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Latest 30 Comments

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By elmapul, 2 Apr 2026 at 3:03 pm UTC

Quoting: Nickname
Quoting: _MarsIt will probably go down a bit again.
But can we talk about the 11% for English only? Holy moly.
All those YouTubers and stuff talking about switching to Linux must have really moved the needle after the W10 EoL.
Well they sure have, but I guess English is over represented on Linux because more techy users tend to prefer English as system language over their native language(I know enough people like that myself, even on Windows, Android or Mac). And to be fair, language support for a lot of not-English languages is still poor on many Linux distros, I still remember Firefox on Manjaro resetting the language to english(from the system language) after each update, or lots of not fully translated strings here and there, missing keyboard support for non QWERTY layouts, incomplete glossary etc etc
Thats partially even still the case with big languages like French or German even on bigger distros sometimes(Take german glossary books for instance, still lacking so many words on both Linux and even on Android these days(2026!)) :/
not to mention, the tutorials...
and commands are all english based

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By elmapul, 2 Apr 2026 at 3:00 pm UTC

Quoting: amatai
Quoting: elmapulan console with 6,5M units sold would be called an flop.
6.5 M monthly active users is more like 20 millions units sold. Not a sound success but by no mean a failure. The Switch 2 is there for example.
except it took less than an year to do what we took 30...

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By JohnLambrechts, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:59 pm UTC

is windows cooked chat?

is the year of linux desktop here?

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By elmapul, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:58 pm UTC

Quoting: PlayingOnLinuxphone
Quoting: elmapulan console with 6,5M units sold would be called an flop.
That depends where you came from. A console trade-mark that arrives for the first time with 6.5M is a victory. A Playstation that loses "just" 6.5M (PS5 has sold 92M until 2 months ago) is also a flop. Linux comes from the bottom, so 6.5M is a true victory (and I think you agree).

But don't forget, we are only speaking about Steam-data. I am playing most of the time without Steam titles as Horizon Zero Dawn or Path of Exile 1/2 or indie games. So sometimes I am part of the monthly-players, sometimes I am not while playing every month some sort of games. PCs of governments or companies running desktop Linux are not included, too. India has a market-share of 20% Linux computers all together. Europe and North-America reached 5% last year before Win10 EOL. The real desktop Linux user number is far above and trends as "Europe governments moves to Linux" is not included here.
non gaming pcs dont matter for the gaming market.
most of the linux users will play on steam anyway, i mean, we have less options when it comes to thirdy party clients officially supporting linux, not everyone knows about stuff like heroic/lutris and thoses dont support all windows stores just the most popular ones.

as for the number being big , yes it is for linux, but again, we arent talking about the linux market here, we are talking about the gaming market.
not to mention if an console took 30 years to reach 6.5 millions of users, it wont be seeing as an success, but its good in an specific meassure: trend

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By Jarmer, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:54 pm UTC

Thank you thank you thank you Microsoft for your miserable obsession with AI, your continued march to make Windows the worst possible OS ever conceived, and your seething loathing hatred for every single human that uses any of your products! All of us in linuxland love you so much for all these wonderful things :) Keep on keeping on MS!

News - Mesa 26.0.4 open source graphics drivers released for Linux
By Jarmer, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:49 pm UTC

I'm running mesa 26.0.3 which I think has the recent big RT improvements but I haven't really played a game that would benefit from any RT (also I'm not entirely convinced that rt itself isn't just marketing nonsense). I might fire up Greedfall 2 soon which I think would indeed have some RT stuff, so we shall see!

News - OptiScaler tool gets a huge new release with more upscaling and frame generation goodies
By Vigil, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:42 pm UTC

I've used it a few times to squeeze a few more FPS from a few games. It's a handy way to easily switch from one method to another.

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Eike, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:15 pm UTC

Quoting: Vigil
Quoting: XpanderWhy on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(
Not everyone displays one program at a time taking up the whole monitor. Some people have multiple programs side by side on their widescreen monitor.
Yes, but that's what Responsive Design is all about.

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By ToddL, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:10 pm UTC

I'm glad that the US Patent Office made themselves useful here to reject this Nintendo patent and I hope the appeals from Nintendo fail because this mechanic has been used in other games for a long time but Palworld got caught in their crosshairs.

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Vigil, 2 Apr 2026 at 2:10 pm UTC

Quoting: XpanderWhy on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(
Not everyone displays one program at a time taking up the whole monitor. Some people have multiple programs side by side on their widescreen monitor.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By Nickname, 2 Apr 2026 at 1:48 pm UTC

Quoting: _MarsIt will probably go down a bit again.
But can we talk about the 11% for English only? Holy moly.
All those YouTubers and stuff talking about switching to Linux must have really moved the needle after the W10 EoL.
Well they sure have, but I guess English is over represented on Linux because more techy users tend to prefer English as system language over their native language(I know enough people like that myself, even on Windows, Android or Mac). And to be fair, language support for a lot of not-English languages is still poor on many Linux distros, I still remember Firefox on Manjaro resetting the language to english(from the system language) after each update, or lots of not fully translated strings here and there, missing keyboard support for non QWERTY layouts, incomplete glossary etc etc
Thats partially even still the case with big languages like French or German even on bigger distros sometimes(Take german glossary books for instance, still lacking so many words on both Linux and even on Android these days(2026!)) :/

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Xpander, 2 Apr 2026 at 1:25 pm UTC

I mean we could have the navigation bars on the left side and then the rest of the content stretched more.
would be very readable imo. I just don't like scrolling that much.

something like youtube has for example.. with navigation bar on the left.. though youtube has gone worse over times also so i have to use the rowfixer extension to have more videos in row.

edit: i think its just because everyone designs the sites for mobile scrolling or something these days. I could be wrong ofc.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By amatai, 2 Apr 2026 at 1:12 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapulan console with 6,5M units sold would be called an flop.
6.5 M monthly active users is more like 20 millions units sold. Not a sound success but by no mean a failure. The Switch 2 is there for example.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By PlayingOnLinuxphone, 2 Apr 2026 at 1:08 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapulan console with 6,5M units sold would be called an flop.
That depends where you came from. A console trade-mark that arrives for the first time with 6.5M is a victory. A Playstation that loses "just" 6.5M (PS5 has sold 92M until 2 months ago) is also a flop. Linux comes from the bottom, so 6.5M is a true victory (and I think you agree).

But don't forget, we are only speaking about Steam-data. I am playing most of the time without Steam titles as Horizon Zero Dawn or Path of Exile 1/2 or indie games. So sometimes I am part of the monthly-players, sometimes I am not while playing every month some sort of games. PCs of governments or companies running desktop Linux are not included, too. India has a market-share of 20% Linux computers all together. Europe and North-America reached 5% last year before Win10 EOL. The real desktop Linux user number is far above and trends as "Europe governments moves to Linux" is not included here.

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By McPoedel, 2 Apr 2026 at 1:00 pm UTC

The first character being a movable player (you) and the other a sub character that can be summoned to appear with actions based on different inputs. These inputs include controlling a battle directly between the sub character and an enemy, automatic battles
That sounds a lot like the first Ni No Kuni game, the PS3 version from 2011 that is (which was later ported to PC).

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Liam Dawe, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:59 pm UTC

Quoting: XpanderWhy on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(
The main reason being: readability. For games, having the area across the whole massive monitor makes a lot of sense. It pulls you in, draws you into the world, helps engross you.

But for reading anything, stretching across such a wide area is overall pretty poor. I'm sure there must have been studies on it I read somewhere. It's about not overloading people.

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Eike, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:57 pm UTC

Quoting: XpanderWhy on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(
On second look... GoL does it, too. :D
Well, I wouldn't want to see your comment stretched over the whole monitor, and I'm happier with empty space than say adds.

News - Steam store home page gets a refresh in Beta, plus another Linux SteamRT3 Beta fix
By Xpander, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:44 pm UTC

Why on earth is there so much empty space. Everything is squished into the middle. I have my monitor in landscape not portrait ffs.
well thats not steam only issue ofc. Every freaking site does that these days :(

News - BOXROOM is a clever casual room builder to give your Steam games a shelf
By TangoBaker, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:29 pm UTC

Quoting: Th3_Fr1ng3What would be an epic move, is when you could launch your games by using this game. This would be pretty meta.
If you pick up the game box and open it, you get an option to start the game from there. What I haven't found is how to delete the starter desk.

News - As expected - Slay the Spire 2 leads the way for the most played Steam Deck games for March 2026
By Liam Dawe, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:29 pm UTC

Quoting: BrokattReally happy for their success. Is this the biggest release yet for a Godot title? It must be right?
Yep - biggest ever Godot release by miles.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By CatKiller, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:22 pm UTC

Quoting: vic-bayI am looking at hwsurvey stats again, and considering MacOS also got its share almost doubled, it is not error in counting linux share, but most likely the surveyed set of machines just happend to have lower share of windows.


No, it's that last month's results were broken by the well-known China overcount. Looking at any month's delta is entirely pointless. The useful thing to do is to look at the longer term trends, which Liam has helpfully documented.

Quoting: vic-bayChina has high Windows share, for some reasons.


Decades of intense directed effort at the highest levels from Microsoft.

Quoting: vic-bayIs there any legal issue with automatic data gathering?
Yes. And it's icky. Requesting consent to collect and publish a user's details at the point you do so is the only sane approach.

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By elmapul, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:17 pm UTC

Quoting: shotm7There is like 130M players by month, so 6,5M linux users. How can publishers afford to ignore such an enormous market share? Few businesses ever get the chance to reach such a vast potential audience.
an console with 6,5M units sold would be called an flop.

lets not ignore one thing: half of the market is mobile, and consoles are 25~30% (in terms of revenue, not ammount of users)

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By elmapul, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:16 pm UTC

Quoting: vic-bayI am looking at hwsurvey stats again, and considering MacOS also got its share almost doubled, it is not error in counting linux share, but most likely the surveyed set of machines just happend to have lower share of windows.
or maybe microsoft pissed off a lot of people... not to mention apple relased cheap macs recently

News - The US Patent Office have rejected a Nintendo Pokemon patent for summoning subcharacters
By tuubi, 2 Apr 2026 at 12:01 pm UTC

Our thoughts: It is completely ridiculous that gameplay elements can have a patent at all. Software patents as a whole are a curse on the gaming and hardware industry that only cause issues for everyone and prevent competition.
Hear, hear!

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By elmapul, 2 Apr 2026 at 11:56 am UTC

calm down, valve did some mistakes in their counting in the past, calm down, calm down, calm down...
ok, i cant

News - Lutris now being built with Claude AI, developer decides to hide it after backlash
By tuubi, 2 Apr 2026 at 11:55 am UTC

Quoting: devland
Quoting: fenglengshun
Quoting: devlandLutris forces you to configure each game from scratch while bottles gives you one prefix aka bottle in which you can run things however you want.
Uh, no? I myself just uses the same prefix (and the same system Proton CachyOS) for Lutris, Heroic, and Faugus.
Lutris forces you to configure each game from scratch as in changing the lutris settings and not the prefix itself.

Lutris has, for each game or program you run through it, a different set of settings which you have to manually set.
In Lutris you can set default options for games on the Wine runner. You don't have to tweak them manually for every game. You can also reuse a prefix for games you install by selecting the same prefix path in a game's configuration. It's not as simple and intuitive as in some of the other launchers, but it works just fine.

News - Breath of Fire IV plus classic Resident Evil 1-3 from GOG arrive on Steam - but with DRM
By rustynail, 2 Apr 2026 at 11:44 am UTC

I do like the idea they sort of use Steam to promote GOG but it probably doesn't mean much to people who don't already have an idea of what GOG is

News - Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
By gradyvuckovic, 2 Apr 2026 at 11:36 am UTC

I'm going to quote a couple of my own old comments on this website from the far far distant year of 2020.

The thing which gives me hope every time I see Linux marketshare go up, is the thought that more marketshare makes further growth even easier.

It's hard to gain marketshare when your platform has no organic third party support. But if you can achieve it, and bring users to your platform, then organic third party support will always follow. Developers and manufacturers of software and hardware always follow users. So if we get more users, we get more support.

At 0.91%, we're not exactly commanding a noticeable portion of the marketshare yet. But every little bit of growth means a bit more organic third party support. Which only makes it easier for more users to make the switch to Linux, as more of the stuff they want is already here.

It's really a feedback loop in both ways. No users means no developers. No developers means no users. The chicken and egg problem that has haunted Linux for years. But it goes the other way too, more users means more developers. More developers means more users.
The analogy I'd use is ... imagine that Linux gaming is like a 100m diameter ball of lead, on a flat plateau of land on top of a hill.

We're been trying to get the ball rolling. Once it does build up speed and start going down the hill, it will become an unstoppable force. We've been trying to get it rolling for years, but it's a 100m diameter ball of lead and we're just a dozen people pushing at the side, having no impact. The stubborn bastard wouldn't shift.

Valve's efforts with Steam, Proton, DXVK, ACO, Pressure Vessel, etc, is like bringing 4 giant trucks up to the top of the hill to help us out, they've strapped them up to the ball and are gunning the engines with the tires screeching. The ball is shifting a little, starting to move, a few inches at least, it's working but it's slow. If they keep at it for the long haul and the tires don't pop, eventually it will build up momentum and it'll work.

If it works, Valve is best positioned to benefit from the success. A new mainstream gaming platform will emerge and Valve will be the centre of it's universe.
I feel like... the ball is definitely off the top of the hill now and is starting to roll. Hang onto your butts!