Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% In March (phoronix.com)
- Reference: 0181205648
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/04/02/0350211/steam-on-linux-use-skyrocketed-above-5-in-march
- Source link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-Tops-5p
> Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March while macOS also jumped surprisingly by 1.19% to 2.35%. The Steam Survey numbers show Windows losing 4.28%, down to 92.33%.
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> Part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers. Month over month they report a 31.85% drop to the Simplified Chinese language use and English use increasing by 16.82% to 39.09%. Other languages also showed gains amid the massive decline in Simplified Chinese use.
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> The latest numbers for March show around a quarter of the Linux gamers are running Steam OS. Due in part to the Steam Deck APU being a custom AMD product and the popularity of AMD hardware on Linux for its open-source nature, AMD CPU use by Steam on Linux gamers remains just under 70%.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-Tops-5p
Works pretty well. (Score:3)
I'm part of that 5%+. The thing about gaming on Linux is that I have no time or mood for fussing around with compatibility issues. Steams Proton layer handles quite a few games without trouble. I used to be a GoG only person but since their requirements for Linux versions are very specific and cause trouble on newer versions of Linux I finally installed Steam on Linux a few weeks back. Sure it's quite a performance hog and it keeps you in the dark about wether it's taking so long to launch because it's running some background update thingie and you have to use top to see what's going on, but other than that, the games listed as playable on protondb launch with a simple click. Which is good.
Guess I'm a steam customer now. After, what, 25 years? I remember when Half-Life 2 came out and they tied it to steam to push the first big digital game distribution platform. Guess that was/is a huge success. Provide good value, get my money. I don't mind.
Re: (Score:2)
They seem to have a very loose definition of "Playable" though. To me, an RPG where cut scenes don't play, and you miss huge chunks of the story, isn't "playable." Last time I burn 100 GB of bandwidth and write cycles based on that "Playable" rating.
Re: (Score:3)
There are a lot of community fixes for that kind of thing, but for most people who ain't got time for fiddling, gaming oriented distributions like Nobara are shipping with baked in patches for things like SMP scheduling issues, Wine bugs, driver gotchas, etc.
I've been running Nobara on my PC exclusively for the past couple of years. It's been great - like a fixed version of Fedora that just works. I hear great things about Bazzite and CachyOS too.
The most fiddling I really have to do to get my games to ru
Re: (Score:2)
Can confirm Bazzite. 85/90% there I'd say, which means there's still a bit of "tread carefully" for people. I'm very happy with the running, but I'd be less than truthful if I said it was completely frictionless.
For example, 90% of my gaming is on Elder Scrolls Online, the 'play' button on Steam runs the Zenimax launcher not the game itself and there's also an annoying recent'ish (few months) bug where it seems games launched from a 3rd party launcher don't know they've got the foreground focus. Steam th
How is dual-boot counted (Score:2)
I have a single Steam account on a single computer that dual boots Windows and Linux, each OS having its own installation of Steam. How is that counted?
Re: (Score:2)
it depends on which boot you have is running when the hardware survey is pushed to you. They do these hardware surveys by pushing a popup to users every now and then, and users need to actually be bothered to click through the dialog.
If you've never seen that dialog, you were never counted.
Re: (Score:3)
Steam asks you if you'd like to participate via a pop-up window, so it depends on which OS you happen to be using when the survey goes out.
This means only results from active users who agreed to submit their system specs are counted. Installation alone doesn't factor into it. If you haven't seen that popup, you're not counted.
Skyrocketed and 5%? (Score:3)
Maybe escalated. I don't think any trajectory that ends under 6% can really be called skyrocketing.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, and it's a positive trend overall, certainly. But I'd hardly call it skyrocketing unless the climb continues to build. Though, to be quite frank, with Microsoft doing everything they can to make Windows less appealing as time goes on, I don't see this trend stopping anytime soon. I just think "skyrocketed" is a little premature here.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. It's the same as when the news media said the stock market "plunged" when it was down about 2.5%. 2.5% is hardly a plunge just as 5% is hardly a skyrocket. It's just over embellishment to generate clicks. We did click though, so that's our fault I suppose.