Here is the latest instalment of Steam's Hardware Survey, as usual we do our monthly thing and compare it and talk about it and make sure you know not to use it as a hard figure.
Linux results for April 2014
Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit 0.25% -0.11%
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit 0.22% +0.22%
Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS 64 bit 0.12% -0.03%
Linux Mint 16 Petra 64 bit 0.09% -0.01%
Linux 3.10 64 bit 0.09% 0.00%
Ubuntu 13.10 0.05% -0.02%
Total: Linux 1.26% +0.06%
Last Month: 1.20%
My thoughts on it
We already know Steam's stats system is a bit odd, sometimes things just don't add up. It's clear Steam is hiding plenty of distro's since the ones they show don't add up to the full figure they give, not even close to it.
It's interesting to see it actually have a positive increase, although it's so low it can be a stat error of course, but it's pleasing to see it even that low.
It will be very interesting to see SteamOS as a distribution in the list and to see how popular it is against the other distros, but we have many months before that happens if they decide to show it there at all.
Things to note
The Other category has gone and that contained a few of the lesser represented Linux distro's like Fedora, Gentoo and Arch for example. It has been reported by a few that Arch may show up in Linux 64bit. Ideally we need Steam to let us see more of them, especially now the stats page has a Linux only section they could do with listing many more distributions in it so that we can get a clearer picture.
Distro-hoppers will mess up the statistics as well, Linux users are far more likely to switch between different distributions than say a Windows user due to how many we have.
Just be aware these results will probably not be that accurate as we don't know how they do their percentage results, they could be rounding up, rounding down or truncating the percentages. So a 0.5% could actually be nearly 0.6% as it could be 0.59% but they could do no rounding and simply truncate it.
Also it won't be every Steam user (it's a survey not a full statistic), so it can be as simple as not actually showing the survey to many Linux people.
Let's face it we know they don't survey 100% of their user base, only a small fraction of it, so bear that in mind as well.
Lastly Linux users typically shy away from any form of DRM, so you can bet there is a large bunch of Linux users who just simply refuse to use Steam.
Final Note: Look at it this way, Steam has around 75 million active users, 1.26% of 75 million is about 945,000 people, nearly a million. What developer wouldn't want to hook into a market that big? We are still under-represented in my eyes. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: Abhishek chatterjeei want all future action or adventure games to linux version then i move windows to linux.
for example..
next battlefield 5 game, GTA V, watchdogs, max payne 4, call of duty (2014), far cry 4.
and i dont think linux support this type of games.. :P
but there are so many native games to play that you couldnt even complete them all + many that work perfectly under wine.. so you dont need to keep your windblows installation at all.
you just dont play those games..theres plenty of choices.
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Well, I don`t think we can expect rising of gaming linux until Steam Machine with Steam OS appearing. And I think it`s right decision. Developers won`t to work with different 5 or 6 popular distros. They will support officially Steam OS only and don`t work with other distro. It will give a chance for us to see good big titles on Steam OS - Witcher 2, Arma 3 and others.
So rising of gaming on Linux we will see only in 2015.
So rising of gaming on Linux we will see only in 2015.
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oldrocker99 May 2, 2014
I have a dual-boot desktop, and kept Windows 7 strictly for the games; I like Bioshock Inifnite and X-COM:Enemy Unknown and a few others, but...
Lately Windows 7 has a frozen mouse pointer (fixed by Safe Mode, until I rebooted, then frozen again), and screw it! All the games I have been playing for the last few month are Steam for Linux games (I do use Steam with Wine to play Oblivion and Skyrim, and they play quite nicely, thank you), and sooner or later, I'm going to deepsix that miserable excuse for an OS ("But it has Office!")and go 100% GNU/Linux again.
There are very few games out there that cannot be ported to Linux; God knows we already have a ton of FPS games, both OSS and commercial, and there's no reason that Battlefield, GTA, etc., etc cannot be ported, except for developer laziness.
Lately Windows 7 has a frozen mouse pointer (fixed by Safe Mode, until I rebooted, then frozen again), and screw it! All the games I have been playing for the last few month are Steam for Linux games (I do use Steam with Wine to play Oblivion and Skyrim, and they play quite nicely, thank you), and sooner or later, I'm going to deepsix that miserable excuse for an OS ("But it has Office!")and go 100% GNU/Linux again.
There are very few games out there that cannot be ported to Linux; God knows we already have a ton of FPS games, both OSS and commercial, and there's no reason that Battlefield, GTA, etc., etc cannot be ported, except for developer laziness.
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Other possibility is Linux publishers. This role can play Mac publishers that already exist - Aspyr and Feral Interactive. They port games from Win to Mac, so they know, how to work with OpenGL.
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Quoting: FutureSutureI am glad that there's an increase, but it's a tiny one. When will we see a considerable jump? An increase of 1.00%, 0.50%, or even 0.25%?
1% would mean about 700k new accounts.
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Quoting: oldrocker99I have a dual-boot desktop, and kept Windows 7 strictly for the games; I like Bioshock Inifnite and X-COM:Enemy Unknown and a few others, but...Man, developers and publishers want money. And if EA will choose what to do: to port Battlefield 4 on Linux and sell 200 000 or 300 000 copies only and to make new pack of maps, that they sell 2 000 000 or 3 000 000 copies, what do you think they will choose?
Lately Windows 7 has a frozen mouse pointer (fixed by Safe Mode, until I rebooted, then frozen again), and screw it! All the games I have been playing for the last few month are Steam for Linux games (I do use Steam with Wine to play Oblivion and Skyrim, and they play quite nicely, thank you), and sooner or later, I'm going to deepsix that miserable excuse for an OS ("But it has Office!";)and go 100% GNU/Linux again.
There are very few games out there that cannot be ported to Linux; God knows we already have a ton of FPS games, both OSS and commercial, and there's no reason that Battlefield, GTA, etc., etc cannot be ported, except for developer laziness.
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Quoting: FutureSutureI am glad that there's an increase, but it's a tiny one. When will we see a considerable jump? An increase of 1.00%, 0.50%, or even 0.25%?
0.25% that is about 150-200k users could be a realistic percentage only after the official release of Steam Boxes, the 1% we have now is already great considering that it's between hard to impossible depending on the country to buy out-of-the-box Linux computers and that big publisher are not on Linux yet (as Deformal clearly explain with an example :) ). Linux could gain a few new ex-WinXP users but they are just 5% and they most likely have a very Windows oriented library so in the best case the 0.06% is not a fluctuation and we'll gain a few more cents of percent ;)
Comparing Windows and Linux stats I noticed a few interesting points.
First that, while I thought Linux users had older slower machines, the actual average amount of RAM (more or less, I approximated the "less than...", "...to..." and "...and higher" ) is equivalent, just 2% difference: Linux 5.89 GB vs Windows 5.76 GB
Linux gamers choose Intel slightly more often than Windows users (76.56% vs 73.69%), CPU frequency statistics don't say much since there definitely old high frequency CPUs (P4) in some Linux machines. The average number of cores is also equivalent with just a 3.7% advantage for Linux (Linux 3.07, Windows 2.96)
The Video Card statistic is not reliable since Steam doesn't specify the graphic used for 34.71% of Windows machines and 39.09% of Linux machines, however Linux users seem to use Intel Graphics more than Windows users (Linux 22.23% vs Win 14.62%) but avoid AMD graphics more or less like Windows users (Linux: AMD 10.02%, Nvidia 27.94%, Windows: AMD 12.92%, Nvidia: 37.72%), unless Steam get confused by FOSS drivers and put AMD on FOSS drivers under "other"...
In any case 0.54% of Linux users are on VirtualBox graphics... that's about 4000 users, I didn't expect so many people to play on VM!
Last, Linux users use their hard drives much less having on average 79GB of space used (avg free=208GB, avg total=287GB) while Windows users on average use 271GB of space but have bigger drives (avg free=362GB, avg total=633GB) ...well, for Linux I should probably talk about partitions since Linux machines often have multiboot.
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About distros being hidden, I don't think they are being hidden. I think it's just that steam can't detect them. I've found that if you have linux standard base (lsb) installed then steam will detect your distro correctly. I'm on Arch and without lsb installed my os is detected as Linux 3.10 (64 bit) but with lsb installed my os is detected as "Arch Linux" (64 bit). Try installing lsb and checking System Information in steam. In Arch the package is called lsb-release. Presumably it's called something similar in other distros.
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Quoting: ChazzaAbout distros being hidden, I don't think they are being hidden. I think it's just that steam can't detect them. I've found that if you have linux standard base (lsb) installed then steam will detect your distro correctly. I'm on Arch and without lsb installed my os is detected as Linux 3.10 (64 bit) but with lsb installed my os is detected as "Arch Linux" (64 bit). Try installing lsb and checking System Information in steam. In Arch the package is called lsb-release. Presumably it's called something similar in other distros.
No, they are being hidden: http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/steams-hardware-survey-now-shows-many-distros.1845
They had the ability to show them before, they now don't.
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Ah ok. Fair enough. So they really hiding them then. I was right about lsb-release though. Another user said the same thing in the comments.
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