News Steam Survey: Linux Gaming Market Share Climbs to 1% For First Time in Years

[Admin]

Valve's Steam Hardware Survey shows that the Linux gaming market share has reached 1.0%, with an even higher outlook for the future.

Steam Survey: Linux Gaming Market Share Climbs to 1% For First Time in Years : Read more

 

[-Fran-]

"Every little helps"

In all seriousness, I welcome this minuscule increase. More options will never hurt, I'd say. And sounds like a good micro-hype for the Steam Deck, as I'm sure there's plenty testing and pre-production things being worked on, so increasing the number of people using SteamOS (or others) I'm sure will help identify gremlins faster.

Regards.

 

[kyzarvs]

With the way Windows is becoming more and more of a data farm instead of an O/S I'm not really surprised. I'd happily consider a linux build for my desktop (ryzen 2700X, so not that ancient) when the time comes rather than pay a scalper for an insanely over-priced TPM card. I'm not anti-security at all - I own a company that does internet security in Education - I just don't see why my never moving, rarely used gaming-only machine needs the same performance-sapping encryption as my laptop which is used for work and has bitlocker enabled via TPM on it.

 

[bigdragon]

I hope Valve is able to push GPU vendors and developers to improve the state of graphics on Linux. This bump to Linux gaming is welcome, but there's a lot of work to do to keep that number growing. We're going to need a serious alternative to Windows in the near future given that Microsoft appears to be taking Windows in the wrong direction.

 

[jkflipflop98]

Imagine if you will for a minute.

A German start-up car company comes out of nowhere with a bunch of shadow funding. To drum up sales and word of mouth, they decide that they're going to partner with Starbucks to give away their cars completely for free. Anyone that walks up and asks can have one of these new cars for absolutely nothing. No strings attached.

After 20 years of giving away cars at a location available to everyone on Earth, they can't crack 1% of the market.

Now how bad do you suppose those cars would have to suck that they literally can't give them away for free? They'd have to be pretty bad, right?

Right.

 

[excalibur1814]

Don't worry... it'll fall again once these devices hit eBay for £50.

Please... PLEASE... think twice before throwing away your cash.

 

[tq45]

Imagine if you will for a minute.

A German start-up car company comes out of nowhere with a bunch of shadow funding. To drum up sales and word of mouth, they decide that they're going to partner with Starbucks to give away their cars completely for free. Anyone that walks up and asks can have one of these new cars for absolutely nothing. No strings attached.

How is this analogy relevant for Linux?
What is the "shadow funding" and "partner up" in the case of Linux?

After 20 years of giving away cars at a location available to everyone on Earth, they can't crack 1% of the market.

In the specific market of PC-gamers using Steam, yes you are right. But not 20 years. Valve officially released Steam for Linux on February 14, 2013. In all other markets except PC-gaming Linux enjoys a huge market share (Android, servers, embedded systems, routers, TVs, super computers etc etc).

Now how bad do you suppose those cars would have to suck that they literally can't give them away for free? They'd have to be pretty bad, right?
Right.

You seem to have a real emotional problem when it comes to Linux. Do you think your gaming experience on Windows would somehow get worse if it got some competition instead of having a near-monopoly market share? Are you emotionally attached to Windows?

 

[jkflipflop98]

I wasn't talking about Linux or Windows. I was talking about German cars.

 

[Bmuduoy]

Imagine if you will for a minute.

A German start-up car company comes out of nowhere with a bunch of shadow funding. To drum up sales and word of mouth, they decide that they're going to partner with Starbucks to give away their cars completely for free. Anyone that walks up and asks can have one of these new cars for absolutely nothing. No strings attached.

After 20 years of giving away cars at a location available to everyone on Earth, they can't crack 1% of the market.

Now how bad do you suppose those cars would have to suck that they literally can't give them away for free? They'd have to be pretty bad, right?

Right.

Where did the bad penguin touch you Budd?

 

[tq45]

I wasn't talking about Linux or Windows. I was talking about German cars.

Well, in that case your post should be removed for being off-topic, right?

Right.

Or I know, how about if you stopped talking nonsense and wrote a real response so we could have a discussion about the subject of the article?

 

[TJ Hooker]

With the way Windows is becoming more and more of a data farm instead of an O/S I'm not really surprised. I'd happily consider a linux build for my desktop (ryzen 2700X, so not that ancient) when the time comes rather than pay a scalper for an insanely over-priced TPM card. I'm not anti-security at all - I own a company that does internet security in Education - I just don't see why my never moving, rarely used gaming-only machine needs the same performance-sapping encryption as my laptop which is used for work and has bitlocker enabled via TPM on it.

You don't need a hardware TPM for your system, you can just enable fTPM in your BIOS. Even if you did want a hardware TPM, you could just wait a year or two (or at least until Win11 is actually released), by which point I really doubt they're still going to be scalped. And performance hit is generally pretty minimal, as all modern CPUs have AES instruction acceleration. That being said, has MS said that bitlocker encryption is mandatory for Win11? Or just that you need a TPM?

 

[TJ Hooker]

I hope Valve is able to push GPU vendors and developers to improve the state of graphics on Linux. This bump to Linux gaming is welcome, but there's a lot of work to do to keep that number growing. We're going to need a serious alternative to Windows in the near future given that Microsoft appears to be taking Windows in the wrong direction.

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but AMD graphics have great support on Linux with their open source drivers. Nvidia generally works well too from what I understand, although Nvidia may require manual driver installation depending on distro, as some don't include any proprietary software (i.e. Nvidia drivers).

 

[tq45]

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to, but AMD graphics have great support on Linux with their open source drivers.

There are actually 2 open source Vulkan drivers available for AMD GPUs on Linux: AMDVLK and RADV.
AMDVLK is the official Vulkan driver developed by AMD while RADV is an independent Vulkan driver developed by a range of companies especially Valve.
Even though AMDVLK is the "official" driver in som sense it is much worse than RADV developed by Valve. And of course it's RADV that will be shipped with the Deck. 😊

 

[TerryLaze]

Don't worry... it'll fall again once these devices hit eBay for £50.

Please... PLEASE... think twice before throwing away your cash.

How is this supposed to happen, please explain.
This device will do what it's supposed to do for several years, what's the reasoning for anybody selling it for 50 moneys.

In the specific market of PC-gamers using Steam, yes you are right. But not 20 years. Valve officially released Steam for Linux on February 14, 2013. In all other markets except PC-gaming Linux enjoys a huge market share (Android, servers, embedded systems, routers, TVs, super computers etc etc).

People love standards and linux lacks a solid standard, there are as many versions out there as there are opinions about OSes, anybody can mix and match whatever they want, and while this is a great thing for people that do have a lot of knowledge it's the biggest horror for people that just need it to work.
Even just installing software is completely unintuitive and works differently on each system, if it's not in the depository a new user might as well forget about it.
SteamOs on the deck might be a good thing for that but then again they wont be able to produce enough units to make a dent.

 

[tq45]

How is this supposed to happen, please explain.
This device will do what it's supposed to do for several years, what's the reasoning for anybody selling it for 50 moneys.

People love standards and linux lacks a solid standard, there are as many versions out there as there are opinions about OSes, anybody can mix and match whatever they want, and while this is a great thing for people that do have a lot of knowledge it's the biggest horror for people that just need it to work.
Even just installing software is completely unintuitive and works differently on each system, if it's not in the depository a new user might as well forget about it.
SteamOs on the deck might be a good thing for that but then again they wont be able to produce enough units to make a dent.

While I agree there are many different Linux distributions out there, in reality only a few are "original" in some sense and all the others are basically "respins" of the original one, choosing some other defaults or tweaking the GUI. The respins work the same as the "original" so they are not that different. Basically these are the major "original" distros, the rest are either based on these or very specialized distros not meant for Desktop:

Debian, Fedora (RedHat) , Arch, Gentoo

Ubuntu and Mint is Debian based,
SteamOS is Arch based etc.
Although Suse is its own distro it uses the same package system (rpm) as Fedora and is therefore very similar. An so on.

I agree though that the different mechanisms for handling installation of applications on Linux distros is a real problem that needs to be addressed. As long as the repository (kind of a software store) for your Linux distribution contains the applications you need and they are updated to new versions, then everything is fine and works quite well. The problem starts when the repository does not contain the application you need or contains an outdated version. Then it is handled in different ad-hoc ways which is neither good from a security perspective nor from a user friendliness perspective.
Personally I think flatpak has the best chance of standardizing packaging and distribution of applications across Linux distros:

https://flathub.org/home

The applications are kept up to date and works on all distros. The Firefox version is officially packaged and supported by the Mozilla organization. You should check it out.

 

[-Fran-]

People love standards and linux lacks a solid standard, there are as many versions out there as there are opinions about OSes, anybody can mix and match whatever they want, and while this is a great thing for people that do have a lot of knowledge it's the biggest horror for people that just need it to work.
Even just installing software is completely unintuitive and works differently on each system, if it's not in the depository a new user might as well forget about it.
SteamOs on the deck might be a good thing for that but then again they wont be able to produce enough units to make a dent.

What you mentioned is Linux'es biggest strength and weakness. The Linux ecosystem is ruled by standards, but the problem is there's a lot of them. XKCD has a very good comic about this issue with Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/

If you want Linux to be like Apple, then that won't ever happen. Apple is an authoritarian rule and Linux is the democratic state. Windows is like Cuba, haha.

Regards.

 

[tq45]

What you mentioned is Linux'es biggest strength and weakness. The Linux ecosystem is ruled by standards, but the problem is there's a lot of them. XKCD has a very good comic about this issue with Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/

If you want Linux to be like Apple, then that won't ever happen. Apple is an authoritarian rule and Linux is the democratic state. Windows is like Cuba, haha.

Regards.

Personally I think the issue of different "standards" among Linux distros is overstated. It used to be much worse like 15 years ago with different standards for filesystem layouts and different standards for system administration etc. Nowadays that is mostly a non-issue. All distributions use a very similar filesystem layout and for better or for worse, systemd has become the one standard for handling system services and administration on Linux. In fact, I can't remember a point in time where different Linux distros were so standardized as they are now. The biggest problem is application packaging and distribution, but my bet is on flatpak to solve this.

 

[-Fran-]

Personally I think the issue of different "standards" among Linux distros is overstated. It used to be much worse like 15 years ago with different standards for filesystem layouts and different standards for system administration etc. Nowadays that is mostly a non-issue. All distributions use a very similar filesystem layout and for better or for worse, systemd has become the one standard for handling system services and administration on Linux. In fact, I can't remember a point in time where different Linux distros were so standardized as they are now. The biggest problem is application packaging and distribution, but my bet is on flatpak to solve this.

Mostly because now you have most distros being based off major common ones: Debian, Suse, Gentoo and RedHat. Where RedHat and Debian I'd say are the biggest ones out there in terms of adoption.

Regards.

 

[kyzarvs]

You don't need a hardware TPM for your system, you can just enable fTPM in your BIOS. Even if you did want a hardware TPM, you could just wait a year or two (or at least until Win11 is actually released), by which point I really doubt they're still going to be scalped. And performance hit is generally pretty minimal, as all modern CPUs have AES instruction acceleration. That being said, has MS said that bitlocker encryption is mandatory for Win11? Or just that you need a TPM?

My laptop is a Medion Beast (sad name I know) i7-10750H, 32GB RAM, RTX2070 - I tested the performance using novabench on the NVMe before and after encryption. There's quite a large hit, but it it still very quick for sure. I have a Sabrent 2TB rockect NVMe in the second slot which I don't have Bitlocker enabled on for data / apps that don't need encryption.

I did wonder if 11 can't just work like Bitlocker on non-TPM devices where it just asks for an additional password before starting to boot the O/S.

 

[Bmuduoy]

How is this supposed to happen, please explain.
This device will do what it's supposed to do for several years, what's the reasoning for anybody selling it for 50 moneys.

People love standards and linux lacks a solid standard, there are as many versions out there as there are opinions about OSes, anybody can mix and match whatever they want, and while this is a great thing for people that do have a lot of knowledge it's the biggest horror for people that just need it to work.
Even just installing software is completely unintuitive and works differently on each system, if it's not in the depository a new user might as well forget about it.
SteamOs on the deck might be a good thing for that but then again they wont be able to produce enough units to make a dent.

Your reasoning seems a little off, if the user lack knowledge why would he need software that is not in the official repositories? Most daily use software is available in the official repositories. And why would a noobie use a distro that doesn't have a lot of software available when most people that are new to linux use Ubuntu based distros? I'm sure Valve picked Arch just because de AUR, I haven't seen a piece of software that is not in there.