Steam Hardware & Software Survey - Go Linux! :)
Steam Hardware & Software Survey - Go Linux! :)
Linux surpassed MacOS in marketshare for the first ever time this month. Let's go! :)
Proton is doing god's work!
False alarm everyone. I run Garuda but have been playing around with Nobara and I filled it out on both distros on the same machine. Sorry to get everyone’s hopes up.
Isn't this just the Steam Deck?
Probably, though does that actually matter?
The SteamDeck is showing people that Linux can in fact game. And while we're always saying "ThE yEaR oF lInUx!" This is actually a huge step in the right direction.
Agreed. I have a deck and I'm now definitely gonna switch my main pc from Win10 to Linux. Steam deck desktop mode helped show me I could be comfortable using it, and the deck in general showed the gaming support is there nowadays.
I now see no reason to not put Linux on my desktop. Just deciding on which distros to check out. Probably mint. Maybe garuda...
Hope this trend continues to strengthen over the next few years!
I do wonder how Microsoft buying up basically the entirety of the western game dev world will influence this in the future though
If Proton keeps getting better, it won't matter. I mean it matters, because this is clearly where governments should step in and bust up the monopolies, but they obviously aren't going to.
No wonder! I've lately noticed that some non-AAA games run way better on Linux than Windows on my computer (5950X, RTX3090). For some reason Barotrauma seems to lag heavily while playing on Windows but runs buttersmooth on Linux. Valheim has similar effect as well.
Also I have already decided that Win10 is going to be the last Windows version on my machine ever. Gaming on Linux has gotten so damn good over the last few years that I see no reason upgrading my Windows installation anymore.
I wish that would be the case for VR too. But with VR there is lots of stuff just not being supported unfortunately. If you have any Headset that basically isn't the Index good luck using Linux. Also there are still Software issues with certain stuff there that won't properly work or not at all. I once tried Linux but unfortunately ran into several issues which caused me going back to windows 11.
@ReverseModule Looks like the growth comes mostly from Windows (-0.56%) users switching to Linux (+0.52%). MacOS (+0.05%) users mostly seem just to upgrade MacOS and are mostly unaffected by the overall numbers. Inside of the Windows numbers, Windows 10 (-1.56%) users switching to either Windows 11 (+0.92%) or choosing an alternative platform (-0.56%). Numbers do not add up perfectly, because these statistics are estimation based on asking randomly a fraction of the user base.
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That's a good point. There are a heck of a lot of people primarily on game pass, now, especially.
I also wonder if they account for people who dual-boot Linux and Windows, and who game only on Windows or who use both depending on the game.
Does a steam deck owner with a Windows desktop gaming PC turn up twice in these numbers, in both the Linux and the Windows users count, do you think? Because then the Linux number would go up 1 without the Windows number going down.
Edit: aside from this, SteamOS and desktop Linux distros aren't necessarily comparable enough to be throwing together in the same category. A lot of the things that make SteamOS a smart choice for the deck, where they can control and optimize for the hardware, don't apply to desktops the same way.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when Windows 12 comes out, since people are unhappy with 11 and thus maybe more willing to jump ship, and Microsoft has a tendency to alternate between releasing good and bad OS's.
Could be a statistical margin of error.
Nah, the increase is 0.52%. Could be a little overblown? Yeah. Could be completely wrong? Very doubtful. Next month it will probably drop a little and keep climbing steadily but surely. But the fact that for this month Linux gamers are more than MacOS gamers for the first time is at the very least very impressive! :)
Valve isn't showing us their methodology (sample size, sample selection mechanism, rate at which people decline the surveys, how the hardware information is gathered by steam once the survey is agreed to, etc), so it's hard to say whether or not a 0.52% increase is accurate, or whether would meet the p-value test of being less than 5% likely to be the result of chance.
Statistically speaking, sometimes if you flip a coin ten times, it'll land as heads ten times in a row, even though every flip could go either way. Based on that particular sample of 10 coin flips, it'd look like the chance of a coin landing heads up is 100% - obviously not the case in reality. Another time, you might flip a coin ten times and get ten tails, seemingly the exact opposite and equally dramatically wrong result. Larger sample sizes reduce the risk of such a coincidence occurring across the entire sample, and P-values are helpful for checking the likelihood of whether a fluke such as this may have affected the result of a study.
Even when studies and surveys do have p < .05 (aka, the likelihood that the result is purely caused by chance is less than 5%, aka statistically significant), there's still that up-to-5% chance that the result is just random luck affecting the sample. And p-values don't account for things like sample bias or other methodological errors, like if valve were preferentially serving the survey to more Linux users than Valve users, or if Linux users are just more likely to respond to the steam survey (because they want that Linux number to go up so Linux gets more support) than Windows users, and that kind of thing. Or for p-hacking shenanigans.
All that said, a small increase makes sense intuitively if it's including the steam deck, and especially considering the unpopularity of Windows 11, and especially since I'm given to understand the Linux numbers have been slowly increasing for a while? But even so, the point I'm making here is I don't think we know enough to definitively say that it's not just luck.
It might be that more Mac users are moving away from Steam as their gaming client - from my experience, it's very glitchy, and hasn't been properly updated in years
The client on macos was buggy as hell, but after the UI refresh update a month or two back it's fine again now
Oh cool, I haven't used it in a while. Good to know!
And isn't there extremely limited support for M1 Mac on Steam? As Mac users upgrade their machines, they can't continue to use Steam like they used to.
My anecdotal experience is that Apple silicon support is not usually a major problem. Plenty of stuff seems to be fine through Rosetta. The worse case is 32 bit only games which are unsupported in modern macos versions regardless of CPU arch.
You can use the client just fine. It's just some games that won't work. We'll see what GamePortingToolkit makes in term of difference. Heroic Games Launcher has apparently made it fairly simple to add it on Mac ala Proton. (I haven't had time to dig into it yet, so I'm just going from what I read in updates/release notes)
How is Linux game compatibility doing in current year?
How about user experience? Should one still expect to have to troubleshoot things on a consistent basis?
Considering doing a rebuild of my win 10 system in the near future and am getting tired of all these obnoxious pop-ups that I can't disable asking me to "finish setting up my PC" by connecting to /signing up for various services.
Pretty good. I haven't had to play around with proton launch options in a good while, Valve and the Heroic team have done a good job making it all plug and play. I don't generally play the latest releases and am not really interested in multiplayer though, so YMMV.
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The user experience, and required troubleshooting, is still obnoxious. Even on the steam deck it's obnoxious. It's just not reliable, much as people hype it up. You'll have to do a lot of troubleshooting at unexpected times when you really don't want to be troubleshooting or might be pressed for time.
If you have an nvidia graphics card you can expect trouble with drivers, too.
If you have Windows 10 pro (or I think there's a workaround to enable it if you just have the Home version), you can go into the group policy editor and disable those annoying pop-ups. You can even disable auto-updates, if you want to, or control how they work. And you can disable most of their telemetry. Windows 10 has a lot of flexibility if you know where to look/figure it out. They make it annoying to deal with, yes, but it has never been has horrible as Linux is for me whenever I've tried it, and it's actually reliable.
Edit: also worth mentioning, depending on the games you play, a lot of multiplayer games' anti-cheat systems do not work on Linux at all, so you can't play those games on it.
I use Linux Mint at home and Windows 10 and 11 at work. The UI is basically interchangeable, I use both in the same manner.
I've had zero reliability issues and Mint was easier to install than Windows when I did it 4 years ago (not had to reinstall it yet, just kept on updating).
Games wise, I just play stuff through steam or classic emulators and it works well enough that typing this is the most I've thought about how it works for a long time.
I'm guessing the people who complain are running some gnarly full-custom linux on new hardware and trying to get the latest games to run ... that was once me, I now use a PlayStation for newer games because PC gaming was just a bottomless money and time pit.
woot