The latest Steam Hardware Survey is out, and as usual some websites are claiming the death of SteamOS. We are here with a better outlook.
February 2016
Linux: 0.91% - 0.04%
If you only take the latest stats at face value alone, you are of course going to see articles containing things like this:
Source - I actually like a lot of PC World's stuff, but this article needed a little more research which I hope they do in future.
There's some key things here that people just aren't covering (or they just aren't aware which is possible).
- The first and most important thing is that SteamOS and Steam Big Picture just don't show a survey, and that's a fact we actually covered.
- Linking into that above fact, for all we know a bunch of people are now using a SteamOS machine rather than their desktop for gaming (or the PC linked to their TV now uses SteamOS rather than another distribution which is what I did), so they aren't tracked at all by this survey. I might have even been one of them, since I use mine regularly.
- The third important thing to remember is that the Steam user-base is constantly growing, and at a rather decent pace too. This growth in general means that even if the Linux percentage on Steam is shown as slightly lower it's actually bigger overall. It's just that Steam's growth is outpacing Linux growth by itself to show a positive uptake on the Steam Hardware Survey.
I would also like to just point out in general, that the percentages we are talking about here are so low it could even be put down to statistical anomalies. We're not only talking below 1% here, we're talking a 0.04% drop over last month, that's a tiny percentage.
Honestly, I think Valve are starting to do more damage month after month having the Operating System (software) in a Hardware survey. I wish they would do something to fix this. It's a hardware survey after all, and you can trigger it easily with a change of hardware or operating system so it's not a great measure to use. How many of you have said about seeing it in Wine, or booting into Windows to see it pop up? I see lots of comments on that.
Linux is actually doing quite well overall looking at the games we have gained, and the games we will be getting. We also have Vulkan coming along which could offer a performance boost for the heavier games.
We also now have well over 1900 games available on Steam for Linux and that number is growing at a great pace. We have Feral Interactive about to announce what looks like two titles too, here and here.
You can also see on SteamDB how many games are likely to come to Linux in future too (quite a lot), and that's only games that have bits stored on Steam. Plenty of games still manage to hide from it before release.
So remember to stay strong, and keep buying those Linux games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
February 2016
Linux: 0.91% - 0.04%
If you only take the latest stats at face value alone, you are of course going to see articles containing things like this:
PC WorldValve's considerable efforts on behalf of Linux-based gaming just aren't paying off.
Source - I actually like a lot of PC World's stuff, but this article needed a little more research which I hope they do in future.
There's some key things here that people just aren't covering (or they just aren't aware which is possible).
- The first and most important thing is that SteamOS and Steam Big Picture just don't show a survey, and that's a fact we actually covered.
- Linking into that above fact, for all we know a bunch of people are now using a SteamOS machine rather than their desktop for gaming (or the PC linked to their TV now uses SteamOS rather than another distribution which is what I did), so they aren't tracked at all by this survey. I might have even been one of them, since I use mine regularly.
- The third important thing to remember is that the Steam user-base is constantly growing, and at a rather decent pace too. This growth in general means that even if the Linux percentage on Steam is shown as slightly lower it's actually bigger overall. It's just that Steam's growth is outpacing Linux growth by itself to show a positive uptake on the Steam Hardware Survey.
I would also like to just point out in general, that the percentages we are talking about here are so low it could even be put down to statistical anomalies. We're not only talking below 1% here, we're talking a 0.04% drop over last month, that's a tiny percentage.
Honestly, I think Valve are starting to do more damage month after month having the Operating System (software) in a Hardware survey. I wish they would do something to fix this. It's a hardware survey after all, and you can trigger it easily with a change of hardware or operating system so it's not a great measure to use. How many of you have said about seeing it in Wine, or booting into Windows to see it pop up? I see lots of comments on that.
Linux is actually doing quite well overall looking at the games we have gained, and the games we will be getting. We also have Vulkan coming along which could offer a performance boost for the heavier games.
We also now have well over 1900 games available on Steam for Linux and that number is growing at a great pace. We have Feral Interactive about to announce what looks like two titles too, here and here.
You can also see on SteamDB how many games are likely to come to Linux in future too (quite a lot), and that's only games that have bits stored on Steam. Plenty of games still manage to hide from it before release.
So remember to stay strong, and keep buying those Linux games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
The comments on this article are closed.
oldrocker99 Mar 5, 2016
I love Linux and hate its non-adoption on the desktop. I'm chuffed at the article in Maximum PC that advised readers to reformat their Steam Machine and just install Windows. I chortle at Microsoft's closed-garden approach. I applaud Steam for trying harder than anyone else to bring quality games to Linux users.
No, I haven't gotten a Steam survey yet.
No, I haven't gotten a Steam survey yet.
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This articles are not bad, the journalist are doing their job of taking the information at the source (the hw survey). The problem is the hardware survey, this thing need to change to help be more representative of Linux usage. But to be fair even the corrected number is probably far from journalists expectations after they saw Gabe Newell push for Linux. The backlash of SteamOS did not help, and now we need something amazing (we may have some soon but will this be enough) or a big comeback of the Steam Machines if we want to get our numbers growing at a decent rate.
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ElectricPrism Mar 5, 2016
Quoting: PeciskSo strap on, review games, ... Linux is not going away as a gaming platform. It will only get better. Case closed.
Erm.... strap what on? I've never heard that phrase used as you just used it.
Strap up implies getting ready for combat grabbing your artillery. Buckle Your Seat-belt implies shits gonna go real fast. Strap on implies? [...]?
Quoting: PeciskQuoting: toorHere: http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/461763/linux-et-le-jeu-video-un-beau-roman-d-amitie-qui-ne-fait-pas-recette-sur-steam.htm
The most famous french video game website also just released an article about how "failure steam is with linux". Claiming that it's not going well at all and will disappear.
Do you think microsoft is getting major video game medias to give a bad image of steamOS ? :þ
Microsoft is well known for handing out PR money to sink competition. It is nothing new, especially regarding Linux. However you also must consider that huge part of so called "journalists" are just Windows users, and are ignorant as hell. They just don't know anything better so don't even have to be paid to paint bad image of Valve Linux strategy.
Because M$ has never used Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) to sway the dumb masses into making choices that benefit their business eh, oh wait.... no - they've done exactly that.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
Quoting: amonobeaxLet's not forget we're not at the same page as Windows feature wise. Many Linux users don't care, but we're talking about ppl coming from the Windows ecosystem their rationality might differ from ours.
Momma says just yesterday after being exclusively on Gnome & Pantheon for a couple years now that using Windows is "strange" and "weird" and that "she doesn't like it". People like what they know.
Of course Microlites don't know about the awesomeness of Shell, SSH, HTOP, IFTOP, X Forwarding, Apt/Yum/Pacman, WPS Office (Only free on Linux), Tabbed File Manager, Tomahawk, Gnome/KDE Plasmoids/Extensions, Rsync
And the biggest of all is that Copy / Paste is not part of explorer.exe which crashes regularly leaving your file operations in some sort of purgatory where you have no clue how far it got without re copying/moving 100GB of files.
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Mountain Man Mar 6, 2016
To help put things in perspective, 1/3 of Steam's catalog is currently available for Linux. When you consider that two years ago, that number was zero, it's easy to make the argument that Linux gaming has seen amazing growth in an incredibly short amount of time, and we're still in the early days! To scoff at Linux gaming as a failure seems rather uninformed and short-sighted.
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Okay, this is my personal opinion on what needs to happen for Linux/SteamOS to take off.
1. Performance. This is the big one. As long as Linux lags behind windows on the performance front, you're never going to see a huge upswing in adoption. The hardcore gaming crowd loves their benchmarks. They want something to show off just how fast and spiffy swift their new $2500 tower 'o super power is, and they'll flock to the OS that gives them the most bang.
Beyond Vulkan, which has TONS of promise, and looks to be able to at least match DX12 on the performance front in an all-things-equal situation, Linux needs better drivers. Valve needs to harass AMD and Nvidia to better optimize what they're offering if they want to eek out a cut of the market.
2. Ease of use and reliability. From my experiences, Linux itself is generally lighter on its feet and more stable than even the already pretty stable and light on its feet Windows 10 (well, besides those random spikes of permanent 100% memory usage, but that's another story for another forum).
The software that runs on the OS is another story entirely, especially the games.
Case in point, I bought Firewatch earlier this week. Awesome game. Ended up playing it in Windows. When I first fired it up, my Steam controller wouldn't work. I went to grab a premade profile that emulated a kb/m setup, because the game WOULD NOT see the controller itself, despite the fact it has support for it built right in. But to do that, I had to launch into Big Picture mode, because Steam on Linux won't bring up the controller overlay when you hit the Steam button when you're on the desktop. Then I got in the game itself, and saw red sparkly lights everywhere a'la XCOM 2. First I updated my drivers. Still there. Then I took a dive into the Nvidia control panel, played around with some settings and toggles, which solved that issue...
...but then had problems with the lighting and shadows ingame. The game was unplayable.
I just gave up, bowed my head in defeat, and booted into Windows. Everything worked perfectly there. Didn't have a single problem.
Yeah, you could lay the blame at the feet of the developers, especially when you consider that there are more complicated games out there, in terms of both graphics and gameplay, that run, to the naked eye, as well in Linux as they do in Windows. Divinity and Alien Isolation come to mind. But at the same time, your average gamer geek won't really care. They'll want it to work, and they'll use the OS where it's most likely to work. Since any newcomers to the Linux scene will likely be dual booting to test the waters, they'll inevitably end up spending more time in Windows at best, give up on Linux entirely at worst.
3. Like the guy in the interview said, games need to launch simultaneously to have a chance to rack up some sales. This is for much the same reason why games need to work well right out of the box. Most people are going to be dual booting, and gamers, being an impatient bunch, will play it wherever it's readily available. A release two months later will still sell to the Linux exclusive crowd, but everyone else will have already played it.
4. Linux is still a little rough around the edges. While things have improved GREATLY over the years, it can still occasionally be a chore to use. You'll see the odd weirdo issue pop up that requires a diving into Google for an hour or two to figure out. Odd weirdo issues that has absolutely no parallel in Windows, mind. While I can't say that the Windows scene is always a silky smooth experience 24/7, it does have one big advantage over Linux.
...I know Windows well. So do a lot of other people. Linux, on the other hand, is still something of a new and different thing to me. As it will be to a lot of other people.
It's early days yet, and things are hardly doom and gloom. There's enough here to get me interested, and I'm sure not the only one who's interest in piqued. But some strides have to be made before it can be considered a true competitor to the MS juggernaut.
Last edited by Renzatic Gear on 6 March 2016 at 6:04 am UTC
1. Performance. This is the big one. As long as Linux lags behind windows on the performance front, you're never going to see a huge upswing in adoption. The hardcore gaming crowd loves their benchmarks. They want something to show off just how fast and spiffy swift their new $2500 tower 'o super power is, and they'll flock to the OS that gives them the most bang.
Beyond Vulkan, which has TONS of promise, and looks to be able to at least match DX12 on the performance front in an all-things-equal situation, Linux needs better drivers. Valve needs to harass AMD and Nvidia to better optimize what they're offering if they want to eek out a cut of the market.
2. Ease of use and reliability. From my experiences, Linux itself is generally lighter on its feet and more stable than even the already pretty stable and light on its feet Windows 10 (well, besides those random spikes of permanent 100% memory usage, but that's another story for another forum).
The software that runs on the OS is another story entirely, especially the games.
Case in point, I bought Firewatch earlier this week. Awesome game. Ended up playing it in Windows. When I first fired it up, my Steam controller wouldn't work. I went to grab a premade profile that emulated a kb/m setup, because the game WOULD NOT see the controller itself, despite the fact it has support for it built right in. But to do that, I had to launch into Big Picture mode, because Steam on Linux won't bring up the controller overlay when you hit the Steam button when you're on the desktop. Then I got in the game itself, and saw red sparkly lights everywhere a'la XCOM 2. First I updated my drivers. Still there. Then I took a dive into the Nvidia control panel, played around with some settings and toggles, which solved that issue...
...but then had problems with the lighting and shadows ingame. The game was unplayable.
I just gave up, bowed my head in defeat, and booted into Windows. Everything worked perfectly there. Didn't have a single problem.
Yeah, you could lay the blame at the feet of the developers, especially when you consider that there are more complicated games out there, in terms of both graphics and gameplay, that run, to the naked eye, as well in Linux as they do in Windows. Divinity and Alien Isolation come to mind. But at the same time, your average gamer geek won't really care. They'll want it to work, and they'll use the OS where it's most likely to work. Since any newcomers to the Linux scene will likely be dual booting to test the waters, they'll inevitably end up spending more time in Windows at best, give up on Linux entirely at worst.
3. Like the guy in the interview said, games need to launch simultaneously to have a chance to rack up some sales. This is for much the same reason why games need to work well right out of the box. Most people are going to be dual booting, and gamers, being an impatient bunch, will play it wherever it's readily available. A release two months later will still sell to the Linux exclusive crowd, but everyone else will have already played it.
4. Linux is still a little rough around the edges. While things have improved GREATLY over the years, it can still occasionally be a chore to use. You'll see the odd weirdo issue pop up that requires a diving into Google for an hour or two to figure out. Odd weirdo issues that has absolutely no parallel in Windows, mind. While I can't say that the Windows scene is always a silky smooth experience 24/7, it does have one big advantage over Linux.
...I know Windows well. So do a lot of other people. Linux, on the other hand, is still something of a new and different thing to me. As it will be to a lot of other people.
It's early days yet, and things are hardly doom and gloom. There's enough here to get me interested, and I'm sure not the only one who's interest in piqued. But some strides have to be made before it can be considered a true competitor to the MS juggernaut.
Last edited by Renzatic Gear on 6 March 2016 at 6:04 am UTC
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Mblackwell Mar 6, 2016
Weird that you had issues with Firewatch. I played it the day it came out (and beat it the next day) and didn't run into any issues at all. Not trying to say the issues you had are fake or anything, just wondering what the heck happened!
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Quoting: PeciskBut as regarding these bad posts it is worth politely contact media and inform them if they got something wrong.
I did for c't, pointing out the driver problem.
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Mountain Man Mar 6, 2016
Quoting: Renzatic Gear1. Performance. This is the big one.I agree, although I think people make a much bigger deal about benchmarks than is warranted. In the majority of cases, Linux easily gets above the 60FPS threshhold, so most people wouldn't even notice that it theoretically lags behind Windows in terms of performance. What it does, though, is deny Linux gamers the coveted "My OS is better than your OS" bragging rights which a lot of people irrationally value.
This is one area where Linux could easily improve.
Quoting: Renzatic Gear2. Ease of use and reliability.What you describe is a "Your mileage will vary" scenario. You mentioned XCOM 2 as being a particularly troublesome game for you, but here's a video showing that it runs equal to and even better than Windows on the exact same hardware:
View video on youtube.com
Having played the game myself, I can confirm that it runs beautifully in Linux, which is likely the result of Firaxis bringing Feral in from the beginning to create the Linux version alongside the Windows version instead of after the fact, and this is where Linux could see the biggest performance and stability gains. It also allowed for a Day 1 Linux release. Too many Linux ports are done after the Windows version is completed, and that needs to change.
But getting back to your problem, that just sounds like you have something misconfigured on your system which can happen in Windows easily enough.
Quoting: Renzatic Gear3. Like the guy in the interview said, games need to launch simultaneously to have a chance to rack up some sales.Agreed.
Quoting: Renzatic Gear4. Linux is still a little rough around the edges. While things have improved GREATLY over the years, it can still occasionally be a chore to use. You'll see the odd weirdo issue pop up that requires a diving into Google for an hour or two to figure out. Odd weirdo issues that has absolutely no parallel in Windows, mind.What? Sorry, but Windows has plenty of odd weirdo issues. I've encountered many of them myself, either troubleshooting my own problems or ones my wife has encountered, and I recently gave up on Windows entirely when a Windows Update got stuck in an endless loop that a Google search informed me is a rather common problem without an easy solution. So I blew away my Windows partition and never looked back. Linux is, in fact, much easier to troubleshoot and repair than Windows or OSX because everything is open. You're not stuck trying to navigate a locked down environment with limited access to the underlying system.
So in the end, the only real "downsides" of Linux gaming at the moment are performance and timeliness of releases, both of which can be solved with relative ease.
Last edited by Mountain Man on 6 March 2016 at 5:36 pm UTC
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wvstolzing Mar 6, 2016
Quoting: ElectricPrismQuoting: PeciskSo strap on, review games, ... Linux is not going away as a gaming platform. It will only get better. Case closed.Erm.... strap what on? I've never heard that phrase used as you just used it.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to think that.
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The real problem with the Steam Hardware Survey is in not really knowing what it reflects. Many Linux users have complained that the survey does not reflect their usage, while others point out it is random. But as we don't know what proportion of the user base Valve aim to hit with a survey each month, this is a difficult to judge.
Personally, I have been surveyed 3 times on Linux and about 6 times on Windows / Wine in about 6 years of having a Steam account. Subjectively I would say that I have had fewer surveys per hour of Linux gaming, but this may be because I rarely restart Linux ( just suspend ) compared with how frequently I used to restart Windows. Therefore I rarely restart Steam under Linux, and it is only on a Steam start that I have ever seen the survey.
Similarly, the Steam Hardware Survey only captures a snapshot of "active" steam users, not the passive ones that just use it for digital distribution and play offline, and finally, of course, the survey does not capture those that don't want to have Steam at all, but still play games.
But, even assuming the survey is biased against Linux, it is unlikely that the market is bigger than about 2% of gamers at present, and that will only change as people get machines that are pre-loaded with Linux like the Steam Machines. And that will be a slow build over a number of years. We shouldn't expect more than a small percentage of Windows users to change, as most either don't care or don't have the necessary confidence/skills.
It would be interesting to see Microsoft disable non-Windows Store applications in Windows 10, just to see what the reaction from developers and users is, but I really don't think they are so brave that they will risk destroying their dominant position in the only client market where they are relevant. I would expect the current situation to continue, and just hope that enough developers continue to support Linux ( even though the returns are not great ) on the understanding that it keeps Microsoft honest.
Personally, I have been surveyed 3 times on Linux and about 6 times on Windows / Wine in about 6 years of having a Steam account. Subjectively I would say that I have had fewer surveys per hour of Linux gaming, but this may be because I rarely restart Linux ( just suspend ) compared with how frequently I used to restart Windows. Therefore I rarely restart Steam under Linux, and it is only on a Steam start that I have ever seen the survey.
Similarly, the Steam Hardware Survey only captures a snapshot of "active" steam users, not the passive ones that just use it for digital distribution and play offline, and finally, of course, the survey does not capture those that don't want to have Steam at all, but still play games.
But, even assuming the survey is biased against Linux, it is unlikely that the market is bigger than about 2% of gamers at present, and that will only change as people get machines that are pre-loaded with Linux like the Steam Machines. And that will be a slow build over a number of years. We shouldn't expect more than a small percentage of Windows users to change, as most either don't care or don't have the necessary confidence/skills.
It would be interesting to see Microsoft disable non-Windows Store applications in Windows 10, just to see what the reaction from developers and users is, but I really don't think they are so brave that they will risk destroying their dominant position in the only client market where they are relevant. I would expect the current situation to continue, and just hope that enough developers continue to support Linux ( even though the returns are not great ) on the understanding that it keeps Microsoft honest.
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