Steam Linux Usage Still On The Decline

[curaga]

WTH is hardware support handled kernel level? Thats idiotic, and one of the reasons you have to tear the ABI apart every few years, and make entirely new stacks every decade to make things work. Hardware support should be handled via drivers.

Uhm. You do know that drivers on Windows are run at kernel level? They have higher-than-admin privileges to your system. The only difference to linux drivers is that they are not shipped as part of the kernel.

[Bucic]

Check this one out and you'll change your mind about what a "big game is"! This little piece of art is a tactical shooter, believe it or not.

If you think it's just a prettier Chromium shooter or something like that you couldn't be more wrong. The developers behind the game http://www.puppygames.net have a whole line of this kind of retro flavored games, each with free downloadable demo, so I encourage everyone to try them out.

When I tried Droid Assault I quit playing Amnesia the dark descent


As for the subject - Steam on Linux needs more first-grade game other than just the Valve's games.

[Artemis3]

As a dev, I've more or less given up on Linux. Putting aside the fact the GPL/LGPL is too restrictive, OSX is simply a much more attractive target for me. Until you solve that problem, Linux will forever be a toy.

Guess what happens when you control the hardware to the point you cherry pick each component to work with your software? Apple. The corporation does this for you, and charges you a premium for that.

If you cherry pick each component, you can have a "just works" experience with any OS. You can't just go out and buy random crap and expect it to work with any OS. Linux (or anything else for that matter) is the same. Did you even try purchasing with Linux pre-installed? or pay someone to pick the right parts for you if you can't be bothered with such a task?

Free (open) Software is not limited to the gpl, there is plenty of bsd/mit like licenses, and the lgpl is flexible for most uses anyway; some projects dual license for special uses etc.

"We" don't really need to "solve" anything, "We" do what "we" need. If "you" need someone to do what "you" need, you better provide an incentive, such as hiring. You can't do this with proprietary (closed) software, period. Need a slight modification to make OS X more productive for you, fix a bug? Too bad. Did that vendor who provided all your software needs just went bankrupt? Aww.

[Artemis3]

If it works on Windows, it should work on Linux. Period.

Your demand goes straight to the software developers, its them who decide which OS to support, Period.

And BTW, its not like you have a giant list on Linux.com the states:

"ATI GPU audio out doesn't work"

AMD's fault.

"Optimus doesn't work"

Nvidia's fault.

"Non-Creative branded soundcards don't work"

False.

"Almost all ethernet cards don't work"

Absolutely false.

And so on. If NVIDIA releases the GTX 880 today, it should work, period, not require years of support to get working.

This is Nvidia's sole responsibility. And, they usually provide the driver.

Rather then, I don't know, making the hardware work? Nah, instead its: "Use our free OS, then spend $700 on hardware to run it, that would be considered a major downgrade over what you already have, as we can't be bothered supporting that."

The OS does not support hardware, its the hardware manufacturer (and software developer) who decides which OS to support (provide either driver or documentation for their device). Or do you think developers have psychic abilities to make random hardware just work out of the blue? Why are you not demanding hardware manufacturers to support the OS? What do you think makes a piece of hardware A cheaper than B? Its cheaper to support a single OS, and it's cheaper to offload functionality to the OS, but that would expose "trade secrets" so they won't "reveal" it. Cheap hardware makes your cpu works more, good hardware can work on its own and doesn't need to expose "secrets" to the host.

Great marketing pitch you got going there.

There is no "Linux" corporation. There are people doing business providing services involving Linux, this is because the software is Free (open) so anyone can be hired to improve/fix things as allowed by the license. The freedom is you don't depend on anyone, not even the author, you can hire anyone else to change or fix the thing, and redistribute your changes and use it whoever you see fit anywhere.

Question: Why does hardware work on Windows and OSX, but not Linux?
Answer: The GPL/LGPL.

In case you have missed it: Because the hardware manufacturer doesn't care to support. They can use any license they want, some things might perform worse if done in userland, but you can't impose your rules to the kernel developers, its their choice and you have to respect it. It's your business or not to link to someone else's project and play by their rules if you do so.

No, don't try and argue it away. The GPL/LGPL are the two most restrictive licenses on the planet for developers. So guess what? Restrictive license, broken software, market fragmentation, and no market share? Why would I bother?

Actually I don't really care what you do, its your business. I do not believe in evangelism. In the same manner, you have no rights on criticizing which license others choose, its their project not yours; don't like it don't use it, go complain elsewhere.

You want licenses that empower the user? Fine. But you lose any right to complain when the developers walk away as a result of that choice.

For each single of you, there are many more who chose to embrace the Free Software model, since it allows people to break chains from single entities. Business and Governments are realizing this, since they are the client, they can demand software to be written using these open licenses. You don't want to? Someone else will.

No one is going to spend billions researching/creating hardware they can't make money on. Keep living the pipe dream.

It's already done, the fact you can't see it its your own blindness (eg: Android).

At the end of the day, when non-linux people think of Linux, what distro do they think of? Knowing that, what distro do you think the devs are going to focus on?

If someone does not know about linux, they can't possibly know (or be biased) in favor of any specific distro; they will start doing online searches and see what shows more often. In the past, it used to be Red Hat, Suse, etc; then came Ubuntu, but this is always moving, it is not fixed in stone. There are hundreds of distros and someone with better ideas will come sooner or later.

A smart dev being distro agnostic will learn about static linking or bundle their own libs, which is what they do in Windows; unless they go open source and let each distro compile/package using their tools.

Do you know what percentage of users that see they need different hardware are going to switch once seeing that?

I'll give you a hint: the number before the decimal point is a 0.

Because the world revolves around you? No, many will learn the truth by searching beforehand and do an informed purchase next time. I have been doing that for over a decade already, I specifically buy things i know they work perfectly with my OS.

You can live your "pipe dream" thinking we are a 0, well keep dreaming, just don't watch netcraft.
And of course, since we are 0, there wouldn't be any sites like Phoronix in the first place, it's only a dream...

[ElderSnake]

Meh we don't need people like gamerk2 and the likes, they will never be satisfied until Linux is a nasty corporate, dumbed down controlled, Windows/Mac clone.

Which thankfully will never happen, but anyway.

[timothyja]

just personal experiance shows, that linux is slower than windows in every way.

Just personnal bias you mean. You have not given one example or benchmark to support your claims. You are a straight up troll.
One simple example of Linux mopping the floor with windows is the filesystem. http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...inux-TAR-files
12 seconds to uncompress 2000 files on windows vs instantly on Linux.

[tecknurd]

That's a pretty amazing read of that chart. What I see is Linux hanging on in the 1% area and Windows 8 growing at a much faster rate than Linux. And the XP downtick was offset by an equal uptick in Windows 7.

Linux is basically going nowhere.

And here's my gaming experience on Ubuntu:

- tearing
- crappy performance
- tearing
- more tearing
- accidentally hit Alt, HUD comes up and I can't get back to my game
- compiz crashed, would you like to send a bug report?

For that matter I can't even use XBMC on the system anymore. If anybody thinks somebody is going to leave the comfort of Windows 7 for this garbage they're very naive.

I have used Ubuntu and it is not friendly to "binary blob" drivers. Because of that I use Gentoo instead. I am more familer with Gentoo than Ubuntu and Gentoo does not require a line to be edit in Grub for "binary blobs" to work. I use Calculate Linux which is Gentoo based.

Compiz should never be used if you are going to play games. This is common sense. I do not think any gamer would enable Aero in Windows. Fancy graphic animation for desktop managers hurts game performance. Use a light-weight desktop/window manager like Xfce with out Composite.

Tearing is caused by the graphics card rendering frames faster than the monitor can display them. Setting VSYNC will help that. I do believe some people are more prone to seeing the tearing of the video more than others because those people are scrutinizing video tearing more by saying they see it. There are tricks to minimize video tearing is to enable triple buffering, but that is only for nVidia graphics using "binary blob" drivers. If you enable VSYNC and enable triple buffering and you still see video tearing, then it is you that have a problem. The human brain is known to fill in gaps could be lies. If a video camera recording the monitor at 120 FPS and it does not have any frames recorded that is tearing, than you should go see a doctor.

Crappy performance is too general. The mouse and/or keyboard have bad response or graphics has poor performance. If it is poor graphics performance, then that is your video card. OpenGL puts a heavy load on your graphics card compared to DirectX or Direct3D. Direct3D uses combination of the CPU, RAM and graphics card for better performance, so you could get by with mid-end graphics, but OpenGL does not let you. Bad keyboard and/or mouse response is cause by latency of the kernel. Try using Ubuntu Studio. Ubuntu Studio uses real-time kernel. Other distributions have option to use a real-time kernel.

XBMC is good for a stand-alone TiVO replacement. If you want it as your player on a desktop, set it up on another virtual terminal device like VT8 because it is like a desktop/window manager. It is best to use VLC or SMPlayer (front-end to MPlayer). Alternative of XBMC is Plex.

My experience of gaming in Linux is good or good as Windows or better in some cases. I used nVidia graphics with "binary blob" drivers. I set VSYNC for OpenGL and enable triple buffering. A gigabyte of RAM helped a lot for the game I was playing. When I did gaming in Linux, it was several years ago. I ran UT2004 because it was the only game in that time that natively runs in Linux. I notice a big improvement upgrading from Xorg version 6.8 to 7. Version 7 and above improved mouse and keyboard responsiveness by a lot. Linux's file IO and memory management is by far superior compared to Windows. I normally did not have to wait for game maps to load. I usually have to wait for other players to load their game maps.

[tecknurd]

Because thats not true at all the Linux desktop has come a very long way, its now just lacking a little spit and polish. Its only a matter of time before it reaches the point of no return, adoption will be exponential. Microsofts dirty tricks (such as the 2008 deals with OEMs to replace Linux Netbooks with Windows ones, to this day I can still not buy a Linux machine from an OEM in Australia) can only hold Linux back for so long before the flood gates open, it may still be years away but its inevitable that Microsofts time at No 1 will come to an end. If you dont believe me I really couldnt give a shit, just fuck off and troll somewhere else why are you even here if your not a Linux user.

Sure talk optimistically. What Linux is, it is an option to use or you don't. You can easily put Linux on a computer even though it may come with Windows or Mac pre-installed. I use Linux because I feel it cheaper for my wallet. I build my computer, so I am not force to use Windows or pay more for a computer that comes pre-installed with Windows. Will companies start supporting Linux in the future. The answer to this is NO because Linux has a disorganize toolkits and libraries. Is Windows going to be history, NO. The reason why Windows will not be history is because it is globally used and unfortunately it is the standard OS. Apple have to deal with that Windows is the standard OS. What Mac is, is an option to use it besides the standard. What sets Linux apart from Mac is can be use on any computer with out some magic.

[tecknurd]

Phoronix: Steam Linux Usage Still On The Decline

With Valve's very well known "Steam Hardware Survey", after showing some promising Linux statistics at first, last month indicated that the Linux adoption of the game distribution software was stagnate or on the decline. The April figures for the Steam hardware survey are now public and they indicate further losses for Linux gamers...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM2Mjg

Like some others have said. Valve is seeing numbers being steady. The steady numbers relate to realistic numbers instead of hyped numbers during when Valve introduce Steam for Linux. Apple is getting the realistic numbers instead of the hyped numbers. Others have said the amount of games that Valve has for Linux is limited, so that could be one reason. I am not really a gamer, so Steam does not apply to me. I did look at what Steam provides for Linux. None of the games seems interesting for me to play. Valve really needs to invest into being like a school to help developers port their games to many operating systems and not just one or the common OS.

[Gps4l]

Not true, because even cpu tests and cpu related runs faster on windows, plus it uses less ram because by default linux is useless and pretty much "naked", and in fact, god invented ram to be used for speed increases, not to be empty and useless, just like in windows - there ram could be under highly used for os speed increases, but if your program needs more ram than is free now, then windows releases that amount of ram and gives it to program... Boot speed is not true also, because windows 7/8 boots faster than any linux distro, actually, boot speed on linux is a big problem, which developers tried to solve some time ago, but failed, as it only became longer for "some reasons" . And comparing disk usage shows your noobish level in general understanding of whats going on in this world... If you would have big and empty head, you would be just like linux nothing personal, you can leave words like "troll" to your friends here, just personal experiance shows, that linux is slower than windows in every way.

My pc is dual boot, win 7 openSUSE 12.3.

OpenSUSE boots way faster then W7.

And then when W7 finally shows the desktop I still have to wait, were openSUSE is ready for use.