Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November
Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November
Can we talk about the definition of a "surge", please!
What percentage increase do you feel is required for surge to be a reasonable definition. A 35% increase feels surge-y me.
It's not the percentage total but the speed of increase.
Small number random samples in big data sets have huge error margins. You need to smooth this over time to see the real trend.
A delicious canned energy drink from the 90s.
Josta was better.
Click bait media
I'm guessing this is because of more sales of the Steam Deck, haven't got myself one yet but I'd love to as everyone that has gotten ones has said it's worth the money as well as is a great way to get through your games on the go.
You may be right in that people are seeing how viable Linux is for gaming due to the success of the Steam Deck.
I'm not sure if steam deck is counted under Arch, but it's definitely not Ubuntu, Mint, or Manjaro. It looks like the increase in Linux desktop is traditional desktop gaming.
SteamOS is 42.99% of the Linux share on there, with the lion's share increase of 0.68%. This 'surge' is pretty much just from the Steam Deck.
I’m not sure if steam deck is counted under Arch
It must be, because there's no way vanilla Arch is the most-used Linux distro, even among gamers.
The deck is "SteamOS Holo" in the metrics.
That, but also the splash buff of Proton making a lot of games work for Linux outside of Steam Decks has probably helped too.
Add the article says, the surge is entirely thanks to the Deck. There was a 35% surge in overall use but 43% of that use is the Deck so PC/laptop use has actually dropped.
I'd say some of that drop was punters like me who were already gaming on Linux and have just moved over to the deck now.
I have a dock for mine and it's really the only thing I use for gaming now as my laptop is very old.
It’s been pretty good. So long as you stick to verified and playable games your experience is going to be pretty solid.
That and Emudeck.
The most seamless retro gaming setup I've used yet.
TBH I've yet to come across any game I haven't been able to play (aside from the obvious VR/occasional anti-cheat), most unsupported games just haven't been tested for most cases
Edit: out of curiosity I actually went through my library to see just how many unsupported games I could download and try (again, not the VR ones lol).
I ended up getting caught up playing Revita all day and it says unsupported but it definitely works! For anyone else interested in that game, it is having some development quirks but there's a public beta branch of it that seems to be the "definitive" version of the game.
Uploaded a control scheme template for the beta since there wasn't one I liked :D
Then I tried an old DOS game Litil Divil which also worked just fine. I'd have tried some others but like I said, addicting game be addicting
id like to think this is because I alone decided to install opensuse (its been an awful experience)
Do you mean Linux in general or just Open suse? Never used it other than booting it up and trying out the live environment
Feel the pain 😂.
If you're referring to openSUSE rather than Linux in general, I have had the opposite experience. I had been on Manjaro for the past couple of years and decided to switch to openSUSE Tumbleweed on a whim and everything for the most part has just worked out of the box with minimal troubleshooting (or just a lot less than I remember when I was originally configuring my Manjaro install). What all have you had problems with?
Heres my biggest complaints so far:
it takes like 45 seconds for my OS to wake from sleep
sometimes my login screen is on my left monitor, sometimes on my right, sometimes on both!
It took me 3 hours to get wallpaper engine running
My package manager keeps telling me I am missing dependencies that I have verified exist.
video games dont perform as well on Linux as they do on windows (even baby games like Risk of Rain Returns which should run on pretty much anything perfectly)
half the time I reboot my computer I get some weird nvidia error, other times I dont at all. Generally when I reboot my computer it just stalls for like 45 seconds before actually rebooting.
it was very unclear what I needed to install to get the latest nvidia drivers installed. Got it working after a few hours of trial and error.
theres some more complaints but those are the ones off the top of my head.
oh also applying themes seems very broken. Every time I apply a theme it grabs icons from a completely different theme. For instance I applied a theme called dracula, didnt like it so I switched back to the opensuse default theme, after a while I found a different theme and applied it but suddenly all of my icons were dracula theme again... also its very hit or miss whether all of the theme actually applies.
Opensuse is a challenge after living in Debian world for a while.
Pop-os is where I eventually ended up. Ubuntu with built in i3 style tiling and none of the snap garbage.
I just removed Windows from my desktop and went straight Linux after seeing how well things ran on my Deck.
bill’s days are numbered
I mean, he's not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
My guess is that most gaming Linux users have a dual boot setup and play games on Windows.
If not for games like Destiny, I wouldn’t even need that. Literally everything else I play runs great on Linux now
I used to keep a windows drive to run steam. But it honestly sees very little use nowadays.
Mostly I boot it every few months to see what shenanigans Microsoft has pulled with windows. Other than that, it's just sitting there. Everything I play runs in Linux.
I run Tumbleweed btw.
Not anymore. I don't even bother to check steamdb, games run anyhow flawlessly under Proton experimental.
(OK, maybe check if the game runs well before buying it)
Wel yeah, single player games almost almost work flawlessly. However games with kernel level anticheat are generally not playable on Linux.
My guess is that most Linux gamers tracked by Steam have a dual hardware setup with a Steam Deck and a Windows desktop PC/notebook.
Tell me why "market share" of commerical, proprietary games is important to Linux again?
Because of Valve, Linux is finally my main OS. I'm a PC gamer and it was a pain in the ass to dual-boot between Windows and Linux.
If you are a Linux user and like commercial games, you probably would prefer them to work on Linux.
“Market share” on Linux aligns the vested interest of game makers and Linux game players. If the company thinks it can make money, it will do more to allow games to run, or at least do less to stop them.
These commercial, proprietary games are one of the things that pushes forward the capabilities of personal computers. They are unreasonable, unoptimized resource-hogs. If a Linux system is as capable of running them as a proprietary OS (that has a deck stacked in it's favor), it means they lose one another advantage over Linux. And it also means that your hardware now is more productive at less bs tasks, especially consumer-grade nvidia cards, who are better supported now than years ago.
Because it’ll be funny if Microsoft just gives up and makes “Windows” a desktop environment for Linux.
There's high potential overlap between the profile of a PC gamer (who is often also a PC builder and general computing DIY hobbyist) and an OS like Linux that extends your tinkering ability massively on the software side.
PC/laptop users are a shrinking demographic nowadays thanks to the advent of mobile devices, but they're a high quality demographic made up of professionals and hobbyists with above average computer savvy. So lots of companies are trying to appeal to them because the choices they make in software and hardware can translate into many other IT fields.
Potentially more support for other things other than gaming, maybe... Hopefully
nvidia openned their drivers not long after they announced that was "working sith valve to givd a better gaming experience on linux"
That's what many people miss. I know Value is doing a lot but I was hoping for some other large companies to get into the space.
A lot of people only play games on their computer, hence running linux doesn't make sense if they can't play games on it
Yup, a big excuse I used to see a lot was
I would like to run Linux, but I want to game more so will stick to Windows
And this has changed a lot with what valve has done which opens Linux to a much larger market of people that can now use it for their usecases.
market share leads to demand, demand leads to supply
this benefits you