Valve Issues A Big Steam Beta Update With Better Overlay, Linux Hardware Acceleration

[oiaohm]

I have a sneaky suspicion that some of that shift from Linux to Windows Valve's last reporting cycle is fueled by Steam Deck owners switching OSes after the previous report, but we never get real numbers to crunch so that's supposition.

Percentage of steamdeck units in the steam survey is able to be located.
AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405
There is only 1 computer on earth with that GPU that the steamdeck does not matter if you running as Linux or Windows all steamdecks in steam survey are able to be located by the GPU. Yes 0.18% steamdecks March 2023 survey and that from the GPU.

So even if all steamdeck users changed to Windows from Linux on Windows numbers it would only just above a rounding error amount of change. Even the Linux change is too great to just steamdeck numbers there is just not enough steamdecks in the survey. Yes a 0.43% change away from linux is many times 0.18% of the steamdeck.

Steamdecks we don't have to assume as much due to being able to get exact percentage for how many of them are in the steam survey.

[mos87]

it's a known security risk

It's not. In this case (and in 99.9% desktop use cases) it's just plain old lazyness.
OTOH, running third party binaries compiled nobody knows how by whom and from never rewieved source unconfined on your desktop is (or at least realistically might be), if we're talking about real vulnerabilities.

Fixing discretional perms aint gonna fix that.

[jorgepl]

Because it's a known security risk that would have been trivial to fix at the outset (now it's a big issue because it was ignored for 2 decades). Duh. So anyone with half a brain should care. Proper file and escalation permissions are a basic security feature even on Windows let alone Unix-like systems and Valve can't even get that right. You're right, it's a local problem. But local problems have a regular habit of becoming part of attack chains. Only someone living under a rock, both fingers in their ears, and singing at the top of his lungs would miss contemporary security trends that regularly feature poor local security practices into viable exploits - including using Steam when available. But that's fine, you don't care, you do you. But those that do care about the security of their machines shouldn't be using Steam on an important machine (full stop right here if it's a really important machine - Steam is an attack vector already even if all you are is a gamer, your Steam account itself is a target, the rest of your local user account is just gravy for gangs, that doesn't even include state targeted individuals) till they actually fix the basic problems with security implications they've ignored for too damned long.

As for all the Windows games... maybe because developer time is money and Linux systems only account for less than 1% of Steam's clientele according to Valve's reports? Most gamers are on consoles beyond Steam's reach to begin with because many people don't like Windows either.

If any development house is developing commercial games for Linux it's not because they're making a big (if any) profit off it. It's because some of their devs want to for whatever reason and somehow get the funding (probably through Valve subsidies), or the tools just create a Linux & Mac version as part of the build process with no extra effort like Ren'Py or relatively minor extra effort like with Unity. Valve has been subsidizing Linux ports and that's why most larger scope Linux games are appearing at all. You can show your contempt for Windows all you want, but Linux is not and probably never will be a major stand alone gaming platform outside of Android or a mostly invisible-to-the-user locked down gaming console. Steam Deck is unlikely to reach a critical mass as a gaming console in its current incarnation.

I have a sneaky suspicion that some of that shift from Linux to Windows Valve's last reporting cycle is fueled by Steam Deck owners switching OSes after the previous report, but we never get real numbers to crunch so that's supposition.

Personally, I'm at the point where I'm migrating off Steam anyway. I'm just fed up with it. My Linux system doesn't have it installed. The Mac only has it for a couple of games. And I'm replacing the games I can and want to keep with equivalents from GOG.com when they go on deep discounts. Any new games I buy on GOG, other marketing platforms for small and niche indie devs like supporting their efforts via Patreon and Itch.io, or I just don't buy it.

Wow such a long rant to say basically nothing...

[Ananace]

It's nice to see Valve continue to improve the client equally for both Linux and other OSes, it's definitely far from perfect on all platforms after all - though the Linux-specific features like compatibility tools are great.

Nowadays itch and Steam are basically the only stores I feel comfortable paying for games on. Others are either actively hostile (Epic), repeatedly breaking promises (GOG), or even actively shitting on their - admittedly smaller - Linux user group.

[slagiewka]

New client is still X11, doesn't scale (2x on Wayland, previous one did scale all right), still doesn't allow for in home streaming (on Wayland)... and Dirt Rally 2.0 tested with 4K drops to 7 FPS instead of 90.

I hope it gets more love at some point.

[kokoko3k]

Steam client is such a bloated piece of chromium.
It still (fixed in the past) sucks resources and uses cpu even while playing.
Let's hope it will not steal gpu too, now that is "hardware accelerated".

I still prefer to start it in minigui mode, hoping they will not ditch it, and use a proper real browser to... browse steam website.

[dreamcat4]

haha. must confess enjoyed the 'lipstick on a pig' comment and the 'bloated piece of chromium'. very funny

that isnt to say i think steam deserves too much over criticism due to it being (lets remember) the first ever such software. it is much aged software now. to understand why. it is so well overdue for retirement by now

but what can we do guys? while most of the alternatives are so bad. maybe bottles? or something else?

for example i do use lutris but really hate the way it works so brittle / easy to break. for example there is no versioning or robust rollback for configurations. to remember what you changed. and not any nuklear / wipe clean start again 'reinstall back' cleaan your settings. so it maked lutris a somewhat useful tool to experiment on. to explore wine configs and settings. but also high overheads for managing. which makes it time consuming.

elsewhere we have a couple of 'aggregator' type game launcher oss projects. which tries to bring together a unified frontend for the lutris, steam, epic, gog and other individual launchers....

problem is that the industry does not have coherent api standards across launchers. each one have their own highly proprietary apis. and some of those apis are just plain broken or totally useless

for example one thing in this area would actually improve things is proper cli or api access for steam. that does not require the steam client to launch its super heavy clunky gui. and all of that nonsense. instead it could be like a runtime library with different cli frontend. or some actually good (not shambollic) client / server model

same goes for the other platform launchers like epic, origin (ea) etc. what an outlandish naiive dream though: it'll never happen. maybe we might see some incremental improvements randomly every now and again. but nothing secure and dependable enough to really depend upon. and to build upon something nice. (you know, that actually works as intended)

[darkbasic]

Does it run on Wayland? Does it scale? Wake me up when it does.

[Volta]

Linux Steam client with precious few Linux games that is.

With most of the Windows games running great on Linux. However, it would be great to have more native games and painless modding support for games like Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas. Those two games with mods are holding me from removing Windows completely.

[murlakatamenka]

Does it run on Wayland? Does it scale?

Runs - yes, scales - no.