A Half-Year Since Valve Released Steam Play For Linux, Its Marketshare Is Still Sub-1%

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Half-Year Since Valve Released Steam Play For Linux, Its Marketshare Is Still Sub-1%

With the start of a new month, Valve has just published their updated monthly Steam figures showing the Linux gaming market-share and more...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-March-2019-Figures

[sarmad]

A Half-Year since Valve released Steam Play for Linux, there is still no hardware manufacturer selling decent Linux gaming laptops.

[muncrief]

Well, unfortunately you really can't run very many games with Proton. I'm glad Valve is working on it, but they need to work on in a lot more. I still have to use a custom wine installation to play my Windows games. Even the ones that do work with Proton, like No Man's Sky, don't run very well.

[sireangelus]

It needs to run pubg lol fortnite and apex. Until we don’t have them on Linux we can forget the largest potential audiences for games that can grow the player base

[Ironmask]

I think it's an oxymoron to try and make Linux gaming friendly when yet so many distros, even Ubuntu, aren't as simple to use as Windows yet. You still need to maintain the system even at a minimum level to prevent it from self-destructing due to outdated packages/drivers/libs. Valve should focus their efforts on a distro that doesn't have to worry about dependency-based package managers (maybe use Snapcraft exclusively?) that might get out of date and brick the system. I'm talking like grandma-levels of ease of use here, so much so that the system auto-updates by default and you have to seriously go out of your way and know what you're doing to disable it, like Windows. And even if you don't update and decide to finally do so after like 5 years, it just works.
They complain about Windows so much yet they aren't offering a viable alternative. SteamOS is not a Windows replacement. If they want to replace Windows then they should actually attempt that, they have the tools available to them, there's more Linux tools out there they can already use then those that they'd have to write from scratch in order to do it. Really, the biggest hurdle would be getting away from the classical Linux ecosystem philosophy of offloading the work of a dedicated SxS implementation by juggling packages in a time-sensitive manner to avoid DLL/SO hell, which doesn't work at all (Any Arch user who forgot to update will tell you that). They really need to make an OS that's 100% idiot proof, I think Linux users just forget what that means when maintaining a system is almost instinct, you begin to forget how to empathize with grandma. There's so much work a perfect Windows replacement Linux distro needs to do and none of it even involves emulating the Windows API.

[Raploz]

The thing is: if Windows already works fine for everything I need, why would I switch to Linux?

Most people - even some computer savvy ones - don't care about "the freedom of open source", privacy or the cost of a Windows license (look, it already comes pre-installed on my computer for "free" and it's what i'm accustomed to use, yay!).

Unfortunately Linux will never be popular on the desktop.

[Templar82]

Well, unfortunately you really can't run very many games with Proton.

You can run "most" games on proton. 60% of the 7000+ games tested as per protondb.com, and the stats look better if you look at the top 1000 games.

The only ones I'm having problems with are multiplayer games with 3rd party anti-cheat software. (and even they will usually run in proton, you just can't join protected servers)

[Chugworth]

You can run "most" games on proton. 60% of the 7000+ games tested as per protondb.com, and the stats look better if you look at the top 1000 games.

The only ones I'm having problems with are multiplayer games with 3rd party anti-cheat software. (and even they will usually run in proton, you just can't join protected servers)

It's impressive how well they've gotten many Windows games to run in Linux. But Linux gaming in general is still a bit too flaky for most people. Even if a game is totally playable in Linux, it's still likely to have minor glitches and performance issues compared to running it in Windows.

There is one thing looming though, and that's Google's cloud gaming service. I played a bit of their Assassin's Creed test on a Linux laptop with an Intel graphics chip, and it worked just fine. With that method, there will be practically no difference in playing a game on a Windows or Linux computer. Though with that said, I'm not really cheering idea of cloud gaming.

[Dukenukemx]

There is one thing looming though, and that's Google's cloud gaming service. I played a bit of their Assassin's Creed test on a Linux laptop with an Intel graphics chip, and it worked just fine. With that method, there will be practically no difference in playing a game on a Windows or Linux computer. Though with that said, I'm not really cheering idea of cloud gaming.

Hi, you must work for Google cause nobody in their right mind would say that Cloud Gaming works. It's psychically impossible, literally as you'd have to break the speed of light to make it work. Unless you're one of those people that think that playing a game in past tense is A OK? Which I have to question your "gaming" credentials as everyone knows that Assassin's Creed Odyssey is better on PC since you can crack the game to unlock all those micro-transactions as the game was meant to be played. Can you do this on Stadia? I think not.

[Dukenukemx]

It needs to run pubg lol fortnite and apex. Until we don’t have them on Linux we can forget the largest potential audiences for games that can grow the player base

We have a winner. As great as Steam is, people do like playing games that aren't on Steam as well. Proton is also far from perfect as even Fallout 4 still has no sound in it, and it's how old now? Epic's Store has made things far worse as I see no intention for them to go Linux. The fact that Proton is open source and has up-streamed their work means eventually we'll get there. For now Proton and Wine both need more work before we can concern ourselves with market share.