Steam Linux Use For June 2018 Comes In At 0.52%

[Tuxee]

Got the survey yesterday. I suppose the Linux market share will skyrocket because of that in July.

[deant]

I game casualy using plain wine or playonlinux. I dont use steam in any form. I primaly play MMOs which has their own middleware only for windows. For example i play Perfect World which needs ArcClient. After i lounch the game I kill the middleware manualy coz it lowers the performance of wine. So my point is - there are ppl playing under linux which DONT use steam. Some (myself included) use GOG too. Yes linux market is not big but is bigger than 0.5%. Wine actualy performs quite well! Developers dont need to make linux ports. For exmaple they can just improve wine compatibitily for their own sake. It should be much easier coz wine is closer to be a "just another windows version".

[mike44]

While wine is easy to use nowadays, not even one single Wirows only game supports it. Personally I don't buy Virows games anymore. I look forward to use my Samsung Odyssey with OpenXR later this year.

[Guest]

You would think that more gamers would have switched to Linux by now? Linux gaming should be better now than it ever was before, Wine has gained more game support, there are several actively maintained DirectX-to-OpenGL and DirectX-to-Vulkan translators(some of which even work with Wine), GPU support is getting better(though support for brand-new GPU's is still bad), Sound problems are getting better, X.Org is being replaced with Wayland which AFAIK has better performance.

Guild Wars 2 is still the only game that has me tempted to switch to Windows from Linux every now and then. On Windows it's nothing amazing with performance (GPU bottleneck with a RX 560 at 4k; overall this game is known to be CPU-bottlenecked though even on high-end CPUs), but it's barely passable in Linux regardless of what version of Wine is being used (Staging with CSMT, pba, and Gallium Nine; latter two help very slightly), and regardless of AMD and NVIDIA. Hasn't changed in the past year or so afaik; performance is just overall worse in Wine vs Windows, significantly in some scenarios (especially large-scale PvE).

Really hoping VK9 helps whenever it's supported enough, or ANet decides to silently add a new rendering API.

From my perspective, things are getting worse. Ubuntu 18.04 or Mint 19 give me problems. For example, I just installed Mint 19 on my FX 8350 and my usb2.0 ports wouldn't work. Turns out I had to enable IOMMU in the bios, but now my USB 3.0 ports didn't work. I had to enter some stuff into grub to get it working. This shit should be working without me needing to find a fix that should have been applied already to the OS. I have to install sksu to get certain apps to work like realvnc server.

Enabling IOMMU really should be a default for distros nowadays. Afaik only Solus does (or at least did) this out-the-box.

Also, sksu? Do you mean gksu? If so, I thought that was deprecated in-favor of pkexec? In any case, if your distro doesn't handle that out-the-box (which wouldn't surprise me with Mint), I'd use another distro.

[beniwtv]

From my perspective, things are getting worse. Ubuntu 18.04 or Mint 19 give me problems. For example, I just installed Mint 19 on my FX 8350 and my usb2.0 ports wouldn't work. Turns out I had to enable IOMMU in the bios, but now my USB 3.0 ports didn't work. I had to enter some stuff into grub to get it working. This shit should be working without me needing to find a fix that should have been applied already to the OS. I have to install sksu to get certain apps to work like realvnc server.

GPU drivers are another mess. Oibaf PPA has been broken for weeks and installing it will just prevent your system from booting. My old M1710 laptop with an Nvidia 7900 GT can't use the Nvidia 304 drivers, and the already included Nouveau drivers are so bad that I can't even start Steam. Minecraft on those drivers give me horizontal bands in image. On my HTPC running Mint 19 with a Radeon HD 7850 I'm going to install the AMDGPU-pro driver, assuming I figure out how cause the damn thing just gives me a list of commands when I run the script. As great as the open source AMD drivers are, the Oibaf and Podaka PPA's have ruined a number of OS installations cause something happens randomly that decides to uninstall most of my apps. That has happened more times than I care to remember. If it isn't that then the PPA's prevent my system from booting back up unless I ppa-purge them out.

Oh yea and the open source drivers don't have fully working OpenGl 4.5 for compat profiles. So Linux Dying Light doesn't run unless you do some trick. CEMU doesn't work at all because of this. Doom 2016 doesn't work in OpenGL. Oh, and RADV in the open source drivers isn't accessible unless you run the amdgpu driver, and the amdgpu opengl driver is really buggy for me.

We have serious problems here.

Even though I have none of these problems you mention myself (using both a FX 8350 with RX 460 GPU and a Ryzen 1800x with a RX 480 8GB), I kinda have to agree with this. There are still too many hardware combos that cause problems in Linux. Specially GPU and USB still need many improvements for certain hardware. We still need to do more research when buying on these basic components than should be necessary.

Not that my Windows-running friends never have any hardware issues, they certainly also do (I know because they come to me to fix that stuff, love it when you install the wireless driver and it BSOD's ), buy way less.

I do feel however that things are getting indeed better and better. Certainly I wouldn't want to go back to just 4-5 years ago, where hardware support was in way worse shape overall.

About the Mesa thing: 4.4 compat profile support just landed in Mesa GIT, so with the next Mesa version due in August most things should be resolved for that - and who knows, 4.5 compat support might even make it in in time too.

[beniwtv]

I have to install sksu to get certain apps to work like realvnc server.

Just my two cents here: You should never ever run a VNC server as root... (or any other public-facing server software for that matter).

[torturedutopian]

I think Linux gaming has gotten insanely good in the last few year, I never thought it would happen. I remember the Loki days. Stellar performance (not on the desktop) with Nvidia, getting good on AMD, so many games I cannot even complete one before getting the next one. It's crazy. (BTW I'm using the obaif PPA under 16.04, not switched to the next LTS yet -- using Neon).

I'm not sure it's such a good piece of news though : this means less time to do useful things (like reading, learning...) , almost no more OSS game anymore, so much more pollution due to buying gaming hardware... So much money wasted getting hundreds of games. What sense does it make ?

As for the 0.5 or 1% marketshare, that's not surprising. Who uses Linux apart from activists or people in computer science ? :-) The only people I know who are using Linux on a daily basis are environmental or left wing activists. Even my IT enthusiasts / engineers friends don't (or in next to Windows). What is crazy is that most people I know would be perfectly happy with a proper Linux distro. (browsing, listening to music, writing mails, managing photos, that's basically it)

[Brisse]

Just keep in mind that Steam is growing incredibly fast, so even if the percentage is falling slightly, the absolute number of Linux gamers has definitely grown.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/the-steam-linux-market-share-for-june-was-052-as-steam-is-still-growing-rather-rapidly.12059

[anarki2]

Almost a year since I first posted this, and I still haven't gotten a survey since switching my gaming rig to linux.

I've been using Steam on Windows for 13 years. Do you know how many times I got the survey? Yes. Zero.

Do you know what that proves? Nothing.

Who the hell cares about your stupid personal stories, srsly? After so many freakin years, are you people still completely unable to grasp the concept of statistics and sampling?

[andy22]

You would think that more gamers would have switched to Linux by now? Linux gaming should be better now than it ever was before, Wine has gained more game support, there are several actively maintained DirectX-to-OpenGL and DirectX-to-Vulkan translators(some of which even work with Wine), GPU support is getting better(though support for brand-new GPU's is still bad), Sound problems are getting better, X.Org is being replaced with Wayland which AFAIK has better performance.

As a windows gamer and linux hobbyist i can tell you what would need to happen. If 80%+ games on steam got a native, fully optimized Linux version aka "Linux" steam tag and controller support actually works out of the box, than i would consider a gaming specialized distro that takes care of all the gaming optimization, driver issues (probably SteamOS).
Wine is a dead horse for me, since running games on a system emulator with DirectX-to-OpenGL, DirectX-to-Vulkan translators will always be sub-par compared to native versions. Most gamers i know have no clue what Wine is and are quite "happy" with there Windows 10 gaming rig, yet if native linux (vulklan, opengl) versions would start to somewhat outperform Dx11/12 versions and most of the gamer related tools (teamspeak, controller tools, ahk, dolby atmos..) would exist/work on Linux, i happily would try to switch and convince my friends.