February 2014 Steam Hardware Survey Shows Linux At 1.3%

[cynical]

No, that's not bullshit, that is a reality from my own personal experience. I was on Ubuntu 13.4 using Gnome Shell DE. When I upgraded to 13.10 I had the following regressions:

* Gnome Shell became sluggish even though I am on i7 quad core with HD 3000 graphics.
* VirtualBox no longer integrates the mouse correctly.
* Putting the PC to sleep does NOT lock it, i.e. you wake the PC up and you are into the desktop without being asked for a password!!
* Steam with DRI_PRIME doesn't render correctly unless I change view mode and change it back.
* The PC crashes from time to time that I have to a hardware reset!

I then tried Fedora and guess what, NONE of the above issues are present. Maybe Ubuntu works better under Unity, but if they don't support Gnome why do they put it in the standard repository?

There is a difference between saying that Ubuntu has been unstable for me, and Ubuntu is unstable in general. Also I didn't even know you were talking about Gnome Shell. It's not surprising that it's been unstable since it's only in 14.04 that they have finally forked the Gnome Control Center and updated gtk. Prior to that you have a mess since Unity is trying to use a mix of old Gnome components that conflict with what Gnome Shell needs. A user reading your statement will assume you mean Ubuntu with Unity is unstable, which is not true since there are many users that don't have issues going from 13.04 to 14.04 including myself.

I'm sorry you had that bad experience (I don't like their decision to build on Gnome components at all), but it's only very recently that the Gnome experience under Ubuntu has become usable. I think moving to Fedora as a Gnome user is a great choice as both projects share the same developers.

(Imagine trying to get Unity working under Fedora, I'm sure it would be even more nightmarish. You can't really compare Ubuntu + another DE to Fedora + default experience and say Ubuntu is less stable, that is an apples to oranges comparison)

[torsionbar28]

I'm on RHEL6 and I use the Windows Steam via CrossOver (wine). I'd guess this gets counted as a Windows user rather than a Linux user. I think it advertises itself as DirectX version 9 too.

[d2kx]

GabeN is a believer of Desktop Linux, and I am a believer of GabeN.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1zkfmv/wearea_videogame_developer_aua/cfuf9lp?context=3

[kersurk]

I'd be interested in the number of Linux users as opposed to percent. Anyone knows 1.3% of what?

[aliquis]

I'd be interested in the number of Linux users as opposed to percent. Anyone knows 1.3% of what?

I assume not all Steam users may use the client / contribute data, was it about 7 million users at the same time they have had? Over 60 but less than 70 million users in total?

[aliquis]

I'm on RHEL6 and I use the Windows Steam via CrossOver (wine). I'd guess this gets counted as a Windows user rather than a Linux user. I think it advertises itself as DirectX version 9 too.

Yeah I don't see why it wouldn't.

[johnc]

I assume not all Steam users may use the client / contribute data, was it about 7 million users at the same time they have had? Over 60 but less than 70 million users in total?

They're at 75 million now. So 1% would be about 750k.