February 2014 Steam Hardware Survey Shows Linux At 1.3%

[Dukenukemx]

As a gamer who primarily uses Windows, I can tell you that graphic drivers aren't the limiting factor for people to switch. WINE is the limiting factor. Valve thinks that people are going to run two machines to play a Windows game, but no. Seriously no. How energy efficient is that going to be?

WINE needs to get faster and more compatible. Open source drivers need improvement, but they're "acceptable" for now. By acceptable, I mean that Nvidia users are going to use Nvidia binary and Intel users are going to be just fine. AMD users are stuck in driver purgatory hell. Open source for AMD is really good, but not good enough. AMD binary is fine, just not always. If you own an older AMD graphics card, then you're stuck with open source. If you're new to Linux and have AMD hardware, you're going to switch back to Windows and forgot this mess.

I have to wonder why Valve doesn't contribute to WINE? There must be a good reason.

[smitty3268]

I have to wonder why Valve doesn't contribute to WINE? There must be a good reason.

Because WINE will never be good enough. It might work fine for the 1.3% of users already running linux who are willing to experiment with things, but you're never going to convince the masses of Windows players to run linux if all their games are buggy, and your only explanation is that WINE is messing them up and you're working on fixing it. You're never going to fix everything, there will always be new problems popping up.

Hence why they've focused on streaming, where they can actually make things work 100%.

[Fry-kun]

75% Intel and 0% NVIDIA? That doesn't sound right at all...

No, that's CPUs. As I said, no breakdown by video

[johnc]

As a gamer who primarily uses Windows, I can tell you that graphic drivers aren't the limiting factor for people to switch. WINE is the limiting factor. Valve thinks that people are going to run two machines to play a Windows game, but no. Seriously no. How energy efficient is that going to be?

Heck at this point I'd just be satisfied with native Linux games working on Linux.

[GreatEmerald]

No, that's CPUs. As I said, no breakdown by video

Oh, all right, that makes sense.

[Andrecorreia]

i never loose time whith this

i dont loose time with this stupid survey, my brother do the same, 99% of the users. why valve dont use a automatic survey? this simply stupid

[smitty3268]

i dont loose time with this stupid survey, my brother do the same, 99% of the users. why valve dont use a automatic survey? this simply stupid

Because then they'd be accused of spying on users and working for the NSA.

[Andrecorreia]

lol

Because then they'd be accused of spying on users and working for the NSA.

lol the same people who use facebook... or g+, etc etc.

or google search or yahoo search,...

[Fry-kun]

Because then they'd be accused of spying on users and working for the NSA.

Interestingly, the same people who are more likely to opt out are more likely to use Linux.
Another possible reason for linux under-estimation could be non-DRMed games on Steam. I have a bunch of those purchased through Humble Bundle -- and most of the time I want to play them, I don't bother starting up Steam.

[ua=42]

I have to say, I'm currently using windows with the plan of switching at the end of the year to linux. I have a HD7850 graphics card, so I'm waiting for all the major performance and features boosts to be included by default in the distros.