Maybe you want to use flatpak? Well, better explain to your users that they need to install and configure it, and make sure whatever proprietary Nvidia drivers they have are also properly flatpak'd. What about the alternatives, something like AppImage/Snap? Those just don't work on Alpine and other non-glibc distributions. Whoops.

Pick an audio API. Pulseaudio? Some people don't run it. ALSA? Good luck, some people run Pulseaudio with ALSA emulation disabled. OSS? Dead, unless someone runs padsp. Pray your users don't run JACK. You'll probably end up on OpenAL, which is now proprietary and/or has an LGPL fork (remember you now have to let users re-link against any other version of OpenAL!).

I sometimes make games and other small interactive demos. I run Linux, and want to send builds to friends also running Linux. The easiest way to distribute these is to build and ship a .exe on a Windows build host and get my friends to run it on Wine, that just works everywhere out of the box. And the .exe's end up smaller and launch faster, too!

[1] - Or go for hacks like https://github.com/pfalcon/foreign-dlopen

pjmlp2• 5 years ago

Now lets join as we prepare for the 2% celebration, about 2041.

unilynx2• 5 years ago

What are the odds of Proton helping to improve Mac gaming?

Will those improvements to Wine trickle through to the Mac eventually or they too linux-specific ? (I'm not that up-to-date with all the graphics APIs they all have nowadays, and I assume that's a factor)

re-actor• 5 years ago

Proton's big tech under the hood is DXVK which translates DirectX calls to Vulkan. If MacOS were to add Vulkan support it probably could benefit from Proton. But Apple doesn't seem to care about Vulkan or modern graphics APIs in general.

dkdbejwi3834• 5 years ago

Proton does not work natively on macOS, end of story. macOS is missing several APIs to make this support viable:
eventfd syscall is Linux-specific, without good alternative on macOS
Apple does not support Vulkan, which is needed for DXVK
Apple deprecated OpenGL support, which is needed for WineD3D
macOS is missing support for Python 3 OOTB

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton...

danieldevries• 5 years ago

My exp with linux gaming is that for sim racing its not possible. To my surprise the logitech wheel did not work, and thus forced me to play Assetto Corsa on Windows.

Zhyl9• 5 years ago

A headline in Linux gaming circles that hasn't hit the wider circuit yet (probably because it hasn't actually been delivered yet) is that Valve are working with Battleye and EAC to get anti-cheat working on Proton for the release of the steam deck.

If this happens it will be, without exaggeration, the greatest thing to ever happen to Linux gaming.

I'm not expecting a massive increase overnight, but it should mean that the marketshare will increase more likely than it will decrease.

gpderetta4• 5 years ago

My brother wanted to play CoD Warzone with me and of course it doesn't work with Proton. After attempting and failing to dual boot into Windows (how hard could it be to create a bootable Windows installation usb key?), yesterday I decided to try vfio. It actually was quite straightforward and way simpler than one would expect from the very intimidating archlinux wiki page. I spent more time getting a nice grub vfio menu entry than actually setting up the VM.

Of course now I expect I'll be eventually banned for running under a VM.

Proton support for anti-cheats can't come soon enough.

trulyrandom• 5 years ago

I don't think Activision bans VM players. I've been playing Warzone in a VM since it was released without issues.

thejosh• 5 years ago

vfio works great for games (and general "Oh cr*, I need this random Windows only thingy), and the added bonus is if you install to another nvme drive, you can actually dualboot if you ever wanted to do that :-).

garou• 5 years ago

I'm only waiting for it to nuke out my windows install.

judge20202• 5 years ago

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/faq

We’re working with BattlEye and EAC to get support for Proton ahead of launch.

tl2• 5 years ago

I'm a huge fan of the work Valve is doing, both in gaming hardware and Linux support, but I'm unconvinced helping game-oriented malware run on Linux is good period, let alone the "greatest thing to ever happen to Linux gaming".

colejohnson662• 5 years ago

The alternative is requiring publishers to remove their DRM, and use Valve’s, and they (the publishers) most certainly would not do that. I’d bet that if Valve tried that, there’d be an antitrust lawsuit against them real quick. It sucks, but the alternative is getting the DRM to work on Linux, so that’s what they chose.

834572• 5 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that those are anti-cheat clients that are required by many games to be able to play online. Not being able to run on Linux means the game will never see Linux adoption.

penagwin• 5 years ago

As a person who both knows how easy cheats are to make, and what anticheat entails - There's no way I'd play without it.

In CSGO for example, many players _want_ a more invasive anticheat solution, and are literally asking or even paying for it through third parties like ESEA and Faceit.

mrinterweb• 5 years ago

I don't fully trust the vendors of anti-cheat software, but I don't think its fair to classify it as "malware". The "mal" in malware mean "malicious". I don't think most anti-cheat software operates with malicious intent.

Zhyl9• 5 years ago

If you think of 'great' in the 'big impact' sense rather than 'unequivocally good' sense, then it holds.

Most complaints I hear about using Linux for gaming are that it can't run games. With anti-cheat it will be able to run games (all of the top ten and most of the top 100).

The principles of allowing Anti-Cheat at all are a valid discussion, but I don't think we should be sabotaging Linux as a viable gaming platform just because some of the trends in software at the moment aren't in line with absolute ideals.

After all, if you don't want anti-cheat you can just continue to not play the games that require it.

gizmondo2• 5 years ago

People here are obsessed about it, while I don't understand what the problem is. Just run a separate Linux (with kernel-level anti-cheat and trusted computing validation, whatever) for gaming only, that's all?

samtheDamned2• 5 years ago

Its about choice. You aren't required to run EAC or battleye but you can choose to if you want to play video games with your friends. Also anticheat on linux is easier to work with than anticheat on windows. Running a linux gaming VM / dualboot is going to be much easier than a windows gaming vm / dual boot.

sourceless• 5 years ago

It'll certainly be the jump point for me -- I'm even holding back a much needed hardware refresh until BattlEye is supported on linux.

aitchnyu• 5 years ago

Umm, is there anti-cheat that doesnt need a locked down OS and hardware? Dont understand what you are cheering for.

Zambyte2• 5 years ago

Yes, and the ones that don't have crazy requirements already work fine.

Unfortunately a lot of people don't care about running malware (see: the % of people who still use Windows). Lots of those people would be more likely to switch if they could run their malware on GNU/Linux.

Kaze404• 5 years ago

EAC already exists on Linux for Linux games. Only the Windows version is incompatible.

Zhyl9• 5 years ago

I'm cheering because this will mean more people can use Linux as a daily gaming driver. I see that as a good thing, albeit with trade-offs.

wyldfire• 5 years ago

Steam deck could conceivably use a signed bootloader to provide some of the guarantees that an Anti-cheat is looking for. But regardless, Valve sounds committed to describing the steam deck as "still a PC [that you could put windows on]".

For non-steamdeck Linux users, at least running on Linux shouldn't be a disqualifier for the Anti-cheat software.

junon3• 5 years ago

This is not a good thing...

Zhyl9• 5 years ago

If it increases Linux Market share and the viability of Linux as a gaming platform, I see it as a good thing.

worldmerge• 5 years ago

I really hope the work Valve is doing with Proton will help to get Office (no, the browser versions aren't a substitute), Adobe software and Touchdesigner working on Linux. I don't game, and would love to switch to Linux but I need those apps to work on it.

ShrigmaMale3• 5 years ago

Microsoft could at least stop actively trying to break O365 on Wine, which I believe it is doing. I have heard rumors (albeit unsourced ones) that MS is trying to bring Outlook over first.

flohofwoe• 5 years ago

I think that's quite unlikely, most games use a fairly small subset of the Windows APIs, if non-game applications currently don't work then it's unlikely that the situation for those applications will be improved by better game compatibility.

atatatat2• 5 years ago

Doesn't all of that stuff have great Wine ratings?

ShrigmaMale3• 5 years ago

Interesting question on how to create same level of protection. On Windows I think the general idea for a bypass is find a vulnerable signed driver and exploit that, but Linux doesn't have the same paradigm for kernel modules as the Microsoft-signs-everything approach on Windows.

matheusmoreira17• 5 years ago

Please no. Keep all those poorly-written proprietary privacy-invading vulnerability-enabling anti-cheat kernel modules as far away from Linux as possible.

Zhyl9• 5 years ago

That's ok, you don't have to install the games if you don't want to.

acharp• 5 years ago

I really wonder how they're gonna do that tho, like implementation wise. I suspect either they are gonna have some sort of deal where VAC can be swapped in, or they're working on some secret sauce kernel module that implements Battleye and EAC.

TomasBaneUK2• 5 years ago

Client side anti-cheats are getting disrupted anyway. You can already buy ML and external hardware cheats that are obviously impossible to detect using the same old methods. It can work for games being streamed locally or over the internet, Stadia, game consoles, anything with a screen.

jl6• 5 years ago

Anecdata: I finally bought GTA V on Steam Linux now that protondb reports flawless single player operation (which I’m happy to report is accurate). It allegedly runs 20% slower than on Windows, but because I’m living 8 years in the future, relative to its release date, I now have a PC powerful enough that it can run at 60fps and max settings regardless of that 20% hit.

Fortunately I have no interest in multiplayer.

bumbada• 5 years ago

I only use Mac and Linux computers.

I don't play games but became interested in VR, specially for programming 3D worlds . Valve basically forced me to install Windows in order to use vive headsets because the linux versions were problematic.

BTW, android uses the Linux kernel, so I consider this 1% highly suspicious.

yyyk2• 5 years ago

My experience is that many times the (emulated) Windows version runs better than the 'native' Linux version, which can have not-so-subtle bugs or not run at all.

This especially happens for older games which haven't been receiving regular updates. Apparently Windows userland bitrots much less.

rbanffy5• 5 years ago

Interestingly, Linux is the dominant gaming platform. It's just that it's called Android.

Siira• 5 years ago

Android is not exactly open, and Google Play Services is not FOSS. Its games are also mostly addictive micro-transaction-ridden trash.

rbanffy5• 5 years ago

The parts that aren't open source are the google-specific pieces. Amazon has a thriving ecosystem (of mostly addictive micro-transaction-ridden trash) on top of their FireOS, which is mostly Android with the Google parts replaced with Amazon parts.

Still, Blackberry managed to make it easy to repackage Android (2.x) software to run on their QNX-based OS and there have been multiple demonstrations of Android software running on Linux with a relatively thin API layer. There's at least one commercial, IIRC, tool that does that for Windows.

nottorp5• 5 years ago

Its games are also mostly addictive micro-transaction-ridden trash.

Yeah, I'm not sure we should call the mobile crap "games".

dkdbejwi3834• 5 years ago

Perhaps the headline should clarify that it's talking about GNU/Linux

rbanffy5• 5 years ago

It's always useful to differentiate between embedded, mobile and desktop/server-grade operating systems.

trasz3• 5 years ago

Android isn't Linux. Linux is just an implementation detail, which could be swapped for something else and the apps wouldn't notice.

rbanffy5• 5 years ago

This is and has always been kind of the point of Unix-like OSs. Blackberry had a workable Android 2 runtime on top of QNX.

You can (at least could) run a Debian on top of a FreeBSD kernel. I run a lot of Linux code on MacOS too.

rvz3• 5 years ago

Linux is the dominant gaming platform.

Given that the article is obviously talking about Desktop Linux, since you can run Proton exclusively on Linux distros (and not Android) the statistics says 96% on Windows and 1% on Linux.

So how is Linux itself a 'dominant gaming platform' here when it is obviously Windows again? It's always cute to see lots of denial of the results here.

jokethrowaway5• 5 years ago

I just switched from dual booting Mac / Windows to Linux and thanks to proton I can play anything I want to play without dual booting.

On Wayland none the less! The year of the Linux desktop! \s

ecocentrik3• 5 years ago

Steam has defiantly been putting in the work promoting Linux based developers and developing Proton (their wine package). Over the last year I've played a half dozen AAA games on Linux through steam, all of them working near perfectly.

I'm surprised the Linux market share isn't higher than 1%, giving the resources they seem to be dedicating to Linux.

sudhirj• 5 years ago

They're now introducing Linux based hardware, which looks set to be super-popular, called the Steam Deck. So they're definitely using the Linux work in their own products. That should give the numbers a boost.

ecocentrik3• 5 years ago

Steam Deck looks like a Wii form-factor device but they had already been collaborating with Alienware and others on the release of console style devices for a few years running SteamOS (based on debian).

nottorp5• 5 years ago

Anyone knows if you can get absolute values for that 1%?

Couldn't find them on the steam survey page and I'm curious how many millions of PCs is 1%.

mminer237• 5 years ago

Steam has about 120 million monthly active players, with about half playing on a given day: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/d...

Assuming Linux players are representative, that puts the number of Linux users at 1.2 million per month and 600,000 per day.

nottorp5• 5 years ago

Maybe but I think the hardware survey is opt in? I get asked occasionally if i want to be counted.

So less than that.

arepublicadoceu• 5 years ago

I was always dismissive of people complaining about Linux as I’ve been using it for the last 15 years without issue. But then I got an nvidia optimus laptop as a gift recently and I just gave up using Linux on this machine.

1. Suspend on lid close simply didn’t work. I’ve tried all kernels I could get my hands on. I resorted to remapping the bogus key that the lid close was sending to suspend.

2. My laptop have the hdmi output wired on the dGPU. So I have to live with a world of pain that is mixed DPIs on Linux where only wayland have proper support.

3. Wayland got some nvidia love on 477 drivers but, in my test, it was a big mess.

So yes, I stopped dismissing people complaining about Linux and went back to windows on this laptop. I assume that nvidia and high DPIs are a common enough usecase in 2021 that I would not recommend anyone to go through this experience.

seltzered_• 5 years ago

"While many believe the Steam Survey is inaccurate or biased (or just buggy towards prompting Linux users to participate in the survey)"

Are there other, possibly better, metrics used to track desktop linux adoption?

helharpr• 5 years ago

It would be great if Linux will start to cater games natively on their OS. The number shows that it is slowly increasing; I hope that the steam deck will not flop and will surely deliver its results.

mastrsushi• 5 years ago

……………yay…………….

foxyv• 5 years ago

I've started playing a lot on Linux because it is the only place I can play some of my games. A lot of old 32-bit games are starting to become unplayable on Windows 10 but are perfectly fine on Proton or Wine. Proton has been the best thing ever for me. I no longer have to keep two versions of Steam on my laptop (Windows and Linux)

On the other hand. There is rarely a moment I play any non-linux native game on Proton that I don't have to fiddle with something. Also a lot just end up not working. It's gotten a lot better recently, but stuff like controllers sometimes end up not working at all and needing a hack to work.

daveungerer• 5 years ago

I switched from Mac to Linux more than 3 years ago, and I've been gaming on Linux for 2 years. I'm far from a hardcore gamer, but I got back into gaming just because I wanted to see how far Linux gaming had come. I was pleasantly surprised. I've played quite a few native games, but also some running on Proton. I was amazed when Doom (2016) ran with excellent performance. The Witcher 3 is another one with great support. I only cracked and started dual booting Windows when I couldn't get Doom Eternal running properly. It felt like such a betrayal! But since then I've decided to be more pragmatic about things.

I still prefer running things on Linux where possible, and I sometimes buy native Linux games even if I don't know when I'll get around to playing them. There are definitely some rough edges, but I think there's a future for Linux gaming. I think it's mostly due to Valve, which is why I get all my games from Steam.

gigel82• 5 years ago

We depend on Steam too much for this information, we need better (more verifiable) metrics given that Steam has a direct commercial incentive to promote Linux gaming.

I'm not saying they're biased or futzing the data (have no reason not to trust Valve yet), but it would be really nice to have an independent source for this (especially moving forward).

Flott• 5 years ago

The Windows 11 announcement is what made me transition to Ubuntu in the last few weeks. So far, I made the transition on 4 out of 5 of my windows PC.

It's far from smooth enough to become mainstream (with ubuntu at least.)

A few example: Steam wouldn't launch on my PC with an Nvidia card. (At to install some x86 package to make it work).

File sharing just didn't work at all without manually edit the smb.conf file.

Ubuntu randomly ignore my router DNS settings. All my self-hosted stuff requiring local DNS randomly stops working unless I force ubuntu to use my own DNS server.

Some games just don't work on any of my PCs (even if they are gold/platinum in protondb).

And many more stuff that works out of the box with windows. Overall, despite the issues, the experience is still positive and i'm not going back.

MR4D3• 5 years ago

How long before we see “Steam Linux”?

detaro2• 5 years ago

-7 years? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

MR4D3• 5 years ago

Okay - I should have been more specific. Can I run regular KDE or gnome apps (a such as gimp), or perhaps something like VSCode on it?

I thought that it only ran the steam app as opposed to a real desktop?

(pardon my ignorance here - I’m vaguely aware of SteamOS, but never tried it)

MR4D3• 5 years ago

I’m thinking Ubuntu could do it as “Ubuntu for Gamers”. It would probably go a long way to getting a common set of infrastructure for developers to build on.

zzo38computer• 5 years ago

Some problems mentioned on the comments on here, although I can think of other problems too than only the ones mentioned. So, I can think of another possible solution to these and many other problems (although it has limitations, but there always will be): Don't design your game for Windows or Linux; write it for Famicom or Game Boy Advance or whatever (or design your own open source VM if you must, and use that). Emulators are available for many computer systems (including the less common ones), and will do many things for you automatically too that you will not have to deal with by yourself, such as rebinding controls, zoom levels, etc. They will then also the user will not have to worry about malware as much, either.

Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

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