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Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

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Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#41

Post by dsego »

deltasixeight wrote: post #19

Just to be fair and balanced I'm a hardcore linux user and gamer and I've tried gaming on linux and I've hit many issues. 365 games on steam and while some windows games work I've hit probably just about every possible issue you can hit with other games. Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots. Sometimes I read this thread and scratch my head. I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to t…

To add a datapoint, the bioshock games would crash while loading/saving on win 10, which seems to be a common issue. None of the suggested adjustments worked for me. Very little problems running on Ubuntu, there might've been graphical glitches but at least the games were playable.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#42

Post by bluecatswim »

deltasixeight wrote: post #19

Just to be fair and balanced I'm a hardcore linux user and gamer and I've tried gaming on linux and I've hit many issues. 365 games on steam and while some windows games work I've hit probably just about every possible issue you can hit with other games. Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots. Sometimes I read this thread and scratch my head. I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to t…

I think at this point most of the issues (not all) that the average gamer experiences are caused by incompatible libraries and the like, it will be interesting to see how good linux gaming gets when the Steam Deck/SteamOS 3 release on which Valve will have better control on what users run.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#43

Post by sascha_sl »

I wonder how Epic feels about this recent surge and the massive interest in the Steam Deck, a device shipping Arch Linux of all things stock.

They have dropped support for Linux pretty hard for anything but Unreal as a build target itself, even with things they acquired. Might have been the wrong gamble.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#44

Post by vardump »

londons_explore wrote: post #15
vardump wrote: post #4

Nowadays OS matters pretty little. Personally, on some level, I don't even notice difference working macOS, Linux and Windows. Other than platform specific development work, it doesn't really matter in the big picture. Other than that, only Linux allows me true visibility to its innards. Fast to fix almost any issues, should they happen. And I say this as someone who has for example no problem debugging Windows kerne…

I find there is a lot of OS-specific knowledge for deep-diving. Want to get symbols to debug the kernel? That'll be the microsoft symbol server on windows, or a System.map file in Linux... Want to make something happen with every boot of the system? That'll be a system service on windows (and by the way they have all kinds of gotchas about what kinds of stuff they can access) or a systemd service on linux. Want to ma…

"Want to make something happen with every boot of the system? That'll be a system service on windows (and by the way they have all kinds of gotchas about what kinds of stuff they can access) or a systemd service on linux."

On Windows there's also numerous registry keys, Windows Task Scheduler, etc (ugh). On Linux, it depends. Could be also init.d or n+1 other options, including a single custom binary running as init process.

> Need to script something quickly? Well thats either bash on linux or powershell/batch files on windows.

Or bash on Windows (WSL, cygwin, etc.). PowerShell is also available for Linux. Both come with their footguns, especially when used on a "foreign" platform.

But you could just as well use some suitable scripting language, like Python, JS or whatever.

Sure, there's complexity if you really start (or need) to look for it. I do think it's exaggeration to say double, maybe 20%, at most 50%.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#45

Post by qart »

sascha_sl wrote: post #31
qart wrote: post #18

What is the point of these surveys when we know how many "level farming" operations[1] are going on in China, etc.? Casual CSGO has become unusable these days. Of course, apart from farming operations, cheaters come from across the world. And AFAIK, most cheats software is available only for Windows. Valve's esports-grade games like CSGO, and DOTA2 are free. There is no penalty for getting banned in such a context. I…

The survey has always been opt-in continuous collection. I see no reason why bots would opt-in. > Participation in the survey is optional, and anonymous. First paragraph on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Level farmers and cheaters are not bots. While level farmers may be likely to ignore surveys, because it would waste their time, cheaters don't have that factor.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#46

Post by maccard »

vardump wrote: post #11
xxs wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has no epoll(), but of course that doesn't matter for games.

Windows does have I/O completion ports, which is, frankly, superior. Then again, Linux has io_uring. Again, pointless in the big picture. Most of the time these details are hidden by libraries.

> Again, pointless in the big picture. Most of the time these details are hidden by libraries.

Except for when they're not, or those libraries don't expose the "one little implementation detail", and a platform hack sneaks in, and _thats_ how we end up with "well it works fine on windows and we use asio so shrug". Unfortunately games are really bad for doing this in my experience (and I'm guilty of doing it on occasion too).

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#47

Post by hpaavola »

josefx wrote: post #35
deltasixeight wrote: post #19

Just to be fair and balanced I'm a hardcore linux user and gamer and I've tried gaming on linux and I've hit many issues. 365 games on steam and while some windows games work I've hit probably just about every possible issue you can hit with other games. Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots. Sometimes I read this thread and scratch my head. I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to t…

> Graphical artifacts, freezing, stuttering, and even full OS reboots. I have seen similar on Windows. For example when Bioshock Remastered Freezes there is no way to exit it, windows still responds, but there is no way to close the game because everything you open is hidden by it. Also the amount of Graphical glitches I encountered in Skyrim is just hilarious. DotA 2 seems to sometimes glitch out when you hit alt ta…

For situation like this, make sure you have at least 2 virtual desktops available and then alt+tab and then ctrl+win+arrow key to switch to an empty virtual desktop and open task manager.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#48

Post by Cycl0ps »

mhitza wrote: post #13

Definitely the number is gonna increase dramatically next year with the Steam deck. Unless it's going to fail in some major way.

It's Valve hardware, so more likely than not it'll flop and you can pick one up for $50 on the 2022 winter sale. Even then it might be relevant for enough weeks to make devs consider designing for native Linux and be in too deep to back out.

Speaking as someone with a steam link and controller floating around their house.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#50

Post by bpfrh »

pizza234 wrote: post #37
vardump wrote: post #4

Nowadays OS matters pretty little. Personally, on some level, I don't even notice difference working macOS, Linux and Windows. Other than platform specific development work, it doesn't really matter in the big picture. Other than that, only Linux allows me true visibility to its innards. Fast to fix almost any issues, should they happen. And I say this as someone who has for example no problem debugging Windows kerne…

OS matters a lot. The fragmentation on Linux is astounding; I have experience with maintenance of Linux-based projects. You'll be surprised at how fragmented distributions are, even within the same family (e.g. Ubuntu-based). The nature of Linux is a double-edged sword, and in gaming, this is a very serious downside - at least, when it comes to Linux-native gaming; Proton/Wine is another story.

Would you say that the new flat and snap format alleviates some of these issues?
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