Valve's Steam July 2020 Numbers Point To A Small Dip For Linux

[Vistaus]

Linux is not there yet for gaming. It still requires fiddling and third party apps to get it to run just right. Most gamers just want to turn on the game and play, which is why consoles are so popular even though PCs can do so much more, but I digress.

I used to want Linux to become dominant and take over. Now I'm happy it hasn't. Marketshare brings a lot of headaches: more viruses, more hacking attempts, and more shady companies with sketchy licensing. It's nice to have an OS that just works and most people don't seem to notice. I worry that won't last much longer.

Linux has the most market share on servers. Show me the extensive list of viruses for Linux servers.

[torsionbar28]

Linux has the most market share on servers. Show me the extensive list of viruses for Linux servers.

There are many markets where Linux has completely dominated and holds the largest market share by far. Internet web/email/cloud servers, supercomputers, and smartphones, to name a few. Not sure why folks continue to falsely equate end user desktops or video gaming, with overall success.

[vb_linux]

Ok Mr Maths, so which one is a game of chance with random distribution of results? Linux gaming marketshare? Or global warming? Please, do tell.

FWIW I bought a big pile of AMD at $1.88 in Feb 2016. Nearly 4000% gain and counting.

PS. You should get your Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) evaluated, there are meds they can prescribe for that.

If I have to explain to you how surveys use probability, really? hint: sample distribution to simulate population distribution

Again, how Global warming is measured and how trends are measured? In fact, people who scientifically measure do know that each measuring instrument also has errors and no measurement can be precise. The same is used in Rocket science, et. al Kalman filtering. All the weather pattern is complex and not deterministic. It is scholastic modeling which is used there. So, just like instead of looking at one coin, don't look at your town only but collect them globally and you will see trends over time series.

But hey, your logic works too" How is their snow in April in my town, Global Warming, Blah Blah Blah?"


Maybe, you can use the meds you prescribe me if you take the Trump out of your mouth.

[grigi]

To be honest, I'm also not really a "gamer" any more. Haven't been for a long time.
I'm also someone that is prepared to pay for my principles, and that was to try and further OSS so we can get rid of the yoke and chain of untrustworthy giant companies.

I have been doing some gaming in the last few years, and actually found it quite surprising how well it works on Linux.
And how crap it has become on windows.

So, I don't really care, as long as we can win the long term game.

Note that users of Linux is mostly people that can compromise. (High on pragmatism). It's neither the most "free", nor the most future-protecting (like GPL). It's about supporting commercial systems and hardware, but doing your best to ensure control is kept in the open.
Basically I have no problem with proprietary software. Just when it goes too far.

It's also a breath of fresh air to have a mostly OSS system, and not have to deal with so many scummy "freeware".

On a counter-point to someone's comment here. I find multi-screen setups on Linux to work better than on Windows or OSX. Especially when your resolutions/dpi are different. And Linux is a developers dream platform, as you can just step in deeper and deeper and see what has been done by tired humans. And mostly, the passion and general acceptance of peoples differences is much better on the Linux camp.

And malware... sucks. I'm sorry.
It's sad that UEFI is so powerful, but done so badly.
At least most of us are trying to do their best, and that's good.

Stay Vigilant? I suppose... It's tiring to live like that though.

[spykes]

The problem on linux isn't gaming, not anymore at least. The problem is that gaming is just about the only thing that works on the damned thing. Major production software doesn't work. Multi monitor support is 100% in the gutter no matter what you do (unless you only use screens with an identical resolution and refresh rate that is) printer support is still just plain sad....

Browsing, gaming and media playback. Those are the only things linux works for. I suppose office work too if you're ok with libreoffice; but that's really it, at least from a desktop user perspective, of course there's a lot of sexy for it for server applications... But yeah. I mean I suppose it does work (if barely) as a general purpose OS, I mean the most common things people do will work (except maybe the freakin printers) but any sort of actual work, pretty much can't get done on linux. Hell, even programmers tend to strongly prefer visual studio over any IDE available on linux.

I've been using Linux as a workstation OS for almost 17 years and it's a real pleasure to work with. I have zero issue in using my printers, from my personal Epson all in one to the big HP I use in the office, everything works flawlessly. Sure you may experience caveats if you search for some very specific programs like Adobe or things like that, but we have more and more alternatives those days (even proprietary ones) .

[herman]

Linux has the most market share on servers. Show me the extensive list of viruses for Linux servers.

I'm brand-spanking new to Linux so I can't give you extensive lists of anything. I just know that most viruses are targeted for Windows. Even breaches into Linux servers are generally used to serve Windows malware (or at least, that's what I have read on tech sites). I also know that there have been some recent reports of cross-platform viruses with one (ACBackdoor) supposedly being worse on Linux than on Windows.

I know Linux is generally more secure than Windows and will most likely remain so even if it became more popular, but I personally don't want to find out the hard way by giving virus makers a bigger target via marketshare. Just my insignificant perspective.

[Sonadow]

There are many markets where Linux has completely dominated and holds the largest market share by far. Internet web/email/cloud servers, supercomputers, and smartphones, to name a few. Not sure why folks continue to falsely equate end user desktops or video gaming, with overall success.

Because we are talking things like gaming, Nouveau drivers, 802.11ac/ax USB WiFi drivers, printers that are not sold by HP, etc, all of which are directly related to desktop use and have zero relevance to the server, supercomputing and embedded world.

[gregzeng]

Trying so hard to put these press releases (two of them) into a management perspective. In the Steam gaming world, Windows has about 96% of the users base. Apple is second, with 3.2 %. Long way behind is Linux, with 0.86%.

Missing are the Android games, including the Chrome OS operating systems, based on Linux. Steam does not include these, since most game players use these with the more popular handheld machines, instead of the desk-bound machines.

The second press release (gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/) estimated that there were "(Jul-2020 - 0.86%): 817,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux Steam". So in July 2020, there were an estimated 95 million game players on Steam, or 94 million potential Linux users who avoided Linux. Linux users are an exclusive One Percenter class, in the games world of desk machines.

Linux seems a serious business operating system, if we ignore Android & Chrome OS. As shown be Apple, these Unix based operating systems are better environmental machines, then Microsoft Windows. The Unix-based systems have better architectural foundations that create less waste, easier & more flexible "kernels", than the traditional systems. Apple's Unix architecture is tightly anti-open source, hiding too many bugs, poor compromises & bad optimizations. Android is not as open-ranged & undisciplined as Linux. Linux itself is a baby, loudly knowing that it's X-display system & package management systems are very limited and undeveloped.

All the operating systems are aware that they are constantly outdated & primitive. The coding languages & internal standards are continuously "improving" & changing. Each change introduces new bugs & bug fixes, with disputable compromises. These upstream changes then are impacting all the downstream items, either for the better, or worse, or no measurable change at all. The other "annoying" changes are the surrounding environments to this soft code. Changes in the hard code & "firm" code creates more changes in the required softcode. Hardware specialists such as Intel, AMD, ARM, Samsung, Apple & Nvidia force the softcode creators to have further headaches. Then umbrella organizations decide to create "standards". So Intel-64 was lost, to be replaced by AMD-64, and the new USB versions are slowly replacing many other private innovations.

The OP focus on "games" with computer systems is the experimental edge in "civilization". These luxury off-duty "fun" events create so many innovations that later benefit the much more serious work environments. Ergonomics of hardware & software are much advanced. For example, reading the two source documents behind this OP, we can see the disappearance of the East Asian languages, to be replaced by English. These language changes were long predicted by a feature writer in Stern Magazine, in the 1970's. Japanese is not used by the Steam users, and Simplified Chinese is declining. Eventually we might be able to create one world language (based on English), and one world operating system, based on Unix.

[PackRat]

I'm brand-spanking new to Linux

Welcome to Linux! Linux sucks so bad that by the time you master it you will be making your own disto and a new desktop environment that suits you.

My bro told me he was going to switch to Linux when dotnet 5 drops in November. He was going to give up on gaming and game development but thanks to phoronix and gamesfromscratch on YT I learned that Unigine engine came out with a free indie licence and it's available on linux. Now he is back in the game and he loves Unigine engine.

Gaming and the technology that is used in so called game engines are far more important than people think. Unigine engine is primarily use is engineering, simulations and military aka defence.

You are worried about Linux getting more viruses because it's becoming popular? Linux could save people lives with game engine tech. Autonomous vehicle's are being used with game engine's and Linux. Imagine a driver at high speeds on a highway that has a medical conditon like a heat attack with a regular car they crash and kill more people. Now with an autonomous vehicle it will detect that the vehicles is uncontrolled and will use an autopilot mode.

Gaming is important it inspires people's imaginations and makes them want to be creative. A PC gamer will start to tinker with files and change things, they will mod the game just like how Linux users tinker and make lot's of desktops. How many games do people need? How many desktops do people need?

Viruses... ? Let's just shut down progress and innovation because of fear, right? Fear is a great teacher but a terrible master.

Fortune favours the bold. PC Gamers and Linux users in essence are very similar. People get bored they move on to new things but they will tinker with the new toy's and Linux must be that new toy.

[AmericanLocomotive]

Linux has been "a couple of years away" from being a complete-Windows-replacement for 15 years now. I'm not knocking Linux or its developers - I think it's just becoming more apparent how much effort had been put into Windows Gaming over the past 25 years, and how hard duplicating all of that work is. With the recent massive gains in AMD driver performance, and Valve's amazing contributions - it feels closer than it ever has before.

But it's really still not there.

I have a SuSE Tumbleweed install on my system - I installed Steam, Installed Portal 2, click play ...and it didn't work. A Valve game with a native Linux port didn't work. After some fiddling, I was able to get it to work with the Windows binary using Proton, but not the latest version of Proton - I had to use an older version. It's that kind of fiddling that really turns people away. They just want things to work.