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Steam Hardware & Software Survey - Go Linux! :)
(store.steampowered.com)
Proton is doing god's work!
False alarm everyone. I run Garuda but have been playing around with Nobara and I filled it out on both distros on the same machine. Sorry to get everyone’s hopes up.
Isn't this just the Steam Deck?
Probably, though does that actually matter?
The SteamDeck is showing people that Linux can in fact game. And while we're always saying "ThE yEaR oF lInUx!" This is actually a huge step in the right direction.
Agreed. I have a deck and I'm now definitely gonna switch my main pc from Win10 to Linux. Steam deck desktop mode helped show me I could be comfortable using it, and the deck in general showed the gaming support is there nowadays.
I now see no reason to not put Linux on my desktop. Just deciding on which distros to check out. Probably mint. Maybe garuda...
I use Garuda and love it, but I also don’t think it’s the best for a first Linux distro, unless you’re good with needing to consistently use the command line for things, and you are interested in learning more about Linux and want a distro that requires you to occasionally get your hands dirty.
From what I’ve seen, Linux Mint is a great first distro. If you want something that’s more purposed to gaming, then Nobara is great. It’s made by GloriousEggroll, who makes Proton-GE. It’s not going to be as new-user friendly as Mint, but more so than Garuda.
Thanks for the tips.
I'm a dev by day, and no stranger to bash/zsh and powershell. That said I don't want to constantly be tinkering in the terminal just to use my OS.
Cheers for the pointer to Nobara, I'll look into that as an option too!
I'm thinking about doing this as well. My Steam Deck runs fine like 99% of the time, so I don't see why a gaming desktop with Linux wouldn't work.
Plus, I've always been looking for a reason to use Linux daily. I've messed around with SUSE and Ubuntu here and there and use it for some homelab stuff, but Linux has never been my daily driver. Which means I've never really learned it the same way I've learned how to use and navigate Windows, or even Mac (I forced myself to learn OSX/MacOS several years ago when I bought a Macbook as my daily driver for productivity). This could be it.
I'd also suggest Linux Mint if you are just starting out. In fact, it's still a great distro for advanced users as well. I use it as a fallback distro sometimes.
You could also check out Fedora or rather a gaming optimized fork of Fedora named - Nobara Linux.
It's showing people Linux is acceptable as a handheld os. Which the world already knew with Android. Linux as a desktop is another story. Steam deck has desktop mode but I highly doubt the percentage of those who use it as a desktop is high. I wonder how many bought the dock.
I think you're wrong. It's showing that Linux has the capability to actually run these games. Some/most people won't be able to equate the Linux on their handheld with Linux on a desktop, but those who do are welcome to the fold.
The Deck is basically a laptop in a handheld form factor, so no, it's not just showing that Linux can game as a handheld.
I don't think there is any doubt on if the games that are steam deck compatible are runnable by steam deck. That's the bare minimum for device support. I don't think a lot of people are using their decks as a desktop and this just see it as a handheld. Rarely I've heard of more people putting windows on their steam deck than people switching their desktop to Linux because of steam deck.
Well, we can agree to disagree.
I have 2 friends who decided to switch their daily driver PCs to Linux after getting a steamdeck, that's 2 out of 5. Not a single one of those 5 has put windows on their deck. shrugs
Your own friend group is the definition of selection bias, though - at the least, they know you and probably have similar interests/hobbies to some degree, and I daresay you've probably said something about Linux to them before.
And there's a whole, active subreddit for people who put windows on steam deck - apparently the initial problems people had with it have been getting ironed out more and more.
I don't know which is more common but I'd need to see actual data, either way.
I have a few friends who put windows on the deck as an experiment. They mainly wanted to play their game pass games on Steam deck which honestly seems to be a cool combination. My deck is still Linux though. I have one friend who has been using Linux for the last 15 years on and off, waiting for it to become a usable desktop OS for them. I'm kind of in the same boat, waiting for Linux to be far less finicky than it is. I'm also waiting for the Linux community to become far better than it is. Anytime you seem to point out a problem with Linux you get a lot of backlash. It's been slowly getting better over the last 10-15 years but not very quickly. A lot of old guards who see any problem report as an attack on their very moral being. Arguing "Well I'd rather use Linux than be a slave to Microsoft!" or such. It's like my god, people are just trying to use the thing to get to the thing they really want to do. The thing that gets in the way less is the thing that wins.
Overall, I see more people keeping Linux on their Steam Deck than switching it to Windows but also see far fewer people switching to Linux on their desktops than people switching their steam decks to Windows. Both are incredibly rare cases. All of this is to say that while I really like Linux, I support Linux when I make my games, I don't see the majority of people using Linux as a desktop replacement until they fix some key issues with the community and general OS.
Hope this trend continues to strengthen over the next few years!
I do wonder how Microsoft buying up basically the entirety of the western game dev world will influence this in the future though
If Proton keeps getting better, it won't matter. I mean it matters, because this is clearly where governments should step in and bust up the monopolies, but they obviously aren't going to.
Might become a problem if Microsoft starts making all their games windows store exclusives. Doesn't seem to be their strategy right now, but it's always a danger.
Exactly. They won’t do it now while their Activision/Blizzard acquisition is under scrutiny but they could easily adopt a new strategy in a few years that restricts purchases through stores Microsoft controls
No wonder! I've lately noticed that some non-AAA games run way better on Linux than Windows on my computer (5950X, RTX3090). For some reason Barotrauma seems to lag heavily while playing on Windows but runs buttersmooth on Linux. Valheim has similar effect as well.
Also I have already decided that Win10 is going to be the last Windows version on my machine ever. Gaming on Linux has gotten so damn good over the last few years that I see no reason upgrading my Windows installation anymore.
I wish that would be the case for VR too. But with VR there is lots of stuff just not being supported unfortunately. If you have any Headset that basically isn't the Index good luck using Linux. Also there are still Software issues with certain stuff there that won't properly work or not at all. I once tried Linux but unfortunately ran into several issues which caused me going back to windows 11.
Nah, I have an index and was not able to get steam vr running. Its problems everywhere in VR on linux I guess.
Oh i expected the hardware that basically is made for the software to actually work with SteamVR always. Guess I'm wrong. But unfortunately proves my post more true.
Nah, for most people SteamVR works ootb with the Index... but SteamVR is also quite buggy.
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@ReverseModule Looks like the growth comes mostly from Windows (-0.56%) users switching to Linux (+0.52%). MacOS (+0.05%) users mostly seem just to upgrade MacOS and are mostly unaffected by the overall numbers. Inside of the Windows numbers, Windows 10 (-1.56%) users switching to either Windows 11 (+0.92%) or choosing an alternative platform (-0.56%). Numbers do not add up perfectly, because these statistics are estimation based on asking randomly a fraction of the user base.
Not to mention that steam is no longer the sole gaming platform on PC which makes statistic anomaly even higher. They just discounted the steam deck for the first time in it's history. This small change could just be people who have windows machines booting up steam decks and getting the survey.
~~Steam Deck is very underrepresented in the hardware surveys, as the questionnaire can only show up in Desktop mode.~~
Not anymore. It's possible to get the hardware survey in gaming mode on Deck for months now (I got it iirc).
I stand corrected then. Never received it on my Deck so far.
That's a good point. There are a heck of a lot of people primarily on game pass, now, especially.
I also wonder if they account for people who dual-boot Linux and Windows, and who game only on Windows or who use both depending on the game.
Does a steam deck owner with a Windows desktop gaming PC turn up twice in these numbers, in both the Linux and the Windows users count, do you think? Because then the Linux number would go up 1 without the Windows number going down.
Edit: aside from this, SteamOS and desktop Linux distros aren't necessarily comparable enough to be throwing together in the same category. A lot of the things that make SteamOS a smart choice for the deck, where they can control and optimize for the hardware, don't apply to desktops the same way.
I also wonder if they account for people who dual-boot Linux and Windows, and who game only on Windows or who use both depending on the game.
From my understanding, which would be made clearer if Valve actually released information on their data collection for the survey, is that the device you submit the survey on is the one that counts. So dual-booting Linux and Windows isn't accounted for. Whatever you do the survey on is the one that it records you as. The survey prompt does tell you all the data it's sending including OS. You can't modify it but you can read it.
aside from this, SteamOS and desktop Linux distros aren’t necessarily comparable enough to be throwing together in the same category. A lot of the things that make SteamOS a smart choice for the deck, where they can control and optimize for the hardware, don’t apply to desktops the same way.
Absolutely agree. It's hard to see Steam OS as a helpful metric for Linux desktop usage. The majority of Steam OS users will only use Linux on the deck and likely never even drop into desktop mode. I am curious how many people bought the dock and how many use it.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when Windows 12 comes out, since people are unhappy with 11 and thus maybe more willing to jump ship, and Microsoft has a tendency to alternate between releasing good and bad OS's.
Could be a statistical margin of error.
Nah, the increase is 0.52%. Could be a little overblown? Yeah. Could be completely wrong? Very doubtful. Next month it will probably drop a little and keep climbing steadily but surely. But the fact that for this month Linux gamers are more than MacOS gamers for the first time is at the very least very impressive! :)
Valve isn't showing us their methodology (sample size, sample selection mechanism, rate at which people decline the surveys, how the hardware information is gathered by steam once the survey is agreed to, etc), so it's hard to say whether or not a 0.52% increase is accurate, or whether would meet the p-value test of being less than 5% likely to be the result of chance.
Statistically speaking, sometimes if you flip a coin ten times, it'll land as heads ten times in a row, even though every flip could go either way. Based on that particular sample of 10 coin flips, it'd look like the chance of a coin landing heads up is 100% - obviously not the case in reality. Another time, you might flip a coin ten times and get ten tails, seemingly the exact opposite and equally dramatically wrong result. Larger sample sizes reduce the risk of such a coincidence occurring across the entire sample, and P-values are helpful for checking the likelihood of whether a fluke such as this may have affected the result of a study.
Even when studies and surveys do have p < .05 (aka, the likelihood that the result is purely caused by chance is less than 5%, aka statistically significant), there's still that up-to-5% chance that the result is just random luck affecting the sample. And p-values don't account for things like sample bias or other methodological errors, like if valve were preferentially serving the survey to more Linux users than Valve users, or if Linux users are just more likely to respond to the steam survey (because they want that Linux number to go up so Linux gets more support) than Windows users, and that kind of thing. Or for p-hacking shenanigans.
All that said, a small increase makes sense intuitively if it's including the steam deck, and especially considering the unpopularity of Windows 11, and especially since I'm given to understand the Linux numbers have been slowly increasing for a while? But even so, the point I'm making here is I don't think we know enough to definitively say that it's not just luck.
It might be that more Mac users are moving away from Steam as their gaming client - from my experience, it's very glitchy, and hasn't been properly updated in years
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How is Linux game compatibility doing in current year?
How about user experience? Should one still expect to have to troubleshoot things on a consistent basis?
Considering doing a rebuild of my win 10 system in the near future and am getting tired of all these obnoxious pop-ups that I can't disable asking me to "finish setting up my PC" by connecting to /signing up for various services.
Pretty good. I haven't had to play around with proton launch options in a good while, Valve and the Heroic team have done a good job making it all plug and play. I don't generally play the latest releases and am not really interested in multiplayer though, so YMMV.
The user experience, and required troubleshooting, is still obnoxious. Even on the steam deck it's obnoxious. It's just not reliable, much as people hype it up. You'll have to do a lot of troubleshooting at unexpected times when you really don't want to be troubleshooting or might be pressed for time.
If you have an nvidia graphics card you can expect trouble with drivers, too.
If you have Windows 10 pro (or I think there's a workaround to enable it if you just have the Home version), you can go into the group policy editor and disable those annoying pop-ups. You can even disable auto-updates, if you want to, or control how they work. And you can disable most of their telemetry. Windows 10 has a lot of flexibility if you know where to look/figure it out. They make it annoying to deal with, yes, but it has never been has horrible as Linux is for me whenever I've tried it, and it's actually reliable.
I use Linux Mint at home and Windows 10 and 11 at work. The UI is basically interchangeable, I use both in the same manner.
I've had zero reliability issues and Mint was easier to install than Windows when I did it 4 years ago (not had to reinstall it yet, just kept on updating).
Games wise, I just play stuff through steam or classic emulators and it works well enough that typing this is the most I've thought about how it works for a long time.
I'm guessing the people who complain are running some gnarly full-custom linux on new hardware and trying to get the latest games to run ... that was once me, I now use a PlayStation for newer games because PC gaming was just a bottomless money and time pit.
woot
Not to be a downer but Valve doesn't give and insight into their methodology of collecting data and it's been wrong a few times before. With Linux, VR, and languages. Why should the statistics be trusted now?
isn't the hardware survey just a voluntary survey available to any steam user? like we know how they collect the data
It's randomly picked users which has been shown that it's not so random and that at one point Linux users weren't being asked as often as Windows users. So without methodology and insight, it's hard to have trust in the survey system.
Of course they weren't asked as often, there's significantly less number of users on Linux. 96.21% of the users asked was on Windows.
No, I mean there was an actual bug with the system where it would ask a single Windows user more often than if they were on Linux. People who used Linux and Windows would notice they would get prompted for the hardware survey the moment they sign into steam on Windows because the system had randomly picked them but the prompt didn't appear in Linux. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/2286 It was a known issue that was fixed around 2018. It's why most steam data for Linux was thrown away in 2018.
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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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