Reported Steam Linux Use Still Right Around 1.0%

[ricequackers]

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.

[tmpdir]

WTF? There are VERY few games for linux, the vast majority of the time I'm just playing Steam games from wine.

WTF??? you are right... But I did not say there are a lot of games for linux. I said the amount of games HAS GROWN SIGNIFICANTLY.

Don't trust me, just compare the amount of users and linux games now and the amount of games en linux users when the first linux games arrived on steam... WTF?

[Guest]

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.

Linux will eat windoze market share for breakfast when SteamBox comes out. The same as it did in mobile space. Where's windows in mobile? Nowhere.

[ChrisXY]

Your argument proves itself wrong .

The amount of valve-linux-games has grown significantly, althougt the amount of valve-linux-players has not. This concludes your arguments is false.

But what about CS:GO and Portal 2? These are the games most people would want to play (except for dota2 for some reason).

[Guest]

Your argument proves itself wrong .

The amount of valve-linux-games has grown significantly, althougt the amount of valve-linux-players has not. This concludes your arguments is false.

I would say there are more factors to consider

I don't think so. While we have more games on Linux there's still lack of most AAA titles. Most people don't care about some indie games.

[Guest]

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:

You wanted to say the Steam experience in Arch Linux.

[nisheet_lall]

Performance still poor.

I have bought around 10 games on Steam ever since it came out on Linux. To be frank, I never really buy any games, I did so to support to Steam for Linux.

4 Months down the line and the performance is disappointing.

I have played Half Life, Killing Floor, Complete Counter Strike Pack. There is a huge difference in performance.

Specs: Lenovo Ideapad 570
Linux Mint 16 Petra 64 Bit, Windows Ultimate 7
Nvidia GE Force 520 M (Optimus) using bumblebee.
3GB RAM.
i5 2nd Gen 2.3GHZ CPU.


Issues seen:

In Killing floor, Half life and CS. The Screen starts to shake in between, we have to press the Esc button to make it stable at times.
In Killing the floor, the performance is laggy, graphics is way too ugly compared to its Windows counterpart. Maybe some problem with their OpenGL implementation.

After 4 Months of Linux gaming, I forcefully had to login to Windows to Enjoy the game.

Hoping the Driver community (NVIDIA I am still waiting for a proper Optimus implementation for Linux), and for the manufacturers, if you are going to make paid games for Linux, atleast keep them at par with Windows version, dont treat Linux users as 3rd Class users.

[tmpdir]

I don't think so. While we have more games on Linux there's still lack of most AAA titles. Most people don't care about some indie games.

Sure... basically you are saying his arguments are wrong because there is at least a third argument: AAA titles.

I can live with being right

personally I think having more games, even AAA titles is not enough to get more linux users on such a short time period. When there are enough AAA games it still takes years to get a significant growth in linux games. Why would anyone switch to linux now if they already have a new and modern OS that works as well? maybe better? When they need to buy something... thats te moment the reconsider.

The steambox is offcourse a game changer, this could boost all this.

[dh04000]

4 Months down the line and the performance is disappointing.

Nvidia GE Force 520 M (Optimus) using bumblebee.

Hoping the Driver community (NVIDIA I am still waiting for a proper Optimus implementation for Linux), and for the manufacturers, if you are going to make paid games for Linux, atleast keep them at par with Windows version, dont treat Linux users as 3rd Class users.

All of your issues with mini-freezes and poor performance is due to bumblebee [I have the same issue ]. Its just not performant. There are processes that just freeze it and it really kills performance.

[johnc]

We'll see what comes out of the January dev conference.

I think someone needs to make a Linux distro based around SteamOS to give people incentive to move over to Linux.