Hello everyone, bit of a change up now as I will be taking on the surveys. We now have the results in for November's Linux gamer survey. Segata simply wanted to focus on other things, nothing to read into folks. So, first of all, big thanks to Segata Sanshiro for continuing it for so long and an amazing job he did on it. Also a big thanks to Feds for continuing to do the graphs for us and writing the app that does it.
The next survey will be available on December 1st, as usual will run for ~2 weeks. If anyone has any general improvement suggestions, by all means fire away.
Respondents
Bit of a drop this month, mainly as I haven't advertised it as much as usual, but still a decent amount compared with other months in general. If anyone has any thoughts on how to better advertise it on GOL and the wider community please let us know.
When the next one comes along, please share it to all the communities you know and help the reach of it.
Primary platform
Practically no change here, which is interesting to see. I honestly doubt this graph will ever really change with our demographic.
Wine
Again, not much change here at all. I imagine this will change in future if the amount of games we get slows down, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Windows partition
Distribution
If you needed more proof that Debian/Ubuntu types are the most popular (apart from always being the case on Steam's survey), here you are. I am always surprised at just how popular Arch is too, I should probably install it one day and see what all the fuss is about.
Desktops
In the past few months I switched back to using Unity, as I found MATE had too many niggling issues. I still miss being able to have a "normal" set of tray icons, and I still personally dislike Ubuntu's choice of restricting theirs to indicators as plenty of apps still don't have an indicator. Luckily I have been able to find replacements for most apps now that do allow me to close them to the tray. So, I am finally 99% happy with Unity.
Distro movement
Seems most people are generally quite happy with their choice of distribution. Something really bad would have to happen to a major distribution to ever show a real change on this one. When Wayland and Mir become the defaults, I think we will see some change here, but who knows.
Graphics cards
It will be interesting to see how this changes when AMD's newer open source driver becomes the normal thing. If it helps stability and performance, then we could see a change here.
Graphics drivers
CPU
Hopefully AMD's newer CPU architecture will shake this up a bit, I remain cautiously excited about Zen. I really do hope it can bring AMD back into people's minds a little more. Intel really need more competition in the CPU market, so bring it on AMD.
Purchasing habits
Ps. Remember we have a Sales Page, keep an eye on it for good deals.
Retailers
This month we removed Desura as a supported store on our survey, as it's pretty pointless having it. They went bankrupt, but even with the store still there it no longer loads properly for me and has been left to rot for months.
Gaming devices
One of our newer questions, and quite a fun one to see the results for. I look forward to see it evolve and change if Steam Machines become a more normal thing, but I don't see that changing at all for quite a few months.
Unique question 1
10% considering buying a Steam Machine seems pretty healthy to me, and a lot of you (me included) wanted a Steam Controller. Next month we will be asking if people have picked up any, so it will be interesting to see the change from thinking to buying.
Unique question 2
Pretty much a zero point change here, not really surprising right now.
If you have any burning questions you want included for our unique questions at the start of December, be sure to fire away in the comments.
Remember, let's have no distro or desktop wars please. Keep it civil, as it's all personal preference, no ones choice is better than another's. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The next survey will be available on December 1st, as usual will run for ~2 weeks. If anyone has any general improvement suggestions, by all means fire away.
Respondents
Bit of a drop this month, mainly as I haven't advertised it as much as usual, but still a decent amount compared with other months in general. If anyone has any thoughts on how to better advertise it on GOL and the wider community please let us know.
When the next one comes along, please share it to all the communities you know and help the reach of it.
Primary platform
Practically no change here, which is interesting to see. I honestly doubt this graph will ever really change with our demographic.
Wine
Again, not much change here at all. I imagine this will change in future if the amount of games we get slows down, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Windows partition
Distribution
If you needed more proof that Debian/Ubuntu types are the most popular (apart from always being the case on Steam's survey), here you are. I am always surprised at just how popular Arch is too, I should probably install it one day and see what all the fuss is about.
Desktops
In the past few months I switched back to using Unity, as I found MATE had too many niggling issues. I still miss being able to have a "normal" set of tray icons, and I still personally dislike Ubuntu's choice of restricting theirs to indicators as plenty of apps still don't have an indicator. Luckily I have been able to find replacements for most apps now that do allow me to close them to the tray. So, I am finally 99% happy with Unity.
Distro movement
Seems most people are generally quite happy with their choice of distribution. Something really bad would have to happen to a major distribution to ever show a real change on this one. When Wayland and Mir become the defaults, I think we will see some change here, but who knows.
Graphics cards
It will be interesting to see how this changes when AMD's newer open source driver becomes the normal thing. If it helps stability and performance, then we could see a change here.
Graphics drivers
CPU
Hopefully AMD's newer CPU architecture will shake this up a bit, I remain cautiously excited about Zen. I really do hope it can bring AMD back into people's minds a little more. Intel really need more competition in the CPU market, so bring it on AMD.
Purchasing habits
Ps. Remember we have a Sales Page, keep an eye on it for good deals.
Retailers
This month we removed Desura as a supported store on our survey, as it's pretty pointless having it. They went bankrupt, but even with the store still there it no longer loads properly for me and has been left to rot for months.
Gaming devices
One of our newer questions, and quite a fun one to see the results for. I look forward to see it evolve and change if Steam Machines become a more normal thing, but I don't see that changing at all for quite a few months.
Unique question 1
10% considering buying a Steam Machine seems pretty healthy to me, and a lot of you (me included) wanted a Steam Controller. Next month we will be asking if people have picked up any, so it will be interesting to see the change from thinking to buying.
Unique question 2
Pretty much a zero point change here, not really surprising right now.
If you have any burning questions you want included for our unique questions at the start of December, be sure to fire away in the comments.
Remember, let's have no distro or desktop wars please. Keep it civil, as it's all personal preference, no ones choice is better than another's. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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20 comments
kellerkindt Nov 18, 2015
Did you ever try Cinnamon as desktop?
Its a quiet decent one, without that fancy large icons popping from everywhere in your face.
Its a quiet decent one, without that fancy large icons popping from everywhere in your face.
0 Likes
I'm always kinda surprised with how little Wine usage changes. I'd expect that with more and more games available natively, that number would go down. Maybe it just needs more time. Maybe it doesn't really matter to me though.
Also:
But hey, atleast fewer and fewer people see the need to use proprietary drivers on AMD GPU's!
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 18 November 2015 at 10:27 am UTC
Also:
It will be interesting to see how this changes when AMD's newer open source driver becomes the normal thing. If it helps stability and performance, then we could see a change here.I, personally, hope so, but this will take time. Even though Mesa 11.1 brings improvements, they're still far behind NVidia's blob performance. I don't expect AMD to catch up enough to make a change until Vulkan gains momentum.
But hey, atleast fewer and fewer people see the need to use proprietary drivers on AMD GPU's!
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 18 November 2015 at 10:27 am UTC
0 Likes
Did you ever try Cinnamon as desktop?I did, but my experience was soured by the major bug it had a while back with the desktop constantly pausing for a second every now and then, and I had it quite often. Apparently it's fixed now, but I've no current plans to move. Cinnamon is lovely though, their attention to detail is awesome. Clem even implemented a few features I directly requested to him in Nemo such as giving you the option to set something executable when trying to launch it, instead of the old message of telling you it's not executable (yep, that was at my request).
Its a quiet decent one, without that fancy large icons popping from everywhere in your face.
AMD's open source driver will hopefully save it, as Catalyst moves far, far too slowly right now. Although, apparently Catalyst will work with parts of AMDGPU in future, so it will be easier to update to new kernels or something?
2 Likes, Who?
kellerkindt Nov 18, 2015
Did you ever try Cinnamon as desktop?I did, but my experience was soured by the major bug it had a while back with the desktop constantly pausing for a second every now and then, and I had it quite often. Apparently it's fixed now, but I've no current plans to move. Cinnamon is lovely though, their attention to detail is awesome. Clem even implemented a few features I directly requested to him in Nemo such as giving you the option to set something executable when trying to launch it, instead of the old message of telling you it's not executable (yep, that was at my request).
Its a quiet decent one, without that fancy large icons popping from everywhere in your face.
Neat, I think I need to thank you for that :3
0 Likes
Arehandoro Nov 18, 2015
I've always used Gnome though starting to get tired of it. Not really sure what are the advantages/disadvantages of using Kde/Cinnamon? In terms of gaming and if any, I mean. In regards of design I think Cinnamon is my sort of desktop/design I like too as I've seen in some videos.
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I'm always kinda surprised with how little Wine usage changes. I'd expect that with more and more games available natively, that number would go down. Maybe it just needs more time. Maybe it doesn't really matter to me though.
I still use wine when playing some of the older GOG games like Fallout or Alpha Centauri. I very rarely use it for steam though, too annoying to have to install a separate steam client every time.
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psycho_driver Nov 18, 2015
You could run stalonetray along side Unity for a nice clean system tray add-on. I overlay conky on top of the unused portion of stalonetray with cpu/ram/hdd/gpu usage data and a clock.
One neat-o (and intially unintended) side effect is that conky stays visible in full screen games, so I can watch per-core cpu usage, ram usage, gpu temps and load, etc. in-game. It gives a good idea of whether games are more cpu or gpu bound.
I use it with cairo-dock but I presume it would work more or less the same with unity.
Last edited by psycho_driver on 18 November 2015 at 4:42 pm UTC
One neat-o (and intially unintended) side effect is that conky stays visible in full screen games, so I can watch per-core cpu usage, ram usage, gpu temps and load, etc. in-game. It gives a good idea of whether games are more cpu or gpu bound.
I use it with cairo-dock but I presume it would work more or less the same with unity.
Last edited by psycho_driver on 18 November 2015 at 4:42 pm UTC
1 Likes, Who?
supermonkey77 Nov 18, 2015
I'm always kinda surprised with how little Wine usage changes. I'd expect that with more and more games available natively, that number would go down. Maybe it just needs more time. Maybe it doesn't really matter to me though.
I do wonder how much of that wine percentage is down to Skyrim or Fallout 3 / New Vegas. I bet it would drop considerably if Bethesda released them natively.
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Segata Sanshiro Nov 18, 2015
View video on youtube.com
Couldn't resist :P
I agree, Wine usage will most likely be on "essential" older games like that which have next to no chance of getting a port. I think it will be one of the slowest things to decrease.
Couldn't resist :P
I'm always kinda surprised with how little Wine usage changes. I'd expect that with more and more games available natively, that number would go down. Maybe it just needs more time. Maybe it doesn't really matter to me though.
I do wonder how much of that wine percentage is down to Skyrim or Fallout 3 / New Vegas. I bet it would drop considerably if Bethesda released them natively.
I agree, Wine usage will most likely be on "essential" older games like that which have next to no chance of getting a port. I think it will be one of the slowest things to decrease.
0 Likes
If you have any burning questions you want included for our unique questions at the start of December, be sure to fire away in the comments.
Maybe what's your OpenGL version?
- < 3.3 (very old GPUs)
- 3.3
- 4.0 - 4.2 (tesselation in 4.0)
- 4.3 -4.4 (compute shaders in 4.3)
- 4.5
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I just want to point out that AMD users can play DX9 games at blistering speeds and it keeps wine usage up especially when porters ignore anything but nVidia.
1 Likes, Who?
Unique question maybe how long did you play games last month?
Good one! (I better start noting down, because Steam only shows the last 14 days. :) )
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I would like to have a unique question along the lines of 'Do you buy exlusively DRM-free games?'. Would be interesting to look at correlations between GPUs, open/closed drivers and DRM-free games.
Also, in this data, it would be nice to see if there is a correlation between whether people would switch GPUs and what GPU drivers they use. Similarly, drivers and buying habits.
Also, in this data, it would be nice to see if there is a correlation between whether people would switch GPUs and what GPU drivers they use. Similarly, drivers and buying habits.
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Lucky_Lynx Nov 18, 2015
I agree, Wine usage will most likely be on "essential" older games like that which have next to no chance of getting a port. I think it will be one of the slowest things to decrease.
I personally use Wine (well Play on Linux) for playing Guild Wars 2. It would be interesting to see what the split is between people using it for newer games and people using it for older games.
Last edited by Lucky_Lynx on 18 November 2015 at 10:14 pm UTC
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Another thought for the unique question:
How many games are in your Steam library? How many in your GOG library?
Also, would it be possible to publish the raw data somewhere, not just the graphs?
How many games are in your Steam library? How many in your GOG library?
Also, would it be possible to publish the raw data somewhere, not just the graphs?
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How many games are in your Steam library? How many in your GOG library?
+ Which percentage of it is Linux compatible?
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Unique question maybe how long did you play games last month?
DRM free gamers have to start playing with a stopwatch. :)
0 Likes
oldrocker99 Nov 19, 2015
Did you ever try Cinnamon as desktop?
Its a quiet decent one, without that fancy large icons popping from everywhere in your face.
I've been using MATE since 1.2 came out. It's far lighterweight than GNOME 2.3, from which it was forked, and is about as lightweight as XCFE or LXDE. Small icons, a built-in dock, nicely configurable and it supports Compiz. When distros began including it, I went into my Happy Dance. Currently running Ubuntu MATE 15,.10, and very satisfied ^_^ . I did try Cinnamon :S: , and, while it's a huge advance over GNOME 3 :><: , that's a pretty low bar to get over.
Of course, we Linux users have all these desktops to choose from. Y'know, freedom
! Try that with any other OS, of course/
1 Likes, Who?
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