Valve Reports Steam Linux Usage Fell Further In March

[eddielinux]

My machine is fine when pulseaudio is compeletly removed.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulseaudio-an-achilles-heel-that-needs-repair/

Do not repair pulseuadio, kill the project. They have had almost 10 years time to fix the shit.

No problem here on my opensuse tumbleweed x64, also since 2011 (I used ubuntu and fedora) I had no problem either.
Did tried to debug on your machine?
What sound card?
Which kernel version you use?
What pulseaudio version?
What happened and what you were doing when happened the problem?
How did you measured pulseaudio performance, memory usage and overhead?

The almost problem that I had two years ago was a gdm with bluetooth headphone which I thought was a pulseaudio problem, but after do some research I learned that when gdm starts with bluetooth headphone active, gdm captures bluetooth headphones before user session start making unable to connect the bluetooth headphone during user session.
There are two fix for this problem, one is putting autospawn=no in var/lib/gdm/.config/pulse/client.conf and the other is enable autologin which bypass gdm additional detections.

[SaucyJack]

Pulseaudio has always been crap and it provides no benefits. Per application volume control and that's it. And anything running through pulse audio has its audio quality absolutely destroyed.

[theriddick]

Valve needs to make it so Steam doesn't have 32library problems like it does now, EVERYONE has to manually remove or relink certain libs from Steam because their too old (system runs newer but steam tries to run older). THEN Valve needs to work very hard with AMD to get them fully supported, claim NVIDIA only is damaging to the gaming industry and certainly puts allot of people off!

Plus they need to collect stats from other distros also (that use Steam app).

[computerquip]

Still am having issues with pulse. It's just shit. Should have never been written in first place. Have Asus xonair over 5 years now, probably more like 7 years. One of first pcie sound cards ever working on Linux. STILL ISSUES WITH PULSEAUDIO. And ONLY pulseaudio. ALSA works like charmed. Pulseaudio fails with multi application усаге setup. Until very recently had all sorts of buffer under-runs. I only keep pulse because of Steam and Skype. It should die in a fire, together with it's fanboys. In Russia there is a phrase, 'им ссы в глаза - всё божья росса', which means, piss in their eyes, it still will be a god blessed dew.
Over years SO MANY times my friends IRL who tried Linux had problems with Pulseaudio. Talking about adoption of Linux, Pulseaudio doesn't help. And worst thing most popular distros install this plague by default. Uninstalling pulseaudio immediately solved ALL of sound problems.

ALSA doesn't have a multimedia mixer that can change sinks in realtime like Pulse can. Ever been watching a video and want to change from sound card to headphones? ALSA cannot do that, there's no interface allowing that. In order for ALSA to do that, the *application* must add support explicitly. PulseAudio has its uses.

[Kano]

@theriddick

As only SteamOS uses a mesa hack to fix that I would just remove the offending files by default and see what happens. For game specific bugs they could scan for private libs that should not be there.

[theriddick]

Kano

Try telling someone new to Linux to do that, the thought of using a terminal to resolve the offending files will send them auto rushing back to windows. Now consider the fact that most people have no help on a new install and will simply STOP using Linux when Steam refuses to load up because of this. Linux has probably lost allot of potential users due to this and the driver issues!

[Kano]

Incorrect, as long as you use Kanotix you can always ask the bot in case you need it after an update and this was no reason to use Windows. If somebody with distro XY does not find a solution in the net I can not help. Some consider themselfs pros and don't know the basics... Do you really think that all games work with Windows 10? I would say some hacks are much more complicated - like run Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection with something newer than Windows 7. Most gamers just use Windows because the favorite games don't run with Linux or too slow.

[theriddick]

I already know all about the issue, I think you guys are simply missing the point I'm trying to make so I will just drop it.

[RealNC]

Why I don't game in Linux:

• Input lag.
  Moving my cursor on the screen or looking around in an FPS game feels like I'm on a boat.
• It messes up my desktop.
  Alt+tabbing from/to the game/desktop with the game running in a different resolution fucks up my desktop icons.
• No tweaking available.
  I cannot configure stuff like DSR, prerendered frames, triple buffering, etc, in the Linux nvidia panel.
• There's no nvidia inspector equivalent.
• No shader injection tools (SweetFX, etc.)
• Missing graphics features in the Linux versions of many games.

If these things would be fixed, Linux would be a good gaming platform for me. Right now, it's total ass.

[eddielinux]

Not gonna do that, crap is crap, why bother.

Oh! nice answer, you don't realize how much this tells me about you:
1 - You were/are a windows user (this is not bad, but ex-windows users are more critcs; familiarity bias);
2 - You never coded anything;
3 - Probably you like linux because is free of charge;
4 - You have problem to understand freedom;
5 - You have less respect the people on the backstage(devs) and their opinion;
6 - You don't know how to act as part of freedom in community (I had some trouble to teach myself too);

I have no problem in dealing with it, but I must to tell you something, if you don't fill a bug form they will never know what happened (I know, a lots of newcomers don't know how to do and as veteran users we need to teach them before is too late), to our community survive, information is crucial.

Why destruct when we can construct?
Why demolish when we can fix?
You will possibly disagree with me, but attacking each other will make us colapse, we are community driven and as we see in any world history book, too much disagreement makes everything fall apart.
As part of this incredible community we need to never forget that our freedom is at stake and teamwork is needed to reach the victory, even if you don't like one teammate pulseaudio, which for me is a good player.