April's Steam Survey Shows Their Linux Users At 0.76%, macOS Drops Below 3%

[muncrief]

I have 23 Steam games. Only 4 run natively under Linux, and 11 run under Wine. And most people wouldn't be able to get the 11 games to run under Wine, but I'm a tenacious embedded systems designer so I can.

That, unfortunately, is the problem with Linux gaming.

[Zucca]

No wonder both are loosing steam (ha ha) when you can just go to gog.com and get games that are easier to install, have no DRM attached to them and you can easily create your own backup copies in case something goes wrong in the future.

GOG is a fine example how to do it.

Last time I checked they were porting GOG Galaxy for Linux... Sadly, I think it's 32-bit only binary once again. But hey, it's not mandatory.

[Hi-Angel]

Another rabid fanboy who assumes that everything that's Linux kernel based can be called (a full fledged) Linux (distro capable of running desktop class software). Too bad you live in an imaginary world.

Welcome to the real world where the Linux kernel alone is worth shat. It's 100% useless but you are free to live in your imaginary world where billions of devices run Linux.

Well, great, go write me a game which can run on barebone Linux. You cannot? Pretty much no one cannot? So, what the fcuk you're talking about? This article is about Linux distros. Your pure Linux kernel lunacy may remain unnoticed in your fantasy world.

Not gonna follow your comments, because you're clearly trolling. E.g. the "why linux isn't ready for desktop" you linked is an old article wrong by ¾ that have been broken down many times on forums, on reddit in particular. A rule of thumb: any blog post on the Internet with disabled comments should be taken with great grain of salt.

Anyway, wanted to say that companies working on embedded or HPC, and contributing to the kernel and related libraries (e.g. libc, or whatever) are implicitly contributing to the desktop. Of course, your desktop not gonna benefit from changes to a driver of rare embedded microcontroller, but don't forget that they also do a lot of refactoring, research, and optimization in the core parts of the kernel. Look how much changes been done in the single 4.11 release https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.11

[Mez']

I had the survey last month. Must be the first time ever.
I also bought Dirt Rally through Humble Bundle monthly (around 10€) and Grid Autosport that was discounted 75% (10€).

I am a happy Steam user.

[nils_]

Previously many people used Linux as the main work environment and had rarely turned on Windows just to entertain themselves. They thought: When Linux will receive good games, I would totally wipe Windows from my HDD/SSD. But now they have WSL. And so they wiped Linux instead.

I'm one of those people, but I can tell you one thing: WSL is in no way a replacement for a full, working linux desktop. aside from an utter lack of features in other areas.

[aht0]

Attention technology peers and buffs: Apparently modifying a Linux kernel for a specific use case makes it not Linux. Thank you oh mighty one for pulling back the veil on this horrible misrepresentation of Linux. We can only assume that a Windows Phone is not Windows because it adds mobile-specific items (like a phone-dialer and custom Outlook Contacts app). Who knew?

Operating system does not consist only of kernel. Kernel is just one of the components of operating system. GNU/kFreeBSD is not FreeBSD, Android is not Linux - if you want examples.

If you want it pointed out - https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

If we tried to measure the GNU Project's contribution in this way, what would we conclude? One CD-ROM vendor found that in their “Linux distribution”, GNU software was the largest single contingent, around 28% of the total source code, and this included some of the essential major components without which there could be no system. Linux itself was about 3%. (The proportions in 2008 are similar: in the “main” repository of gNewSense, Linux is 1.5% and GNU packages are 15%.) So if you were going to pick a name for the system based on who wrote the programs in the system, the most appropriate single choice would be “GNU”.

[speculatrix]

Meanwhile:

thanks, I wondered how to block people, and you're the first!