Unity Stats Show Linux Gamers Are Well Below 1% Of Their Customer Base

[theriddick]

I have quite a few U3D games in my Steam library. I know some of them won't work for me under Linux with Open driver because of the issues I have mentioned around 500x throughout this site. I will give them another go once my videocard comes back to me, Wasteland2 for example is U3D, I also have some Shadow Land of some sort but that crashes on startup. (most games will start with FGLRX driver when I use to have that, but performance was very poor).

[schmidtbag]

Empty argument, if you need gaming, Linux is still disaster, Mac OS is a bit better, but only real choice are Windows or Console, or maybe SteamOS if you dont care that in your collection is only 1/4 of Windows games.

Mac definitely is not better for gaming. Mac has less hardware support, worse overall performance, and as of lately, there are less games release for Mac.

there inst nothing better than customized Windows with Total Commander, Display Fusion, Filemenu Tools, Filebox extender atd other utils, Visual Studio is still best IDE for advanced coder and with cygwin and putty is still best experience.

Yeah... and not everybody has a 6-core Xeon with hyper-threading and 32GB+ of RAM.... It takes way too much junk to make Windows the "best" experience. Visual Studio is good if you code in C or anything C-like. Otherwise, it is seriously overkill for anything else.

I gave my mother Ubuntu too, because she just need to boot into Firefox it was good enough for most of time, but:
...

Funny - whenever I install Linux for the computer illiterate, they don't bother me for years. Meanwhile, I constantly find myself helping people who use Windows. If you just install default Ubuntu, then yeah, your mother is going to have a hard time adjusting. But the nice thing about Linux is tweaking it to your needs. If all your mother needs is firefox and camera imports, it is very easy to simplify the computer to do just those and nothing else.

If you knew remotely accessing was going to be a problem, you should've had the foresight to port forward ssh.

[ruthan]

"Windows 8 at 0.7%, Windows 7 at 65.9%, Windows XP at 17.3%, Windows 10 "

Poor windows religious users, they do not know that there is something better. I will give a Debian Xfce live dvd to my aunt, she is suffering from slow boot and shutdown and win10 upgrade ads in her win7 laptop.

Empty argument, if you need gaming, Linux is still disaster, Mac OS is a bit better, but only real choice are Windows or Console, or maybe SteamOS if you dont care that in your collection is only 1/4 of Windows games.
I working with MacOS, Mate, Xfce, Gnome, KDE and if you are heavy GUI user as im there inst nothing better than customized Windows with Total Commander, Display Fusion, Filemenu Tools, Filebox extender atd other utils, Visual Studio is still best IDE for advanced coder and with cygwin and putty is still best experience.

I gave my mother Ubuntu too, because she just need to boot into Firefox it was good enough for most of time, but:
- something she was stuck with some tutorial for average users, only described only for Windows
- because of Linux EXT4 bug, she was 2 weeks offline, because booted into busy box.. and i cant fix it remotely
- she just needed to upload pictures from camera and phone - and windows just not open after device was connected => dead end
- flash upgrade issue, i age of flash only youtube

Those problems werent worthy of save 100 bucks, even without visits - my 5 years old nephew also want to play Rayman and Cars..
I wasnt even 100 bought old XP copy for just $50.

[Tuxee]

WinXP 17.3%, Win10 8%... Sounds legit. With these figures I wouldn't care to much about these "statistics".

[schmidtbag]

@thereddick
I personally own an R9 290 and have been using the open source drivers for about a year and a half now, on either Debian or Arch. Everything has been very smooth for me. My xorg.conf is pretty basic. The worst experience I had was in the first month I had it, where power management wasn't fully functional yet and a couple games performed worse than my old HD5750. Today, it runs great. There are a few games with some questionable issues, but those problems can be linked to the game devs, not the drivers. There definitely is room for improvement in performance, but it seems every month the radeonSI drivers get a little bit faster.

Seems to me you have a hardware issue. You shouldn't need to control the fans at all. If they're too loud, you have bad ventilation in your tower or you made the mistake of getting a Gigabyte or OEM model with the reference cooler. If you are getting stability issues, that could be linked to your power supply. These are pretty power-hungry cards. If you have more than 2 PCIe power cords, try swapping one of them. Some PSUs are mistakenly designed with PCIe power cords put on the same rail.

[andre30correia]

i don't remember a single unity3d game, the plugin never was native (we need to use pipelight) i really think this huge numbers for their garbage

[theriddick]

That may be so, but I will tell you this, without manually setting the power states of my 390x under Linux with the standard package driver results in freezes and system restart problems. NOW that I understand the problem better I can easily resolve it, but it required a fair bit of tom foolery under terminal before X start to resolve that issue.

I still need to figure out howto make my own fan profile for the 390x (there have been ways but often they are outdated and no longer work). But honestly how hard would it be for a developer to 'get' a 390x or any other other cards that have these issues and just USE it for a while to understand these issues (I mean use it to game etc), then apply fixes.

I get the distinct feeling allot of AMD OSS driver team is exclusively testing with a 285 card or something....

schmidtbag I get told allot there is no problems with just using standard, but if I were to make a video of what happens when using 390x (think it happens for 290x and maybe non x versions also) from installing/using/gaming/steaming you'll be surprised!

[schmidtbag]

Its going to be a little while longer until Linux is at all NOT TERRIFYING for new comers!

Yeah, well that'll never happen. People hate change. That's why people tend to stick with whichever OS or desktop environment they were first introduced to. That's why people hate Windows 8 and newer. There are plenty of Linux distros that are more user-friendly than Windows or Mac but people will still be afraid of them, because they're different.

The fact we have so many driver problems atm is a HUGE hurdle (not everyone has NVIDIA cards!). Plus almost everyone I have talked to about using Linux said that its too hard/complicated when things go wrong; the idea of even typing in a command terminal is scary for almost all people. I can't tell you how many times I have installed a video driver which failed on boot up presenting a black screen!

Driver problems aren't that bad. Do things the way your distro prepped them and you'll be fine. If you download drivers independently of your distro, there's a good chance something will fail eventually.

Unfortunately you 'almost' never experience that horror on Windows (recent NVIDIA driver was BSOD etc), which is why it will continue to be the main platform indefinitely. I do hope Linux starts getting above %1 gamer usage one day, perhaps when display drivers improve? perhaps when we are able to run Fallout4 under Wine at good FPS @ 4k LMAO...

On Windows, you get other problems that break your system just as hard or just as frequently. They might not be driver problems, but problems that still get in your way. But when Windows fails, it fails hard, and it's very difficult to repair it. When it comes to reinstalling an OS, Windows tends to be far more tedious.

The problem is you're trying too hard to make linux be something it's not. It isn't Windows and it isn't a replacement to Windows. Wine should be avoided at all costs. I personally haven't used wine on my home PCs in about 7 years. I understand sometimes you might have some obscure program that only runs on Windows (such as any Adobe CS product) but the way I see it, wine should really only be used to help you transition away from Windows, but you should eventually ween off of it.

[theriddick]

Using Steam will practically auto opt you in. Considering most these games don't run outside of that.

Its going to be a little while longer until Linux is at all NOT TERRIFYING for new comers!
The fact we have so many driver problems atm is a HUGE hurdle (not everyone has NVIDIA cards!). Plus almost everyone I have talked to about using Linux said that its too hard/complicated when things go wrong; the idea of even typing in a command terminal is scary for almost all people. I can't tell you how many times I have installed a video driver which failed on boot up presenting a black screen!

Unfortunately you 'almost' never experience that horror on Windows (recent NVIDIA driver was BSOD etc), which is why it will continue to be the main platform indefinitely. I do hope Linux starts getting above %1 gamer usage one day, perhaps when display drivers improve? perhaps when we are able to run Fallout4 under Wine at good FPS @ 4k LMAO...

[BangoMopar]

is this counting all the unity games on only those than support the 3 PC OSs?

^ This. And I Tweeted that I agree. If every Unity game "phones home", well, the numbers are useless since most Unity games are not released for Linux...