Valve's Steam Survey Data Shows Linux Usage Pulling Back During June

[josh_walrath]

I am disappointed that there hasn't been more of an uptick with Proton and all the positive Linux gaming press of late, but we're talking about a percentage of ALL ESTABLISHED STEAM GAMING ON PLANET EARTH, so maybe a noticeable effect was too much to ask for . I don't think we'll see the numbers budge much until Steam can be used on Chromebooks, which perhaps could happen soon, with primary installs or streaming...

Then again, all of this might not matter for long, as I'm predicting much of casual gaming in 5-10 years will all be through Stadia like services, platforms will somewhat become obsolete, which I think will be terrific for users of all platforms.

I'm a fan of the conspiracy theory that Stadia is just Google trying to leverage giant GPU clusters they were using for something else that got scrapped. Otherwise, it's a horrible idea philosophically *and* technically.

The philosophical horribleness is fine; we're used to it. The technical horribleness, however, should quickly kill Stadia: you can't game with user->network->render->network->user latency even on good, 5-10-year-into-the-future connections. You'll get motion sickness from moving the cursor alone.

I hope it at least drives more Linux-friendly development, even if it only lasts as long as Stadia does.

[zoomblab]

There are zero successful desktop/mobile OSes which don't have good compatibility with old software. None.

I think you over exaggerate. As an example, I am running MySQL 5.5 which was released in 2010 on Ubuntu 18.04 fine. Also I prefer to install my work tools from tar gzips and as such they are usually cross distro compatible :-) Other than that, AppImages are designed to offer exactly what you are complaining about. Easy to use application bundles with perfect backward compatibility across distros and releases. And now we have Docker that does the same thing but is more complicated and used mostly for deployments of services and server side stuff.

[oiaohm]

In Windows 10 you can run Windows 95 applications

That is true. Linux ABI stability does not go as far back. But there is a line in sand.

Linux distributions start at glibc 2.3 or newer with ABI stability this is 2002 and newer.

you also can compile applications for older versions of Windows.

Linux distributions can be made do this but its a serous pain. As I pointed out before that you could force the issue. With a current day glibc you can create a glibc.h file that forced 2.3 only functions or use a stub library to get you there.

2002 there is a reason why ABI stability starts then on Linux. That is the 1.1 Linux Standard Base release year and the start of different libraries taking ABI stability serous-ally on Linux.

That's both backward and forward compatibility - both of which are in an awful state on Linux. To be precise forward compatibility is damn near missing while backward compatibility is a royal PITA.

https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.5.html

Zoomblab mentioned mysql 5.5 you can download these tar.gz packages that is targeted at glibc 2.12 and they work perfectly on current day Linux distributions not a single bug.

So forwards compatibility can be rock-solid on Linux. Its key the applications are correctly bundled.

https://downloads.mysql.com/archives/community/

Yes you can go back here 5.0.15 version that is the 2005 version of mysql grab the tar.gz files and they still run on current day distributions without trouble.

birdie basically what you are saying makes no sense really. I have graphical and server software I can list that were packaged correctly using ABI stable libraries of the time from 2002 forwards that you can drop on any current day Linux distribution with glibc and they work perfectly.

Linux start date for API/ABI stability is 2002. What is missing is a SDK to take full advantage of this.

[some_canuck]

i finally got a survey after like 3 years

[aht0]

I somehow doubt that the amount of people with access to a gaming system in the southern hemisphere is anywhere near 1/4 of the gamers in the northern.

Yep, you can see it in random more popular multiplayer-capable game's server browsers quite easily. Oceanian servers are few: Reason, tho Australia is effin' huge, population there is relatively sparse, most of the rest of that region is ocean. Africa below equator consists mostly of "hellhole countries" - people living there tend to not own computers - with the exception of South African Republic - which seems to be heading that direction. Out of South-American countries, Brazil might be only one with fair density of PC users/gamers. Antarctica is barren-frozen wasteland.

[starshipeleven]

Meanwhile you can compile an app in Windows 10 which will work perfectly in Windows 7 with zero issues. You can even compile applications which will run in Windows XP.

You can compile applications for whatever OS on Linux too, just saying.

[starshipeleven]

In Windows 10 you can run Windows 95 applications

*some

[Guest]

Until we have Linux as a platform which offers a rich set of stable APIs/ABIs supported for at the very least 10 years, we won't have any gains in Linux gaming market share.

And then maybe we shouldn't deprecate and throw away the things which still work great vs. something which is lacking huge desktop oriented features like global keyboard shortcuts. I mean seriously? An X.org replacement which has been in development for over a decade doesn't offer an API for global keyboard shortcuts. Then what about remote screen sharing? Only recently some work has been done towards it. And again no APIs for sending keyboard/mouse events remotely.

WTF is wrong with Linux developers?

My biggest issue with Wayland (on GNOME) that I see barely anyone even acknowledge is the laggy mouse cursor with high CPU/GPU usage. Seriously, how does anyone use Wayland with that being an issue? Can reproduce this super easily by running GpuTest or prime95, but it happens randomly even with general usage; and forget gaming altogether with this. Meanwhile, under Xorg, cursor works perfectly under full CPU/GPU load.

I thought I'd give Wayland on GNOME another go the other day while trying to play FFXIV at 4K; absolutely horrible. Mouse was near useless, and FFXIV looked like it lost FPS as well. I'm using Fedora 30 and a RX 580, so nothing software-wise should be outdated when it comes to the graphics stack, GNOME, and Wayland.

Another lesser issue is that I can't seem to create a CVT-RB resolution which I need for stable 4K@60Hz. This is easy on Xorg (just toss a generated modeline into a xorg.conf snippet). On Wayland (on GNOME), this obviously doesn't work, and the only way I've gotten this to work was to dig through some manuals, a lot of searching, and eventually create this kernel option: video=HDMI-A-1:3840x2160MR@59, and then choose 59Hz for that option instead of 60Hz (the CVT-RB refresh rate for whatever reason doesn't show up if I use 60Hz; which again isn't an issue with Xorg and the snippet).

I'm not exactly happy after hearing the recent news about RH putting X on maintenance mode... It's actually usable.

[betam4x]

For steam survey results to actually mean anything, I need to get a steam survey. I have not gotten one at all since moving my main machine over to Linux. I imagine others have had a similar issue. Who knows, even game play stats might be broken. Does a game played under Proton count as being played on Linux or on Windows (since it's WINE)? are Valve's detection algorithms even accurate at this stage? The Linux gaming communities I visit are often more active than say, AMD communities, yet AMD has seen a sizeable market share improvement according to retailers that publish their numbers and 3rd party benchmarks that publish theirs, but according to Valve AMD is little more than a blip on the radar. Ryzen has completely dominated Amazon's top 10 list for CPUs since the launch of Ryzen Gen 1. Either Amazon doesn't sell many CPUs (doubtful) or Valve isn't doing a very good job (likely).

[betam4x]

My biggest issue with Wayland (on GNOME) that I see barely anyone even acknowledge is the laggy mouse cursor with high CPU/GPU usage. Seriously, how does anyone use Wayland with that being an issue? Can reproduce this super easily by running GpuTest or prime95, but it happens randomly even with general usage; and forget gaming altogether with this. Meanwhile, under Xorg, cursor works perfectly under full CPU/GPU load.

I thought I'd give Wayland on GNOME another go the other day while trying to play FFXIV at 4K; absolutely horrible. Mouse was near useless, and FFXIV looked like it lost FPS as well. I'm using Fedora 30 and a RX 580, so nothing software-wise should be outdated when it comes to the graphics stack, GNOME, and Wayland.

Another lesser issue is that I can't seem to create a CVT-RB resolution which I need for stable 4K@60Hz. This is easy on Xorg (just toss a generated modeline into a xorg.conf snippet). On Wayland (on GNOME), this obviously doesn't work, and the only way I've gotten this to work was to dig through some manuals, a lot of searching, and eventually create this kernel option: video=HDMI-A-1:3840x2160MR@59, and then choose 59Hz for that option instead of 60Hz (the CVT-RB refresh rate for whatever reason doesn't show up if I use 60Hz; which again isn't an issue with Xorg and the snippet).

I'm not exactly happy after hearing the recent news about RH putting X on maintenance mode... It's actually usable.

Most people have NVIDIA cards, and on NVIDIA cards it's exactly the opposite. The fact you are gaming at 4K is likely an issue. The 580 is NOT a 4k card. Hell, I have a 570 (slightly slower, but the performance gap isn't that big) and 4k games are a slideshow on that card even on low settings. The only cards capable of decent 4k gaming (at max or high details at least) are 1080ti or RTX 2070 and above cards and in many cases the Radeon VII. Polaris based cards are meant for 1440p tops, unfortunately. You may have gotten better results in Windows, but short of trying the closed and open source drivers in Linux, and double checking that the Windows and Linux settings match, and the versions of the game are the same, you will have a hard time with an Apples to Apples comparison.

For the record, I lost 10-15% of my framerate and frametimes increased when I used X over Wayland for GNOME. This does not appear to happen on KDE however. I am also unable to use Wayland on KDE to test if Wayland is any faster, just that X performs better when using KDE vs GNOME for gaming. It could be due to the KDE compositor offloading GUI work to the GPU. Indeed changing the compositor settings makes game performance worse (Phoronix verified that later after I tried it with a review of their own).