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

[Sonadow]

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.

Marketshare is a balancing act. On one hand a certain amount of marketshare is needed in order to attract hardware vendors into providing drivers for Linux. The pathetic state of Nouveau and 802.11ac/ax USB wifi adapter compatibility will definitely be much better if desktop Linux occupied at least a 5 - 10% share of the desktop OS pie.

[liamdawe]

They've already fixed it to say it was a 0.02% drop FYI.

Historical look: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

[herman]

Yes virus free Linux times are over! I was hit by a UEFI trojan two years ago. But probably my fault as I was opening email attachments after 20 troubles free Linux years... Lots of malware seems to swap in from Android.

Sounds absolutely nasty. I've learned to be more careful in recent years with viruses but every so often my judgement lapses as well. It's easy to forget that the next link may be the last one you click before needing to wipe everything.

[herman]

Marketshare is a balancing act. On one hand a certain amount of marketshare is needed in order to attract hardware vendors into providing drivers for Linux. The pathetic state of Nouveau and 802.11ac/ax USB wifi adapter compatibility will definitely be much better if desktop Linux occupied at least a 5 - 10% share of the desktop OS pie.

You're right about that. Wifi and Nouveau are two things I'd love to see improved.

[Mike Frett]

You can always tell the people that don't use Linux. They always complain about how you can't play games and how nothing that's plugged in works. Not very good trolling.

[kescherPh]

Just today, I got the survey dialog again, after not getting it for 3 months straight (presumably because I didn't play a lot of games on Steam).

[scottishduck]

There is a slow increase in time when you graph out the Linux market share. It’ll take some time but if we reached 2% that’s when things are possibly significant enough for developers to take more notice.

[rabcor]

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 is actually pretty much there for gaming already, you can count on roughly 70% of titles to work without any hassle, some at worst with maybe a minor hassle (such as a launch option) with maybe another 10-20% that will work but with a bit more hassle.

There are cases where gaming on proton is faster than native windows too.

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.

[Sonadow]

Linux is actually pretty much there for gaming already, you can count on roughly 70% of titles to work without any hassle, some at worst with maybe a minor hassle (such as a launch option) with maybe another 10-20% that will work but with a bit more hassle.

Needing to install compatible 32bit libraries is not a bit of hassle. It's a major pain for people who want to maintain a pure x64 installation without a crapload of extra packages being shit all over the system. Especially for people who run self-built versions of libdrm, libglvnd and Mesa.

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 saying this for all of 12 years that I have been using desktop Linux and yet everybody thinks I'm just shilling for Microsoft. And media playback does not even work unless the distribution bundles the mp3 libraries and a functional version of ffmpeg compiled with support for proprietary codecs.

The bolded point has been a huge peeve for me in Debian 10's versions of Plasma Wayland. I have a laptop with a 4K display and have set Plasma Wayland to use a scaling factor of 1x. And yet, when the laptop is connected to a second displat, Plasma thinks that it should automatically scale my 4K display to a factor of 2x without my input causing the entire desktop to look odd. And setting it back to 1x causes Plasma to go apeshit because it still recognizes window buttons and contents in their original 2x scale position instead of at 1x.

[torsionbar28]

How is your Trumpist cultist advice about Global warming and how are valve Linux numbers related?

I can never tell if the next coin toss will be head or tails but I can still tell you a trend. If you do it 10000 times I can still tell you to expect 5000 heads.

Valve tells you of trends in gaming. How many people prefer one OS over others? Which cards are preferred? Which processor is preferred? Game Developers can take advantage of this data, so can you, if you believe in Buffet type value investing. AMD's move from $2.5 to $76 now though has a lot of profits and market share increase baked but I still see it going up to $100 at least.

And if only we want to look at Linux, averaging this over past time series shows you that the Linux market share hasn't moved much despite the improvements from the proton, etc.

So, think before you tweet and maybe pick up a maths book and read probability.

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.