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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%

#101

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

threatripper wrote: post #51
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 would rephrase this: The share of users who could work well with any of the operating systems is increasing. The fundamental differences between the operating systems that impact user experience are decreasing. I think 90-99% of users only use Browser+Office+Games which could work well in any of the big operating systems. Some software preferences are superficial and appropriate replacements exist on the other plat…

> I think 90-99% of users only use Browser+Office+Games which could work well in any of the big operating systems.

Linux Desktop evangelists have been saying this sort of thing for about a decade now, only they used to exclude "games" from that list because Linux was so terrible as a game platform. Their constant underestimating of "average computer user" is, in my opinion, one of the big reasons they've completely and utterly failed to make significant headway in the Desktop market.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#102

Post by grumbel »

sascha_sl wrote: post #43

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.

Sweeney seems to be pretty happy with it:

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/141575567884990054...

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#103

Post by yyyk »

terlisimo wrote: post #61
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 get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to the point of delusion I see your point but consider this: 20 years ago you could make the same argument for all aspects of linux, not just gaming. Why use some hobby level OS for serious work when you have Solaris, HP-UX, AIX? Today we have a very usable Linux desktop and pretty much total dominance in the server arena, only because people were at one point "delusionally…

Propriety Unixes always had very poor CLIs, to the point people would pay the FSF* to get to install GNU utils. No surprise people would flock to the (offering practically better experience) free OSs.

* Payment for CDROMs. Net distribution wasn't as common then.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#104

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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.

The fact that you're being downvoted for pointing out the objectively true statement about fragmentation in Linux Desktop says a lot about the community behind it. Which, incidentally, I think is another big reason people avoid using it.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#105

Post by Tsiklon »

pjmlp wrote: post #67
terlisimo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get enthusiasm for FOSS, but enthusiasm to the point of delusion I see your point but consider this: 20 years ago you could make the same argument for all aspects of linux, not just gaming. Why use some hobby level OS for serious work when you have Solaris, HP-UX, AIX? Today we have a very usable Linux desktop and pretty much total dominance in the server arena, only because people were at one point "delusionally…

Only because the owners of Solaris, HP-UX, AIX decided to outsource part of their UNIX development costs to Linux on one side, while others decided they wanted a free beer POSIX implementation to avoid paying for UNIX. Except gaming culture is all about IP, something that FOSS don't seem to grasp on their quest for freedom über alles.

Video games are a particularly interesting subsection of software in the context of free software.

Broadly speaking video games are an expression of software and multimedia solely to be used for consumption, and intended to be consumed exclusively within the canonical form presented by it’s developer.

In that way IP is very important, because often there’s more than just the investment in underlying game engine and third party middleware involved; it’s a combination of artwork, audio, video, bespoke scripting, and architecture, to make a whole work. It could be reasonably argued that those pieces should be aggressively defended to ensure the investment is not wasted as these pieces may be of limited utility outside of the complete whole.

I’m certainly all for increased transparency into the inner workings of this package. But it’s an interesting topic and I don’t know enough to even form an opinion on where I think the correct answer lies.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#106

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

bpfrh wrote: post #50
pizza234 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Personally I'd say no, not really. They're hacky and a lot of overhead for what is actually a very straightforward and natural thing on other OSs. AppImage is a bit better, but it still has to pull some namespacing tricks to work.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#107

Post by heurisko »

fsloth wrote: post #77
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 don't understand why people insist on this shoehorning either. It's like some obscene tribal topos that refuses to die. KDE 1.0 came out in 1998 - 23 years ago (O god I'm old). The discussion of "Linux to replace windows desktop" is over two decades old. In computer age this is something geological. It's like... well, Macintosh came out in 1984. Xerox Alto came 1973. If we go back 5 years we reach Englebart's Mothe…

> I'm not sure reverse engineering Windows stack on Linux is very effective way of spending our civilizations engineering resources.

I don't think it is a question of a pool of resource that can be reallocated, however, as in a business.

The people who work on reverse engineering Windows presumably do so, because they are interested in doing so. They might not be interested in building something new.

The choice might therefore not be between doing this, and doing something new, but between doing this and not doing anything at all.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#108

Post by bumbada »

I only use Mac and Linux computers.

I don't play games but became interested in VR, specially for programming 3D worlds . Valve basically forced me to install Windows in order to use vive headsets because the linux versions were problematic.

BTW, android uses the Linux kernel, so I consider this 1% highly suspicious.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#109

Post by yyyk »

My experience is that many times the (emulated) Windows version runs better than the 'native' Linux version, which can have not-so-subtle bugs or not run at all.

This especially happens for older games which haven't been receiving regular updates. Apparently Windows userland bitrots much less.

Re: Steam survey shows Linux marketshare hitting 1.0%

#110

Post by Macha »

xnzakg wrote: post #97
jacobmischka wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to work around this yourself using a pulseaudio null sink and some loopbacks. You send the game audio to the sink, and loop the audio from the sink back to your main output device. I've done this in the past for OBS, but you should be able to add your microphone input as well using another set of sinks and loopbacks I think.

Sadly this causes discord to noise cancel the game audio and it sounds horrible

Yeah, also the audio codec for voice is really low bitrate so even if you turn off all the filtering in the UI it's still pretty bad, while the proper streaming setup has better audio
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