I waited a bit longer than usual on this, since last time Valve adjusted their numbers from positive to negative for the Linux market share. It seems as of last month, the Linux market share on Steam went up a bit. You can see them on Steam here.
When I say "went up", I don't mean we actually increased. Well, we did, but we're still not at the levels we were before PUBG's (PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS) release on Steam. Anyway…the January 2018 market share on Steam for Linux was 0.41% (+ 0.15%).
That's certainly better than a continual downward trend that we had been seeing, but as I said in a previous article on this, I fully expect it to bounce around until the incredible interest around games like PUBG subsides.
I've gone and updated my previous charts to highlight what's been happening for those interested. First up, the Linux market share on Steam just by itself to see what's been happening recently.
Now, to get some perspective on why the sudden drop, take a look at the choice of languages on Steam, the battle for the most used language.
Finally, here's a look at what would happen if we took out Simplified Chinese as a language and when we look at just English as a language in relation to the Linux market share on Steam.
You might have questions as to what's going on for January to bounce back a little, well, it could be a simple case of "1,044,000" PUBG players being banned by BattlEye.
I know many of you question the validity of the numbers from the Steam Hardware Survey, but as far as Valve are concerned they're accurate. Here's what a Valve developer said about them about a year ago:
Actually, the real login numbers are usually a bit lower than the reported survey numbers due to the noise of random distribution. The system works as intended.
Just something to think about, for all the people who think it's unfair in some way.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I too receive the survey once or twice a year, and I haven't upgraded anything in a long time.
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As to what the Steam binary "knows"--I work in a university library. Our thing is to keep track of a few million books, journals, DVDs, electronic resources of all sorts and so on. To do this we have an extremely complex and pretty damn expensive software system. And in my job I frequently come face to face with the strong distinction between what "the system knows" as in, the information is definitely in there somewhere, and what "the system knows" as in what there is any way for me to retrieve. Doesn't help that our current system kind of sucks, but it's a general problem with complex software.To add my own experience, on Linux I've seen the survey maybe 3 times in 3 years and yes I also saw it a lot more on Windows. I don't know what that says, I don't know their methods or how they do their sampling.I noticed that survey usually asks for things that can't be detected reliably enough, like your connection speed, microphone use, Steam Link ownership and such. I now strongly believe the survey has nothing to do with calcualting the market shares. As a developer, why would you show a user a survey only to account for their platform? It's already known to the Steam binary! So I think the survey itself is overrated and if you haven't got it even once in years it doesn't mean a thing.
So the Valve people may or may not actually know the platform information that the Steam binary must obviously have. Someone could surely code a way to retrieve that information, but whether they have actually done so or whether they just rely on the survey because it's there, we don't know. All we know is, the only data they're telling anybody is the stuff from the survey. Which may or may not be accurate, because they're also not telling us how the dang thing works.
Thinking of the survey, I think I've gotten it like once in the last few years. I don't even get it when I buy a new computer, install Linux on it and start gaming fresh. OK, my /home gets installed on the new computer from backup, but still. Not much surveyage here.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 8 February 2018 at 5:52 pm UTC
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no_information_here Feb 8, 2018
So the Valve people may or may not actually know the platform information that the Steam binary must obviously have.Yeah, it is too bad that Valve is so short on cash and no software developers want to work for them. Otherwise, a more tech-savvy company could hire someone for a week to write something into the client.
/s
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Really, from a "promoting Linux gaming" perspective I'd probably be more interested in Valve stats of how much money is spent buying games from the different platforms.
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Actually I beleive that the main reason was that some WINDOWS 10 users were unable to boot there PCs after Microsofts emergency Meltdown-Spectre patch! :D
Last edited by wolfyrion on 9 February 2018 at 7:47 am UTC
Last edited by wolfyrion on 9 February 2018 at 7:47 am UTC
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Actually I beleive that the main reason was that some WINDOWS 10 users were unable to boot there PCs after Microsofts emergency Meltdown-Spectre patch! :D
I've seen a few PCs bricked at work , my boss's included.
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slaapliedje Feb 10, 2018
Actually I beleive that the main reason was that some WINDOWS 10 users were unable to boot there PCs after Microsofts emergency Meltdown-Spectre patch! :D
I've seen a few PCs bricked at work , my boss's included.
This brings up what I was thinking. I have talked many times with coworkers about using Linux for work and general desktop use. All of them still have this mentality it is crap. They love it for servers, but think it is not useful for general computing, let alone gaming. And I can't help but think that most of this is fed to them through the push by most IT limiting their supported platforms to Windows or macOS.
Back in 80s, it was said many times, things like "no one was ever fired for buying IBM." What people used at work typically is what people use at home, and I thonk that still partially holds true.
If we could get more companies to support using Linux on company provided laptops, the desktop market share would also go up.
More users there, the more gaming that goes on there.
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If we could get more companies to support using Linux on company provided laptops, the desktop market share would also go up.
Actually , I used to work for a company related to IBM , and the IBM-ers I spoke to told me they had a choice of Windows or Red Hat since they used Lotus Notes at the time for mail/chat.
Not sure if this still holds true today though.
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slaapliedje Feb 10, 2018
If we could get more companies to support using Linux on company provided laptops, the desktop market share would also go up.
Actually , I used to work for a company related to IBM , and the IBM-ers I spoke to told me they had a choice of Windows or Red Hat since they used Lotus Notes at the time for mail/chat.
Not sure if this still holds true today though.
Was that before or after Red Hat stated they no longer cared about the desktop? I can under stand the "we can't support a billion distributions" idea from an IT perspective, but Red Hat Workstation and Ubuntu (as much as I dislike it myself) would be plausible. I am still shocked that mid-7.x release of RHEW, they updated to a newer Gnome-shell.
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If we could get more companies to support using Linux on company provided laptops, the desktop market share would also go up.
Actually , I used to work for a company related to IBM , and the IBM-ers I spoke to told me they had a choice of Windows or Red Hat since they used Lotus Notes at the time for mail/chat.
Not sure if this still holds true today though.
Where I work we are free to choose the OS we like (at least at dev level). Almost all the dev teams use Linux (from Fedora to Ubuntu) but, for some unknown reason, support & professional services use Windows with a lot of shitty tools in order to connect to client servers. Even though almost every devs use Windows for gaming at home. Not sure if there is a relation between what you use at work and what you'll be using at home for daily gaming/web browsing.
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slaapliedje Feb 11, 2018
If we could get more companies to support using Linux on company provided laptops, the desktop market share would also go up.
Actually , I used to work for a company related to IBM , and the IBM-ers I spoke to told me they had a choice of Windows or Red Hat since they used Lotus Notes at the time for mail/chat.
Not sure if this still holds true today though.
Where I work we are free to choose the OS we like (at least at dev level). Almost all the dev teams use Linux (from Fedora to Ubuntu) but, for some unknown reason, support & professional services use Windows with a lot of shitty tools in order to connect to client servers. Even though almost every devs use Windows for gaming at home. Not sure if there is a relation between what you use at work and what you'll be using at home for daily gaming/web browsing.
It's much less so now, but back in the 80s, people would bring work home with them and ended up buying IBM compatibles because Lotus or whatever didn't run on Amiga/ST.
We 'kind of' are allowed to choose OS. Basically we're not bitched at if we use something besides mac/windows, but we're 'on our own' as far as connecting to the VPN and some of the other tools they provide.
But yeah, all the sales/support drones use Windows. I even work with a couple ops guys who chose Windows10 over macOS. I cringe every time I see putty... I did show an engineer CSSH and he about lost his shit when I was typing the same command into 20 systems at once! Thought it was the greatest thing ever.
Last edited by slaapliedje on 11 February 2018 at 4:34 am UTC
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