“A dedicated gaming system with an available OS that most people will never directly access has slightly more users than an operating system that is openly antagonistic to most games” is one of the weirdest flexes I’ve seen from the Linux community, and I’ve been around it for about 20 years.
Can’t hear you over the sound of my GPU crashing 😎
amdgpu: segfault in gem_freeShould be easy enough to hear over the sound of my audio not working!
/s (my audio has worked fine for over a decade)
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The steam deck is hands down the most interesting piece of tech (outside of modern smart phones). It’s wild I’ve been able to get Fallout 3 mods working in the crazy windows proton boot shells that just magically worked.
While I wholeheartedly support and use linux for gaming, I rather blame this on the attempts of apple to block gaming on a mac as much as possible (removing 32bit support, the switch to ARM and not using established standards like opengl and vulkan but building their own ‘metal’)
Unless SteamOS is counted separately from every other distro, I’d say it (via steamdeck) accounts for most of the growth.
I don’t see why people emphasize this distinction. If development is driven for the steam deck it’s driven for linux as a whole.
Well, yes, we all benefit. Most often than not, improvements on steamdeck directly translate everywhere else, but not always. I believe the steam client HW acceleration has been broken for nvidia gpus for a while now(?).
Don’t get me wrong, gaming on linux is better than its ever been. But i wish it would take into account linux as a whole and not just one specific piece of hardware.
Then why not count ChromeOS?
If people are running steam games through chromeos then yeah, count it! I would also count windows for ARM as windows…
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Does Steam run on ChromeOS? Because if it does, and it’s included in those stats, then ChromeOS is woefully underrepresented. ChromeOS has more users than all other Linux put together, but doesn’t show as an OS on the Steam survey at all.
The point is that the Steam Deck is as “Linux” as ChromeOS or Android are.
In other words, Linux means absolutely nothing to the end user on these systems because they’re so clamped down as to be useless beyond the provided playground. The Steam Deck is a bit different but even then what percentage of users actually use Linux directly rather than the provided Deck interface?
If a user is using a Steam Deck then they are using Linux though.
No, they’re not. Not anymore than someone using Android is “using Linux” or you’re “using OS/2” when you find an ancient ATM. This is just more goalpost moving by Linux apologists to make themselves feel better about the “year of the Linux desktop” still being at least 6-8 months away.
It’d say ChromeOS and Steam Deck are important less for whether the are “real” linux and more because by increasing the number of users using a linux base you get better stability in gaming on linux.
I use linux as a daily driver, but I couldn’t care less if others do. But if it leads to a better gaming experience then that’s something I can get behind.
SteamOS is real enough distro. AFAIK it even has KDE preinstalled.
Do they not? I have no idea how many steam installs there are on chomebooks but I don’t see why they wouldn’t count towards linux numbers.
Valve controls the data, the data is incorrect. Only trusting steam is just like trusting Elon Musk. Anyone or any company that 100% controls the data should not be 100% be trusted.
Steam has no reason to skew these numbers, and these numbers make sense.
No they don’t make sense, Valve controls who gets the survey, Valve is known to lied, “linux” what?, bot accounts inflatiation, VM possibility counted, etc. We can never confirm these numbers, we can never know if they are based on real humans.
I mean it’s less than 2% of users that seems pretty reasonable lol
Ok, but why to they want to lie about these numbers? Inflate the steamdeck market?
Yes, that is a thing. People have already posted about increase in linux and they assumed Steam Deck. There is no actual number saying it’s the steam deck, it’s just assumed. Plus, this goes back to Valve controlling the numbers, they can sell any number they want and the linux side could be close to the truth. Valve having this much control is the problem i’m talking about.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/07/nearly-40-of-linux-gamers-on-steam-are-on-steam-deck/
So what was that you were saying about nobody know what percent is actually the Steam Deck?
Or maybe this one: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-June-2023-Statistics
Or any of the other sources that break down Steam numbers by distro?
Oh but of course Valve is lying because they totally don’t have literally thousands of developers (many of whom are multi-billion dollar corporations) relying on these numbers for sales projections or anything…
Come on. Use brain.
You totally belong here.
SteamOS is responsible for 42,07% of GNU/Linux usage according to steam
40% of linux steam usage
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$(date +“%Y”) is going to be the Year of
the Linux DesktopLinux gaming.Lmao. True!
Maybe devs will stop targeting Windows and Mac and instead target Windows and Linux. The number of games that have Mac and Windows versions is too damn high.
We have proton and it works well but any little thing to prevent Mac from gaining more popularity is for the better. There is no place in gaming for a platform that doesn’t even let you upgrade the gpu on their desktop machines.
Apple played a big indirect part in helping Linux. Imagine if no company ever had to worry about supporting anything non-Windows. At least knowing they had to record their app for Mac made these things more obvious
I think this is a clear case of a rising tide lifting all boats.
More gamers outside of Microsoft’s ecosystem is good for everyone.
all the game are still inside Microsoft ecosystem. The big player here is Wine which transforms Microsofts system calls to Kernel(Linux system calls).
That’s true to a point. But there’s motivation to release native clients even if Windows compatibility layers exist, and I’ve seen devs do exactly that. For example, Return to Monkey Island was Windows-only but Steam Deck-certified on launch. Shortly after (within a month IIRC) a native Linux version was released as well. This was great for me because even though it was certified for Steam Deck, somehow it didn’t work quite right on my Linux system. Wine/proton is an extra point of failure and it does fail quite a lot.
The way I see it, proton is bootstrapping Linux gaming. Can’t get gamers without games, and you won’t get games without gamers. Proton is fixing that paradox and getting the gamers in first. Native games are already following, and will likely increase right along with Linux’s market share.
Also, “market share” isn’t necessarily as important as absolute numbers. Most games only need to find a small audience to be successful. 2% 20 years ago was easy to ignore. 2% today is quite a big market, and a viable niche in its own right.
Linux sweep
I thought the 2% was SD users on Linux? This is 2% of all Steam users?
Yes, 2% of all steam uses Linux (including steamdecks)
I’m confused why you think only 2% of steam deck users would use Linux when it’s the OS that ships with it. Unless I misunderstood what you meant by SD?
Yes, 2% of all steam uses Linux
That’s awesome.
I’m confused why you think only 2% of steam deck users would use Linux when it’s the OS that ships with it.
I didn’t. I thought it meant 2% of Linux gamers were on SD.
I hope it won’t age like milk after the new game porting thingy will get stable release and thus mac will get some more ports
Long live the revolution!
opens Witcher 3
