Steam Survey Reports The Latest Linux Gaming Marketshare For October

[xiando]

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.

That makes me wonder how they decide who gets to be in the survey. I did not get a single request to take part in a survey until three months ago. I've been asked every month since the first request. It's like they are on to me, knowing that I am willing to give up my previous privacy to participate in their all-invasive survey.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Steam Play and Wine are pretty awesome but there is the problem of Windows moving to WinRT / UWP APIs used by Windows 10, which Wine and Steam Play have zero support for.

[TemplarGR]

Reminder that i have never been included in the survey, for so many years now...

[elvis]

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.

Well, I care. And so do ~0.72% of Steam users, clearly. I don't mind if other's don't. They're welcome to their personal opinions, and can use anything they choose. I don't for a minute want everyone to use the same thing, and am happy to have choice in a market with literally billions of people and their own, personal, individual needs.

I'm also very, very happy that Valve continue to put in the effort they do. It's a sad day when we're all forced to use the same software. Choice is great, whether you choose the minority, majority, or something in between. That's great for everyone.

Keep banging on with aggressive lines like these, if you like. But there's no war here. It's just software. Vive la difference.

[moilami]

I would like to see a graph of Linux Steam users over time. I think k would be > 0.

[rabcor]

I'm one of the 0.05%

Anyhow, it's a good thing people aren't moving to linux in droves just yet. While proton is amazing and can run an incredible amount of games compared to wine just 1 year ago, it's far from ready. We're still waiting for FAudio to replace XAudio, proton needs better .NET framework support as users fail repeatedly to install it. Lack of 32-bit prefix support also makes it impossible to install some other things like wmp9 (required for dark souls) and wmi (required for some older games like everquest) and for every game that you're surprised works perfectly well, there's another game that you're surprised doesn't. Statistically speaking (based on early, incomplete statistics), there's a 70% chance that a game will run with proton. That is a huge number. But the chances that a game will work out of the box with proton is only just over 20%. That number needs to go waaaaaaaaayyyyyyy up for

[LordVulkan]

Steam has skyrocketed in china during the past 2 years, that is why Windows has experienced such a high growth.

If you take a look at this month numbers, both Windows and macOS loose platform share and Linux is the only one gaining it. This means Linux has growth the same that both of Windows and macOS combined.

[dungeon]

On statcounter both Windows and Linux goes down , while OSX and ChromeOS goes up:

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-...ktop/worldwide

1.64% for Linux vs 2.16% for WIndows XP:

http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version...ktop/worldwide

It looks like ChromeOS will beat us, before we beat dead cow called Windows XP

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.

Well, no one cares about Windows XP too long time ago, but some people still use it Same will happen with Windows 7, support goes out in a year, but it is still used 36% worldwide, situation which sounds worse than with XP. Windows XP support was dropped at about 19% wordwide usage and so on.

I think that there is always market share of about 30% for unsupported OSes

And here comes the funny fact - on some points of time, the most people like to use extended or no supported versions So, market share of "not really supported" represents the most of the market

If we look much more deeeeply on what blobby software is maded and depends upon, we could for sure say how majority will always use unsupported versions of something

[V10lator]

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.

But we're talking about games here, so you say games on Windows break a lot. Let's compare that to Linux: How often did the kernel to userspace API/ABIs do breaking changes? How often did SDL break? How often did Mesa/OpenGL break? Not at all? So a native Linux game should be lonnger forward compatible than a native Windows game.

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.

As a game dev you can target the things stated above (SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan) or, well, just the Steam Runtime?

Then there's no universal packaging mechanism

Just make a tar archive. Packaging is the job of the distros... Or, again, Steam...

[ssam]

The survey does not trigger if you are beta.