Reported Steam Linux Use Still Right Around 1.0%

[lano1106]

OH GOD! Your killing me! Hahahahahhahahha! I don't know what is funnier, the part where you think the OSS radeon driver will ever catch up with the Catalyst driver or that you WANT it to perform on the level of the spastic as heck Catalyst driver! Hahahhahahahhahaha!

Please, if you can, explain why you think that I am wrong. I'm basing my opinion on what AMD did and where they allocated their scarce resources.

- Pierre Boudier left AMD last month.
- They have opened a lot of HW specs.
- OSS AMD team has been very active.
- HW video decoding is much better with OSS (XvBA is broken right now)
- Major perf gain in OSS driver
- OpenCL support introduced in OSS

Yes catalyst is better now but I haven't seen major breakthrough in catalyst lately. They seem to do the bare minimum. Some bug fixes and add support to new cards. That is it.

If the same momentom continues, it is clear to me that radeon OSS driver will eventually catch up catalyst. That is my interpretation on the long term view that AMD has taken. Feel free to disagree. In the end, I do not care which driver I use, I just want the best of my HW. OSS is better as it lets user fix bugs themselves...

Dangling Pointer: I have finally succombed by purchasing Metro: LL last night at 13.99$ With such a low price tag, I could not resist. Lets hope the developper will continue supporting the title and bring it eventually on par with the Windows version as the platform enhancement allows it.

[CFWhitman]

Fascinating! So Linux isn't at around 24% as some of the delusional rabid Linux fans claim..... It's still exactly at 1%. Just like well, forever.

Well, I don't recall seeing anyone claim 24%. Still, the percentage of Steam users on Linux (which may or may not be accurately reflected by Valve's numbers) does not equate to the percentage of desktop users of Linux. If you look at hits at Wikimedia sites (including Wikipedia), the percentage for desktop Linux is around 2%, and it's been growing fairly steadily for the past several years.

If the growth keeps up, then Linux could easily have a much more significant percentage in not too many years because this kind of growth tends to be geometric. That is, if it was 1% five years ago and is 2% now, then 4% five years from now might be a conservative estimate. Of course, you never know beforehand when it might grow faster or when the growth might wane and the market for it reach saturation.

[CFWhitman]

Which, again, is handled install time. VERY few instances of needing to adjust anything after initial install to make the program work. And driver installs are largely painless now, since Windows gets the latest certified driver automatically on device detection now.

Software updates are far from painless. Also I just manually installed the latest video card driver on my brother's Windows 7 machine for him since it wasn't up to date along with updating some software that was a potential security threat (like Adobe Flash and Reader). I also removed expired anti-malware software and installed Microsoft Security Essentials along with Malwarebytes to give him some protection and clean off a malware that was on it.

And to be fair, Android is having its own AV/Spyware issues, far worse then Windows is at the moment. You should be happy you aren't targeted as much as OS's that are actually used by the public at large.

This is just completely untrue. It's way easier to stay malware free in Android than in Windows, and it's way easier in Windows than it used to be. Pretty much all the Android malware is in the form of Trojans. If you don't install questionable apps, you won't get infected. I have yet to see an Android malware in real life, and I've seen plenty of devices. Most Windows malware these days is also in the form of Trojans, though you will see the occasional Flash/Java/Adobe Reader exploit.

[trougnouf]

The Steam experience in Linux is noticeably worse than Windows too. To be fair, I use Arch Linux so there are a couple of extra steps involved but still, this was my experience:

• Activate the multilib repo (ugh, do I have to? Everything else I use is 64-bit native)
• Download and install Steam (very easy, let pacman do its work)
• Launch Steam, login and install TF2 (again, very easy, but it doesn't play too well with tiling WMs like i3. An issue I don't have with any other program)
• Launch TF2. It seems to load fine, but hangs before the menu shows up. Some googling later, it turns out I need to enable the en_US.UTF-8 locale in /etc/locale.gen. Why? I use en_GB and only that because I'm British. And why does it fail so fatally? No other program has this problem.
• The time to load TF2 seems to be around 20-30 seconds as opposed to the 10 or so seconds in Windows
• Join a server. I then endure an excruciatingly long load time while the CPU fan spins manically due to the game doing...something. Joining a game takes as much as two minutes. On the same hardware in Windows, it takes 5-10 seconds. Max.
• As a minor point, the fonts look distinctly worse in Linux, all thin and spindly.

Apart from all that, actual gameplay is perfectly fine. No graphical issues, lag or stutter when using the Catalyst drivers. But until stuff like the above is resolved, it is literally faster for me to reboot into Windows and load a game than play in Linux.

Seriously? You are using Arch and you are complaining about having to read a few simple instructions (activate a repository) on the Wiki? This makes no sense, if it bothers you to do so you are using the wrong distribution.

As far as the "real issues" you mentioned go;
- UTF8 is meant to be a universal standard that is compatible for everyone, why should they bother with your limited encoding choice? Anyway that's on the Arch documentation.
- Issues with obscure desktop environments are a real issue (Steam tends to act weird with e17 as well), but I wouldn't call that noticeably worse than Windows. I doubt that Steam was tested on whatever alternative environments are available on Windows (KDE?). Those environments probably represent about 1% of the 1% Linux userbase so there is virtually no incentive to get them working properly.
- Games performances have nothing to do with the Steam client.

Arch isn't even supported (and as long as they get it working on a standardized/open environment I think it is reasonable to expect unsuported distributions to take the necessaries steps needed to ensure a smooth Steam experience), yet everything works out of the box in almost all cases.

[icebox]

for me it had the opposite effect

I was running slackware on my personal desktop. When steam for linux came out I installed it and even bought a few games more to show support, but it really got me back into gaming and so eventually I ended up upgrading my video card and since I was already using a windows vm for lightroom I switched to windows 8.1 completely. Besides gaming and lightroom most of the work I do at home is inside vm's anyway so changing the host didn't impact that at all. Should I be ashamed ?

[Gps4l]

Seriously? You are using Arch and you are complaining about having to read a few simple instructions (activate a repository) on the Wiki? This makes no sense, if it bothers you to do so you are using the wrong distribution.

As far as the "real issues" you mentioned go;
- UTF8 is meant to be a universal standard that is compatible for everyone, why should they bother with your limited encoding choice? Anyway that's on the Arch documentation.
- Issues with obscure desktop environments are a real issue (Steam tends to act weird with e17 as well), but I wouldn't call that noticeably worse than Windows. I doubt that Steam was tested on whatever alternative environments are available on Windows (KDE?). Those environments probably represent about 1% of the 1% Linux userbase so there is virtually no incentive to get them working properly.
- Games performances have nothing to do with the Steam client.

Arch isn't even supported (and as long as they get it working on a standardized/open environment I think it is reasonable to expect unsuported distributions to take the necessaries steps needed to ensure a smooth Steam experience), yet everything works out of the box in almost all cases.

I just like to respond to the Arch is not supported remark. ( I use openSUSE )

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux