Steam On Linux Usage Spikes To Nearly 2% In July, Larger Marketshare Than Apple macOS

[slalomsk8er]

it seems a few months ago. at or before the release of the steam deck we had the tech press try to 'jump onto' linux gaming. and re-evaluate it. to try and determine how 'ready' it was for prime time. and the general outcome was walking away with a general feeling that it overall still wasn't good enough yet.

Don't trust, the press and especially the dying gaming press, it's just a cesspool of clickbait at this time.

Gaming on Linux was good enough for me 10 years go and is near perfect by now. How do I know? I haven't booted into windows in months and the last couple of times I did just to apply the updates - I guess it's again time to do that.

Don't hunt the nice shiny features and always crave the next new thing, that will make it ready for the masses. It's ready for your, when it works for you and for the masses, it's ready, when they can buy a gaming machine in the store, preinstalled with a GNU/Linux Desktop OS.

[direc85]

I've had a really good time with Linux driver support for, say, five years or more. I've had one glitch with my Radeon GPU, and even that didn't really matter. On my work system I had to manually install sof-firmware to get sound working, that's something that needs fixing though.

I had an NVidia GPU a few years back, and when I used a supported Ubuntu and kernel version, the (sigh) closed source driver worked well.

Linux + Steam out-of-the-box has been quite great for quite some time. For non-Steam-based games I have less experience, but the few games I've tried have worked fine with newer Wine.

[CochainComplex]

You really do not know? Can't you translate simple numbers into conclusions? OK.

That the increase in popularity is based solely on Deck, not on desktop Linux, whose popularity is stagnant.

This is obvious. But what's the conclusion you are drawing?

[HEL88]

This is obvious.

Reading comments like you shows that it is on an upward trend.

And it's obvious to you that the popularity of desktop linux is stagnating. Wow.

You impressed me .

[evasb]

You don't like Linux, you don't like open source, you don't like open drivers.

What are you doing here, HEL88?

[Sonadow]

If you want to build for older version you just need to use a toolchain for that. The system toolchain builds for the system.

And how do you get an older toolchain from three Debian releases or six Ubuntu releases ago in a modern, updated distribution, wise guy?

[slalomsk8er]

And how do you get an older toolchain from three Debian releases or six Ubuntu releases ago in a modern, updated distribution, wise guy?

CI/CD pipelines is how this works in a modern project.

[discordian]

And how do you get an older toolchain from three Debian releases or six Ubuntu releases ago in a modern, updated distribution, wise guy?

podman run debian:buster

[skeevy420]

Epic Games is on Linux? Cool!!!! How long have they supported us?

Only unofficially. A lot of people use Heroic or Legendary*, but I run the official Epic client with Wine (I use Lutris GE-Proton runner). To get access to Steam's controller configuration options for games played via Epic I have Lutris create a Steam shortcut and I use that shortcut to launch an Epic game (or the client).

*I have somewhere around 100 games from Epic installed. It wasn't until last month that my ISP offered an unlimited plan**. That matters because anytime I'd try to go from Epic to Heroic or Legendary half or more of my games wouldn't be detected correctly and redownloads would be triggered so all the limited bandwidth I'd have to use up wasn't worth the switch.

**Funny how when AT&T starts running lines and offering plans for unlimited fiber The Local Cable ISP Monopoly cuts their rates and offers unlimited plans.

[Weasel]

Most gamers in their right mind won't use Linux when the driver system is Linux is completely fucked up.

The only OS in the world where upgrading drivers or requiring new hardware support mean upgrading the OS, its system files and the kernel instead of installing a simple driver package.

Not if you use NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. You literally just run their installer, and install it just like on Windows. Even on 10 year old kernels.

But NVIDIA is evil right?

Absolute clowns everywhere.

Or when you build software in Ubuntu 23.04 that makes calls to glibc and can't use that software in Ubuntu 22.10 because that binary is tied to the fucking newer version of glibc it is built with. Again, Linux is the only OS in the world where targeting older systems means having to build and develop on that fucking older system. So if I need to build an application that uses Qt6 and glibc, and it needs to support old distributions all the way back to Debian 9, what am I supposed to do? Install Debian 9 in a VM and fucking compile Qt6 from source, then do my development there?

Try telling a Windows developer that if he wants his software to be usable on Windows 7, he needs to build his software in Windows 7 and not that new PC running Windows 11. Or a macOS developer that to build apps that work with macOS 10.9, they need to do their development on macOS 10.9 and not on their new Macs running macOS 11.7. See if they tell you to GTFO and stop wasting their time.

I agree with this though. You can use containers, but it's still trash experience that shouldn't be. Open source dependency stack is just a joke.