Steam's Linux Marketshare Ticks Up Ever So Slightly For May

[jntesteves]

Yes, the point is that even with SteamPlay, it's a little bit more involved than clicking install and playing the game, so the user friendliness isn't there. I guess the only safe assumption to make is that average users are brain dead, and anything more involved than that is too much, not to mention that there's generally a performance penalty to running wine. Oh, and there are plenty of games that require some more work to get running in SteamPlay.

I appreciate what Valve is doing, and it's one of the reasons why I buy from them, but that doesn't change the fact that the general population won't be switching. The mere fact that you have to go out of your way to install another operating system might be too much in itself.

I guess you haven't played on windows in a while. Many games released before 10 that didn't receive patches since, require you to search forums for manual fixes that involve replacing DLLs in the game's folder and sometimes even installing some third party system software developed by some unknown kid on the internet. The situation is simply ridiculous to try to play older games on windows, so I guess soon or possibly already, Linux runs more games than windows 10 and in an easier and well supported way. Many PC gamers are used to modding their games, I guess it's acceptable to ask them to toggle a switch.

[the_scx]

Are legacy games converted in 64bit for linux users? thanks.

No, games are finished products and are rarely updated, especially if a lot of time has passed since the launch. It looks a bit better in multiplayer titles, but a lot depends here on the popularity of the game.

Anyway, as an user, you dont't have to worry about 32-bit libraries (maybe except glibc and drivers, especially OpenGL). Steam provides a runtime called Steam Runtime, and all games on this platform have to use it.

https://pastebin.com/raw/F7RVqBbx

The "beta channel" thing is no longer needed since at least 6 months back so it's just the "enable SteamPlay for unapproved games" that is left. But more than that Valve have funded DXVK and Xaudio2 where both projects would not have been in the state that they are today without that support from Valve.

Yes, the point is that even with SteamPlay, it's a little bit more involved than clicking install and playing the game, so the user friendliness isn't there. I guess the only safe assumption to make is that average users are brain dead, and anything more involved than that is too much, not to mention that there's generally a performance penalty to running wine. Oh, and there are plenty of games that require some more work to get running in SteamPlay.

I appreciate what Valve is doing, and it's one of the reasons why I buy from them, but that doesn't change the fact that the general population won't be switching. The mere fact that you have to go out of your way to install another operating system might be too much in itself.

[F.Ultra]

Are legacy games converted in 64bit for linux users? thanks.

You cannot convert 32-bit games to 64-bit on any platform without recompiling the game from source. To run old 32-bit games you need to have the 32-bit versions of the needed libraries installed (and Steam contains a copy of the 32-bit Steam runtime for that reason).

[F.Ultra]

SteamPlay hasn't made these games suddenly work. They did for a long time, if you were to put in the effort to set up a wine prefix for them. It only made it slightly easier (you still need to click around to enable a beta channel and enable SteamPlay for unapproved games).

The "beta channel" thing is no longer needed since at least 6 months back so it's just the "enable SteamPlay for unapproved games" that is left. But more than that Valve have funded DXVK and Xaudio2 where both projects would not have been in the state that they are today without that support from Valve.

[Azrael5]

Are legacy games converted in 64bit for linux users? thanks.

[BNieuwenhuizen]

Steam just uses OpenGL Renderer string reported by your video driver. And it depends on your driver version. Older Mesa versions reported chip code names instead of product names. For example, both RX480 and RX470 were reported as 'POLARIS10'

I suspect Steam actually uses PCI vendor:device IDs, since IIRC it reported my things by brand name before mesa did the name change.

On the other hand, looks like RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X/590 have the same PCI vendor:device IDs. You might be able to tease them apart based on revision and CU count, but since the drivers don't really care I doubt anyone has done the work to split out all of them.

[khnazile]

Steam client shows my RX 580 as a RX 580, so I don't understand what is happening.

Steam just uses OpenGL Renderer string reported by your video driver. And it depends on your driver version. Older Mesa versions reported chip code names instead of product names. For example, both RX480 and RX470 were reported as 'POLARIS10'

[birdie]

Again a dozen of lame and stupid excuses as to why the Linux market share in gaming (and overall on the desktop) is non-existent and no one sees an elephant in the room: Linux as a desktop OS sucks ass. You just cannot expect people to move to an OS with so many wonderful features and quirks.

Say, you want to have something very simple akin to Windows file sharing in Linux. How would you do that? There are many other petty little things which might look insignificant but people depend their lives on them.

Same here. From 2005 until 2016 I had always dual booted some version of Windows and some version of Linux. Windows 10 came out, got 2 FUBAR updates, haven't had Windows installed since early 2018.

I'm contemplating installing a copy of 10 LTSC so I'll have a Windows comparison when testing games on Linux. I actually own a 10 Pro key, but gods-damn 10 Pro has too much crap I do not want...it's like comparing Ubuntu to ArchBang.

Not to mention that I simply don't trust 10 Pro at all since on any update it would reset file associations, it didn't respect telemetry settings, it didn't respect updating settings like the limited bandwidth setting...pretty bad on Micrsoft's part that I'll seriously consider pirating Windows for their long-term Enterprise edition when I own 10 Pro because 10 Pro sucks that much ass.

Plus I just don't want to risk being a guinea pig and get hit by some dumbass data-eating bug because MS decided I needed to be a beta tester since I did my usual "check for updates manually because it's Sunday and I don't have shit going on". If y'all don't know, manually checking for updates in 10 will set it up so you get beta updates...seriously...they assume that if you manually check for updates then you have to be a bleeding-edge fucktard versus a person who wants to check for updates at a time when they know their system can have downtime.

For all Windows needs that where wine-staging doesn't suffice, I just use virtual machines. M$ provides free VM images on modern.ie, and there are some sites where I can get older releases of Windows that I can virtualize when I want to run legacy software that doesn't work in wine. It's pretty useful in some rare cases, I've used virtual machines to do things such as updating firmware in my mouse.