8mo ago

Linux has reached 2.32% in Steam Hardware Survey for May 2024

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I bought a Steam Deck.
- You are valid, and we love you
- I run Bazzite. We are sort of the same.
- I wish I could... it's not being sold on my country :(

There is one dude with a Windows 8 laptop that turns it on once per month just to take this survey.
- *8.1
  Due to the optimizations Windows 8.1 is my favorite Windows version. When I compared it to Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon on my old (now dead) laptop, it performed slightly faster. It also somehow beat Windows XP which is what that thing was made for. Although a part of that could have been that half of the drivers only worked in XP, so it had more to load.
  Maybe if they properly called it Windows 9, it would have caught on. It was definitely different enough from 8.
  
  What does "perform slightly faster" mean? Boot time? App loading? CPU perf?
  
  Maybe if they properly called it Windows 9, it would have caught on.
  "Windows 9" was a no-go due to lazy programmers. Could have gone with "Windows Nine" though, which would have brought the naming in line with "Xbox One"

Thats fuckin amazing.
I can still remember when we celebrated linux being at 0.8% and it was not long ago.
- I think Linux reached 0.8% in 2018 iirc.
  It's definitely accelerated a bit in the last two years.
  Alas, all it takes is for Microsoft to tone down the insanity before it will plateau again. So best hope for now is too increase it as much as possible by welcoming refugees before Windows 12 comes out. Maybe gain another percent or two.
  
  The rise of Linux in this is absolutely driven by SteamOS and the Steam Deck, let's be honest here. This narrative of people escaping Windows because of W11 changes that pretty much only get reported here is... a bit of wishful thinking.
  
  It's in Microsoft's best interest right now to keep Linux slightly popular, because it helps them fight off antitrust cases

Looks like GoL has a plot over time. Linux adoption is starting to hockey stick, definitely above linear growth, this is getting exciting! I would guess, if it hits somewhere around 5-10% and keeps this hockey stick shape, we'll really start to see the game industry justify giving it more attention.
This will come with both good and bad, I expect it's only a matter of time before some game tries a native kernel level anti-cheat, aka root kit, on Linux.
- Thanks for pointing that out! I made it into a shitty meme over at !linuxmemes@lemmy.world
  
  https://feddit.nl/post/16112837

It seems comedic but I would imagine when one in 50 of your users falls into a certain cohort you start to consider them in your designs.
- And that’s the most naïve way of looking at it. With more data you may be able to see if Linux users favour certain genres of games over others, so the number may be a lot higher than 2% for your game in particular.
- There were some reports from game devs who said that the big reports from Linux users was worth it just for that.
  https://playingtux.com/articles/developers-dv-rings-saturn-very-satisfied-bug-reports-linux-users?lang=en
  He actually pulled together stats for it all, and it was 5.8% sales making 38% of the big reports, which tended to be high quality.
  So from his experience as an independent game dev, he said it was worth it just for the QA you get out of it.
  I think a lot of the libraries and tooling being updated to be more platform agnostic helps too. It's not "press button to support Linux", but it's getting a lot easier than needing to rewrite your engine for every platform.
- English speaking it's a solid 5% now, so I'd say it's one in twenty.

More than 50% of people are using Win10 and M$ are about to stop supporting it. That's trouble brewing.
- No it is not. MS stopping 10 support early sucks, but the average user doesn't know or care.
  For reference, by the same point in Win10's lifetime, 40% of users were still on Win 7, and by the time they stopped Win7 support it was 20% still. Phone manufacturers advertising ongoing software support has made this a bit more relevant or prominent, but most PC users will only update as their OS tells them to, and if the OS goes silent they'll just keep chugging along. We know this, it's how it's been forever. "People still on Windows 7" was a bit of a meme even at the time.
  
  How could you not mention Windows XP in this comment. MS kept up support for a surprisingly long time while encouraging everyone to upgrade (and rightly so), but even 5 years after they completely dropped support, they had to release a security update to protect against a widespread attack because a ton of organizations were still using XP.
  
  This.
  The first time users start to change OS is when Chrome or Steam doesn't work because of the unsupported OS version.

We can push for 5% I can feel it!

I'm doing my part.

I’m pleasantly surprised Linux is way ahead of OSX. This looks really good!
- Hmm. What games are for Mac OS? I have never played a game on a mac ever. Not even seen what can be played.
  
  Not many are officially supported, but there are a few. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one surprising example. Many Paradox games are also supported, like Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley, Terraria and Hades as well.
  
  At least chess:
  
  https://i.imgur.com/jSJPJ1x.mp4
  Source: https://archive.org/details/Computer1985_6
  ^/j
  
  Not many indeed. There's a switch in your settings to only show you games for your designated OS, or there are symbols below the games' vignettes that tells you which OS is supported: win / mac / steam
  Frustrating is famous games from the 32 bits era, where they would be available to Mac but work only on macos pre-10.14 and not from 10.15 when macos went fully 64bits. Which means on top of reduced availability, some of this availability would only work on a mac from 2010 or so.
  
  You can play windows games on mac with using a crossover (uses wine and some open source software)
  Here is a demonstration
  https://youtu.be/CBoKIFMnPvQ?si=8axV557SMMroF2co&t=533
  But I don't think you would buy a mac for games

Impressed by all the folks on Win7 and 8.
Also surprised to see double the MacOS users
- One of my old boxes is still win7. I'm never upgrading it and I keep it as a media thingo. I have an xp box in the garage somewhere, but I may have cannibalized the parts at some point. I'm pretty sure it works.
  
  Mpd.

OK. The share of SteamOS within the Linux OS has increased by 3%.
So the amount of the active steam decks per month is about
0.4534 *2.32 *0.01 *150000000 ≈ 1,577,832
- If you look into the data Steam OS Holo s listed and it is 45.3%. Arch separately is second at 7.9% and then third is the Flatpak installs across all Linux versions at 6%.
  The changes are more difficult to interpret as Linux is growing overall so changes between Linux distros are difficult. For example a small decline in overall share may still represent an increase in total numbers. While Steam OS is up another 3% points, other distros combined are up more - Ubuntu and PopOS combined are up 5% points. That suggests the Linux growth is split between Steam Deck and PC users rather than purely one or the other dominating.
  
  Thank you, friend.
- @Vincente @mrMADAFAKA I think no, it's not. If you go into Steam statistics and ask to only show the results per OS, you can see the statistics only for Linux. There you can see how much of each Linux distro is being used. Arc is not the first.

A lot of that is probably steam decks
- Essentially Arch Linux graph minus something.

I'm surprised Arch is that high compared to other distros.
Also interesting that people are actually switching to windows 11, everyone I know is staying on win10 as long as possible because they're more used to the interface.
- One of the things that got me to change my gaming desktop from Mint to Arch was the fact that you get the cutting-edge version of everything; kernel and amdgpu being the most important, but also getting the latest version of Lutris and things is nice too. Brought me from "usually about 50 fps outdoors in Elden Ring" to "usually about 60 fps" on the same machine.
  Makes sense for a gaming machine to only include the services you actually want, which Arch enables. Supports my hardware better too - my audio gear works perfectly in Pipewire but is ropey in ALSA, so rather than "install Mint -> install Pipewire -> remove ALSA -> hope ALSA is gone", the sequence is "install Arch -> install Pipewire", which make more sense.
  Other cutting-edge rolling release distros are available, of course, but once you learn Arch, it makes a lot of sense for gaming.
  
  BTW: ALSA is never gone. It's the kernel sound driver. And Pipewire is more or less just a helper. But underneath it all it's still ALSA.
  
  Don't forget the AUR. It's so much easier to use yay than it is to go to GitHub to manually check for updates/download/install a deb or rpm file.
- SteamOS is Arch-based. Could be that.

I think Proton is the smartest thing Valve has ever done. Thanks to that, Steam is going to get about 90% of all the Windows gamers switching over to Linux.

I so very much hope that the Linux gaming effect increases. Not only for gaming, but for the productivity world. If development of these 'compatibility layers' (Wikipedia) like Proton, Wine improves and maybe win-native software (thinking of CAD in particular) can be made working reliably on Linux using these packages, one or the other big player might adapt. That would be a much cheaper way of expanding the software's range than developing and maintaining a native Linux port...
... and maybe I am too naive.

I look at this and wonder
Why gog galaxy and epic client were ported to macos and linux users still didn't get native game binaries from epic?
Edit:
I didn't realize comments are formatted in markdown

We. Love. To. See. It.

noice

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