Linux user share remains above macOS in the latest Steam Survey

There's another interesting number.
While we always consider China to nearly not use Linux, simplified Chinese is the second most used language by Linux Steam users. :D

I have to thank nvidia for enabling me to game on linux at a time when it was impossible otherwise many, many years ago when i had zero success on the terrible fglrx AMD. it's what kept me going until AMDGPU was up and running. Now however im on AMD and its amazing honestly in comparison how much better it is than nvidia, no contest. Your kneecapping yourself running nvidia on linux, it's like choosing to have a lower quality experience on purpose.

Why do you think so? I'm using Nvidia on Linux, and I don't see problems.

I find the desktop experience to be smoother in general. On gnome wayland everything is really snappy and there is no feeling of lag. I don't know why but muilti-monitor was a pain when turning one screen off to save energy it would mess up the orientation. Issues mixed resolution / refresh multimonitor was a big one. Then sometimes i would get proton game hangs. The card seemed to run the fans faster than they reasonably should so perhaps that is a compatibility issue and i had less success with undervolting and controlling the card. But for gaming the overall feeling of stability is there, even with V-Sync on (and i believe this is by design) there is less lag locked at 60 using wayland than relying on X11 desktop compositor + nvidia proprietary. Now you could use force composite pipeline on nvidia but that seemed to cause problems with games like CS:GO or any other triple buffered games.. again not present on wayland even the 'vsync lag' is not there now when its technically vsync'd. Then there is the need to add a separate repository on nvidia and build against the kernal i have, which would sometimes fail because the kernal headers were not matched to the current driver meaning a system boot to the fall back f86 nouveau driver and that was after having to work out how to downgrade kernal and reinstall from the terminal.
outside of that, again i dont know why but emulation has been really smooth and with nvidia i kind of got used to very small amounts of microstutter, just now and again and assumed it was the game engine.. it wasn't it was the drivers / nvidia card.

Knowing how much effort Valve and other companies are pouring into the FOSS driver gives me confidence in more performance gains / stability and future support ... PLUS .. backwards compatibility on older hardware where we at least have the potential for new AMD technologies to trickle back generations, like FS3.

so quite a lot.


edit* i know i mentioned efficiency but my full desktop GPU on AMD is idling at just under 5w and that's even on mixed resolution multi-monitor which was never the case with nvidia and yet there are both technically the same TDP cards.


Last edited by Lofty on 3 September 2023 at 8:59 pm UTC

Apple is a PC vendor, so dropping 32-bit support and not supporting OpenGL / Vulkan directly harmed gaming on their own platform.

They dropped support for old games. So what? Do you really believe any user will be angry & switch the platform? People don't buy Macs to play games. They want to play games on a Mac because they own a Mac. The goal is to get ported games into the app store.

It's glaringly obvious they don't care about this use case, Steam or not Steam.

No, dropping legacy software doesn't say anything about their future efforts. Creating Metal (as a high performance API) & the Game Porting Toolkit on the other hand says they do care.

They deliberately make things worse, something Linux never has done for gamers.

Every single Linux user made things deliberately worse by just switching to Linux. Only a fraction of all Windows games work on Linux (according to ProtonDB only about 15% of the Steam games are tested/documented, for the Steam Deck it's even less). There are still more than enough games to play.

More important than compatibility with old games is compatibility with new releases.

It's glaringly obvious they don't care about this use case, Steam or not Steam.

No, dropping legacy software doesn't say anything about their future efforts. Creating Metal (as a high performance API) & the Game Porting Toolkit on the other hand says they do care.

They care about abstract graphics capability on their hardware, perhaps for use by in-house software and whatnot. But they don't care about the use case of games, as in having large numbers available, because going all Not-Invented-Here by doing Metal is very obviously going to force game developers to do extra stuff before their games will work on MacOS. I'm pretty certain even the Game Porting Toolkit, which sure wasn't around in the earlier days of Metal, still adds significant effort for developers. Not that the point of the technology was to make games hard to port--just, they didn't care.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 3 September 2023 at 8:01 pm UTC

They dropped support for old games. So what?

So it means they don't give two sh*ts about gamers. They do whatever the heck they want for their own purposes. Gamers being completely not a consideration. QED.

Arguing any abstract arguments when they literally made already existing games on their own platform unplayable is pointless. Gamers care about games, not about Apple telling them "your games you paid for are now broken, have fun".


Last edited by Shmerl on 3 September 2023 at 8:15 pm UTC

[…]

Direct3D 12, Announcement: March 24, 2014
Metal, Initial release iOS: June 2, 2014
Vulkan, Announcement: March 13, 2015
Metal, Initial release macOS: June 8, 2015
Direct3D 12, Initial release: July 29, 2015
Vulkan, Initial release: February 16, 2016

So it means they don't give two sh*ts about gamers. They do whatever the heck they want for their own purposes. Gamers being completely not a consideration. QED.

Arguing any abstract arguments when they literally made already existing games on their own platform unplayable is pointless. Gamers care about games, not about Apple telling them "your games you paid for are now broken, have fun".

Yes, your right. Gamers care about games. Apple tries to get games on macOS. Apple cares about games & gamers on macOS. QED!

Talking about unplayable: Valve released a Linux based Steam Deck. Tell me, how many games don't work on the Linux based Steam Deck? What does this tell us about Valve? We're not talking about some games, there are tens of thousands of games.

And another point: Linux did break games. There was & is incompatibility between distributions & there are incompatibilities between base libraries versions (e.g. libc). There are enough reports of old native ports not working on current distributions.

Yes, your right. Gamers care about games. Apple tries to get games on macOS

Saying they care about gamers or try to get games on macOS when they make existing games unplayable is complete nonsense. No point to even argue further about it.

Ubuntu realized it in time when they wanted to drop 32-bit support and reversed that dumb idea, which is a lot better than how Apple treats gamers by completely disregarding them.

That's why I seriously don't get anyone expecting macOS to be usable for gaming, when Apple just gives them middle finger in that sense.

It's simple. Apple cares about Apple and tells users what they should do or not do. Apple doesn't care about gamers and isn't interested in their needs.


Last edited by Shmerl on 3 September 2023 at 9:30 pm UTC

Saying they care about gamers or try to get games on macOS when they make existing games unplayable is complete nonsense. No point to even argue further about it.

But they are. No point to even argue further about it. Just because they removed support for legacy software doesn't make the other untrue.

Apple doesn't care about gamers and isn't interested in their needs.

You probaly don't know much about macOS users, gamers or their needs.

What a fluffy troll we have here...

Direct3D 12, Announcement: March 24, 2014
Metal, Initial release iOS: June 2, 2014
Vulkan, Announcement: March 13, 2015
Metal, Initial release macOS: June 8, 2015
Direct3D 12, Initial release: July 29, 2015
Vulkan, Initial release: February 16, 2016

Your timeline is misleading. Both MS and Apple can be blamed for not supporting Vulkan. They did it very deliberately knowing it's being developed, since they did it out of obvious lock-in intent.


Last edited by Shmerl on 4 September 2023 at 12:29 am UTC

Your timeline is misleading. Both MS and Apple can be blamed for not supporting Vulkan. They did it very deliberately knowing it's being developed, since they did it out of obvious lock-in intent.

Are you serious? My timeline? We are talking about facts (The way it's a fact, that Apple wants to get games on macOS, because they said so). But to spell it out: Apple released Metal two years before Vulkan was released. Or in other words: To support Vulkan Apple would had to wait two whole years.

To signify how much time two years are: How successful would the Steam Deck be if players had to wait two years for any game to be playable? Steam machine ring a bell?

Are you serious? My timeline?

Timeline starts with Mantle which presented such ideas before Apple and MS rushed to make NIH knock offs of them. And AMD from the beginning expressed the interest to make it a common API. That's why Mantle later was turned into Vulkan. Basically, collaboration on it could have started from the beginning, if Apple and MS weren't arrogant lock-in proponents who benefit from work of others either way.

See also: https://twitter.com/renderpipeline/status/581086347450007553


Last edited by Shmerl on 4 September 2023 at 6:29 am UTC

Apple runs an app store on their phones and one on their computers. The store on the phone removes old software regularly. They break APIs all the time and software (including games) needs to be maintained and updated constantly to remain usable on new os versions. As far as I can tell they run their computer store the same way.

Gaming is huge on their phones, possibly on their computers as well, but it's not the kind of gaming we think of. Their approach perhaps makes sense for general software and throwaway phone endless runners or farm sims, but "traditional" games (that get updated for a limited time) do not fit this model at all.

I, personally, treat my games very seriously and want to be able to keep playing them after years and years. The Apple ecosystem does not allow for this.

They obviously don't care about Steam and games Mac users buy there. It makes them no money and they made a lot of them useless when they dropped 32-bit support and surely will again as they obsolete APIs.

The only thing they're interested in is keeping the money coming in, which in turn forces developers into constant revenue stream models like subscriptions, micro transactions or ads. And Apple clearly supports gaming in this scope.


Last edited by damarrin on 4 September 2023 at 10:25 am UTC

Apple does care about gaming. I don't own a mac or iWhatever, so I don't have firsthand data, but I know that:

- iOS gaming is *much* bugger than Android gaming
- Some developers prefer to write Vulkan apps on Mac, over MoltenVk, just because the metal debug tools are better than Vulkan's

So, no, metal was not a gimmick for their own internal use. They forced it on iOS, it has great tools apparently, and it *is* successful.

I know, it's unfortunate, and I wish Vulkan was in a better situation, but it is what it is.

So Apple may or may not care about gaming on *mac* (I would argue we don't know, because we don't have numbers from their store). But it very clearly does care about *gaming*, and they are being very successful about it.

(The way it's a fact, that Apple wants to get games on macOS, because they said so)

It's a fact. Because a corporation said so.

I mean, technically, it's no doubt vaguely true, in the sense that I want a pineapple fresh from the tree to drop into my lap. I'm not willing right now to do what it would take to get that to happen (e.g. travel to Hawaii), so it' s a pretty abstract desire. So, sure, Apple want games on MacOS, in the sense that they would be happy if it sort of spontaneously happened, but their main corporate goals dictate doing various things that will make it unlikely; they don't care enough to take platform actions that would help it happen.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 4 September 2023 at 2:05 pm UTC

Another question, does somebody have survey results of the last months or years stored? Would be interesting to draw the Mac line as well. :D

Wayback Machine.

Well, that did work!



If it's a trend, it's a new one it seems.
Or I need to dig further down the timeline.

*edit* Fetched some more data, and I don't see a Mac decline between August 2021 (oldest number fetched) and May 2023. Wayback Machine is slow. It must be reading the data from tape. X)


Last edited by Eike on 4 September 2023 at 4:24 pm UTC

Your timeline is misleading. Both MS and Apple can be blamed for not supporting Vulkan. They did it very deliberately knowing it's being developed, since they did it out of obvious lock-in intent.

Are you serious? My timeline? We are talking about facts (The way it's a fact, that Apple wants to get games on macOS, because they said so). But to spell it out: Apple released Metal two years before Vulkan was released. Or in other words: To support Vulkan Apple would had to wait two whole years.

To signify how much time two years are: How successful would the Steam Deck be if players had to wait two years for any game to be playable? Steam machine ring a bell?

Your timeline is faulty, Vulkan was first announced in July 2014 at the SIGGRAPH conference. And ofc development had been quicker if say Apple and Microsoft had decided to join the development, one cannot just ignore the massive amount of money and resources that those two have compared with Khronos.

Also I don't see why waiting would have been such a problem, the first wave of games released with Metal came in 2017 anyway since everyone waited to see it stabilize first.


Last edited by F.Ultra on 4 September 2023 at 4:13 pm UTC

Another question, does somebody have survey results of the last months or years stored? Would be interesting to draw the Mac line as well. :D

Wayback Machine.

Well, that did work!

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If it's a trend, it's a new one it seems.
Or I need to dig further down the timeline.

*edit* Fetched some more data, and I don't see a Mac decline between August 2021 (oldest number fetched) and May 2023. Wayback Machine is slow. It must be reading the data from tape. X)

I went back as far as Liam's Steam Tracker does (since some subset of data before then is hinky):



(Edit: added trend lines)


Last edited by CatKiller on 4 September 2023 at 6:15 pm UTC

I went back as far as Liam's Steam Tracker does (since some subset of data before then is hinky):

Thanks!
August 2021 was a bad date for my cutoff. :D
Did you fetch all of that manually from the website? It sometimes took like half a minute for it to display the link(s) for a certain day for me...


Last edited by Eike on 4 September 2023 at 6:18 pm UTC

Did you fetch all of that manually from the website? It sometimes took like half a minute for it to display the link(s) for a certain day for me...

I did. I've done data hunting for Liam's tracker before. The trick is to load the results into new tabs so that they can be getting on with loading while you wait for the next link to appear. And to make a cup of tea if it's getting too tedious, of course.


Last edited by CatKiller on 4 September 2023 at 6:32 pm UTC