Steam On Linux Still Tap Dancing Around 0.9% Marketshare

[mdedetrich]

Linux is never going to make a significant dent in the Windows gaming/Steam ecosystem until Linux users have a reliable way to get he latest graphics drivers (regardless of their Linux version/distribution) and hence for graphics card manufacturers to actually be able to quickly fix their graphics drivers without needing to go through Linux kernel maintainers.

This is why the majority of people game on Windows and not on Linux, Linux is way too monolithic and inflexible for the gaming ecosystem. Games are complex and being able to deliver fixes quickly (regardless of the environment that the user is running in) is of critical importance.

[jaxa]

Maybe Windows 11 will drive a few more people to Linux.

Daily reminder that i have never witnessed a steam survey on my client on Linux. Just this summer sale i spent 170 euros on linux native games, still no survey. There is something fishy going on here.

Why does it need to be a "survey"? Can't they just detect all the specs for all the users? I haven't used Steam much so I don't know about it.

[kfriesth]

I've been playing windows games and apps in linux for many years, have never seen a survey. I converted my parents and other family members and manage their systems still no survey...just saying

[mozo]

Linux is never going to make a significant dent in the Windows gaming/Steam ecosystem until Linux users have a reliable way to get he latest graphics drivers (regardless of their Linux version/distribution) and hence for graphics card manufacturers to actually be able to quickly fix their graphics drivers without needing to go through Linux kernel maintainers.

This is why the majority of people game on Windows and not on Linux, Linux is way too monolithic and inflexible for the gaming ecosystem. Games are complex and being able to deliver fixes quickly (regardless of the environment that the user is running in) is of critical importance.

Install Arch, it's flexible enough. I have being gaming for 15 years on Linux, the experience is great.

[ix900]

I've been playing windows games and apps in linux for many years, have never seen a survey. I converted my parents and other family members and manage their systems still no survey...just saying

Always someone says this lol. Same thing happens on Windows or whatever OS. Its how it is. Live with it.

[pmorph]

Again, Linux gaming is for those who have too much spare time and want to constantly learn and adapt. Under Windows it's "Install" followed by "Run".

I think you are ignoring a rather common use case. I'm an occasional gamer at best, and use linux for everything else, so I'm not going to spend time maintaining a windows install just to play those occasional games.

[kfriesth]

Always someone says this lol. Same thing happens on Windows or whatever OS. Its how it is. Live with it.

They are 80 year old WOW World of Warcraft players and have played since 2009 with 32 inch monitors and water cooled systems, they love rgb setups even their RGB keyboard and mouse. Their pvp ventrilo convo is funny to listen too lol bet not everyone says that

[avem]

I think you are ignoring a rather common use case. I'm an occasional gamer at best, and use linux for everything else, so I'm not going to spend time maintaining a windows install just to play those occasional games.

You are a very uncommon use case. Desktop Linux market share is below 3%. Absolute most (over 95%) people who use it are IT professionals (either developers, programmers or devops). It's near unusable for those who have no IT background. People claim their grandmas use Linux only ... grandmas do not install or maintain it which makes this statement false.

[Max Payne]

Judging from the posts, there seems to be a misconception that you can use proton to play just about any windows game on linux.
Proton is great for running vintage windows games, but for recently released games tends to be useless, it takes some time since launch date for the bugs of running a new game on proton to be fixed, and sometimes by the time the bugs are fixed and the game is playable on proton it is no longer trending and your gaming pals moved to another game.
Not to mention that the vast majority of games made using Unreal Engine or Cryengine are broken on proton mostly due to Easy Anti Cheat that ironically claims to have native linux support but game devs don't want/care to use that possibility and distribute their games outside of windows.

Windows is a better gaming platform than Linux, more games are support out of the box, anti cheat software, peripherals, the software that the peripherals vendors make to better use those peripherals are almost always windows exclusives.

But like some wise people have stated even if Linux became a better gaming platform it wouldn't have much effect on it's market share, the vast majority of end users don't know how to make a fresh install of an operating system, and others don't want to bother if the operating system they have works for them.

[scottishduck]

People need to face the facts. Linux is still not “install and go”. It still needs people to look up guides to do things. It still has an overzealous and unhelpful community of elitists.

The default Linux install is still usually a default GNOME environment (dogshit) and will also usually have “proprietary” packages hidden by default. It is not in a user friendly place, still.