Steam Linux Marketshare Ticks Up Higher For September

[L_A_G]

Interesting that the RX 480 is the most popular GPU on linux.

It is also weird that the RX 480 is up by 0.7% in the last month, since these are not on sale new for a long time now.
To me it indicates that the trends of the survey is kind of lacking approx 2 years behind or linux users are buying up all the old RX 480s ...

But come to think of it. I bought a new PC about 2 months ago, but I am not expecting to see another steam survey for the next year or more. In this light it explains why the trends are more than 2 years old.

No, the selection is supposed to be random with a few modifiers to prevent machines that are on essentially 24/7 so there really shouldn't be any kind of delay in the hardware surveyed.

More likely than not the change is due to a change in how the participating systems for the survey are selected. Up until somewhat recently gaming webcafe machines were highly over-represented as they're going to be on 24/7 and thus much more likely to be selected for the survey. The thing about web cafes is that they're not really a thing in the west, but pretty huge in Asia, particularly China, and was reflected in the very high percentage of machines with the language set to Chinese despite Steam not being officially supported in China.

They fixed that last year and as a result we saw an upswing in both Linux and AMD usershare as it turns out AMD cards are even less popular in China. As for the most recent results that saw similar kinds of changes, that's probably due to the official Chinese version of Steam hosted by a local company taking off over there. This version is separate from Valve's own and thus results from it, if the survey is even performed in it, aren't going to be in these figures from Valve's own system.

[bregma]

Is there any suggesting these changes to the overall proportion of Steam users taking their survey while using Linux differs from random variation? If this number is supposed to be a statistic, it's missing half the useful information (variance). It's about as useful as using a colour ("there are ecru users taking the steam survey while running Linux this month!!! OMG, last month there were taupe and in April there were beige!!!).

I suppose it's a good way to get clicks from innumerate readers. Between Linux support on steam and anything to do with societal equity, the clicks keep this forum online.

[aufkrawall]

You will get your survey if you install Windows the first time while you have realized that Vulkan makes your games more laggi than DirectX.

That's total bollox.
Probably your compositor isn't unredirecting or something like that.

[rabcor]

let's aim for that 1%!

That's total bollox.
Probably your compositor isn't unredirecting or something like that.

That doesn't make it total bollocks, do you think the average user even knows what a compositor is? How are they supposed to figure this shit out. This kind of stuff is the reason why the linux desktop never managed to take off. Maybe the year of the linux desktpo will never actually come, desktop operating systems will be phased out in favor of mobile ones like android by the time we get there.

Thousands of developers, and we still can't get a 100% reliable desktop experience, I mean we're close, we've always been close, but nobody's ever closed that last gap.

[theriddick]

Well to be fair windows has its fair share of issues also, its just gaming is generally allot more flexible/usable on windows. Linux still has a bit to go, we might not see much progress until wayland becomes standardised. Still lots of little issues for dual monitor users for example, LOTS of issues.

[slalomsk8er]

Funny, I just got the survey yesterday on my living room PC. According to the survey stats my TV has 7inches . Sadly the kids prevented me from the adventure of opening a bug against the survey.

[kpedersen]

let's aim for that 1%!

Thousands of developers, and we still can't get a 100% reliable desktop experience, I mean we're close, we've always been close, but nobody's ever closed that last gap.

This is very true. Open-source seems a little too volatile to really produce a polished desktop. The technology changes too fast and too sporadically without working together for perfect interoperability.

Just small subtle things like missing icons in the default install, default display brightness in login screen not being restored or remembering which audio output to use per user often work for a few revisions but are then broken during the next. And when they do work, something else is a little broken.

That said, compared to Windows 7, I find Windows 10 to have a few more breakages, especially around screen layout or using less consumer tools (gpedit.msc, services.msc, etc). Often there are resize issues causing the components to cut off around the edges. So perhaps it isn't just open-source that is dropping the ball here.

[Naquatis]

That's total bollox.
Probably your compositor isn't unredirecting or something like that.

Well this installation thing was not that serious. But what I found about my pool of computer systems -> every time I put a new Windows machine into the network it did not take that long till Steam ask for a survey. But I have installed far more Linux systems with Steam and they never popped up a survey.

[skeevy420]

Interesting that the RX 480 is the most popular GPU on linux.

It is also weird that the RX 480 is up by 0.7% in the last month, since these are not on sale new for a long time now.
To me it indicates that the trends of the survey is kind of lagging approx 2 years behind or linux users are buying up all the old RX 480s ...

But come to think of it. I bought a new PC about 2 months ago, but I am not expecting to see another steam survey for the next year or more. In this light it explains why the trends are more than 2 years old.

I have to assume that's partly because the RX 5*0 cards tend to be reported as RX 4*0.

RX 480s and 580s are damn good cards for a combination of value, Linux compatibility, guaranteed long-term Linux support, guaranteed major desktop environment performance and support, gaming performance, computing standards support, they both over and under clock very good, and they're mature enough that most major bugs have been squashed. IMHO, they're the best AMD cards for a 1080p Linux desktop that also plays games.

[starshipeleven]

Thousands of developers, and we still can't get a 100% reliable desktop experience, I mean we're close, we've always been close, but nobody's ever closed that last gap.

Probably because these developers are working for server features first.