Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by scheeseman486 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 11:54 AM UTC

forrestthewoods wrote: post #370

scheeseman486 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Thanks for reading!

I've been following this all pretty closely, it's been exciting. The year of the linux desktop is kind of a punchline, but it's sort of a misnomer anyway. It was never going to happen in the span of a year. But it has been happening; when online discussion spaces can never seem to shut the hell up about all these new idiot users asking all these stupid questions, that's when you know you're seeing a lot of growth.

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

#372

Post by nomel » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 1:15 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #363

functional_dev wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gamers Nexus is competent, timestamp starting at 10 minute explanation of methodology: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Tjp82Cgi8dvcZo-p&t=704

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

#373

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 08, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #372

tomnipotent wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Gamers Nexus is competent, timestamp starting at 10 minute explanation of methodology: https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=Tjp82Cgi8dvcZo-p&t=704

[deleted]