Steam Survey Reports The Latest Linux Gaming Marketshare For October

[dungeon]

You see, with proprietary OSes you get stable APIs/ABIs which are supported for many years and always work as expected. .

Yeah, they work always as expected my ass - It is harassment full for everybody



https://betanews.com/2018/10/23/more...r-2018-update/

[some_canuck]

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.

oh sorry, been too busy... <clears throat>

i still haven't gotten my survey since switching entirely to steam+linux. no, deleting or editing that one file doesn't work.

[Brisse]

no, deleting or editing that one file doesn't work.

Good, because if that was possible then the entire survey would be invalid.

[skeevy420]

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.

I don't see the point to complain about it. I've had 2 surveys in 8 years of using Steam, both in May of this year, both for Linux, never had one for Windows (haven't used Steam for Windows in 6 years outside of Wine environments FWIW).

[skeevy420]

The survey does not trigger if you are beta.

Really? Did not know that. That explains a lot about our comments and why I had those surveys earlier this year -- I reinstalled Steam and then realized I wasn't on beta when Michael did a story about Proton.

[Brisse]

Really? Did not know that. That explains a lot about our comments and why I had those surveys earlier this year -- I reinstalled Steam and then realized I wasn't on beta when Michael did a story about Proton.

You no longer need to be on the beta branch to use Proton though. That was just during the first one or two weeks after it was initially released. While Proton itself is still considered beta, it is included in the stable Steam client since a while back.

[Big_Mama]

The survey does not trigger if you are beta.

That is not true. I am in beta and had a survey yesterday.

Btw i find it funny how everybody takes this survey so important. As if Valve woudn't know the OS share without it... Every time you log in Valve knows what OS you are on!

[AsuMagic]

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.

Yet Vulkan is much better than OpenGL for switchable graphics... Simply because you can load a specific Vulkan implementation easily with an environment variable.

[Weasel]

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.

Someone who actually knows what he's talking about. Also, Wine is a thousand times better option for *most* applications that you archive yourself and expect to be useable 5, 10, 20 years from now (yes, the shock, an "older" version) instead of going with whatever your distro pre-packages.

Cue oiaohm about how "servers pay the bills" and other bullshit in a Linux desktop thread where nobody really gives a shit about servers. It has to be said, since I identify the problems FOR THE DESKTOP, I provide potential solutions, and he starts barking about how "it's not useful for servers" like who the FUCK cares.

Windows has server editions of their OS. Guess what, they don't use the desktop version. Threads like these are for DESKTOP distros.

So if anyone mentions servers 1 more time I will kill a kitten every time that word is used. Feel responsible for it.

[Weasel]

Yeah, they work always as expected my ass - It is harassment full for everybody

Sorry broski, but the API/ABI define the platform and has nothing to do with update woes which are part of the OS.

Windows is a terrible OS. But it has a platform a thousand times better than Linux because it's stable.

Thankfully, you can have both on Linux, just use Wine: great platform, great OS (kernel). At least in theory, since Wine is far from perfect unfortunately.