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

[remm]

The games are mostly quick OpenGL ports using a wrapper, so this doesn't work very well. As a result, focusing on Vulkan is the right decision.

[Tuxee]

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.)

Well, StatCounter was never more than a tool to indicate trends "in some way". The up and downs and bumps never made any sense.
To make you feel better:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-UY-monthly-201411-201510

OTOH in Germany the market share for Linux has been slowly climbing to around 3% - so this seems a rather accurate estimation.
And last but not least: The future looks bright for Linux here http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-o...-201411-201510

[Tuxee]

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.

Should an "expert" like you not be aware, that SteamOS is based on Debian? Anyway, since we are talking about open source, you can still dig up some "good QT5 engineer" and give Valve a run for their money with you shiny new overlay. There's demand elsewhere, too: I'm still waiting for a shiny Software Center on my Ubuntu.

[CapsAdmin]

I got my first hardware survey ever on linux yesterday after using linux for about a year. Maybe instead of complaining about this every time we need to ask valve how this works.

[soulsource]

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

Yet they basically funded the development of the Intel Vulkan driver. So the effort put into SteamOS cannot be that small, right?

[bitman]

This is not surprising. I mean why would anyone run SteamOS now? On one side we have huge set of windows games which run at a good performance, we have a good video drivers and no drama dealing with them. On the other side we have SteamOS which has horrible video drivers, limited game library and sometimes quirks here and there. BigPicture mode is fanstastic, but i still run it on my windows laptop which i dual-boot. Good news is that linux game library is growing and with amdgpu driver future looks bright at least for this vendor. As long as they manage to make driver at least just as good as windows one. So thats that. Dont expect sudden spike just yet. Maybe in a year or two we will start to see some more serious growth when trading windows for SteamOS will only mean reduced game library and not other downsides that were listed.

[haplo602]

Coincidence

I bought a new HDMI cable yesterday so I fired up the linux desktop at home. Steam client was the 3rd application launched (shell, firefox, steam client). After a few minutes a new update was downloaded and Steam client restarted.

What's the first thing I see in the client store page when it loads ? HUGE ads for Just Cause 3 and Rainbow Six. BOTH WINDOWS ONLY ... Never got these before, I always saw linux games on the store page before. So -1 for Valve.

Then I went to check the Steam machines page (since it was plastered all over the store page). Funny enough, 2 or 3 of the links pointed back to the same Steam machines page, the other 2 loaded garbled web pages.

Looks like the Steam Linux client is getting worse and worse ....

[Passso]

This is not surprising. I mean why would anyone run SteamOS now? On one side we have huge set of windows games which run at a good performance, we have a good video drivers and no drama dealing with them. On the other side we have SteamOS which has horrible video drivers, limited game library and sometimes quirks here and there. BigPicture mode is fanstastic, but i still run it on my windows laptop which i dual-boot. Good news is that linux game library is growing and with amdgpu driver future looks bright at least for this vendor. As long as they manage to make driver at least just as good as windows one. So thats that. Dont expect sudden spike just yet. Maybe in a year or two we will start to see some more serious growth when trading windows for SteamOS will only mean reduced game library and not other downsides that were listed.

Because SteamOS works and looks like a CONSOLE. Meaning it is plug and play, making things work and updates silently.

I do not personally want to manage another Windows box with antiadware, antivirus, antispyware, dotnet, programs updated one by one by hand, use a mouse and a control panel fo fix things etc. etc.

Plug, start, have fun. Valve do the rest of the work like Sony, MS and Nintendo do already. And guess what? This console can be very cheap and already have a HuGE catalog, far more than the 3 official consoles.

[s_j_newbury]

I don't really understand why Steam didn't go the ChromeOS route and have a Gentoo derived distribution. They know their target hardware and could have built optimized binaries which covered compatibility with any variant without any unnecessary bloat. Lean and Mean.

[yoshi314]

I don't really understand why Steam didn't go the ChromeOS route and have a Gentoo derived distribution. They know their target hardware and could have built optimized binaries which covered compatibility with any variant without any unnecessary bloat. Lean and Mean.

because the target hardware is varied, and reusing a well established binary distro is good enough.

you want to tweak it - install gentoo on it. nobody is preventing you from doing that.