Steam Linux Usage Put At 0.6% For September, Contrary To Other Inflated Numbers

[bridgman]

I'm sure AMD dropping Linux support cold turkey has affected many people who wanted to play games under Linux. The open source developers have done an admirable job of attempting to develop new drivers, but it's a huge job that looks like it won't be ready for prime time for at least a few more years. Unfortunately since AMD is barely dedicating any resources to help I just can't see it happening any sooner. We already see AMD hardware from just a few years ago being abandoned in desperate attempts to keep up with new hardware, which is a mere harbinger of things to come.

Huh ?

Are you maybe talking about fglrx, with compatibility support in the OpenGL driver ? That has been replaced with AMDGPU-PRO, not dropped.

[carewolf]

Why are we assuming that all Linux users play games? I use Linux and never had any desire to use Steam, and could not care less about its existence ans bogus statistics.

Or they do play games but dual boot to Windows. I was refusing to touch Steam for years for being DRM, I only whitelisted them for being on Linux, but once white-listed I also have them on Windows (to play Witcher 3, and Divinity: Original Sin 2), and they way Valve count, even if I play 90% of the time on Linux, all installations get counted equally and randomly, so some years I count as Linux some years as Windows.

Edit: I believe the way Valve counts btw, is if you haven't been surveyed in 6 months, you are eligable, and every time you install a steam update when eligble you have a random chance of being surveyed. If you haven't been surveyed in 6 months, and have a steam installation you haven't launched in a year, launching it and having multiple steam updates installed, is a sure way of triggering the survey on that machine.

[TMM_]

I don't quite see how. 6% of steam users being Linux users and 6% of internet users being Linux users are in any way incompatible with each other.

I'm not trying to claim that those numbers are correct but just on the face of it it doesn't seem all that outrageous.

[Vistaus]

I think 4.83% are pretty reasonable. When you look at StatCounter, and you sum up Unknown, Linux and ChromeOS you get about 4.5%.
So what do you think StatCounter doesn't recognize? I have reasonable doubt that there are many Windows or OS X - Machines in "Unknown" so only Linux Distributions they aren't aware of should be in "Unknown".

So when I look at both statistics, Windows ~85,5%, OS X ~10% and Linux and other Unix-like ~4.5% seem to be reasonable.

Edit: You can smoke Steam Survey in a pipe as Linux is firstly adopted by professionals who need to protect their intellectual property and integrity of production centers and not gamers.

"Unknown" may also mean other OS's they don't know of, like Haiku, various BSD's, KolibriOS, AmigaOS (either Classic or 4), ReduxOS, embedded system OS's, etc.

[Ansla]

Huh ?

Are you maybe talking about fglrx, with compatibility support in the OpenGL driver ? That has been replaced with AMDGPU-PRO, not dropped.

He must be talking about fglrx, and you must admit that for someone that insists on using the binary blob for gaming (not that anyone should do that) the switch to AMDGPU-PRO was not smooth at all. The decision to not support the just released Ubuntu LTS in fglrx even though AMDGPU-PRO was not ready yet made perfect sense from a maintenance perspective, but it did make it easier for existing users that insisted on using the blob to switch to Windows than to the new Ubuntu.

And if I'm not mistaken AMDGPU-PRO does an even worse job of keeping up with new kernels than fglrx did.

[lucrus]

Why you are assuming tha all Windows users play games?

I don't know what ataradov is assuming, but I assume that Windows users are gamers by a much higher percentage than in the Linux world. In my experience (for what it's worth), if for each "Steam on Windows" gamer you can expect other 10 non-gamer Windows users, then for each "Steam on Linux" gamer (which is a very uncommon choice among Linux users, both for being a gamer and for using Steam) you can reasonably expect other 100 non-gamer Linux users.

[beer]

I registered just to post this.

Please stop reporting Steam as if it's the be-all-end-all source for OS statistics. As others have said, not all linux users are gamers. A small percentage of them, even. And like gaming, not all linux users are developers.. so sources like Stack Overflow are unreliable for general statistics as well.

I think the most unbiased, general audience sort of statistics I've found have been the results done by Pornhub (everyone likes to rub one off, regardless of OS).. their 2016 numbers put linux at 3%, which seems very reasonable, and has been increasing steadily and realistically year-over-year. I'm really anxious to see their 2017 results.

2016: 3%
2015: 2.5%
2014: 1.7%

Sources:

2016: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2016-year-in-review
2015: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/por...year-in-review
2014: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/os-battle

Pornhub is the best I know of, but I'd still love to see something like Amazon break down OS statistics. There's no better "general population" sort of website that just about everyone uses. At least for countries where Amazon is widely used.

[boltronics]

The news is not surprising. Haven't all the elite GNU/Linux users re-purposed their GPUs for mining by now? Hard to game when mining.

Wait until the mining craze is over, probably at some point early next year. I predict it'll jump back up.

[lucrus]

Wait until the mining craze is over, probably at some point early next year. I predict it'll jump back up.

I predict the mining craze won't be over anytime soon, if only the Ethereum network keeps growing even a fraction of what it's been doing lately (and they call it Web 3.0 for a reason, I think). I predict that the percentage of Linux miners among GPU owners will grow above the Linux gamers.

[Ruediix]

This is a monopoly! We must learn to oppose this! To 'bake the bread'. Baking the bread will lead to a lot of dead. If you are pro microtransations, pro DLC, pro Loot Boxes, you must be exterminated! We must take back the gaming industry!!! It should work for us, not us for them! Break the face, bring back the fury, fight the system. Steam is cancer! Fight to the death! Death to Gaben!!!! Bake the bread!

We need nice games that go back to the model of proprietary content on an open source engine, with a nice generous demo level that gives you a full feel for the game, not just a tutorial and glimpse.

If the gaming companies won't make it for us, like you said, we need to bake our own bread!

We need to also end Microtransactions for anything that is not purely cosmetic.

As a note, even without Greenlight we can publish on Steam. However, we should not publish exclusively to Steam. Steam has some advantages. Matchmaking for one. Still, we can't give anyone monopoly.