Steam Linux Usage Reportedly Hits 0.33% For March

[TemplarGR]

yeap. it's going to be a year of the linux on desktop. as every year for over a decade

The year of the Linux desktop is already here. 2 decades ago if you wanted to use Linux as your daily driver you would be considerably limited in many ways. Today you can play modern games, have free software for most needs, hardware drivers are pretty good for most hardware, and wine is really maturing. You don't really need to install Windows anymore, unless you care about a few AAA games that aren't playable native or with Wine. Big deal.

[WolfpackN64]

With an influx of popular titles like PUBG and Fortnite (neither of which I play) and the corresponding influx of Chinese gamers, who mainly use Windows, the numbers seem to be accurate.

However, I still believe that, in absolute numbers, there never have been more Linux gamers as now. Marketshare is after all only one metric.

[Michael_S]

You don't really need to install Windows anymore, unless you care about a few AAA games that aren't playable native or with Wine. Big deal.

You don't care about those games, and I don't care about those games. But millions of people do.

And more generally, if a PC gamer goes to Steam they can look at every. single. game. in the Steam Store and know that it's available for Windows. With OS X and especially with Linux, there's a game selection but there are thousands of titles unavailable. Most of those titles you can't get are worthless, but a gamer only needs one game they love to be on that list to lose 100% of their interest in Linux for gaming.

This is the same reason my kids have a Playstation 4. Their favorite game is Madden NFL, and that hasn't been on Windows since 2008. I could have offered them a $2,000 Windows gaming PC or a $300 Playstation 4 or Xbox One, and they still would have gone for the console because the console has Madden NFL 2015, 2016, etc...

Valve has done a lot of awesome things over the past few years for Linux gaming, really. The situation now is far better than it was. But they would need to spend more money than they have on game ports or maybe on Wine for SteamOS to go anywhere.

[schmidtbag]

Now that Fortnite has been taking a lot of attention away from PUBG, I wonder if that has something to do with it (since that isn't available on Steam). I think it's reasonable to say that 0.05% of Windows Steam users stopped signing in to play Fortnite (whereas I'm sure most players sign into Steam regardless).

Back when Steam on Linux first came out, I got the survey just about every month. But, I haven't seen one for well over a year now. I don't sign in as often as I used to but I still sign in multiple times per week.

[caligula]

The year of the Linux desktop is already here. 2 decades ago if you wanted to use Linux as your daily driver you would be considerably limited in many ways. Today you can play modern games, have free software for most needs, hardware drivers are pretty good for most hardware, and wine is really maturing. You don't really need to install Windows anymore, unless you care about a few AAA games that aren't playable native or with Wine. Big deal.

Modern users have more demanding requirements: 10 to 16 bits per chan HDR / 3d / 8k high DPI graphics, extremely low latency studio sound cards (no Linux drivers), 802.11ac 4x4 MIMO AP chips, USB3 display cards, Wacom Intuos products, Apple products (e.g. 4k video streaming, intelligent gesture support with touch pads), proprietary pro scanners and printers, DRM streaming services (the old pipelight solutions require old Firefox), latest AAA games, DX realtime ray trace APIs, RAIDZ2 with Linux native Btrfs, full exfat support, full Mali 3d stack, ...

[wizard69]

Ihonestly i dont see the average Linux user being a heavy gamer. It is pretty much the same thing on MacOS. People gravitate to these OS's because they need the power for professional reasons. If they really wanted to game Windows is the low effort path.

[Rexerex]

So which are these extreme cases?

[dungeon]

So which are these extreme cases?

Extreme case should be - If someone release game for Linux, but not for Windows. That usually does not happen, but the opposite often happens - regardless, opposite cases are not deemed as extreme, but normal

It is sort of normal to see Windows only game, isn't it - but that opposite happens is not expected

[Brisse]

Modern users have more demanding requirements: 10 to 16 bits per chan HDR / 3d / 8k high DPI graphics, extremely low latency studio sound cards (no Linux drivers), 802.11ac 4x4 MIMO AP chips, USB3 display cards, Wacom Intuos products, Apple products (e.g. 4k video streaming, intelligent gesture support with touch pads), proprietary pro scanners and printers, DRM streaming services (the old pipelight solutions require old Firefox), latest AAA games, DX realtime ray trace APIs, RAIDZ2 with Linux native Btrfs, full exfat support, full Mali 3d stack, ...

What sort of fantasy are you living in? Take a look at the Steam survey again and look at what kind of CPU's, GPU's and monitor resolution people are running and it should be obvious that the sort of consumer you are talking about is almost non existent. I mean, 4k displays are @ 0.71%, GTX1080ti are @ 0.74%, most people have 2GiB VRAM, 1080p display and quad core CPU's @ ~3GHz (wasn't long ago dual core still dominated).

[carewolf]

So which are these extreme cases?

Strategy and adventure games