Steam Linux Usage Shows A Decline For August

[feregember]

Dota2 and CS:GO were the top two games on the list ordered by daily user count, far ahead of all the other games. That was the case for years. PUBG joined to them in August, but that is a Windows-only game.

[johnc]

Valve is a big steaming pile of crap.

[caligula]

I have had mostly positive experiences with Steam on Linux, been playing lots of games with lots of success.

I am also not ideologically opposed to the idea of Steam (like some of the other commenters seem to be), it makes it really easy to get access to games and play them.

Sure but you have to admit the platform is a pile of stinking shit. 32-bit libraries, some old libraries are centuries old, awful windowed user interface, the Steam OS is bloated pile of crap with legacy display drivers. I enjoy gaming and Steam as an experience, but not on their platform, prefer gentoo or arch any day over their crap. I'm hoping that their lack of skills in building a x-platform linux package & distro won't sink the whole ship. It would be shame if one had to install Windows just to play games.

[boxie]

Sure but you have to admit the platform is a pile of stinking shit. 32-bit libraries, some old libraries are centuries old, awful windowed user interface, the Steam OS is bloated pile of crap with legacy display drivers. I enjoy gaming and Steam as an experience, but not on their platform, prefer gentoo or arch any day over their crap. I'm hoping that their lack of skills in building a x-platform linux package & distro won't sink the whole ship. It would be shame if one had to install Windows just to play games.

nah, it's not a stinking pile. just a system that has a lot history and therefore legacy.

when you don't have access to the source to recompile everything 64bit - you end up with supporting 32bit libs, because windows :P

[DMJC]

As someone who has a working steam setup I have to say for me, the biggest flaw is the lack of good AAA titles. I don't care about indie RPG #5001. I just want decent FPS/RTS/Racing/Space games to play. I already own most of those titles on Steam and the 2-3 games I don't own aren't that great anyway. Linux still lacks modding tools for most games. I live in Australia and we have one of the largest modding communities in the world (moddb.com is an Australian run website). It's not just Blender/GIMP there's a ton of missing pipeline tools in the ecosystem and almost no games are shipping with Linux based level editors.

[zanny]

While I have Steam running on my pc I find myself both buying and playing games from GOG since almost all Linux releases are cross-store. I've put several hundred hours into the Beamdog Enhanced Editions of Baldurs Gate, Pillars of Eternity, and the new Shadowrun games in this last year and I got them all on GOG.

Looking back, I'm not surprised that Steam on Linux adoption has slowed to a crawl / declined since GOG started advertising Linux support two years ago.

[Cape]

I think the survey on Linux is brokened... and I still don't understand how they actually count a +1 to the monthly count.
For example, how do they count all the bot Network for the various skin sites? Or the cheaters that have 10 different accounts?

[Xaero_Vincent]

I didn't have many problems with Steam although the steam runtime libaries based on Ubuntu 12.04 is horribly old and needs to be re-based against 16.04 at least. X11 is the major problem for me. I got tired of X11 crashing and freezing up my system and the screen going black almost everyday from regular use, so now I'm trying out running Antergos in a full-screen VMware VM w/ OpenGL 3.3 3D acceleration via VMware SVGA VGPU driver on-top of a shell-less Windows 10 host (without explorer.exe running). The VM automatically boots and restores a saved guest snapshot and kills explorer.exe after Windows logs in. It works well as VMware Player only allocates a couple gigs of RAM at a time and has almost no CPU usage, unless the guest is doing something. The Windows games run at virtually full-speed with the VM running in the background. I can also launch Windows games and apps on the host from within the Linux guest by using a simple Windows SSH server and piping program launch commands from Linux .desktop shortcuts via 'sshpass'.

[zzarko]

What I don't understand is why Valve needs OS survey at all? When one is logged to Steam, OS information could be (is?) gathered automatically...

[R41N3R]

Sadly Steam is based on so much legacy technology... 32 bit libraries are a constant issue, the focus on Ubuntu probably hindered the development too, Wayland support is not available, games that worked well will refuse to lunch, the Steam client on 4K screens doesn't scale and Videos in fullscreen are broken, game crashes are not reported at all... I value that Valve is supporting Linux with so many games and that they support the development of graphic drivers. But the Steam client and needs a refresh.