Reported Steam Linux Use Still Right Around 1.0%

[Guest]

just trying to understand what you are saying.

I am using steam under Arch. The experience is not perfect but it is ok. I have tried Serious Sam 3 and the small issues that I have encountered are:

* Having about a frame rate around 30 fps at 1920x1080 with a Radeon HD 7970.
* Small sound skips during cutscenes
* Had to workaround the STEAM_RUNTIME to have 7.1 sound. openal lib shipped with steam sandbox does not support that.

How exactly using a different distro, lets say Ubuntu, would have made the experience better?

Is the ALSA fix to the sound driver to enable HDMI 7.1 sound on Radeon cards available on Ubuntu?

In Ubuntu you won't have problems ricequackers experienced in Arch:

• Activate the multilib repo (ugh, do I have to? Everything else I use is 64-bit native)
• 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.
• As a minor point, the fonts look distinctly worse in Linux, all thin and spindly. (not sure about this one)

[Guest]

Of course, all of them are true FOSS games, none of them commercial content distributed anywhere for pay. Hell, the authors of 0ad (my favorite) go so far as to remind everyone that the game is free and there is no need to pay for copies offered by someone else!

I realize there are many cool games on Linux which are free. However, I meant commercial games and point was some people stick to Windows, because they pirate games.

[haplo602]

Hmm ... I have Steam on Gentoo, no problems so far. Bought the Half-Life collection, Serious Sam 3, X3 Albion Prelude, CS: Source ....

No issues with any of the games so far. Source engine performance is decent, SS3 lags a bit around 30-40 fps at 1920x1200 after some tuning (needs a new GPU probably).

Got the survey last month for the first time. The collected info was surprisingly correct ;-)

[nomadewolf]

Although the progress is fast, IMO.
The best titles are still missing.
Personally, when they get any of the Total War titles in Linux you can count me in.
Until there, it's windows for me

[Azpegath]

In your Steam client click on Help > System Information. This is the data sent when the window pops and asks you if you would like to participate in the survey.

Theres no reason why this information couldn't be submitted at login for all users.

Exactly my point.

[Azpegath]

Although the progress is fast, IMO.
The best titles are still missing.
Personally, when they get any of the Total War titles in Linux you can count me in.
Until there, it's windows for me

You mean like this?

[Adarion]

After reading a complaining article like this before I actually installed steam on my Gentoo. Still did not see any kind of survey yet. But I wonder if they do not see downloads of clients, connects of their user agents - I mean every time you start up that thing connects to your online account unless you set it to offline. That should give them some numbers.
Maybe also a lot of people still search for games offered on Linux and not W32 only, and maybe some of us have to fight with GPU drivers for some applications.

[DanglingPointer]

Absolutely. I'm looking forward to make my Linux box my 'next-gen' console. However, I haven't bought Metro yet.

While it is a nice effort and bold move for the company, I cannot convince myself to settle for a lesser experience than the one I would have on Windows for identical hardware. I'm waiting the OSS radeon driver to be on par with Catalyst or AMD to get their things right or maybe to see that the Metro dev will offer updates to their games as the Linux platform improve.

It is arguably the best looking native linux game that exists to date even if it isn't on par with Windows.

I've clocked it mate, with an R9-290X with the very first driver with the slider maxed out. And the game ran smooth.
It is the best looking game I've got on Linux. The game itself is awesome in the sense that it has a unique storyline from a foreign (Russian) perspective with an ambience and back story that is quite immersive once you follow the rabbit down the hole and look into the Metro-LL universe.

It may not have all the eye-candy settings that its DirectX counter part has. But it will still be, like I said, the single best looking (subjective of course, but I'm not alone) and most advanced AAA game available to Linux especially when you have a rig that can max it out. That said however, I played the first third of the game on a HD 5870 at 5 bars on the graphics slider before I upgraded to the R9-290X; and even then it was the best looking game on linux and that was on a 5yr old card!

[dh04000]

I'm waiting the OSS radeon driver to be on par with Catalyst or AMD.....

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!

[ChrisXY]

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!

Well, I have a HD 7970M that runs with the - as we all know - still very underperforming radeonsi.

These things that I have tested recently ran much better with radeonsi + PRIME than with fglrx + "official" hybrid support (that's also broken in many ways):
Distance Alpha
xonotic
wine - skyrim
wine - dead space