Valve's Steam Survey Numbers For October Just Point To More Inaccuracies

[liamdawe]

Valve's survey numbers usually get revised later in the month, IIRC.

Here's a dedicated page, at gamingonlinux.com: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index....am_linux_share Thanks, liamdawe

Edit: numbers from before Nov. 2017 have been removed from that page due to a few bugs with how Valve reported marketshare... That made it over-report computers in cybercafés. This was highly correlated with the rise of PUBG in China, with a big increase in the playerbase & (stretching my knowledge a bit) steam-backed cybercafés there, which created a huge spike in chinese-speaking numbers, as reported in the steam survey, while this caused a big dip in Linux number. Hence why the extra graphs on that page, to explain that.

There's not much point in them now that this bug has been fixed. I wish the longer history wass still available on the site to provide soe context, though.

Thanks for the mention and showing our page

We learned to wait a few days to a week before updating our dedicated page, as the numbers often fluctuate within that time. No idea why, Valve haven't said but it almost always changes in the first week once the initial data goes live on their page.

As an example of why we wait on it, here's what Phoronix reported in August:

The Steam numbers put out tonight by Valve for July 2019 show a 0.05% decline for Linux usage down to 0.79%.... But this is another month with rather flakey numbers. Valve originally pegged Steam's Linux usage for June at 0.76% only to quietly revise it at some point during July to apparently 0.84%.

Valve didn't quietly revise it, just their numbers never quite match up in the first few days. When you look back at their data using the waybackmachine, Valve later adjusted it to be correct as a +0.03% increase over June. As I mentioned, this happens often and ideally Phoronix should wait a week before reporting or else Phoronix reports will just end up inaccurate as a result. To be clear, this is not a dig at Phoronix, I only know this due to running that dedicated page and so I check back multiple times a month to ensure ours is correct.

This month is another clear example of why rushing to report it isn't ideal. Phoronix said:

The Linux numbers for October 2019 as of this evening are shown as 0.83% with a +0.03% increase over September.

Valve have already revised it to say it's 0.83% (0.00% change not the +0.03% Phoronix stated), meaning it's the same as last month and they may well update it again in the next few days.

[useless]

I tried playing CSGO. It was laggy as hell and I immediately uninstalled it. PIng seemed to be OK (~40ms), FPS was also OK (>200), but it felt like there was a 0.3 seconds delay between my actions and the reaction of the game. It felt like I was in water. I couldn't win a single duel. No, thank you.

No problem over here: several AMD GPUs, in several PCs. That sounds very much like compositing being on (i.e. compton, which sucks) or some vsync issues related to the driver.

[Davidovitch]

I tried playing CSGO. It was laggy as hell and I immediately uninstalled it. PIng seemed to be OK (~40ms), FPS was also OK (>200), but it felt like there was a 0.3 seconds delay between my actions and the reaction of the game. It felt like I was in water. I couldn't win a single duel. No, thank you.

I play CSGO regularly on Arch Linux with latest Gnome (3.34) on Wayland (Ryzen 1800X + Radeon RX 580). That works for me (no terrible lag), although I have "doubled buffered" under "wait for vertical sync". In previous versions of Gnome Wayland there was a lot of tearing. In order to prevent that I had to increase to "triple buffered" for the v-sync setting, but that resulted in terrible lag. Older Gnome on X worked much better: no tearing while not using any buffering.

Edit: I checked again by setting it to no buffering: snappier, but a little more tearing.

[skeevy420]

I play CSGO regularly on Arch Linux with latest Gnome (3.34) on Wayland (Ryzen 1800X + Radeon RX 580). That works for me (no terrible lag), although I have "doubled buffered" under "wait for vertical sync". In previous versions of Gnome Wayland there was a lot of tearing. In order to prevent that I had to increase to "triple buffered" for the v-sync setting, but that resulted in terrible lag. Older Gnome on X worked much better: no tearing while not using any buffering.

Edit: I checked again by setting it to no buffering: snappier, but a little more tearing.

If you're using Xwayland, Setting TearFree and EnablePageFlipping to On in your xorg.conf might help. My 580 really likes those to be on.

[Davidovitch]

If you're using Xwayland, Setting TearFree and EnablePageFlipping to On in your xorg.conf might help. My 580 really likes those to be on.

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately, they where already on by default, so it didn't make things better. I can live with a little bit of tearing as long as it is very snappy and fast, just like my shooting :-)

[PackRat]

I haven't used Linux for like 9 months. I had a free win 10 pro developer licence but when I upgraded to ryzen cpu mobo Microsoft wanted me to pay for win 10. I did not like Microsoft's new terms of service they made in may anyway, so I installed Ubuntu 19.10 and things have improved a lot. With Lutris I got other game launchers to work like Ea 's origin , Ubisoft , Epic games launcher. Dead Island now works with radeonsi (radeon 280x) with opengl 4.5. The only thing that does not work for me is doom 2016 demo with proton.
Unreal engine 4.23.1 hanged with verifying vulkan and the fix was unplugging the second monitor. A 280x with 3gb vram is just not enough and the driver is still not finished. My bro made a first person multiplayer shooter with networking and it did work with win 10 and Linux. He wants to switch to Linux but no visual studio.

[Remdul]

He wants to switch to Linux but no visual studio.

Make him check out Apache NetBeans* which is fully a featured IDE. I've used if for all my C++ projects last 5+ years. Even the project settings dialogs are almost identical to VC++ (no learning curve), and has some very nice productivity features that MSVC doesn't have. Lightning fast code assistance (intellisense was always too late), great refactoring, superior search function (doesn't pollute results with external library code, or inside comments), scrollbar view-finder (for instant overview of code matches) etc etc.
Also great support from developers, had at least 3 bugs fixed within a few months after reporting! The only downside of Netbeans that you can't go back to MSVC; you'll miss these vital features.

* Since 8.2 there's been no standalone Netbeans C++ release installer, but you can still install the regular Netbeans (Java) and then install the official C++ plugin from within the IDE via plugin manager, which may be a bit confusing to newbies.

[skeevy420]

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately, they where already on by default, so it didn't make things better. I can live with a little bit of tearing as long as it is very snappy and fast, just like my shooting :-)

Well, as far as vsync goes, you could try setting vblank_mode=1 to force vsync with Mesa, SDL_VIDEO_X11_NET_WM_BYPASS_COMPOSITOR=1 to tell the window manager to disable compositing for an SDL game (helps with KWin), & there's trying libstrangle to set vsync that way. Since I use a 1080p TV as my monitor, vsync helps with everything and the only noticeable difference with it on or off is less to no tearing in games -- Morrowind was so much better after switching from a 1366x768 16" monitor to a 43" 1080p (in 720p low/medium w/ 20ish fps 'cause my GeForce 4 sucked major ass).

Sometimes there's just that bit of tearing we have to deal with

That SDL one is for X11, but if you're using an Xwayland session, doesn't hurt to try.

When you say on by default, do you mean in the config or going by the man pages saying they're on by default? In my experiences over the years, explicitly setting it in a config is better than relying on autoconfig magic in regards to GPUs.

[M@yeulC]

The only thing that does not work for me is doom 2016 demo with proton.

Take that with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that this specific game used to not work because of Denuvo DRM. They removed it from the main game later on, but never from the demo.

You could try to use Steam's 2h/14d refund policy as a demo, if you wanted

[Luke_Wolf]

Make him check out Apache NetBeans* which is fully a featured IDE. I've used if for all my C++ projects last 5+ years. Even the project settings dialogs are almost identical to VC++ (no learning curve), and has some very nice productivity features that MSVC doesn't have. Lightning fast code assistance (intellisense was always too late), great refactoring, superior search function (doesn't pollute results with external library code, or inside comments), scrollbar view-finder (for instant overview of code matches) etc etc.
Also great support from developers, had at least 3 bugs fixed within a few months after reporting! The only downside of Netbeans that you can't go back to MSVC; you'll miss these vital features.

* Since 8.2 there's been no standalone Netbeans C++ release installer, but you can still install the regular Netbeans (Java) and then install the official C++ plugin from within the IDE via plugin manager, which may be a bit confusing to newbies.

You're the first person I've heard of suggesting NetBeans, I'd mostly suggest KDevelop or QtCreator at this point due to the clang integration, or CLion if you're willing to pay for it.

On topic... it's nice to hear that Michael has finally realized that the numbers Valve posts are questionable rather than shouting from the rooftops that they're the most accurate thing ever.