Steam Survey Reports The Latest Linux Gaming Marketshare For October

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam Survey Reports The Latest Linux Gaming Marketshare For October

October was very interesting for Linux gaming with no AAA native game ports released but a heck of a lot more Windows games are now running nicely on Linux thanks to Steam Play / Proton / DXVK. So it's quite interesting to see Valve's just-published monthly Steam Survey results for the month prior...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Survey-October-Surprise

[tildearrow]

Typos:

Anyhow, Valve's Steam Survey puts the Linux gaming marketshate for October 2018 at 0.72%, which is surprisingly unchanged given the Steam Play advancements. Valve's numbers today show 0.72% for Linux, which is said to be a 0.05% increase over the month prior.

[Sonadow]

Typos:



(the second sentence is redundant and contradicts the first one)

Both grammatically and statistically. Most statistical applications don't even register such changes on the basis that they are just that statistically insignificant.

[anarki2]

I wonder how many more years it will take for everyone to finally realize that Noone gives a rat's ass about the Linux desktop. A lot of zealots are still stuck with that old tired argument of lack of games back from the 90s, but it's been proven countless times to be completely irrelevant.

Yet we have to listen to this "the stats are flawed" bullcr@p each and every friggin month. When the feck is it gonna be over.

It's not something that needs explaining, it's just the way it is. It's not "why don't they care", it's "why would they care".

[ssokolow]

I wonder how many more years it will take for everyone to finally realize that Noone gives a rat's ass about the Linux desktop. A lot of zealots are still stuck with that old tired argument of lack of games back from the 90s, but it's been proven countless times to be completely irrelevant.

Yet we have to listen to this "the stats are flawed" bullcr@p each and every friggin month. When the feck is it gonna be over.

It's not something that needs explaining, it's just the way it is. It's not "why don't they care", it's "why would they care".

I assume it'll last for however long they fear that said stats may be misinterpreted as "the pool of potential customers on Linux is shrinking".

[Filiprino]

Nobody cares about macOS desktop neither.

I wonder how many more years it will take for everyone to finally realize that Noone gives a rat's ass about the Linux desktop. A lot of zealots are still stuck with that old tired argument of lack of games back from the 90s, but it's been proven countless times to be completely irrelevant.

Yet we have to listen to this "the stats are flawed" bullcr@p each and every friggin month. When the feck is it gonna be over.

It's not something that needs explaining, it's just the way it is. It's not "why don't they care", it's "why would they care".

Steam Play is still in Beta. After it reaches mainstream Steam, usual work will have to be made: keep adding games and improve performance.

[birdie]

I wonder how many more years it will take for everyone to finally realize that Noone gives a rat's ass about the Linux desktop. A lot of zealots are still stuck with that old tired argument of lack of games back from the 90s, but it's been proven countless times to be completely irrelevant.

Yet we have to listen to this "the stats are flawed" bullcr@p each and every friggin month. When the feck is it gonna be over.

It's not something that needs explaining, it's just the way it is. It's not "why don't they care", it's "why would they care".

Linux users do care however Linux developers don't 'cause they are averse to the very idea of creating an interoperable OS with good long-term support (except RHEL but it's not a desktop distro). You see, with proprietary OSes you get stable APIs/ABIs which are supported for many years and always work as expected. E.g. most Win32 applications from the Windows 95 era still work just fine in Windows 10 64. Games are less compatible but that's because graphics APIs used to change/advance a lot in the past.

With Linux you get ostensibly compatible operating systems (=distros) but in reality they have varying libraries (versions, patches, availability, etc.) so you cannot even reliably target multiple distros at once. You could have by releasing your game as open source but most games have a lot of IP to protect, so that will most likely never happen. And targeting different distros is just an insane amount of work.

Then there's no universal packaging mechanism to add insult to injury and a dozen other issues which don't exist in e.g. Windows.

At the moment Wine is a thousand times better option to run Windows games in Linux than to release them natively. Thanks God (sorry, I meant Alexandre Julliard at al) we have it.

[birdie]

It's strange that this time around we don't have a dozen of Linux users who claim that this survey is invalid because they've never seen a prompt to participate in it. Really weird. Maybe it's finally occurred to them that a lot of Windows/MacOS users have also never seen this prompt which doesn't make it any less valid because it includes literally millions of people.

[SofS]

The whole thing is in rapid development and more at an alpha stage than beta.

Vulkan is not readily available to switchable graphics systems, at least I have not seen a simple solution like optirun/primusrun, actually, the only working solutions seems to require launching a whole new WM and then Steam within it.

This is all very new, the news have barely been spread around yet, particularly word of mouth.

People who have already compromised with schemes like dual booting or dedicated gaming systems are not going to change their setup overnight, the whole things has to be very mature and even then it will probably still take another upgrade cycle for them to go full Linux.

[Veerappan]

It's strange that this time around we don't have a dozen of Linux users who claim that this survey is invalid because they've never seen a prompt to participate in it. Really weird. Maybe it's finally occurred to them that a lot of Windows/MacOS users have also never seen this prompt which doesn't make it any less valid because it includes literally millions of people.

Nah, we're just sick of repeating the same thing every month. The situation with the survey is still suspicious. I still get prompted regularly on the rare occasion s that I boot windows, but I haven't gotten a Linux survey in so long that I can't remember. And yes, I spend about a day every two months in windows, the rest in Linux.