Steam On Linux Drops Below 2% For August 2024 Survey

[yoshi314]

Valve really needs to be more transparent on what subset of users they hold these surveys for. I havent gotten a single survey prompt in my 5+ years on desktop Linux... Do they scan all users hardware nowadays?

i suspect it triggers on new install or some significant hardware change. i also rarely get them.

[bernstein]

…
So GNU/Linux without Deck has: 1.92 * (1 - (0.278 + 0.128)) = 1.14%
…

The really interesting thing about this is, that if the steam deck really accounts for roughly 0.80%, then the steam player base is roughly 500-600 million. And the Linux players are about 10-12 million.
so the 60 milion ps5 & 140 million switch players dont look like much…

[mSparks]

can you show me any device category like steam box or steam deck who steamOS competes with android ?

there is no steam deck competitor with andorid... also there is no steambox/playstation based on andorid.

"competes" refers to what people spend their money on.
They spend gaming money on pc games, steambox games, android games or playstation games etc - therefore they are each competing with each other.

[qarium]

What is that supposed to mean?
X11 is unrivalled for desktop;

• Most Secure and battle hardened of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Best 2D performance of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Best 3D performance of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Best VR performance of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Largest range of software support of any desktop graphics protocol.

What is this "modern role" it cant be fixed for?
Seems to me to be a similar "modern audience" to that being targeted by Disney and Ubisoft, target 0.5% of the audience, then act surprised when you get 0.5% of the sales.
Steam Box mainly competes with Android, in some ways wayland is technically superior than Androids' Surface Flinger, but, OTOH, few thousand active devices vs 10s of billions.
Clearly neither have any role to play in desktop gaming, characterised by complex display configurations, wide and significant 3PD peripheral support and the fastest CPU and GPU compute money can buy on the day.
Sony - openBSD - currently take that crown, by a significant margin. Mainly, IMHO, because they direct all their effort to supporting what their customers and 3PDs want rather than their ego, and kill garbage like concord off within days of seeing their audience doesn't want it, rather than the decade and a half people have been promising wayland will be something people want.

can you show me any device category like steam box or steam deck who steamOS competes with android ?

there is no steam deck competitor with andorid... also there is no steambox/playstation based on andorid.

[Espionage724]

keep in mind we had x11 for decades and it could never fulfil modern roles like valve steam box.

I don't buy that; isn't a Steam box supposed to play games from Steam? X11 can do that better than Wayland no problem today

[mSparks]

X11 can not be fixed to full fill modern roles.

What is that supposed to mean?
X11 is unrivalled for desktop;

• Most Secure and battle hardened of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Best 2D performance of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Best 3D performance of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Best VR performance of any desktop graphics protocol.
• Largest range of software support of any desktop graphics protocol.

What is this "modern role" it cant be fixed for?

Seems to me to be a similar "modern audience" to that being targeted by Disney and Ubisoft, target 0.5% of the audience, then act surprised when you get 0.5% of the sales.

it could be that it is malicious and also necessary evil at the same time. ... modern roles like valve steam box.

Steam Box mainly competes with Android, in some ways wayland is technically superior than Androids' Surface Flinger, but, OTOH, few thousand active devices vs 10s of billions.
Clearly neither have any role to play in desktop gaming, characterised by complex display configurations, wide and significant 3PD peripheral support and the fastest CPU and GPU compute money can buy on the day.

Sony - openBSD - currently take that crown, by a significant margin. Mainly, IMHO, because they direct all their effort to supporting what their customers and 3PDs want rather than their ego, and kill garbage like concord off within days of seeing their audience doesn't want it, rather than the decade and a half people have been promising wayland will be something people want.

[qarium]

Indeed, the vast majority just try the default wayland mode, decide its crap, and go back to windows or macos.

you are right here this is really a possibility. but my opinion is we have no other choice because X11 can not be fixed to full fill modern roles.

Rather than taking the time to switch to what actually works and never crashes.

thats of course not a easy task.

My point is, the whole "wayland mode" thing is an absolute lie, even the wayland stuff that "half works" is still 100% dependant on X11 for all the stuff that half works, and the stuff that doesn't work was intentionally broken as part of the "single user, single application" design requirements of the wayland protocol.
Pushing that on people looking for an alternative to microsoft logging everything you type and see as part of adapting to the 2015 USA Freedom Act is nothing short of malicious.

it could be that it is malicious and also necessary evil at the same time.

keep in mind we had x11 for decades and it could never fulfil modern roles like valve steam box.

[mSparks]

i manually checkt it in the past i really use firefox in wayland mode.

you see it to technical and to perfectionist yes in a technical and perfectionist world all you say is correct.

and yes i even today crashed the firefox by moveing tabs around this sometimes lead to a firefox crash.
no big deal i just start it new.

well your interpretation could be that if wayland firefox can crash then it is not production ready in a technical perfectionist world.

but to be honest most people are not that critical than you mSparks

for a technical perfectionist like you this clearly means you wait another 10 years until it us mature enough for you.

Indeed, the vast majority just try the default wayland mode, decide its crap, and go back to windows or macos.
Rather than taking the time to switch to what actually works and never crashes.

My point is, the whole "wayland mode" thing is an absolute lie, even the wayland stuff that "half works" is still 100% dependant on X11 for all the stuff that half works, and the stuff that doesn't work was intentionally broken as part of the "single user, single application" design requirements of the wayland protocol.

Pushing that on people looking for an alternative to microsoft logging everything you type and see as part of adapting to the 2015 USA Freedom Act is nothing short of malicious.

[qarium]

firefox wayland is here

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1443803

wayland on firefox is experiemental, and if you arent using xwayland most of the ui is broken.
worth it because??
for desktop wayland proper offers less security than a properly configured X11 session, anything using xwayland is as secure as the weakest link in either X11 or wayland, since both are running.
wayland is designed for in car entertainment and embedded systems, and for that purpose it is very likely the best choice. Certainly better than anything ms has to offer
The whole point of wayland is it strips out the unnecessary complexity of multi user, multi application default of X11 for a single user, single application setting like car guages or payment terminals
redhat have pretty much abandoned the desktop and server space outside of selling ibm mainframes, which is imploding for various reasons.
There is NO LINUX DESKTOP SOFTWARE that does not require X11 - even firefox and chrome still lean heavily on libX11, try an install without it if you don't believe,
just delete everything returned by
rpm -ql libX11
and see what still works afterwards. (warning; you likely wont even be able to boot into a graphical session)
heck, anything using cairo is X11 only - that includes the wayland demos lol.

msparks@localhost:~$ dnf repoquery --requires cairo
Last metadata expiration check: 0:23:35 ago on Sat 14 Sep 2024 11:17:08 CEST.
libX11.so.6
libX11.so.6()(64bit)
libXext.so.6
libXext.so.6()(64bit)
libXrender.so.1
libXrender.so.1()(64bit)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)(64bit)
libfontconfig.so.1
libfontconfig.so.1()(64bit)
libfreetype.so.6
libfreetype.so.6()(64bit)
libm.so.6
libm.so.6()(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.1)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.29)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.29)(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.35)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.35)(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)(64bit)
libpixman-1.so.0
libpixman-1.so.0()(64bit)
libpng16.so.16
libpng16.so.16()(64bit)
libpng16.so.16(PNG16_0)
libpng16.so.16(PNG16_0)(64bit)
libxcb-render.so.0
libxcb-render.so.0()(64bit)
libxcb-shm.so.0
libxcb-shm.so.0()(64bit)
libxcb.so.1
libxcb.so.1()(64bit)
libz.so.1
libz.so.1()(64bit)
rtld(GNU_HASH)
​

i manually checkt it in the past i really use firefox in wayland mode.

you see it to technical and to perfectionist yes in a technical and perfectionist world all you say is correct.

and yes i even today crashed the firefox by moveing tabs around this sometimes lead to a firefox crash.
no big deal i just start it new.

well your interpretation could be that if wayland firefox can crash then it is not production ready in a technical perfectionist world.

but to be honest most people are not that critical than you mSparks

for a technical perfectionist like you this clearly means you wait another 10 years until it us mature enough for you.

[mSparks]

i use mostly firefox only... and Firefox switched from xwayland to native Wayland long time ago...
this means your claim that i use xwayland is completely speculation.

firefox wayland is here

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1443803

wayland on firefox is experiemental, and if you arent using xwayland most of the ui is broken.

worth it because??

we had this talk in the past wayland+xwayland add usefull security layers

for desktop wayland proper offers less security than a properly configured X11 session, anything using xwayland is as secure as the weakest link in either X11 or wayland, since both are running.

well it looks like you are right wayland is only used in car enterainment systems and only developed by redhat for this purpose

wayland is designed for in car entertainment and embedded systems, and for that purpose it is very likely the best choice. Certainly better than anything ms has to offer

The whole point of wayland is it strips out the unnecessary complexity of multi user, multi application default of X11 for a single user, single application setting like car guages or payment terminals

redhat have pretty much abandoned the desktop and server space outside of selling ibm mainframes, which is imploding for various reasons.

and i use fedora 40 with wayland every day and most of the day it does not touch xwayland

There is NO LINUX DESKTOP SOFTWARE that does not require X11 - even firefox and chrome still lean heavily on libX11, try an install without it if you don't believe,
just delete everything returned by
rpm -ql libX11

and see what still works afterwards. (warning; you likely wont even be able to boot into a graphical session)

heck, anything using cairo is X11 only - that includes the wayland demos lol.

msparks@localhost:~$ dnf repoquery --requires cairo
Last metadata expiration check: 0:23:35 ago on Sat 14 Sep 2024 11:17:08 CEST.
libX11.so.6
libX11.so.6()(64bit)
libXext.so.6
libXext.so.6()(64bit)
libXrender.so.1
libXrender.so.1()(64bit)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)(64bit)
libfontconfig.so.1
libfontconfig.so.1()(64bit)
libfreetype.so.6
libfreetype.so.6()(64bit)
libm.so.6
libm.so.6()(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.1)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.29)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.29)(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.35)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.35)(64bit)
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.38)(64bit)
libpixman-1.so.0
libpixman-1.so.0()(64bit)
libpng16.so.16
libpng16.so.16()(64bit)
libpng16.so.16(PNG16_0)
libpng16.so.16(PNG16_0)(64bit)
libxcb-render.so.0
libxcb-render.so.0()(64bit)
libxcb-shm.so.0
libxcb-shm.so.0()(64bit)
libxcb.so.1
libxcb.so.1()(64bit)
libz.so.1
libz.so.1()(64bit)
rtld(GNU_HASH)

​