Linux share on Steam hits highest peak in years thanks to Steam Deck

Quoting: WMan22A lot of people are just waiting for the mere opportunity to pick up their Steam Deck. The platform's rolling out so slowly, though I'd prefer they do it this way over just bulk releasing them and have scalpers snatch em all up and run into the same problem anyway.

Still plenty of scalpers around, noticing Steam Decks for sale on Ebay at big mark-ups. Sure, you can only reserve one Deck per Steam account - but that doesn't stop you owning multiple accounts.

The glorious return of Windows 7
Windows 7 64 bit
3.01% +0.60%

Which is obviously caused by
Simplified Chinese
24.75% +2.50%

They can't get rid of the legacy
Also the increase of the Chinese hasn't stopped the increase of Linux gamers.

Quoting: g000h

Quoting: WMan22A lot of people are just waiting for the mere opportunity to pick up their Steam Deck. The platform's rolling out so slowly, though I'd prefer they do it this way over just bulk releasing them and have scalpers snatch em all up and run into the same problem anyway.

Still plenty of scalpers around, noticing Steam Decks for sale on Ebay at big mark-ups. Sure, you can only reserve one Deck per Steam account - but that doesn't stop you owning multiple accounts.

Though they'd have had to own those accounts for at least one month prior to the opening of pre-orders; accounts less than a month old weren't allowed to pre-order until after a three-day period. (For reference, I just got my order email June 30 after ordering ~1.25 hours after the window opened, so we're nowhere near that 3 day mark yet.) I'm sure there are some people who had accounts like that they could use, but I bet a lot of those scalpers only have a single unit to sell at this point.

Quoting: fireplaceI’m glad the Steam Flatpak is getting more traction. Native games on Linux sometimes required libraries outside of the Steam runtime, and developers don’t notice this and just say that it only supports ubuntu or fedora or some crap like that. Now with the Flatpak, it’ll be clear as day if the native game works or not.

Flatpak Steam has some issues but mostly with older native goldscr games and is easily fixable with a launch option. However I use it simply due to organization and the fact it limits read/write of all my other files on my desktop. 100% recommend the steam flatpak especially if you hate when native linux games just throw folders anywhere in /home/.

Quoting: Guest1.18% of the survey were GNU+Linux users, and 7.57% of those were Steam Deck owners, which means \~0.09% of Steam users have a Steam Deck (9 in 10,000).

Steam's last announced figure of 132 million monthly active users came at the beginning of 2022.
That comes out to a little over 100,000 Steam Decks in the wild (unless my maths is wrong). That seems reasonable, based on what I've heard about estimated numbers of shipped units (approx 6,000 per week).

Though not everyone with a Deck is getting opted-in to the survey, so it's more of a snapshot than definitive numbers.

Agreed, I think the 118k number is probably pretty accurate. It's also in Valve's interest to force a survey for every Deck, not only to show strong numbers, but to comparee purchase with usage. I wouldn't be surprised if it does a survey on first run (which is ancedotally consistent with my experience with Steam; survey on new installation.)

Quoting: udekmp69

Quoting: fireplaceI’m glad the Steam Flatpak is getting more traction. Native games on Linux sometimes required libraries outside of the Steam runtime, and developers don’t notice this and just say that it only supports ubuntu or fedora or some crap like that. Now with the Flatpak, it’ll be clear as day if the native game works or not.

Flatpak Steam has some issues but mostly with older native goldscr games and is easily fixable with a launch option. However I use it simply due to organization and the fact it limits read/write of all my other files on my desktop. 100% recommend the steam flatpak especially if you hate when native linux games just throw folders anywhere in /home/.

Question, I'm not familiar with snap/flatpack, but if it keeps everything in the container, does that mean it limits what it can access outside the container? Like prevents Steam from reading the rest of my /home partition for example?

Quoting: fireplaceI’m glad the Steam Flatpak is getting more traction. Native games on Linux sometimes required libraries outside of the Steam runtime, and developers don’t notice this and just say that it only supports ubuntu or fedora or some crap like that. Now with the Flatpak, it’ll be clear as day if the native game works or not.

I'm not happy to see a patch getting more traction.
I would be happy if the patch wouldn't be needed because the cure gained the traction, instead.

Some fun math: if last month SD were at ~5% and this month it is at 7.5%, it means an increment of 2.5%/month ( I know I'm making a lot of inaccurate assumptions but for this back of the envelope calculations I think they are ok). However, Valve just said they are more than doubling production so I would expect an increase of ~5%, which would put the SD at 12.5% of Linux usage, close to doubling it's previous number.

Let's see but if this prediction happens, I think we may start seeing the SD noticeable overall soon.

According to the trend line in the plot, linux will hit 50% of the market share sometime in June of 2500. I need to make memo for my grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand children to check this out :)

Quoting: mphuZIt's a shame that Valve hasn't released the SteamOS desktop distribution yet.
And even the new Big Picture is missing in the beta version of Steam.

The SteamOS is suited to SteamDeck's hardware. This makes the whole thing easier and cleaner. Desktop OSes must be ready for all kind of hardware, and not all combinations will work well. Although I would love to see the Steam OS on PCs, I don't think it would be a good thing after all:

- the SteamOS development team would have to deal with probably 1000% increase of bugs, issues and bad press, which is not going to help anyone
- users would be frustrated by various issues that don't exist on SteamDeck, so the experience hadn't been so smooth
- the bad press, experiences, would likely distract from the process of marketing SteamDeck, they already have their hands full, they should stay focused, they are already doing a lot

We already have community OSes like Chimera OS that is doing a similar thing, but is more open that SteamOS and suitable for PCs. Any issues with the system won't be credited back to Valve.

Said that, I don't think that releasing SteamOS for PCs will happen or if it happens, it may not be a good thing, unless Valve makes this an unofficial spin-off, run by and for the community - without any guaranties or official ties to Valve. If there would be some hidden, unofficial support of some Valve employees, it would be a nice touch thou.


Last edited by michaldybczak on 3 July 2022 at 11:12 am UTC

Quoting: denyasisQuestion, I'm not familiar with snap/flatpack, but if it keeps everything in the container, does that mean it limits what it can access outside the container? Like prevents Steam from reading the rest of my /home partition for example?

For Flatpak, indeed, it will protect your /home from Steam reading and writing anywhere it wants. You can of course add supplementary paths, notably with "flatseal" app, that's what I do with my library being on another drive than my /home. You can also add paths as read only, as an example for music access.

For snaps, depending on what the application packager does (enable full home access by default or not), it should also protect your /home. I also remember that snap has no support for fine grained permissions (allowing one specific folder). At least from the last time I used it. And there is no "flatseal" equivalent for easy management of permissions.