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Gaming on Linux has been showing Steam Hardware Survey for a while now, but with the data being quite broad and specific only to Steam, we decided to make our own Linux-specific survey. This should give us an idea of metrics within Linux gaming, such as the percentage of users who use Wine, dual boot or what their favourite game retailer is.
The idea is to have the survey running monthly, and then publish the stats at the end of the month alongside Steam Hardware Survey, hopefully shedding some light on a few things which still remain a mystery and over time give an idea of how things evolve. Maybe in the future this may also provide some interesting data to studios looking to make/port games for Linux as well.
The survey is anonymous and is just intended to be a bit of fun, so please don’t try and take it 100 times to boost the stats for your favourite distro or retailer - that would do a great disservice to all of us who looking for some interesting and accurate data. If you have any suggestions on changing the questions or wording of the questions, feel free to write them on here (but bear in mind that SurveyMonkey has a limit of 10 questions for free users) and we may revise the survey next month.
Please feel free to take the survey and share it with anyone who games on Linux - the bigger the sample, the better the data we will have.
EDIT: SurveyMonkey have decided to reveal only after publishing the survey that a free account only allows a maximum sample of 100 people. For this month only, I'll pay the fee, but that still means that the sample is capped at 1000 (and at this rate, it looks like it may go over 1000) so the survey will end once that number is reached. If anyone knows of any free survey tools we can use which don't have sample caps, let me know in the comments or send me a PM so we can do next month's survey on a different site. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The idea is to have the survey running monthly, and then publish the stats at the end of the month alongside Steam Hardware Survey, hopefully shedding some light on a few things which still remain a mystery and over time give an idea of how things evolve. Maybe in the future this may also provide some interesting data to studios looking to make/port games for Linux as well.
The survey is anonymous and is just intended to be a bit of fun, so please don’t try and take it 100 times to boost the stats for your favourite distro or retailer - that would do a great disservice to all of us who looking for some interesting and accurate data. If you have any suggestions on changing the questions or wording of the questions, feel free to write them on here (but bear in mind that SurveyMonkey has a limit of 10 questions for free users) and we may revise the survey next month.
Please feel free to take the survey and share it with anyone who games on Linux - the bigger the sample, the better the data we will have.
EDIT: SurveyMonkey have decided to reveal only after publishing the survey that a free account only allows a maximum sample of 100 people. For this month only, I'll pay the fee, but that still means that the sample is capped at 1000 (and at this rate, it looks like it may go over 1000) so the survey will end once that number is reached. If anyone knows of any free survey tools we can use which don't have sample caps, let me know in the comments or send me a PM so we can do next month's survey on a different site. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Try Google Forms, it automatically enters your stuff in a nice Google Sheet so that's nice.
Don't worry about the stats for game purchases, they will be lower for this last month given that not much happens during these months, but the results will be different (will be interesting to see how much this changes for Steam winter/summer sales).
With the distro, just put whichever one you game on most. I use Kubuntu on my laptop and Xubuntu on my gaming PC, but I'd consider Xubuntu to be my gaming distribution (and don't switch at all). So'it's not distro hopping, that's just having two distros.
Thanks for the limesurvey and google suggestions, they're both good alternatives to SurveyMonkey. Wish i'd known sooner, but I'll use one of those next month.
Given the current limitations I can understand why it should be left as it is for the moment, but two questions I would like to see added at some point are whether or not survey participants care about the DRM situation of their games and whether or not they prefer to use free software or binary blob graphics drivers with their hardware. There is a big difference between gaming on AMD with Catalyst and gaming on AMD using the radeon drivers.
I also can not help but fail to see the importance of the distro hopping question in the context of gaming, as most distributions should be roughly the same in that respect, and which one you use should not have that big an impact on your gaming experience.
Well, I suppose this post already justifies the point of the survey, as it might just give us a more definitive way of either refuting or affirming these sentiments beyond just shouting "WELL, I DON'T!" at the top of our lungs.
:P
For PC Gaming I use Linux - I have actually built my own SteamOS box and am patiently waiting for SteamOS to be officially released and to get the controller (running the beta currently), but have also used OSX in the past, for any game I cant get on Linux I use a games console (ps4 and wii u).
Your survey doesn't really cover this. The questions are a great start but you might want to go into hardware and into build and usage and make the questions more specific:
Do you use Gnu/Linux as your primary gaming platform? well in my case no not really.

Change this to Do you use Linux as your primary pc gaming platform ?
The answer to this for me would be Yes.
Do you own any games consoles ?
x nintendo
x playstation
x xbox
etc...
If SteamOS gets all of the multiplat games that are coming to PS4 I'll get them on SteamOS to support Linux Gaming and frankly my current steamos box is way more powerful than the ps4. I don't use windows at all and will not install it just for playing games.
well, 97% of ubuntu is just debian. That said, looking at both popcons, it has one order of magnitude more users than debian. What of those 2 things grant a separate option is a can of worms i wont bother to open :)
i buy games when I believe they are good. In one month i can buy 5 on another nothing. I don't just buy every crap out there.
Also, about compiling steam machine...
It's sorta weird question. I compile my own PC's, if its better than steam os PC, does it qualify?
Yeah, that question is weird... maybe some I bought 2 humble bundles with 10 games each, 5 in total in linux. How many games did i buy?
About the steam machine I think the question is, do you plan to buy a machine announced as such?
I assemble my own machines as well, but I could upgrade the rig on my tv if the price and specs are good.
Its not usual that you can put money into something marketing linux
for example i mainly use windows for gaming because linux just aint there yet for me, with most ports beeing quite buggy and amd drivers a pain - still i buy only linux supported games because i will make the move to 100% linux usage at some point. so the first question is kinda weird for me =)
Great idea, and thanks for doing this.
Took your survey instead :)
I don't know any other free survey tool :P
Next month we can look to use google as suggested.
Yep