Valve Publishes Steam Survey Numbers For April 2024

[Panix]

Fedora 40 at least has both a steam and an nvidia RPMFusion repo. You just need to enable them. I have a AMD card, but enabling the steam repo and 'sudo dnf install steam' was the only thing I had to do. Arch ate my system (locked up during a update and like half my files were 0 sized; so I just installed Fedora 40 for shits since I use it on my work system) and Steam works fine. Fedora 40 KDE spin. Wayland default and XWayland isn't installed. I've no issues playing the games I used to play under Arch.

EDIT: I take that back. Looks like:
xorg-x11-server-Xwayland.x86_64
xwaylandvideobridge.x86_64

are installed. Is that technically the "XWayland" packages? Dunno..either way...it works fine and I've had to do zero tinkering.

Xorg and Xwayland being the in the name of the packages seems to indicate that. Fedora et al. isn't set up for gaming, though - that's clear. Why? Well, Nobara exists. Garuda? Some ppl decided to tweak Fedora - and one of the reasons is to set up a system that is more media and 'gamer' friendly?

Also, I believe most gamers in Linux use nvidia gpus - although, that might have changed - I suspect any change or development there is fairly recent. It might tilt back towards Nvidia, at any rate - if explicit sync adoption/integration improves the experience w/ a Nvidia gpu Linux desktop?

[mSparks]

TWO PERCENT IS PATHETIC.

Two percent of people driving the IT equivalent of a Ferrari is far too much imho. Wayland goes a long way to fixing that

[cutterjohn]

I'm looking forward to when at least one popular distribution finally drops the wayland default so people find you can actually use Linux to play steam games.

Having to disable and uninstall wayland to get steam and steamvr working is a step most people probably dont take, leaving them thinking it just doesnt work, its a testament to how bad windows is now that so many have already got that far.

have been running tumbleweed since October pretty much exclusively, wayland, been playing steam games no problem...

Now if you ask me about heroic and lutris launchers, that's another story since they just don't work consistently, which leaves GOG out in the cold, and I won't even mention other wannabe stores as GOG is truly the closest rival to Steam.., but GOG just cannot get their shit together... other than lets go back to the 90s and release these shell install scripts for linux games, and well windows games, good luck...

[EDIT]

Since running predominantly tumbleweed I have had EXACTLY ONE steam survey which was in February IIRC...

That said in windows I cannot recall the last survey request... and I have dual booted for years, for reasons(none of yours)...

...and yes I know how to manually trigger the survey, but why bother... all they will get is my hw and it will not make any difference for TW...

[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
...or maybe distro will make a difference, but I doubt it since Valve is already supporting linux so at best it will skew the number by maybe 0.000001%
[/EDIT2]

[LinuxNoob]

Gonna open up champagne and celebrate that 1.9%?

Just for you, yes...

[mSparks]

have been running tumbleweed since October pretty much exclusively, wayland, been playing steam games no problem...

All that needs adding to this is a recommendation that people buy a Reva G-Wizz for their next car because reasons and the cycle of comedy will be complete.

[oleid]

steam deck uses proton, proton is a fork of wine, neither wine nor proton supports wayland, the wayland version of wine only just got basic opengl support a few weeks ago:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Wayland-OpenGL-Merged

Yes, and steam deck uses Wayland for its primary UI. By the way, the games I play have native Linux ports and thus also use Wayland.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/oraq9t/if_someone_was_wondering_if_the_steamdeck_runs_on/

And at this point is never meaningfully going to progress beyond that.

in two years from now steam deck still uses proton but 2026's proton uses Wayland by default. 🤷♂️

I know why you think google told you the steam deck uses wayland, Its exactly the same reasons popular distro builders create effective barriers to keep windows gamers and people educated by google and wikipedia away from the linux desktop.

Please enlighten me. Why did Google tell me it uses Wayland?


By the way, by know I validated the claims from the Reddit link myself. Wayland it is.

[jacob]

Just a couple of thoughts.
- Most of personal Linux use is on mobile devices and if gaming on Android is counted, Linux is actually pretty popular on gaming.
- Linux dominates compute servers and data centers where gaming is not important at all.
- Nvidia makes most of its money on computing and AI. The money Nvidia makes on gaming is 98% on Windows. Those two facts explain why Nvidia doesn't care about Linux desktop and gaming.
- Unless, Playstation switches to Linux from BSD (Sony wants to stay away from GPL to keep their source closed) or Steam releases a Linux gaming PC or console, there will not be a surge in Linux gaming share. Improvements continue in Linux gaming capabilities and other corporations (maybe Amazon) might also use this capability.

The Linux-based console from Valve has been here for quite some time, in case you haven't heard! But I wonder what its market share is.

[Alexmitter]

but the input lag,

The only situation on which x11 may have a slightly lower input latency is when you have a tearing picture, tho I have no idea who actually wants to play with a garbled screen. I intentionally switched to Wayland to play a game on which low latency is key, and it would surely not improve my performance if I had to track fast moving objects on a garbled screen.

lack of steamvr support on gnome,

Gnome works on supporting second seat DRM lease exactly for that.

and extremely common crashing of the compositor

I haven't seen it crashing in a long while, but KDE crashed on me a few times on my Steamdeck, on x11.

intentionally hard to install the nvidia drivers

Having a frequently updating kernel and no legal possibility to ship nvidias turd in its official repos is sure totally Fedora making it intentionally difficult.

[carewolf]

steam collects its data in real time from every user on the platform.

https://steamcharts.com/app/730

The survey just adds data they cannot collect automatically by law (like what distribution of linux/version of windows was being used or what model cpu/gpu is being used)

Perhaps, but if they collect it, they do not publish it. What is publised is from the survey, and the survey alone.. which is also why it varies so much whenever they change details on how the survey operates.

[mSparks]

Please enlighten me. Why did Google tell me it uses Wayland?


By the way, by know I validated the claims from the Reddit link myself. Wayland it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitism