Steam Kicks Off 2020 With Linux Gaming At The Highest Point In A While

[AdamOne]

Sorry, no.

A developer will always channel the invest to the 99 % and not 1 % share.
No matter what the absolute numbers are.

Why should he care about the 1 %?
Even if the 1 % is large, the other part is larger by two orders of magnitude.

I was referring to reports on how many percent use this OS or that. Without knowing the other half of the equation its hard to make anything out of the statistics by Valve that purposely leave out number of users.

[gamerk2]

Just a note: I updated GitHub issue #6561.

There are 49 closed issues and 32 new issues in the last month. Based on these two numbers it can said that Valve does care about the Steam Linux client.

The Client? Sure, since that's money for them. But native ports? That's an entirely separate discussion.

[gamerk2]

You got lucky or I bought the wrong games and programs back then. For me, Windows never "Just worked" until 2000...but I was still frustrated with needing this version of Direct X, installing random VB and Visual C versions, etc with seemingly every program and wondering if there was a better way.

That's when I discovered Linux and package management; specifically, Debian and Apt.

I'm still frustrated when I have to use winetricks to deal with game dependencies. Luckily, Proton and Steam remove that layer of frustration for most of my games and most of them "just work".

Actually, Linux gaming via Proton and Wine reminds me of gaming back in my Windows 2000 days. For the most part, it will just work...but I might have to tinker around to get it to working flawlessly since it was made for Windows 98/an entirely different OS.

To be fair, the situation with various Visual C distributions is better then it was. And annoying as it was to have (checks control panel) 17 different versions installed, it *does* guarantee the version your specific program wants is installed properly (even if 99% of the time just installing the latest works). And yes, Steam does hide most of that from the end user.

The problem with Linux for most users is they want to hit a button and for things to work. The instant you utter the words "package manager", you've lost them. Throw in the necessity of running most apps through a compatibility layer, and the constant kernel updates that either break compatibility at times, or outright drop hardware support because "it's not being maintained", and you can see why most people won't ever swap.

Personally, I view the lack of a HAL as Linux's major shortcoming. Without that, all hardware is tied to what the kernel does. If the kernel changes, then all hardware/drivers need to change to match. On Windows, you just target the HAL, and really couldn't care what the Windows kernel does under the hood. Microsoft, for the most part, goes to great care to *never* break compatibility; as long as a driver exists for that version of the OS (and again, that's *entirely* up to the manufacturer), then your device will work independent of any future updates.

If Linux had a HAL and the community got behind *one* distribution, Microsoft would be bankrupt in 5 years. But neither of those will ever happen.

[xinorom]

The instant you utter the words "package manager", you've lost them.

Sounds like they're just too smart.