Steam On Linux Is Ending Summer 2020 At Just Under 0.9% Marketshare

[ntropy]

I am pretty happy with Proton, cant keep up with all the games I have to play. Since I mostly play headless, I set up a dummy monitor now, to be able to stream in 4k. Gonna see how that ends up.

I doubt that just because you can game on Linux now, it will make billions of Windows users change to Linux. Linux is the OS for Devs and they will want to play their games on the OS. That will help linux gaming more than anything else.

For the future I think Linux will be more important regarding game streaming. I am pretty excited to see, how the development around NetGPU will progress and what we have to expect from that. I can imagine that having a game locally installed or stream a game remotely may merge a bit in the future. So it wouldnt be necessary to only use the servers hardware for streaming, but you can add performance as the user as well.

[gregzeng]

What is with all these trolls...It's been the same nonsense for years, always "Linux doesn't work" and "Linux isn't for gaming". Please, give me a f'n break, I doubt any of you even use Linux.

Seems you don't lke "facts" & "figures"? Why not attack the OP, Michael?
> "After a small dip in July, how did the Steam on Linux gaming market share end out for August prior to many gamers returning to school and others still being isolated at home? A small uptick but still under the 1% threshold."

Ok - you are a very proud "One Per Center". We get that. Some of us want to not be part of a lost minority. Some blame Nvidia and other hardware creators. Now we have HiDPI and other hardware changes everywhere. Instead of attacking each other, try to focus on the problem. End users do not want CLI education & tedium. However, with Linux & The Linux Foundation, there is no answer yet. So end users choose Windows, then Apple.

The bulk of the game players are on Android. None have been able to seduce these have-fun game players to the big-boys games.. Can it ever be done?

[oleid]

Nobody hates you for installing closed drivers. Nobody hates you for criticizing init system. Another issue is there is no Steam x86_64 client and if you'd like to avoid multilib/multiarch then it is bit inconvenient at least.

Not sure what you want to say. In any case, I (infrequently) use Steam on Arch via flatpak. AFAIR I don't have any multiarch on Arch itself, however, it's all handled (somehow -- don't care, it just works) within the sandbox.

[CochainComplex]

Wouldn't it be easier and more accurate to count the logged in users? Im sure it sends some information after login if you are on win or on linux. And then average the percentage over the year? Or counting client update requests might help aswell. So I guess the numbers then would be way more different.

[chocolate]

I've had some time this summer to appreciate just how good Steam for Linux really is. Somehow, compared to other platforms, it feels like it's the most stable and reliable. It doesn't ever remember its fullscreen status on Windows, and it's just a mess on macOS: slow, sometimes grainy, DPI scaling is all over the place. On Linux, it just works.

Not to mention, other operating systems get in the way of gaming, whereas Linux can be more of a console-like experience, almost zero maintenance required. Windows breaks itself, takes you on unsolicited tours of useless software at startup... macOS is clunky, awful multitasking and awful management of proper fullscreen windows and borderless, fullscreen windows. There's also the matter that macOS deprecates stuff out of the blue and you're left without an alternative. Native games like Tales from Monkey Island can be glitchy or fail to start outright. It's the worst platform of them all, for sure.

Also important: input support sucks on both Windows and macOS. On Windows, people rely on all sorts of hacky and low quality, even sketchy I'd say, community tools that e.g. convert an input standard to another.
All major joypads work out of the box on Linux, and Steam adds its own cherry on top by letting you configure them on a per-game basis. Awesome.

Linux can also be the main gaming box from which to stream games to other computers running Windows or macOS, and it's very reliable in doing that.

I've just recently been experimenting with Mirror's Edge Catalyst and even that game works fine, as well as its online features, on top of EA Origin, on top of Proton, seamlessly.

This is probably the most enjoyable experience I've had since ever, and I've started gaming as a child on MS-DOS.
I've chosen to run Steam on a dedicated SSD with Pop!_OS, a XanMod kernel to get the latest amdgpu kernel driver, and the kisak-mesa PPA for the latest and greatest stable userspace drivers (if you're a regular user, don't bother with stuff like oibaf). My RX 5700 is shining and the latest open source drivers are surely helping. Of course, the hardware has been chosen exactly so that the software side would be as painless and maintenance-free as possible, and that's easily achieved thanks to AMD and Valve.
Two PPAs are literally all that's required on top of a base Pop!_OS installation to make the configuration last presumably for years.

https://xanmod.org/

https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa

[liamdawe]

Historical data for those who want it: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

It actually puts us at around 845,500 monthly active users on Steam.

[ColdDistance]

That's a pretty good write up. I agree. Linux has failed as a gaming platform and for good technical reasons at that.

It's just not a platform for closed source. I get more stability from running Linux native games via ProtonDB (thanks steam for that option btw.) in many cases.

OS update? Oh no a native game stopped working coz <libX>. Game update? Crash on start. It's been pretty ridiculous tbh.

I'm saying this as a Linux main since early 2000s. I'm never going to switch to Windows of Mac for my main setup since they both suck on so many levels, but for gaming, Linux has failed and I don't think with how things are setup up that it can succeed.

I use Steam for Linux since 2013 and today all the native games I have work correctly, with just some games (specially Half-Life 2) with problems with vsync, but using Wayland (running the games with XWayland) I avoid that.

BioShock 1 was released in 2007 and at least the physical version always gives me problems with full screen mode in Windows Vista and later versions. Windows Vista was available when BioShock 1 was released, so the physical version of the first BioShock wasn't compatible with a current operating system of those days.

The original version of Fallout 3 was released in 2008. One year later, in 2009, Windows 7 was released and Fallout 3 doesn't work on it (and on Windows 10 too), so the game was broke just one year after the release. This is the truth about the marvelous retrocompatibility of Windows, broken applications just using the next Windows version. Curiously, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion works on Windows 7 and later. LOL.

I played on Ubuntu, KDE neon, Manjaro, openSUSE, Fedora, Linux Mint and Debian, with NVIDIA and AMD cards (AMD today, NVIDIA in the past), and in Debian I used the Flatpak version of Steam. I've never seen a native game fully broke as a I've seen on Windows. Today I use Fedora Workstation with a RX 580 and I didn't see any native game broke even though the kernel is constantly changing and I don't have to remember what is a driver because with AMD graphics Fedora is a very well configured operating system for gaming. Just install the system, install Steam, activate Steam Play (if you want to play Windows games) and start to play.

Today I'm playing to The Evil Within and the Windows version of that game isn't the best port. Well, with the ultra configuration less the antialiasing, that I deactivate because I use the 1080p resolution on a 21 inch screen, I didn't have any crash after playing the game 28 hours and I only have drops to 40fps in overloaded and some very open sites, the most of time the game works over 50fps, and the half of time the game works over 60fps, so I think it's fully playable.

[JPFSanders]

How much can I pay folks to end the stupidity of discussing percentage of Linux user marketshare on (Windows) Steam?

Steam sucks. Steam Linux really sucks. Nuff said.

460 Hours of No Man's Sky
349 Hours of Risk of Rain 2
245 Hours of Subnautica

All of those hours disagree with you.

Steam on Linux has been a total blast so far, not only access to thousands of games has been opened to us penguins, Valve has been the cause of massive improvements on all areas of the OS, Ranging from card drivers and 3D libraries to massive improvements in Wine and plenty of other areas like peripheral support.

And this is why when I buy games I buy them through Steam, vote with my wallet, vote for making my platform better.

[ALRBP]

460 Hours of No Man's Sky
349 Hours of Risk of Rain 2
245 Hours of Subnautica

All of those hours disagree with you.

Steam on Linux has been a total blast so far, not only access to thousands of games has been opened to us penguins, Valve has been the cause of massive improvements on all areas of the OS, Ranging from card drivers and 3D libraries to massive improvements in Wine and plenty of other areas like peripheral support.

And this is why when I buy games I buy them through Steam, vote with my wallet, vote for making my platform better.

I personally prefer to "vote" against DRM, buying games on GOG.

[carewolf]

I personally prefer to "vote" against DRM, buying games on GOG.

Yeah, but unfortunately their launcher still doesn't work on Linux, so it is slightly less convinient. Still have several games from there too though.