Steam On Linux For March Drops Down To 1.00%

[Rabiator]

You must have zero modesty and respect to yourself to tell me I'm exaggerating issues with Linux. I'm not. I'm blunt and honest. You don't like my manners? Well, boohoo, I'm not writing a poem for you.

I see nothing positive about Linux, correct. There's no OS (thousands of incompatible distros don't count), and even individual distros are not well suited for the average Joe.

Hit a nerve there, huh? Comparing your tone with my own, my post was a lot more polite. I guess will avoid future discussions with you, as I'm not in the mood for politeness anymore. You may consider this a victory, but I just want to avoid filling the forum with unnecessary flamebait.

[birdie]

Hit a nerve there, huh? Comparing your tone with my own, my post was a lot more polite. I guess will avoid future discussions with you, as I'm not in the mood for politeness anymore. You may consider this a victory, but I just want to avoid filling the forum with unnecessary flamebait.

So, I have rock solid arguments, you have your politeness. I'm not going to miss you either as I prefer to be on point, not trifle with being shamly and overtly polite.

You've now spent what? Three posts discussing my manners and me? Ad hominem much? Woah, amazing! You probably don't even watch movies with obscenities. You must have missed these gems:

• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
• Casino (1995)
• Scarface (1983)
• Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Any many many others. And it's not as if I'm cursing too much, actually as I've limited the amount of foul words I'm using.

[Ironmask]

Also, let me tell you how I despise hate the Linux community.

No other community that I've ever dealt with has these wonderful traits:

• Attacks, hatred, ridicule of companies which don't release open source software/drivers. "F you NVIDIA"? 147 results according to Google.
• Infinite and equally stupid arguments about things which should just work (Xorg vs. Wayland, ALSA vs OSS, ALSA vs PulseAudio)
• Hatred towards Intel (despite Intel contributing to Linux a ton more and earlier than AMD) and AMD worshipping (despite price gouging with Ryzen 5000 and RDNA 2).

And a personal example: I was banned on r/Linux several years ago because of a private interaction with a moderator. I did not infringe on any guidelines or rules. I've asked them at least a dozen times to unban my account. The result of writing to "Message the mods"? No one is even fucking replying. Nil, nada, zilch.

I just use Windows and only check this place for cool hardware and server news. Getting invested in the Linux community is not good for your mental health. If I see a stupid thread here, I just go "aw, was hoping for some interesting discussion, oh well" and shrug it off and close the tab.
Linux community is really not worth paying attention to. I can't even read technical documentation on the Linux kernel without it opening with a stupid quip about software communism. It's so tiresome. I just use what works and I'm a happier person because of it.

[Nozo]

[*]Applications segfaulting or crashing for no obvious reasons? In 2022? Abso-fucking-lutely the same.

Most of these problems occurs due to hardware fragmentation as well, because like Linux, the PC is not a platform, and this affects all operating systems that support a wide variety of hardware, including Windows. The newest generation of Intel CPUs, Alder Lake at launch had compatibility issues in multiple OSes and still does.

I see nothing positive about Linux, correct. There's no OS (thousands of incompatible distros don't count), and even individual distros are not well suited for the average Joe.

You are one of those who repeat the fragmentation myth, poor of you. There so many non-Windows and non-macOS unified operating systems (that have nothing to do with Linux) are out there and not all of them combined have reached the 1% of that 1% that desktop Linux has, because as i said before, nobody cares about those operating systems. At least most Windows users will have heard of Ubuntu. How many of those users, including those complaining about fragmentation, have heard of FreeBSD, Haiku, AROS, Illumos and others? Spoiler alert: Nobody, absolutely nobody.

[Nozo]

Regarding Linux market share on Steam, these statistics don't count those using the Steam Deck in console mode afaik, so they wouldn't be reliable in this case anyway.
The Linux desktop market share will remain as it is unless some of the companies that fund it like Red Hat or SUSE show real interest in the desktop and show a real willingness to popularize it with clear goals.
To date, no one community-driven operating system has been successful with the masses, including certain "unified marvels" mainly because communities doesn't have the media power or the money for that, most communities don't have that goal either.

[martynhare]

Also, let's be fucking honest here. I spent two hours setting up my Windows 10 installation six years ago. It's worked ever since than without a single fucking issue. Again, let me be honest: not a single fucking issue. I've installed over 70 cumulative updates, nothing has broken, everything works. I've update graphics drivers at least a dozen times as well.

I'm posting this from my Windows PC and I can confirm that Linux and Windows are as bad as each other, they're just differently bad. I maintain both for a living and make plenty of cash having to work around the mountain of problems both OSes present everyday users, even when said users can build a PC, know how to compile software and know what an OS is.

Birdie: I think you may be looking at Windows as better because you haven't stepped back to evaluate both systems objectively.

Here's a list of long standing issues with Windows which Microsoft hasn't fixed:

• Missing some DLLs like Visual C Runtime? Windows will just name the missing DLL, not tell you how to get it. Just like on Linux. Still no improvement since 2005
• Audio on Windows still requires separate driver versions to support various OEM input/output jack layouts, resulting in many issues (e.g. Realtek, Intel SST)
• Windows still doesn't have a clean way to forcibly close file handles in 2022, just like Linux. Installers still rely on PendingFileRenameOperations hack to delete files
• Suspend support on Windows is still broken as some machines will "just resume" at random, while Intel Queencreek breaks the ability to enter S3 properly
• Want support for EAX and surround in your video games? Broken since 2007 with the release of Windows Vista and nobody at MS has tried to fix it since
• Microsoft also completely broke hardware accelerated audio with Vista and this is only just being re-added for Windows 11. Linux kept it this whole time, buggy or not
• Hardware acceleration of GDI rendering (which most apps use) was broken in Vista, partially restored in 7 and only just got on par again with XP with Windows 10
• Want to bind RPC to specific NICs using netsh?. Works on XP. Breaks updates on Vista/7/8.1. BSODs 10 with critical_process_died. Core functionality broken since 2007
• Want to use different IP address configurations per WiFi network? You still can't do this properly on Windows in 2022. Maybe they'll make this work in 11 eventually?
• Have you tried using Windows 10 with a Microsoft Account while having a poor Internet connection? Enjoy your crashing Windows Explorer, as things like Search die!
• For the best part of a year, printing on Windows 10 has been a choice between dire insecurity and being completely unusable due to multiple botched updates in a row
• Ever since mid-2015, games using SecuROM/Safedisc stopped working on Windows 10, no support on 11. Just like Linux, you now need to install no-cd patches!
• Microsoft broke PC games using GFWL on Windows 10 in mid-2014. As of 2022, no official fix came from Microsoft for single player games which won't launch properly
• DirectInput deprecated in favour of XInput, meaning official controller support is relegated to just Xbox controllers. No proper DirectInput replacement since 2012

Windows has not only failed to improve in terms of basic functionality, it's gotten worse in many ways.

For gamers, there's an entire industry around keeping stuff working. GOG makes money repackaging Windows games, often with what would otherwise be DMCA-violating patches, so that people can play games they already paid for many years ago. For newer stuff, Valve intercepts calls from unsupported controllers/joysticks to add what looks like seamless third-party controller support to Steam games because of a bone-headed move Microsoft made back in 2012.

For serious business users it isn't much better. As of 2022, high end HP workstations still keep receiving AMD GPU driver downgrades due to a bug in how Windows Update handles device driver versions, which has been an issue since late 2016! There's even a special error message for the scenario in the setup files for when Windows Update reverts your driver before the Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise installer can complete. If you happen to opt for NVIDIA, Windows Update will instead swap out your Studio Drivers for Game Ready Drivers if you happen to have an RTX 2080/3080, taking away that prestigious 30bit colour support!

Microsoft also just announced a sunset of private enterprise Microsoft Store support. No longer will you be able to "just run" a private store with a subset of "modern apps" available, now we're expected to implement our own infrastructure to script the deployment of apps, many of which need special licencing to deploy outside of the Microsoft Store in the first place. This would be like if Canonical took away APT repositories and told you to roll your own, while simultaneously forcing you to approach ISVs one by one to obtain alternative licencing arrangements for software!

For developers it's even worse, as we're now 4 abstraction layers deep when it comes to "modern" GUI toolkits (those not labelled as deprecated), yet we still lack the basic RAD functionality for making business apps which ancient, crusty WinForms offers. When it's easier to develop apps using .NET 3.5 or even VB6 than it is to make WPF, UWP or WinUI apps... it kinda makes GTK3 and Qt look like worthwhile time investments!