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Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

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Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#211

Post by gpderetta »

lloeki wrote: post #124
seaal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver. I still ran in a few snags: - DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one. - Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid…

Agree on both counts. I use debian unstable and is usually 50/50 on whether the machine will reboot on a working display after a kernel upgrade. Very easy to fix if you have a bit of knowledge, but certainly not ready for the general public.

I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#212

Post by WhyNotHugo »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #5

I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions. The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Stea…

> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt

Agreed.

January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#213

Post by petu »

deafpolygon wrote: post #175
petu wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're asking how it's setup/configured, then Valve ships "Steam Input" that can do a lot of things and one of them is translating gyro data to mouse events. Some games support gyro directly, but even then AFAIK people prefer Steam Input due to how configurable it is.

More like, how does gyro help you play some games?

With controller sticks you control the 3D camera only indirectly -- by telling the rotation velocity (in very limited range) and for how long to apply it.

With gyro you have 1:1 proportional camera position input, like with mice.

It's more or less about possibility of developing muscle memory. With (linear) gyro/mice you could sharply snap camera to a point you see on screen without much overshoot. You could turn 180 degrees in split second with eyes closed (actually with gyro people often use flick stick for such big rotations, turning instantly -- but that's besides the point)

With controller stick? Well you could try to time that 180 turn takes 1.5 seconds of holding at full deflection -- good luck developing a feeling for all the speeds inbetween zero and full deflection.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#214

Post by scbrg »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #149
scbrg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.

Kernel updates.

I've got 6.19.8 in stable-backports. I don't know. I don't feel massively outdated.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#215

Post by Zhyl »

krs_ wrote: post #72
thrdbndndn wrote: post #5

I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions. The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Stea…

Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Yes, this is the key. You can account for anomalies such as Lunar New year, do rolling averages and other statistical modelling to show trends.

Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#216

Post by petu »

margorczynski wrote: post #161
petu wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We probably could run Linux distros under hypervisor (just like default Windows install those days runs not on bare metal, but under Hyper-V). And then games that wish for anticheat start a separate VM in hypervisor with complete secure boot chain of trust. Would require GPUs to support SR-IOV though.

Maybe something using AI could be implemented - does a screenshot of your game e.g. every second and if it detects anything that would suggest cheating then it informs some central system and sends it a movie of you playing for the final verdict. Of course this all is based on the assumption that the local AI can do this fast enough with enough precision.

That runs on client side, so can easily be tampered with (assuming you're suggesting that instead of secure boot chain).

Also cheat HUD elements can be simply rendered outside of game window (or even on another device like smartphone).

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#217

Post by Zhyl »

cryptoegorophy wrote: post #98
sonzohan wrote: post #4

When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles) When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use. Whenever the next version co…

I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?

There's a good tracker here:

https://areweanticheatyet.com

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#218

Post by noname120 »

seaal wrote: post #33
simmanian wrote: post #10

A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I hav…

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

Is it thanks to ML needs or is it unrelated?

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#219

Post by nijave »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #130
zelphirkalt wrote: post #121

I wish things were working so seamlessly for me, as people describe in the comments. There seems to be something wrong with Steam and how it works, so that in my machine (and CPU and GPU from 2019, with official Linux drivers from standard repos, running Debian KDE) it almost never manages to start a Windows game. I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was…

Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves a…

Agree. I've had generally good experience with Fedora and Steam + tips from ProtonDB

Only have had 1 snafu with Steam i386 dependencies causing issues with x86_64 packages. I think there's a Flatpak of Steam available that should help isolate that but iirc there was some caveat

Re: Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

#220

Post by nijave »

braiamp wrote: post #147
BatteryMountain wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves a…

> don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind I use Debian stable on my laptop and testing on desktop. It is fine. Only the newest games that need a specific 0 day patch may suffer a bit but that's only for 1-2 weeks even on testing. You want a stable system first, then to unlock the full performance out of everything, and most bleeding edge fail in the former and are a coin toss on the later.

Think hardware also plays a big role. If you have a new AMD GPU, you'll likely highly benefit from mainline or close-to-it kernel
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