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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

#361

Post by forrestthewoods »

rkomorn wrote: post #359
forrestthewoods wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me take the game developer lens. You love Linux and want to support Linux. What is the cost to you? SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch. Now let’s imagine you want to support gener…

> Once upon a time I shipped a native Linux binary (Planetary Annihilation). Pretty sure I kickstarter'd that! But also never actually played it.

PA Titans is pretty good! Definitely niche. In hindsight the whole spherical planets thing is definitely bad. Vanilla flat rectangular maps would have been better.

One of the interesting consequences of Kickstarter is you get hard locked into “promises” even if those ideas turn out to be bad. Naval was so bad but it was a stretch goal so had to ship it. Lesson learned!

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

#362

Post by foresto »

nijave wrote: post #354
foresto wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your computer's bluetooth module could be the source of the trouble. Some people have found that using a different dongle fixed their wireless controller problems.

That makes sense. I've had the most issues on my old Dell XPS and a dongle would be annoying on such a small laptop

Are you sure? Bluetooth dongles these days can be smaller than most low-profile USB drives, barely protruding from a laptop's exterior. It might be worth browsing the available models.

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

#363

Post by tomnipotent »

functional_dev wrote: post #355
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…

what surprised me is how Proton works under the hood... no emulation at all! wine translates win API -> Linux. Then DXVK converts DirectX calls into Vulkan in real time, and VKD3D-Proton for DX 12. so it always native Vulkan.. no wonder performance is even better than in windows! this laid it out it for me visually - https://vectree.io/c/how-proton-runs-windows-games-on-linux-...

> no wonder performance is even better than in windows!

Every "benchmark" I've seen from someone claiming a game performs better on Linux via Proton than on Windows was written by someone that doesn't know anything about running benchmarks or how statistics work.

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

#364

Post by drnick1 »

foresto wrote: post #357
drnick1 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers. You need recent hardware for this to be relevant. Generally speaking, you don't need rock-solid stability on a gaming rig or even a "workstation," since uptime isn't really a consideration. I run Debian on my home server, but my other machines, including a backup laptop, all run Arch. A good A…

> This is true, but you may be missing out on performance and compatibility improvements from recent ("bleeding edge") drivers. No, not missing out. Just waiting a few weeks longer than I would on a rolling distro, until the improvements arrive in Debian Backports. (If I'm really impatient, I can install something manually or make my own backport, but I'm assuming most people won't do that.) I have experienced cases…

> System uptime is a consideration whenever I need my computer for something immediately, but my choice of Debian is not only about that.

Maybe you should try Arch on one of your machines. I have a lot of experience with both Debian and Arch, having used both extensively on all kinds of hardware over long periods of time, and have found Arch to be ideal on desktop. Having access to the latest software and drivers is a huge plus with recent hardware. I have never encountered breaking changes.

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

#365

Post by imp0cat »

traderj0e wrote: post #304
imp0cat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong though, the amount of Snap stuff you have to remove in a fresh install is starting to get a bit annoying (I usually remove at least the Snap versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and replace them with binaries from Mozilla - they will still self-update).

You don't have to remove them though, it works fine.

You are right, the snap versions mostly work fine. It's just that there are a lot of annoyances due to the nature of Snap packages (slowness, increased disk space requirements, problematic integration with the rest of the system...), but it definitely is possible to live with them.

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

#367

Post by ekianjo »

mikkupikku wrote: post #168
ekianjo wrote: post #40

This means nothing. There is so much up and down based on the active Chinese user base. PHoronox making headlines out of thin air again

M$ shareholders ITT are sweating bullets! Gaming has always been Microsoft's redoubt; without it they will lose the retail market entirely and be left with only the B2B market coasting on the soon forgotten legacy of what Windows once was, and eventually that will dry up too as Windows fails to capture the attention of a new generation of engineers and administrators.

They will never lose the retail market because they enforce severe rules towards OEMs.

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

#368

Post by zelphirkalt »

drnick1 wrote: post #337
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…

Are your games installed on a standard Linux partition, e.g. ext4? Proton struggles to launch games from NTFS volumes and can silently fail.

I have tried both, installing on btrfs and installing on NTFS (shared with a Windows installation). I think I will get a dedicated gaming machine at some point, which hopefully will not have the same issue.

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

#369

Post by scheeseman486 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #358
scheeseman486 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SteamOS is Arch with atomic updates and some custom patches here and there. The system stack is pretty standard; Mesa drivers, Steam Linux Runtime, Proton, it's all what ships on every other distro. The only significant difference is that games run in gamescope-session by default, but that isn't exclusive to SteamOS either and doesn't meaningfully affect the execution of software, it's just a different window manager…

Let me take the game developer lens. You love Linux and want to support Linux. What is the cost to you? SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch. Now let’s imagine you want to support gener…

Steam Deck is an x64-based PC running Arch Linux with FOSS Mesa drivers, which are shared among all modern AMD GPUs. There's extra wrinkles with Nvidia GPUs, but their proprietary driver is the Windows driver with a bunch of kludges to get it to work on Linux and if you're using Vulkan then it's mostly the same code paths. It's also improved greatly in the past couple years.

You're right about native Linux binaries, but the rub is that you don't need to create generic binaries, there's a bunch of options that use containers to deal with environmental permutations and given the Linux version of Planetary Annihilation uses the Steam Linux Runtime environment, you know this.

It is funny that supporting Linux is as easy as providing a win32 binary, but it's not a joke. This is the case because it works.

I think your experience is a little out of date, or you've somehow been missing what's been happening over the last half decade, because in practice gaming on Linux is now absolutely fantastic. Not just on Steam Deck, as since Valve is using the same general software stack that every other distro uses, all the improvements they've made have permeated out to the rest of the ecosystem. On my CachyOS PC with an RTX 3090, the only games that consistently give me problems anymore are titles that ship with kernel-level anti-cheat. Otherwise when I buy something from Steam I simply assume that it'll work.

Steam Deck sales have actually softened quite a bit over the last couple of years, all this recent explosive growth has been driven by desktop users.

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

#370

Post by forrestthewoods »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #369
forrestthewoods wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me take the game developer lens. You love Linux and want to support Linux. What is the cost to you? SteamDeck is a very specific set of hardware running a very specific OS with a specific runtime. This is very easy. The fact that it is Linux is almost immaterial. If it were not Linux at all it would require a similar amount of effort. Might as well be a Nintendo Switch. Now let’s imagine you want to support gener…

Steam Deck is an x64-based PC running Arch Linux with FOSS Mesa drivers, which are shared among all modern AMD GPUs. There's extra wrinkles with Nvidia GPUs, but their proprietary driver is the Windows driver with a bunch of kludges to get it to work on Linux and if you're using Vulkan then it's mostly the same code paths. It's also improved greatly in the past couple years. You're right about native Linux binaries,…

Thanks for response. Not sure I have much more to add. But wanted you to know I saw and read it. :)
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