Check out our Monthly Survey Page to see what our users are running.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

GOL Survey Results: February

By -
The results for the February survey are now available for you to take a look at and compare with results from previous months.

You can find the new survey for March here, so please fill that out if you haven’t already.

Please click on the images to enlarge. Once enlarged, you can also cycle through them using the arrows.

Respondents
image

Many thanks to the 926 people who took the time to complete the survey! That’s around 100 more than the January survey and near the 1000 mark which I would like to keep close to.

Question 1 - Do you currently use Linux as your primary PC gaming platform?
image

Question 2 - Did you use Wine to play games last month?
image

Question 3 - Did you use a Windows partition for gaming last month?
image

Question 4 - What distribution do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

Question 5 - What Desktop Environment do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

Question 6 - Did you change your primary Linux gaming distribution last month?
image

Question 7 - What graphics card do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

Question 8 - Which drivers do you use for that graphics card?
image

AMD
image

Intel
image

Nvidia
image

Question 9 - What CPU do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

Question 10 - Did you exclusively buy Linux-supported games last month?
image

Question 11 - How many Linux games did you buy last month?
image

Question 12 - Which of these retailers did you use to buy your Linux games last month?
image

Unique Question 1 - Have you bought Dying Light yet?
image

It seems like February’s AAA release didn’t have a lot of takers (only 7.5% of respondents in fact). However, another 40% of respondents plan to get Dying Light at some point so the game certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed. Perhaps that’s a lesson to the AAA game industry that if they want to charge the standard £40 at launch, then they should have the decency to do some serious QA first.

Unique Question 2 - How have your experiences been with AAA titles on launch in the last year?
image

I was perhaps a bit too ambiguous with this question and neglected to take into consideration that a lot of people simply don’t buy games at launch, yet alone pre-order. To make up for that, I added a unique question about pre-orders to the March survey.

Nonetheless, these results show that in general, Linux gamers seem to have more positive experiences than negative with launch titles. This either means that developers are either doing a pretty good job at porting or that many of you are wise enough check GOL or forums before buying games to see how well they work, or most likely a combination of both. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Community
0 Likes
About the author -
After many years of floating through space on the back of a missile, following a successful career in beating people up for not playing Sega Saturn, the missile returned to earth. Upon returning, I discovered to my dismay that the once great console had been discontinued and Sega had abandoned the fight to dominate the world through 32-bit graphical capabilities.

After spending some years breaking breeze blocks with my head for money and being mocked by strangers, I have found a new purpose: to beat up people for not playing on Linux.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
All posts need to follow our rules. For users logged in: please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Guest readers can email us for any issues.
23 comments Subscribe
Page: 1/2»
  Go to:

Liam Dawe 2 Mar 2015
There must be something to KDE, i need to give it another go, and I'm still surprised Cinnamon is so low!
Imants 2 Mar 2015
There must be something to KDE, i need to give it another go, and I'm still surprised Cinnamon is so low!

For me Cinnamon crashes too much so I use unity for my main gaming PC. I still keep Mint installed on my father computer and check time to time what changed but for now it is working worse than Ubuntu :(
zimplex1 2 Mar 2015
I always love looking at these stats. As for Dying Light... I just can't play yet ANOTHER zombie game. The only interesting zombie game to me is project zomboid but that's because it's super challenging and more survival focused. Anyways... Good write-up as always.
chrisq 2 Mar 2015
Why no love for the Enlightenment window manager, it's great :)
aL 2 Mar 2015
I used to rock xfce, I came from the gnome 2 refugee camp. kde was too heavy and not my style... but after hitting a few xfce bugs and without new releases on sight (a new one recently happen) decided to give kde another go.

My machine is beefy enough now and I just want my DE to get out of the way. Kde sports some weird decisions (like the way activities and/or the way the panels work)

But that said, its configurable enough that I set it to my liking without much fuss and pretty much forget what DE im using most of the time for the past 9 months or so.

Who would had thought I would end up using kde... not me...
mao_dze_dun 2 Mar 2015
Omg, Pantheon is less used than SteamOS. Poor Elementary...
Segata Sanshiro 2 Mar 2015
I can vouch for KDE, I've used it ever since Unity replaced Gnome 2 in Ubuntu. Plasma 5 also looks very good so going to upgrade to that soon. For gaming I use XFCE though since I prefer to free up resources for games and I find LXDE a bit too ugly for now.

As for Dying Light... I just can't play yet ANOTHER zombie game. The only interesting zombie game to me is project zomboid but that's because it's super challenging and more survival focused.

I have to agree with you. As Yahzee put it, "releasing a zombie game is like giving a present wrapped in McDonald's cheeseburger paper - you don't need to look inside to know they're not really trying". That said, Dying Light is a pretty fun game and once they fix it I'll probably put quite a few hours into it. It's kind of like going to see a summer blockbuster, you know what you're getting and it's certainly not high art, but you can still get a good few hours of enjoyment out of it.
fraghopper 2 Mar 2015
The graphs are interesting, I'd kind of like to see the numbers in text form though; much easier to skim.

I also use KDE. As others have said, it's so configurable at this point that you can hide or de-activaite the parts you don't like, design your own desktop, and let it just keep out of your way.
ZeroX1987 2 Mar 2015
Personally I'm using KDE for over 4 years now. So I obviously join the group recommending it to you Liam. As far as I have seen from planetkde they are really active and plasma 5 is shaping up quite nicely. Really can't wait for the stable release.^^
For everyone using the terminal on a regular basis I recommend to try out the yakuake package (kde's version of the guake terminal of gnome) as well... ;o)

Back to the topic at hand: Just as Fraghopper wrote a separate overview of the numbers (in textform) would be great. Even though I am interested in the overall trends I mostly want to know the current values taken from the survey.
Spl-it 2 Mar 2015
View PC info
  • Mega Supporter
There must be something to KDE, i need to give it another go, and I'm still surprised Cinnamon is so low!

For me, KDE is the only DE that doesn't require me to mess around with anything vsync related and still end up with screen tearing. Games run buttery smooth using KDE's own vsync and disabling any in game vsync.
Nyamiou 2 Mar 2015
On the third question, you should make it so that the "Yes" answer is at the bottom, because the "I don't have a Windows partition" and "No" are similar answer so it would be better if this was easier to add up those two. Also on question 8, between the different kind of CPU the colors are not always for the same thing (like green is sometimes for proprietary drivers and sometimes for open source drivers) that make it harder to instantly see the differences between the graphs. Also, could you please add "Bundle Stars" to the list of retailers. Aside of that, thank for those interesting graphs that show that less people are using Windows (which is great) but that at least ten percent of people are buying games not supported on Linux while still not using a Windows partition (maybe they have a Mac, or maybe they just have hope) and that people on AMD are not switching to a NVidia graphic card like they should (sorry for trolling but that's a little true, guys on AMD are always complaining about performance issues).
Segata Sanshiro 3 Mar 2015
On the third question, you should make it so that the "Yes" answer is at the bottom, because the "I don't have a Windows partition" and "No" are similar answer so it would be better if this was easier to add up those two. Also on question 8, between the different kind of CPU the colors are not always for the same thing (like green is sometimes for proprietary drivers and sometimes for open source drivers) that make it harder to instantly see the differences between the graphs.

I'll pass on the suggestions to fedso, he's the graph guy :)
Hamish 3 Mar 2015
I actually had to admit to buying a Windows game for once in my life, but it was for less than $2 dollars and I bought two Linux supporting games with it on GOG for much more than that.

Still though. :|
Skully 3 Mar 2015
For me KDE is the face of Linux. It has always been my main desktop since 2002 on Debian "woody"
If KDE didn't exist, I probably would never have stayed with linux at all.
I still take a look at all the other desktops on my spare machine when new versions come out. But I can't stand any of them.
I would rather give up computers or use windows.
edo 3 Mar 2015
There must be something to KDE, i need to give it another go, and I'm still surprised Cinnamon is so low!
Agree, Cinnamon is for my specific case the best DE. I love KDE, but it always felt unfinished (but probably plasma 5 is in better shape)


Now, related to the question 8 about intel, that question doesn't make any sense, as far as I know the only driver available for linux is the open source, so to ask to the people if they are using the private driver in intel GPU on Linux doesn't make sense. Of course, if I am wrong then I would like to know that.
pd12 3 Mar 2015
I was thinking it's confusing if the graph colours don't correspond to the respective company logos (nvidia-green, AMD-red, intel-blue) etc.
Is it possible to change the colours to do that?

-From a Kubuntu 14.04 nvidia-proprietary user (the majority of ppl) =P
Caldazar 3 Mar 2015
KDE is like Minecraft, learn "recipes" and build whatever you want.
In form my desktop resembles Unity a lot but in functionality every comparison is ridiculous.

There is a learning curve attached to it of course, not everyone has time for that, but if you're an enthusiast who rather builds his own PC instead of just buying some Dell machine why not extend the fun to your DE?
loggfreak 3 Mar 2015
KDE gives me the least issues and is the most customizable, i've always liked it, i used xfce and cinnamon as well, but no sync to vblank...
+ i like the lancelot menu in KDE

however i've been having issues with menu items not showing when searching inside the menu and some still appear while searching when they are no longer on my system, and i can't find out why that happens
loggfreak 3 Mar 2015
the only downside to KDE is the massively slow boot speed, aside from that it isn't really slow/bloated like many people say
boot speed on KDE is a lot longer than any other DE, though plasma5 is a big improvement in this aspect
fedso 3 Mar 2015
View PC info
  • Supporter
On the third question, you should make it so that the "Yes" answer is at the bottom, because the "I don't have a Windows partition" and "No" are similar answer so it would be better if this was easier to add up those two. Also on question 8, between the different kind of CPU the colors are not always for the same thing (like green is sometimes for proprietary drivers and sometimes for open source drivers) that make it harder to instantly see the differences between the graphs.

I'll pass on the suggestions to fedso, he's the graph guy :)

Noted and added "pin colour to answer" to the TODO list :)
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.