Valve Publishes Steam Survey Numbers For April 2024

[rhavenn]

it runs.. on amd (not nvidia at all, which is some 80% of gamers), but the input lag, lack of steamvr support on gnome, and extremely common crashing of the compositor are well established and more than enough reason for most to go straight back to windows - its why linux mint is so popular for steam gamers - it defaults to X11.

when a popular recommended distro like arch or fedora switch to X11, that 1.9% will easily hit double digits.

unfortunately e.g. fedora do everything possible to keep steam gamers away, intentionally hard to install the nvidia drivers, now remove X11 from the default install completely so not even AMD guys and gal gamers will use it.

Fedora 40 at least has both a steam and an nvidia RPMFusion repo. You just need to enable them. I have a AMD card, but enabling the steam repo and 'sudo dnf install steam' was the only thing I had to do. Arch ate my system (locked up during a update and like half my files were 0 sized; so I just installed Fedora 40 for shits since I use it on my work system) and Steam works fine. Fedora 40 KDE spin. Wayland default and XWayland isn't installed. I've no issues playing the games I used to play under Arch.

EDIT: I take that back. Looks like:
xorg-x11-server-Xwayland.x86_64
xwaylandvideobridge.x86_64

are installed. Is that technically the "XWayland" packages? Dunno..either way...it works fine and I've had to do zero tinkering.

[rhavenn]

Just a couple of thoughts.
- Most of personal Linux use is on mobile devices and if gaming on Android is counted, Linux is actually pretty popular on gaming.
- Linux dominates compute servers and data centers where gaming is not important at all.
- Nvidia makes most of its money on computing and AI. The money Nvidia makes on gaming is 98% on Windows. Those two facts explain why Nvidia doesn't care about Linux desktop and gaming.
- Unless, Playstation switches to Linux from BSD (Sony wants to stay away from GPL to keep their source closed) or Steam releases a Linux gaming PC or console, there will not be a surge in Linux gaming share. Improvements continue in Linux gaming capabilities and other corporations (maybe Amazon) might also use this capability.

Steam did release a gaming console. It's called a Steam Deck. Linux native (based on Arch) and has plenty of verified games from your existing Steam library.

[oleid]

I'm looking forward to when at least one popular distribution finally drops the wayland default so people find you can actually use Linux to play steam games.

Funny, according to google I'm using Wayland to play games on my new steam deck. I didn't even notice.

[oleid]

Not this time.

Chinese fell significantly by -3.12%, while Windows grew, with Linux and macOS shares falling.

Maybe India?

[mSparks]

Funny, according to google I'm using Wayland to play games on my new steam deck. I didn't even notice.

for the record, all these people educated by google and wikipedia is the main reason I dont really have a problem with the elitism on the part of the distro builders.

Let them all believe windows is better for gaming.

[WannaBeOCer]

No shit, Sherlock. You must be strong now: The "native" ports of Feral or Virtual Programming used frequently an in-house translation layer.


Well, that's not true, too. Quite the opposite. And Proton versions have improved their translation performance whereas native ports frequently get abandoned.

https://youtu.be/kKdT3RuL9jQ?t=100

Yes, you can't play PUBG or Fortnite. That's not exactly news.


Now you are trolling, right? Popping an Ubuntu from a live stick onto your hard drive is neither a pain nor a challenge. I recently had to set up a windows Windows 11. You don't want a Windows online account? Now THAT'S pain. An brand new Ubuntu 24.04 on a laptop is a 10 minute endeavour. Then install Steam, then install games, then play. It is that simple. Rly.

Nope. They stopped that. Proton is "too good" to make a native port viable.

That youtube video you posted clearly has different settings on. The left one obviously has tessellation enabled while the Proton one doesn't. You can notice bricks, the floor are all flat on the proton video while the one on the left actually shows texture. Lower graphics settings will increase FPS. You can see the texture difference at 51s

https://youtu.be/kKdT3RuL9jQ?feature=shared&t=51

All I got from Phoronix's reviews was that AMD's own drivers on WIndows are garbage compared to open source Linux drivers.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon2022-windows-linux/7

https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-windows11-ubuntu2304/6.

I use Solus Linux for linux gaming testing, performance is worse than WIndows. Solus actually has a good OOTB experience since they package everything needed with the steam package. I haven't touched Ubuntu since 22.04 and it was missing many dependencies when attempting to use proton. Other issue with Ubuntu, are all the guides available to install dependencies and they will most likely add a random third party repo. While Nobara Project/Solus focus on desktop use without interacting with the terminal.

At the end of the day the next platform that appears to be gaining traction is macOS.

[oleid]

for the record, all these people educated by google and wikipedia is the main reason I dont really have a problem with the elitism on the part of the distro builders.

Let them all believe windows is better for gaming.

What is the connection between your answer to my post and what I wrote?

[mSparks]

What is the connection between your answer to my post and what I wrote?

steam deck uses proton, proton is a fork of wine, neither wine nor proton supports wayland, the wayland version of wine only just got basic opengl support a few weeks ago:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Wayland-OpenGL-Merged

And at this point is never meaningfully going to progress beyond that.

I know why you think google told you the steam deck uses wayland, Its exactly the same reasons popular distro builders create effective barriers to keep windows gamers and people educated by google and wikipedia away from the linux desktop.

[Panix]

I am on an all AMD system and I also use Steam on Ubuntu 24.04, previously 22.04. I am one of the few.

Gonna open up champagne and celebrate that 1.9%?

[Panix]

its plain and simple wrong that linux gamers are not growing valve steam grows all the time its just that windows steam users grow faster than the linux steam users. but in total numbers the linux gamers do in fact grow.

LOL! The comedian is back!

Linux is not growing - it's just more or less the same - game developers don't care about Linux or support it. In fact, there's websites out there that detail the support or lack thereof. TWO PERCENT IS PATHETIC.