Steam Linux Usage Still On The Decline

[LubosD]

I'm not surprised, because even I'm not so active on Steam any more.

And the reason? I bought most of the good games in February, now it's just indie projects of greatly varying quality.

[LubosD]

It's the fact that window managers and DEs aren't up to snuff.

You're seriously kidding, right? Compared to what? Windows?

[nightmarex]

AMD drivers aren't that bad okay? Gaming on Ubuntu may suck, but that's because Ubuntu is the posterior of the Linux world.

To those who find DE's lacking... WTF do you use your computer for? To play with your desktop? Now, there are legitimate complaints to be had here... just not stupid eye candy complaints...

Okay on to the games. VSync solves tears. As for the lack of variety.. Yeah but still have much more games than we had =). I have been backing kickstarter games to make sure games come to linux, you can help for free by petition game companies start threads on their boards about Linux support. I know I try and fail a lot but think it raises awareness.

I never get petitioned not since I only had steam in wine... So I don't know what's up with that.

[startzz]

You're seriously kidding, right? Compared to what? Windows?

Exactly Its very simple - gnome 2 died, plus it never was completely fixed, gnome 3 - now that is a joke, no kidding kde is kind of broken because of facts, that its very slow, unstable, and finally, it looks like http://screwednews.com/wp-content/up...too_much_2.jpg ... xfce is broken - no vsync, by default it has 0 functionality, and im not even going waste time on other home made "pron". And surprise surprise, so much hated unity actually is the only hope of this sinking ship, though it has very limited functionality and new versions always comes with new set of bugs and so on and so on ... Not to mention, that every de becomes even worse due to bad linux graphics drivers, it doesnt matter what you have, intel, radeon or geforce... And that is a fact, because linux world cant just do things good - like windows with its rock-solid de, or mac - these os has 1 de for everything, and what is on linux ? 1 de for 1 thing ? bitch, please

[Artemis3]

Great way to welcome new users.

Yes he is at fault. Did he check before installing which hardware he had? Do you blindly purchase xbox peripherals for your playstation? Do you buy windows programs for your MacOS? Do you think any generic cheap windows machine can run all software ever written?

If the user has incompatible hardware, don't lie to them. Its best to not bother unless you are ready to reverse engineer and code (hack) your way in; or replace any offending devices with things known to work.

There shouldn't be any "right" or "wrong" hardware; it should all work.

This is impossible, because there are devs (like you) who don't care about other OSes. The same happens with hardware manufacturers, not only they refuse to make proper drivers, they also won't document anything so others could write them. This is not the OS fault, I can make a piece of proprietary hardware with linux only drivers that would never work with windows or macos. How is Microsoft and Apple at fault? There is far less macosx certified hardware so buyers check if their OS is supported before purchase, which is what some people fail to do with linux.

The only things that are expected to work "universally" with "any os", is precisely hardware fully documented or with open source drivers which can be ported to other OSes, or things adhering to open standards such as USB mass storage, etc. (Eg. anything working with gNewsense or Openbsd).

For the last time, for Windows users: Ubuntu = Linux.

Obvious lie quickly revealed with a minimal online search. After the Unity debacle, Canonical has been losing users like there is no tomorrow. Canonical is currently too busy playing with phones and tablets to be of any use for the PC platform. Their distro is fine, as a base for non unity desktops thanks to Debian roots. This is why Lubuntu or Xubuntu can serve Steam perfectly with none of the Unity issues or slowdowns; Same distro, different desktop.

Also windows users are not complete idiots, they know how to use a web search and read things in forums like this before trying a different OS, the smart ones will use a second machine for experiments and EXPECT some of their hardware to fail, not because of the OS, but because the manufacturer did not explicitly support said OS.

So basically, don't bother using the second largest GPU manufacturer on the OS...

Correct. It is Amd's sole fault not supporting Linux properly, or fully documenting their hardware. Intel is doing the right thing, but Nvidia works where Amd fails. Without source or documentation, nobody but them can fix things. This is why wine developers don't bother with Amd. A few selected Amd gpus work, but the work required to research which one and how, is beyond new users patience or time. Hence the formula: Lubuntu + nvidia (or variant which avoids Unity).

With lubuntu, it is a simple click to the steam.deb to install and be done. Other distros might be better, but a little extra work might be needed, as Valve targeted ubuntu (packages in their repos) for dependencies.

Your post, basically, highlights why most devs like me don't bother with Linux. Compared to Windows, its still a toy.

As evidenced by the majority of servers in production today, most would argue its exactly other way around. Some people keep windows solely FOR gaming, as in, TOYing.

Sometimes heroic efforts are made to make offending hardware work by determined people digging their way into reverse engineering, that is no small feat, and its often unpaid and thankless (even prosecuted if you live in the wrong place); while you rest in your laurels blaming the OS.

[Artemis3]

Maybe it's my fault. And don't worry, I buy NVIDIA. And I've never had NVIDIA problems on Linux.

But stuff that was near flawless on Ubuntu 10.10 / 11.04 (say, Doom 3, Quake 4... XBMC) is really bad on 12.04.2. The performance problems are not in NVIDIA's lap, that's for sure. Now maybe I don't have some configuration set right or whatever. But I just don't have the patience to deal with some of that stuff anymore. If I boot to Windows 7 my games run fine out of the box.

What is the main change from Ubuntu 11.04 and 12.04? Unity. I gave you a solution: Go with Lubuntu (currently 13.04), problem solved. Lubuntu = light classic windows like desktop. There are other alternatives that might work if you want to try.

[Artemis3]

All open source drivers are total crap and useless, and proprietary blob is just far behind windows! ( thanks kernel devs, gpl fanatics...) Anyway, i won't buy hardware for the software, i preffer to buy software for the hardware i have !

Even the wi-fi drivers are bad, and can often drop your network, add more lag and etc.

You are getting this because you have the wrong attitude. You HAVE to buy hardware that works with your software, not the other way around, else you are chained to a single vendor (ie. Microsoft) and always hope for the best. Wi-fi issues are usually a sign of ndiswrapper and friends, or low quality blobs (proprietary code load at run time).

When a hardware misbehaves in Linux, it means the manufacturer did not care, and often did not support the use of that hardware with alternative OSes. If you buy blindly, you are supporting this attitude. What you must do, is purchase from manufacturers who DO care about your preferred OS. The fact in linux is that nvidia is proprietary crap that works, whereas Amd fails, and intel is open and getting there.

Open source drivers are not crap, it is what they have achieved without help from the manufacturer (often disobeying their rules). The minimal 2d support is usually there because some people wanted to use their server with embedded hardware without risking using unaudited blobs that pose both security and reliability risks.

[Artemis3]

I was hoping Steam would make Torchlight available for Linux, but so far it does not seem to be there. Also I accidentally purchased Torchlight 2 because I thought it would work with Linux, but I was wrong. So I wonder how many Linux users have done that.

Torchlight 2 works with wine just fine. Torchlight 1 has faceless warriors but other than that it works fine. They hired a single person for that port... Considering how other games perform (native and wine), i see no reason they couldn't do a decent port in the first place.

I'm doing purchases of linux games only, and its easy to spot the lack of a penguin logo before hitting the green button You can also scroll down to the requirements section for each individual title in a game pack.

[johnc]

What is the main change from Ubuntu 11.04 and 12.04? Unity. I gave you a solution: Go with Lubuntu (currently 13.04), problem solved. Lubuntu = light classic windows like desktop. There are other alternatives that might work if you want to try.

One of those alternatives that I know works for sure is Windows 7.

And as a bonus it's already installed on my system and has a game library.

[Hamish Wilson]

One of those alternatives that I know works for sure is Windows 7.

And not Windows 8?