There have been a few mentions in this thread of portable gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally. Has anyone here tried using them as a primary machine? I've been thinking that since I travel with a portable keyboard and mouse anyway, maybe one of those machines might not be too bad for actual work?
Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
211–220 of 560 posts
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck. If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false: 1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam. 2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been…
Alternative options: - International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks. - Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks - Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics. Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Dec…
The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys.
I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#213I was really proud that my kids (8,10,12) all have used linux for gaming for the last several years. Steam runs perfectly for most games. And, they know how to to use "flatpak update" to update the sober runtime for Roblox (I know this is not steam, but it is an example of how well other things run on linux). I'm so proud (and ashamed they play Roblox, but choose your battles). But, Fortnite. I tried to run a Windows…
This really sucks... Fortnite is a must-have for many people (myself included).
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Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say it's perfect quite yet. I just installed Debian on my Framework, and my microphone isn't working. Debugging it for the last 30 minutes has gotten me nowhere, and half the answers on the internet don't apply to my distro. Until basic issues like this go away or have easy solutions, it's hard to recommend it to anyone.
Audio has always been overengineered and brittle. Vanilla alsa was the sweetspot, but things like pulseaudio and all the projects that followed it to "fix" it have too many things that can go wrong.
I don't seem to have any issues with audio anymore since Pipewire became default on Ubuntu, as a non-professional but fairly demanding user with a bunch of wired headphones plus bluetooth. I definitely used to have plenty of annoyances!
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#215I’m using steam on Ubuntu 24.04 with 9y old hardware (which was mid-tier when new), playing mostly 2d platformer games and older resident evil titles. Never had any issues, this setup runs like a champ
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's correct, and the most competitive multiplayer games tend to have fixed tick rates on the server, but the higher FPS is still beneficial (again, theoretically for all but the highest level of competition) because your client side inputs are sampled more frequently and your rendered frames are at most a couple ms old.
I think you're missing the point. The game could be processing input and doing a state update at 1000Hz, while still rendering a mere 60fps. There doesn't have to be any correlation whatsoever between frame rate and input processing. Furthermore, this would actually have less latency because there won't be a pipeline of frame buffers being worked on. Tying the input loop to the render loop is a totally arbitrary deci…
Doing that will increase input latency, not decrease it.
There are many tick rates that happen at the same time in a game, but generally grabbing the latest input at the last possible moment before updating the camera position/rotation is the best way to reduce latency.
It doesn't matter if you're processing input at 1000hz if the rendered output is going to have 16ms of latency embedded in it. If you can render the game in 1ms then the image generated has 1ms of latency embedded in to it.
In a magical ideal world if you know how long a frame is going to take to render, you could schedule it to execute at a specific time to minimise input latency, but it introduces a lot of other problems like both being very vulnerable to jitter and also software scheduling is jittery.
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#217I made the switch more than a year ago and it's been basically problem free. Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine). The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always…
This has been my experience as well.
I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.
My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters. Also, there are 540Hz displays.
> If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. Okay I think I follow this, but I think I'd frame it a little differently. I guess it makes more sense to me if I think about your statement as "the frame I'm seeing is only 2ms old, instead of 16.67ms old". I'm still not seeing the action for 16.67ms since the last frame I…
This is mostly like high fidelity audio equipment, or extreme coffee preparation. Waste of time for most people.
I used to play CS:Go at a pretty high level (MGE - LE depending on free time), putting me in the top 10%. Same with Overwatch.
Most of the time you're not dying in a clutch both pulling the trigger situation. You missed, they didn't, is what usually happens.
I never bothered with any of that stuff, it doesn't make a meaningful difference unless you're a top 1%.
But there's a huge number of people who play these games who THINK it does. The reason they're losing isn't because of 2ms command registrations, it's because they made a mistake and want to blame something else.
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> React based start menu with visible lag That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688
The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React [1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler
I wouldn’t be so sure…
Re: Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory
It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.
You don't need wsl, just install rigrep or the powershell equivalent of find