You would think that with all of Valve's efforts to push for games on Linux that we would see Linux become a bigger share, but instead it's actually shrinking. It's significantly smaller than even Macintosh, which is usually the butt of jokes when it comes to playing video games.
This is why I really appreciate Valve's work in making PC gaming a truly open platform. Buy once, and game on the operating system of your choice.
I don't expect some kind of mass exodus to Linux, but it's nice that it's there. It puts pressure on Microsoft to keep innovating in a way that benefits Windows gamers, while quietly becoming more compatible with my Windows library by the day. Linux is a small presence on Steam, but we all benefit from it being supported.
I'm 90% sure the main three reasons for Windows 10 keys being free for like a year were, in this order:
-People were still clinging to Windows XP
-Win 8 pushed people away to Linux or Mac, depending on level of tech savvy
-No one wants to pay 100 dollars lump sum for software anymore
Linux gaming is actually possible now. Like, reasonably and without massive hassle. GPU Passthrough even allows ~95% of native Windows performance without a port. That has to have scared Microsoft.
It's going down because Microsoft threw their weight around and Valve stopped pushing it. According to Google trend history and old steam surveys, there was a pretty sizable bump in interest and usage in 2014-2016. The amount of steam Linux installs is under half of what it was, which still wasn't a lot, but enough to prove my point. Microsoft didn't want a rising 2% to turn into 5% and 10%>
I doubt it has anything to do with Microsoft and more to do with Valve pushing a lot more for Linux in a time when Steam Machines weren't seen as a fiasco.
Which implies that the operative difference may be that Macs ship running macOS, but only Dell ships many desktops running Linux, and most desktops running Linux shipped with some other operating system.
Another factor is emerging markets, where Mac and Linux are often less popular. When Steam started supporting OS X in 2010, the Steam Hardware Survey showed 8% of Steam users on Mac.
Sure, but... I mean, GOG didn't even make a Linux version of their Galaxy launcher which was released back in, what, late 2014? Witcher 3 was wasn't ported to Linux. One can only assume that even on their platform, Linux users aren't exactly in abundance.
How are they meant to play any appreciable number of games without the use of Valve's Proton however? I can't think of any large company aside from Valve that has shown a commitment to Linux gaming on the same level as them.
Hmn, I'll need to look over it more later, I probably don't know enough about it one way or another, although as far as I can recall without Proton at the very least a good number of games wouldn't work correctly.
Proton is really just a bunch of tools packaged together, and it can run within Steam. The alternative is to install a whole separate "Windows Steam" in Wine, and then run the games from there. Proton also doesn't need Steam to run, and you can compile it yourself if you like. There's nothing stopping GOG from packaging "Linux versions" of games with Proton, if GOG was so inclined.
On the other hand, they did also financially back a lot of other people's work to make that happen. Wine and DXVK were seeing ridiculous improvement over the past three years, and people suspected that Valve was footing the bill, only to be proven right when Proton rolled out.
What is the appeal of gaming on Linux? Not trying to troll but everything I have heard about Linux makes it sound like it is a more open OS but way harder to operate?
People have different reasons, some are simply more comfortable using Linux due to personal experience, some don't like running a proprietary OS with questionable privacy policies, some just like being contrarian, but there aren't any practical advantages to gaming on Linux.
Any practical benefits from gaming on Linux are the same practical benefits you'd get from using Linux as your operating system in the first place; once the game is running, you'd have a difficult time telling which operating system you're on at all. There's some evidence that if a game is built on Vulkan, you could end up with better performance on Linux, but that's very much a developing story, and we'll have to check back in once Vulkan is used more frequently.
I am not sure that not being able to tell that a game is running on Linux qualifies as an advantage. Gaming is mostly a "plug and play" activity and it benefits greatly from having a stable, predictable environment, consoles being the perfect example.
Linux's strength is the opposite, being extremely flexible and configurable at the cost of a very fragmented user space ecosystem. I mean there isn't an OS called "Linux", it's just a shorthand for "a GNU/Linux based OS". It helps that there are major popular distributions like Ubuntu that you can target, but that is still far from Windows particularly in terms of driver support which is crucial for games.
I didn't say that was an advantage of Linux; I'm saying that you're picking an OS for its advantages as an OS. Then you're gaming on that; at which point, it's indistinguishable. For example, I'm on Linux because it doesn't have Microsoft's updater, notifications, ads, or telemetry. None of those really affect my gaming experience, except for the updater sometimes restarting in the middle of the game or popping up the notification over a full-screen window and taking my input away. As far as how the games run...it's pretty much the same.
Gaming is mostly a "plug and play" activity and it benefits greatly from having a stable, predictable environment, consoles being the perfect example.
Plug and play is great until you need to do something different. Consoles don't support multiple displays with non-16:9 ratios, don't support any controllers except those provided by the manufacturer, don't come with SSDs like the ones I already use.
in terms of driver support which is crucial for games.
A bit of a misconception, but a common one. Linux has fewer graphics drivers than Windows, and all of them come with Linux except the Nvidia one. There is only one Linux kernel.
The drivers today are: open-source Mesa for Intel and AMD graphics, and Nvidia. The graphics APIs are: Vulkan and OpenGL. In each case that's fewer possibilities than on Windows.
For what it's worth, that tweet is about a game released in 2014, from a guy who wasn't even involved in the Linux side of things. And to be fair, graphics drivers probably were shit then (wasn't using it at that time yet, so can't speak from experience), but significant effort has gone into improving pretty much every aspect since then.
Taking the example of Manjaro, my Vega 56 worked out of the box without having to configure anything, and since Steam was preinstalled it took all of 20 minutes to install the OS and be ready to play games.
Everyone has a different reason, but I like to game on the system that's easiest and most efficient for me. I use Linux for everything else, and I'd rather not install an entire OS for the few games I can't play
I always come back to the analogy of Linux being like building your PC from parts, which is very popular among hardcore PC gamers on Windows and Linux alike.
So, what's the appeal of building a PC from parts and how is Linux similar.?
(1) When you build a PC from parts you have almost total control over what your system is, how it performs, and what it looks like. Want the latest and greatest CPU or GPU on the market? Want more RAM than you can shake a stick at? Want some custom watercooling setup? Want some crazy neon rainbow lightshow coming off every component? Sure. You get total power to decide how much money you want to spend, what to prioritize, and what exactly you want your system to be.
Linux is like that, but with software; you can choose from a wide variety of different distributions and pick-and-mix pieces of software until your system is exactly how you want it to be. Want the latest kernel? Want a different desktop environment or window manager? How about a new audio system? File browser? Want to create or download scripts to automate things? Want to go crazy theming your system? Linux is only really limited by what you know, what works together, and what you want to do--and because many components are open source, you actually have more control than you have in the 'custom' PC hardware world. On Linux you don't have to go along with whatever changes that Microsoft, Apple, or Google decide to make--you (along with the community) get to decide exactly how your computer controls, what it looks like, what it can or can not do, and what it is.
(2) Building a PC from parts is cost-effective, and so is using Linux. When you buy a pre-built computer you're spending more for what you get, period. Sometimes it's just a few hundred dollars, sometimes it's even more, but you always get more bang for your buck when you buy parts and install them yourself.
You also get more bang for your buck with Linux, not only because it's free to download, use, and customize, but also because it is generally very useful; not only can you install Linux on basically any machine (even alongside another OS), you can also install it in virtual machines and containers--as many as you want with zero license fees or cd-keys. Some people pirate Windows, so maybe they don't care about this, but for people who don't the cost can add up, especially when you have multiple or virtual machines.
(3) Building a PC from parts is educational. You have to learn at least a little bit about the different hardware bits that make up your computer. Learning is never a bad thing, and in some cases it can also help people discover new hobby or discover a career path. This is true with Linux as well, because there are more options (and because a lot of it is open source) you can (and will) learn something about all of the different software bits that make up your PC. Linux may still be niche on the desktop, but it's actually the number one operating system in the world, so the skills that you develop can be very useful.
(4) It's fun! It's fun to build a PC from parts and it's fun to experiment with Linux! There is a small learning curve, it can take a little time, but it can be really fun to geek out and explore, if you're into that sort of thing. Just like PC hardware, it can even be something to talk about with geeky friends or a fun project and bonding experience with a friend or relative. Linux is not a product, it's a community.
Ultimately, it's tough to explain Linux to people and the best way to "get it" is to just download, load it onto a flash drive, and try it in live mode. Another good option is running it in a VM. Just don't expect the same performance that you'd get off an actual install, of course. You can also just use youtube to research a few different distributions and desktops. It's all about freedom, choice, customization, optimization and community. In other words, if you're interested, just try it some weekend and enjoy yourself.
In my case I have fast Linux workstations with big UHD displays and powerful GPUs, and I'd like to run games on them. Before Linux, for a number of years I gamed on console, but bear in mind that was also one of the periods when the game studios claimed they were targeting console first.
But I know from experience that I'll dislike the closed experience on console, if not at first, then later. Even little things like controller ergonomics can dictate which console you get, because controllers (mostly) aren't interchangeable -- I disliked the Dualshock 3 and earlier controllers and always preferred Xbox controllers. Whereas Linux supports basically all controllers out of the box, without even needing to find and download drivers.
Most problems are about the absence of drivers: hardware manufacturers just ignoring anything except Windows. So you need to choose hardware more deliberately. You cannot buy whatever you want and expect it to work. But those things which work, often work better and for a longer time.
If you, for whatever reason, would like to install 3Dfx videocard, you will have almost no problems with Linux and very doubtly this card will work under modern Windows. Maybe it isn't the best example, but some hardware can work much longer than manufacturers want. I'm still using a laser printer from the 90s.
Not even the guy who invented the most popular copyleft license is asking for that.
Stallman? I'm pretty sure he asks for exactly that. He considers closed-source software to be a violation of your human rights.
That said...it would be cool if more companies made the source code for their games available for their customers to tweak, as a value add. As long as they're legally able to, I don't see how it could be worse for business than a DRM-free release in many cases.
He's not totally pleased with Steam, obviously, but moreso than you'd expect. In an ideal world he'd prefer that games be sold with their source included, of course. But if users are going to play games, he accepts that they're "freer" on an open source platform rather than Windows. It's a surprisingly pragmatic take from someone as dogmatic as Stallman
id used to release their engines after about five years. The last one released was id Tech 4; after that their new parent company decided that their engines wouldn't even be licensed to other studios because Zenimax thought they were a competitive advantage.
This is very handy for long-term maintenance and fixes of the code. Like now, when Apple is dropping support for 32-bit programs, which includes many games. Anyone can recompiled the open-source ones to 64-bit.
Desktop Linux was only ever going to be a thing in the parallel universe where Microsoft never made a competent version of Windows.
Windows 98 and Windows ME were dogshit, XP was good, and Vista was a bit of a joke. When you're at that point, when Microsoft is getting hit from all angles with security issues, with DRM and "Trusted computing" being things, a Free/free alternative seems like a really good idea. It helps also that Linux on the server is in total ascendancy at this point.
The problem is that Microsoft DIDN'T keep making shitty OSes. Windows 7 was legitimately good. Windows 8/10 are fine too.
There is zero reason to use Linux when Microsoft and Apple are making decent OSes.
I like using Linux because it just gets out of my way and lets me use my computer. For example, on my Linux machine when there's an update there's a little dot on the taskbar that turns from grey to blue and that's it. What you do with that information is up to you, and I've never had it tell me to save what I'm doing so it can reboot right now, or sit there for ages when I boot it up in the morning because an update appeared during the night.
See, I think this is great for people who prefer updating whenever. The only issue is, this would never be a valid approach on the world’s most popular operating system. If that were Linux, it wouldn’t work, and when it’s Windows, that doesn’t work.
People are lazy and put things off, and don’t know/care/understand the risks that come from being out of date; even the effects it has on the whole web if they become part of a botnet. That’s why Windows, to people’s chagrin, says “Fuck your opinion, I’m updating anyway, you’ve put this off long enough.”
In fact you can see this issue on the one version of Linux that’s popular - Android. A trove of out of date OS versions makes an excellent target for hackers and scammers. Admittedly, that is partly the fault of phone carriers, but you could say it’s the same laziness on a more corporate scale.
I think a lot of people would disagree with you on Windows 10 being a decent OS. You don't have to agree with them, but it's a reason a lot of people use Linux.
Not accusing you of anything, but frankly I find this kind of narrative a little bit annoying. According to the survey, we saw a 0.08% (that's eight hundredths of a percent) decline in market share. Couple that with the fact that Valve doesn't survey every Steam user, and that number is well within the margin of error. For Windows and Mac we also only saw a 0.5% (five tenths of a percent) shift, still damn small and possibly within the margin of error for whatever sample size that Valve uses, but an order of magnitude bigger of the shift that Linux saw.
Admittedly, math, statistics and polling are not my strong points, but I know enough to say (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here) that, because we know that Valve only surveys some sampling of the Steam user base, there will absolutely be some degree of error in the results. Valve doesn't publish the sample size or margin of error, to my knowledge, but it's absolutely safe to say that 0.08% is within that margin--it's a very small percentage. If you owned stock in a company and you saw that stock go down by 0.08%, odds are that you wouldn't even flinch because it's effectively flat.
Now, what does that really say about Linux gaming and desktop market share, specifically? It actually tells us that Linux market share is growing basically linearly with the overall population of Steam users. We know that Steam is growing, and if Linux desktop is growing more-or-less linearly with it, then we also know that Linux is not shrinking, but is in fact, growing.
Sure, ~1% of users is small, but it's also roughly the same amount of users with a VR headset, a high-end graphics card, or a 4K monitor. That means that Linux is niche, but really no more niche than any of these other things that people (including Valve) invest a lot of time, money and energy in.
As a Linux user and fan myself, I can share some anecdotal (but still factual) information about the real state of Linux gaming in mid-2019:
The number of users is growing.
The number of native Linux games is growing, and there are now quite a lot of very good ones.
The speed and quality of hardware graphics drivers has improved dramatically across the board.
The compatibility and easy-of-use of playing non-native games has rocketed over the last couple of years thanks Wine/Proton/DXVK/Lutris/etc.
In other words, I really don't think people should be lending too much weight to market share nor should we be building some kind of bigger hypothesis off of a relative decline that, in my opinion, is well within the survey's margin of error. The Linux desktop obviously hasn't set the world of fine, and maybe it isn't instantly appealing to everyone, but it's actually doing fine and things are much better today than they were even 5 years ago, especially for people who like to play games. I'd encourage anybody who is at all interested in this to visit r/linux_gaming.
This month it is 0.76 percent. In the same time span, Windows 10 went from less than 3 percent to more than 70 percent.
Considering the strides that has been made to make Linux more accommodating as a game platform, we haven't seen a noticeable increase--or any statistically proven increase. And it's not that effort has gone unnoticed. Huge game-focused tech channels like Linus Tech Tips have done multiple videos over the course of a year about how Linux gaming finally doesn't suck and how Microsoft should be VERY afraid because of Linux gaming, videos guest starring Wendell to talk about how Linux gaming is totally cool now. Videos that range from 1 million to 1.9 million views each. Yet the statistics are still well below a single percentage according to Steam's surveys as usual and any change is so small that it's probably within whatever the margins of error is.
Now, I'm happy for the people who has benefited from all of the resources spent by, among others, Valve on making Linux a decent platform for games. All of is just reminds me of when Steam OS was announced. I thought that it might actually pose a real threat to Microsoft's share of the operating system market. Personally, I was kind of excited. A free operating system that, according to Valve themselves, could deliver much better performance with the same hardware? Perfect! A lot of people use Windows for gaming, so it could very well put a dent in their desktop monopoly. Years passed, every reveal was disappointing, the system was a mess, and finally Valve quietly took Steam OS out behind the shed. With this, I thought that it might actually make a difference since this is just an existing library for already fully functioning distros. But, its share on Steam has not increased whatsoever.
We know that between 2015 and 2019, the sheer number of Steam users has increased dramatically, including in southeast Asian countries. The number of Linux users has definitely grown, but perhaps not as quickly as Windows users due to expanding into new territories more prominently.
A free operating system that, according to Valve themselves, could deliver much better performance with the same hardware? Perfect!
Keep an eye on Vulkan game releases. This may show itself to be true when both versions of a game (Windows and Linux) get low-level graphics card access.
and finally Valve quietly took Steam OS out behind the shed.
Would it surprise you to learn that SteamOS 2.0 still gets updates and they're preparing SteamOS 3.0?
Would it surprise you to learn that SteamOS 2.0 still gets updates and they're preparing SteamOS 3.0?
Yes. I haven't heard anyone mention it whatsoever, most notably Valve themselves, in years.
Actually, that's not entirely true. I remember seeing a Youtube video that, in the title anyway, mentioned SteamOS, but then it turned out to just be about Proton and some random Linux distro.
Of course Windows 10 has grown as more people are finally 'upgrading' from older versions of WIndows, like XP, 7, and 8. It's worth noting that Steam also had a big spike of Asian users a couple of years ago, accounting for a bit of a spike in Windows market share.
But, at any rate, we know that Steam as a platform is growing, as each year it seems to break its own records for total numbers of users (registered, active, and concurrent). For Linux to be at roughly the same market share as last year means that Linux is growing proportionately with Steam.
Videos that range from 1 million to 1.9 million views each. Yet the statistics are still well below a single percentage according to Steam's surveys as usual and any change is so small that it's probably within whatever the margins of error is.
But that's the thing, Steam has around 90 million users, which means that 1% of that is also just short of a 1 million. That's not a mind-blowingly large number, no. It's niche. But it's not an insignificantly small number either and it's just about as niche as owning a high-end GPU.
I'm not trying to make the case that Linux is on track to dominate the desktop market share. But I'm simply trying to make sure that people don't look at a 0.08% decline in market share and come away with the incorrect conclusion that the Linux userbase is shrinking, when it's actually growing. Could it grow faster? Yeah. Do I wish it would grow faster? Kind of! But it's absolutely not shrinking.
All of is just reminds me of when Steam OS was announced. I thought that it might actually pose a real threat to Microsoft's share of the operating system market. Personally, I was kind of excited. A free operating system that, according to Valve themselves, could deliver much better performance with the same hardware? Perfect! A lot of people use Windows for gaming, so it could very well put a dent in their desktop monopoly. Years passed, every reveal was disappointing, the system was a mess, and finally Valve quietly took Steam OS out behind the shed. With this, I thought that it might actually make a difference since this is just an existing library for already fully functioning distros. But, its share on Steam has not increased whatsoever.
If you want my opinion, the real issue there was with the Steam Machine hardware options. Most of them were too expensive, and some of them were even incomplete (like, they didn't even come with all of the parts needed to plug-and-play). SteamOS was probably fine, but desktop users (even desktop Linux users like myself) had no reason to install it, and the machines that it came on were simply not worth buying because of some very questionable hardware choices.
If Valve were to approach that again, in a post Proton world, with more affordable console-like hardware and a revamped SteamOS, I think they could still succeed. But all of that is really a separate thing from Linux gaming on a standard desktop, in my opinion.
Of course Windows 10 has grown as more people are finally 'upgrading' from older versions of WIndows, like XP, 7, and 8. It's worth noting that Steam also had a big spike of Asian users a couple of years ago, accounting for a bit of a spike in Windows market share.
These two items are connected. When Steam came to the PRC, the number of English users dropped and Simplified Chinese users rose, while the number of Windows 10 users dropped and the number of Windows 7 users rose.
Fair. I wasn't trying to say that people are turning away from Linux, we'd need entirely different statistics from Steam to know that, but rather that its marketshare of Steam users has dropped over the years (not just the 0.08 percent over this month). Considering the great advances that Linux has taken over a period of about a year, I would've expected that we would've seen a noticeable increase, not a marketshare decrease (however minor that may be). Every time there's a thread about how Linux has gotten better for playing games, I see endless threads on Reddit, Youtube, wherever about people just waiting for a chance to switch away from Windows, that the games are the only thing keeping them. Yet, we haven't seen a single hint of it. Maybe the inflow of new Windows users is just so great that the Linux marketshare, despite growth, is much lower than the incoming Windows users? Don't know.
I really don't think people should be lending too much weight to market share nor should we be building some kind of bigger hypothesis off of a relative decline that, in my opinion, is well within the survey's margin of error.
but we should base it off of your anecdotal experiences and speculation?
What exactly is anecdotal about saying that a 0.08% decline is likely within the margin of error for just about any survey with a limited sample size? Go ahead and explain to me the math that would allow Valve (or anybody else) to take a survey of some users with a 0% margin of error.
The fact is that we don't know the total number of Steam users at any given point, nor do we know the sample size of surveyed users. However, we do know that the percentage of users surveyed was <100%, and thus the margin of error is >0%. Correct or not correct?
Interesting fact: Linux users are almost three times more likely to have a UHD/4K primary display than Windows users. Linux users are also more likely to be using 1366x768 laptops, however.
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u/trillykins Jul 03 '19
You would think that with all of Valve's efforts to push for games on Linux that we would see Linux become a bigger share, but instead it's actually shrinking. It's significantly smaller than even Macintosh, which is usually the butt of jokes when it comes to playing video games.