Even With Steam Machines, Steam Linux Usage Stays Below 1%

[ParticleBoard]

I used to put some weight on these numbers but not any more. I thought it was for gauging platform usage but my last few installs of steam followed a pattern.

- installed steam on my Win7 laptop (small niche partition for testing) and after a few boots the steam survey pops up. Annoyed I closed it over and over and over again waiting for it to pop up on linux on my main computer on the same account, it never did. Eventually I just filled it out.
- just installed steam a few days ago on my linux pvr to try the nvenc hardware accelerated streaming stuff (which works really well even on a low end box). After a few boots of that I get the survey.

I think the survey just wants to return the specs on as many NEW systems as it can, to get the same specs on the same box over and over it doesn't seem too keen. 1% is probably in line with how many windows machines have steam compared to linux but I doubt it's a fair indicator of actual usage. Hell I'm down for 3 windows and 2 linux surveys over the years.

[Xaero_Vincent]

From what I've seen and heard from others, SteamOS doesn't ask for hardware surveys! The only way to get them is to set SteamOS to run in GNOME desktop mode and run the desktop version of the Steam client, which is done by editing lightdm.conf to boot into GNOME (which few Steam Machine owners would do versus just installing Windows). Apparently simply "switching to the the desktop" within SteamOS session doesn't support running the desktop UI Steam client.

And more bad news regarding SteamOS...SteamOS 2.0 (Brewmaster) is slower than 1.0 (Alchemist) with some games:

Valve really needs to get their act together and get SteamOS up to an acceptable standard for gaming.

[Kver]

I heard a rumor that Valve put less than a handful of people working on SteamOS.

Rumors hold about as much water as a wicker basket, and there's functionality spillover to consider as well. For example, Valves work on Vulkan drivers could fall under one of several teams. Same with BPM, the Steam controller, and Linux utilities in general. But all of that contributes to "SteamOS" as a system.

The actual OS itself would be pretty negligible to maintain as Valve isn't concerned with most traditional desktop requirements. It's not like they'll have hundreds of engineers on it.

[philips]

NeptNutz, you're nuts

[lockheed02]

Now that is mean. Logged into steam (linux) about 1 hour ago - no trace of a survey. Then found this article. Checked linux steam again. Nothing. And now I just wanted to spend a few minutes in Skyrim via steam on wine and voila! HW survey!
I always wondered - am I counted as Windows as my 4.2.6-200.fc22.x86_64 with fglrx 15.30.3 becomes in Survey:

Operating System Version:
    Windows 7 (64 bit)
    Wine Version: wine-1.7.55 (Staging)
    NTFS:  Supported
    Crypto Provider Codes:  Supported 311 0x0 0x0 0x0
    
Video Card:
    Driver:  ATI Radeon HD 5600 Series

And my shiny R9 290 becomes a HD 5600!

I don't think the survey has any representative character ...

Lockheed

PS: that was my third or forth survey in 2 years or so

[Cyber Killer]

There's also another problem - I read a few articles that OEMs will ship Steam Machines running windows instead of SteamOS (sic!). That's like stabbing Valve efforts in the back :-/.

[GreatEmerald]

Meanwhile, gs.statcounter.com is no longer useful because there are too many Windows. Vista or XP or 8 will have to die first before Linux shows up on the graphs again, unfortunately. (Unless you only look at South America.)

[humbug]

Valve really needs to get their act together and get SteamOS up to an acceptable standard for gaming.

Valve seems to think that there is little more they can do to improve the openGL ecosystem performance.
In the last year they seem to be more focused on Vulkan which appears to be their longterm bet as far as correcting performance discrepancies vs windows (which is causing bad press atm). I think they want to move towards thinner driver layers and non-reliance on application specific profiling.

[varikonniemi]

Is anybody really surprised? Valve's Linux efforts have been almost zero. If they were really serious, they would have people working on steamos, and all parts of the software stack. What we see is a shitty integration of an existing fullscreen UI on top of ubuntu. Give me one really good QT5 engineer and half a year, and i will give you something with feature parity to big picture.

Where are the valve's mesa/intel/nouveau/amdgpu/input/kernel teams trying to dethrone microsoft? Nowhere. As everyone else, they expect someone else to fix/implement it. And still they have a quite sizeable team dealing with reverse engineering/fixing all the issues the blackbox of windows causes them.

[mike4]

Valve seems busy with Vulkan and SteamVR. Maybe some day we see Half Life 3 first for SteamMachines with SteamVR using Vulkan.