Steam Survey Results For November 2024: Linux Gaming Marketshare Slightly Higher

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  • stiiixy
    replied
    Possibly was the tablet models. I just remember staying clear because MS and the reports coming in, it was a bit of effort to get going. This was ten years ago.

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  • sbivol
    replied
    Originally posted by stiiixy View Post
    I remember the first few models being particularly aggressively anti-linux.
    Maybe you remember the Surface tablets? I have the Surface Laptop Go and it works perfectly, the battery lasts 6-8 hours with normal use.
    I even flashed its firmware from Linux.
    Power profiles are supported, which is not true for the Deck.

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  • stiiixy
    replied
    Originally posted by sbivol View Post
    ...
    especially contrasted to Microsoft's Surface laptops which are generally flawless with Linux out of the box.

    When did this happen 🤪

    I remember the first few models being particularly aggressively anti-linux.

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  • sbivol
    replied
    Originally posted by avis View Post
    Can it run any other Linux distro and everything will work right out of the box without a heavy amount of tinkering? No.
    Mine runs Kubuntu 24.04 and I find it quite usable. This was not the case with 22.04, which simply didn't work.
    But you're right, the amount of Deck features that don't run properly (or at all) on mainline Linux is staggering, especially contrasted to Microsoft's Surface laptops which are generally flawless with Linux out of the box.

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  • skeevy420
    replied
    Originally posted by sarmad View Post

    I don't think that's the criteria for defining a Linux distribution. I think the criteria is the compatibility with Linux apps, and SteamOS is indeed compatible; any Steam Deck game can run on any distro, and any Linux app can run on SteamOS, therefore I consider SteamOS to be a Linux distro.
    The simplest criteria for a Linux distribution is that it can run on multiple devices and that it is mass distributed. SteamOS is neither of those. SteamOS is only available for a single device as a recovery image. There are no installers or ISOs that other people can mirror to ensure that SteamOS will always be available like any one of us could do for any Linux distribution. That's the difference between RHEL and SLED being Operating Systems and Fedora and OpenSUSE being Distributions.

    The other problem with your assessment is that "Steam Deck" games are simply Steam Games. They were running on Linux desktops using Steam years before the Steam Deck existed. Any Steam game that runs on Linux will also run on the Steam Deck. The problem with that very broad statement is that LTS like RHEL, SLED, and even the OG SteamOS are in that list and they don't run all games on Linux. Only New Linux like Fedora and Arch can accomplish that.

    There's also the niggling issue of SteamOS. I mean the original Debian-based SteamOS that's still an actual distribution and still being distributed. It doesn't run the majority of Steam games. The Steam Deck is Valve's way of prototyping SteamOS before rolling it out to everyone. They really, really fucked up with their first attempt at creating SteamOS. By not distributing the next iteration of SteamOS to the masses they'll be able to have a lot more control than they did when they rolled out what was essentially Debian with Steam preinstalled over a decade ago.

    When it finally leaves the Deck and is available for general purpose computers then it'll go from a prototype OS to a distribution.

    Yeah, they picked Debian as a gaming OS 11 years ago. It works as brilliantly as that idea sounds.

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  • blackiwid
    replied
    Originally posted by avis View Post
    Meanwhile Linux has had 30 years to increase its market share and it hasn't increased much at all. Around 2% give or take.
    1. it's (steam) gaming marketshare not Linux Marketshare, places that measure Linux market share as example with browsers, show a recent growth around the last 2 years.
    2. Let's think of a other market comparison let's say Walmart vs a small store in the Area or "market" to use the old metaphor, usually the big corporation that bribes the government or corrupts them can crush this small stores and they get smaller and have less and less market share, and if they build 10% more stores the small stores closes some of there's here it's the opposite if Walmart opens 10% more this small stores (Linux) opens up also 10% more stores successfully and not only locally but worldwide.

    I think that is a success, meanwhile this Walmart has other competitions like Aldi (Playstation) yet this Walmart also bought now big food producing companies and they would earn more if they also sell this products to as much stores as possible, so even selling them to the small stores would earn maybe eventually Wallmart more than trying to crush them.

    I am not worried, things take a while AMD needed 10-15 years to get the ATI drivers in a good state not even close to perfect they slowly getting near there, why would valve be there in 2 years since the steamdeck is out? It was a big stepping stone compared to the steam machines that totally failed, so give it time.

    Also I think the real opportunity to gain Market share is with new Windows Releases, Windows 11 came out 2021 there was no steamdeck at least available, and even if it would been announced nobody knew prices and if it had not proven that it works / is great, also of course it's by very few used as all-purpose PC but more a appliance not even as gaming pc only... so we will need a mix of extending the use cases like VR is in the making and maybe get some other form factors, maybe steam deck Notebooks...

    It takes a while, now I personally use also Linux on my gaming PC that uses a rx 5600xt but I thought about not upgrade it, at all, currently the hardwareprices even used are to high for me and the question becomes does it make sense to upgrade both systems in the future. So with a normal user using Windows on that machine they might have the same question.

    But again most people don't "change a running system" but do or buy different decisions they already made when it's time to replace the Os or PC. Now because there are no Steam Deck Laptops preinstalled, there will not be soon a growth to 20% still having to manually install it, is a huge burden, but could it come to 4% steam deck numbers by some users install it, sure.

    Also I suspect because mostly high Chinese Numbers hurt the Linux numbers always, in the West so locally it already grows and not only the world wide numbers matter but if it can grow in certain countries it proofs that it can grow everywhere.

    And there is also a concept of leading markets if as example in the US certain trends happen often months or years later you see in other markets similar trends and I wouldn't call China as a leading market, MS might have high market share in China, but how much of the licenses are bought and how much do they pay on average per license 2 dollar? So it's not a very profitable / valuable market share.

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  • moonwalker
    replied
    Originally posted by tenchrio View Post
    Just that the X86 iso for Windows doesn't enable the touchscreen HID drivers during the install process like how moonwalker pointed out before.
    Small correction - I wasn't even installing Windows 11 on a touchscreen device, it was a bog-standard touchpad that Windows didn't recognize out of the box. And it was the latest at the time (23H2, I believe?) Windows ISO on a laptop that's neither bleeding edge, nor severely outdated, and was originally shipped with Windows 11 (HP EliteBook 860 G9).

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  • moonwalker
    replied
    Originally posted by Espionage724 View Post
    If I had Steam Deck, I'd probably toy with SteamOS for a bit, install Fedora Workstation if I found SteamOS usable, but likely have Windows on it because... it's a portable X86 gaming console, and I know the general gist of Linux gaming enough since 2016 that Linux gaming is more about being able to do it, vs doing it well (I'm more into the form-factor and hardware vs the software bits making that hardware work well)

    If I had PCVR still, I'm not convinced Linux can be usable for that better than Windows. Linux is too-much about slower abstraction to make stuff easier for people (Lutris, Proton, Steam, Wayland, Brtfs, CoW, etc) and it's tiring after a while to have to workaround around each piece of newly introduced slower tech
    I've tried using Windows on my Steam Deck, and while I didn't go through my whole collection (that would take way too long), the games I did benchmark were actually running either at almost exactly the same speed, or a bit faster on SteamOS than on Windows, with no noticeable to me difference in quality. Not only that, but some games were running faster on Steam Deck with its older APU running SteamOS than on something like GPD WinMax 2 with newer and supposedly more powerful 7840u APU running Windows 11. Obviously, I was comparing using exactly the same graphics settings, or at least as the same as I could control for.

    Granted, I did that benchmarking a whole year ago, so it is possible 7840u Windows drivers have since been optimized and may outperform SteamOS on Steam Deck if I were to benchmark it now.

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  • moonwalker
    replied
    Originally posted by avis View Post
    You're correct with Windows you get all the drivers you need granted your hardware is not ancient.
    Stop making shit up and re-read my message, that's not what I wrote. And the main point there was that you should be comparing apples to apples, not apples to sugar cane. The closest equivalent of installing any general purpose OS on a Steam Deck is one of those all-in-one-sans-keyboard-and-mouse computers, not a PS5.

    Originally posted by avis View Post
    When you install an average Linux distro on your SteamDeck its multiple feature just won't work at all. It looks like the Steam Linux kernel is heavily patched: https://static.sched.com/hosted_file...ss-eu-2023.pdf

    I glanced over this PDF, and it looks like SteamOS is kind of like a "standard" Linux distro, except it has a ton of extra tidbits here and there.
    Most of those extra tidbits are performance and recovery enhancements, and while highly desirable are not make or break for running an OS making use of hardware features. They are also all being upstreamed, e.g., futex2 was upstreamed in 5.16, if I'm not mistaken.

    Originally posted by avis View Post
    Yep, I can install Windows on a Steam Deck no problem, detach the keyboard and it will work. Windows has come with a software keyboard since Windows 7 or something while the vast majority of Linux distros don't provide it out of the box and I'm far from sure it will work for your DE screen even if you install it. No such issue with SteamOS.
    KDE Plasma has on-screen keyboard, and it works just fine. It even pops up on screen automatically when DE detects no physical keyboard attached and focus is given to a text edit widget, unlike stock SteamOS keyboard that needs to be explicitly called up on with a gamepad shortcut. Not sure about desktop-oriented GNOME shell as I've never used it on touch screen devices, but Posh definitely has touch screen keyboard and it also works fine. And then there is still Steam on-screen keyboard, which is what SteamOS uses by default, and that should, at least in theory, work with any other DE.
    Originally posted by avis View Post
    BTW, it's called SteamOS, not Steam Linux OS.
    You're the first one I've ever seen to use the name "Steam Linux OS", sober up.

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  • moonwalker
    replied
    Originally posted by avis View Post
    I've never claimed Linux is incapable of doing things.
    Huh? Where did that come from?
    Originally posted by avis View Post
    Linux is incapable of working reliably, for all use cases and all people (in the most recent Wayland thread people seriously told me I should abandon my DE and switch to Gnome/KDE just to get all the features of Wayland, isn't it some kind of cringe? I mean Linux used to require special hardware, now Linux needs special software to be usable? LMAO what?) and that's only a concern on the desktop. On the server it's been super strong for more than two decades now. In my company we've had servers with over 600 days of uptime (isolated, don't think we're idiots). But those servers churn data and send it via wires. They do nothing else. No UI, no graphics, no input, no audio, no video, nothing.
    You're making bold sweeping claims that are either useless, or simply untrue, and that's part of what creates a perception of you as an arrogant asshole. If you're just trolling - be my guest, keep doing that, but then it's kinda hypocritical to complain about arguments getting personal, and while I still don't condone death threats, I can see how a combination of arrogance and hypocrisy can piss someone off to the point of wanting to pound you into a bloody pulp. So my unsolicited advice to you is either stop making sweeping claims (that generally have a tendency to be untrue), or stop complaining when people express how much they hate your guts for your arrogance.

    Then to address your claim that "Linux is incapable of working reliably, for all use cases and all people" on its face value - first, lets define "reliably". If you mean 100% of the time, then while your claim would be technically correct, it would also be useless, as you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment in everything you do in life, because nothing works with 100% reliability in this universe, except for maybe laws of physics, and even that is a mere maybe - we just haven't seen them being broken as we currently know them. Second, if we accept that there is no 100% reliability and we have to compare varying degrees of reliability then your claim is immediately untrue, because of all the operating systems, at least for my use cases Linux works the best, and that means Linux is already "incapable of working reliably" not for all use cases and not for all people. And I use Linux not only on servers, but also on my work laptop, my personal laptops, my media center, handhelds, tablets, ebook reader, and smartphones (and I'm not talking Android, I'm talking Mobian). For my use cases and on my hardware Linux works exceptionally well, much better than any other operating system, and when it does fail to work as expected, most of the times I've been able to trace the breakage to something stupid I did myself. The cases when it is not a breakage resulting from my own tinkering are exceedingly rare, compared to the same Windows where I still get an occasional blue screen out of nowhere simply plugging/unplugging USB devices.

    Originally posted by avis View Post
    The reason Valve forces an immutable image on their devices is because they want to make sure people get the experience they want with as few regressions or bugs as possible. You just can't get that with run-of-the-mill Linux distributions, except maybe RHEL, which is not a suitable gaming platform due to a severely outdated software stack.
    The company I work for provides Linux desktops to our (corporate) customers. Those desktops use traditional distributions, with rootfs mounted R/W, and updates done as individual packages instead of wholesale image. To date (our service been running for over six years) we had only exactly one case where distro's updated package caused what we considered breakage of our service, and none that would cause regressions in customers' actual desktops. Except for that one distro issue, every problem our customers had over those 6+ years were due to either our own code (that tries to solve some rather non-trivial even for Windows problems - that's my excuse for our bugs), or, more often, due to either problems in customers' environments (like ridiculous segregated DNS setups, firewalls blocking more than they should, non-functional hosts, replication issues, expired certificates, etc., yada-yada), or end-users mucking up things they shouldn't touch (renaming hosts or changing DNS in AD environment, using VPN inappropriately, trying to override system Python version, deleting files that are critical for the service, and so on and so forth).

    My point being, with a reasonable distro choice the biggest problem of traditional R/W rootfs is not the regressions, it's the end users that have more permissions and confidence than knowledge. Shipping immutable OS images doesn't free you up from having to have a robust CI/testing infrastructure, if you don't have it you're just as likely to ship a regression in an immutable image as in traditional one. What it does free you up from is end users mucking up the core OS.

    Originally posted by avis View Post
    And I totally agree that the PC market has been dying as PC has become a luxury hobby and most people are better served by their smartphones/tablets or consoles.
    I never said PC market is dying, and I'm tired of hearing that BS. It has matured and became saturated, with some shrinking in the areas that are better served by newer form factor devices, but that's not the same as dying. Unless and until tablets and smartphones become capable of fully replacing laptops and desktops for all use cases, or there is some new form factor or paradigm gets invented that can do the same things only PC can but better, the PC market will keep on living in the niche it carved out for itself. And I do include Macs under PC umbrella, because while they're no longer x86-based, functionally they still serve the same purpose - large screen(s), more efficient keyboard/mouse based input, larger power and thermal budgets for more CPU/GPU performance, more flexible I/O options.
    Last edited by moonwalker; 03 December 2024, 12:07 AM.

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