According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That’s a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months… It’s also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.
Data from Valve: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined
I’ve never looked back to Windows since switching my gaming rig to Linux about a year ago.
One of my favorite things is when a game launches with a DX12 option that says “Windows 10/11 only”. Au contraire, game option. You’re about to run on a penguin.
Thank god for Valve and how awesome they’ve been to Linux users
I really hope they release Steam OS for everyone soon. I’d love to install it on my laptop, currently running ChimeraOS which is functionally very similar, but would love to have the stuff like tdp control working in the overlays too without needing third party tools or workarounds.
It would be especially cool for the other handhelds out there like the ROG Ally
I know that there is that unofficial HoloISO that people use for desktop, it seems to work just fine but i would prefer an official distro release myself
Main downside for that is there’s 0 support for Nvidia GPU’s
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That’s still the previous version of SteamOS though. The Arch based one that’s on the Steam Deck still hasn’t been released for everyone to use.
Now we just need an open source steam client and they will be the literal proof that companies can contribute to GNU/Linux and still stay on top.
They’ve done such amazing work for Linux. Linux gaming wouldn’t be the same without them.
and also made popular always online DRM,gambling and lootboxes.
It was going to happen regardless. Better It be Valve dominating the market instead of any other evil corp
So awesome they run a monopoly on videogames through their useless closed source spyware.
Well, their position is what allowed them to do so much for Linux. And their desire to distance themselves from Microsoft, which I’m absolutely on board with.
The only desire they have for is money, this is the same company that doesn’t mind promoting gambling to kids. Their stupid ass closed source launcher that shouldn’t exist needed to run software is a million light years away from what Linux stand for
There are other colours than black and white, you know?
I fully agree that Valve has their share of issues. There’s things I too don’t like about them, but that doesn’t mean the good they do is worthless.
Bringing their spyware to linux isn’t anything good
“This program is spyware because it collects huge amounts of user information, including but not limited to your Home Address, Telephone Number, Credit Card Number, and Internet Search History. Steam also profiles your hardware, communications through Steam’s social networking features, and contains a mandatory self-updater. Steam will not work without an internet connection.”
Seems like they need to collect your address, telephone, and credit card number to process payments? Steam is it’s own internet browser, so the browser data it collects is from itself, not your personal browser.
You seem paranoid and this website seems to be incorrect or purposely stating things in a misleading way, oh and steam does work without and Internet connection
Steam shares your informations with third parties. Zetta you don’t seem to mind much so why don’t you tell us your real name, give us your home address, your telephone number and post a log or your search history? Don’t tell me you are paranoid
doesnt make them any better
Of course they did it because it benefits themselves. But it doesn’t only benefit themselves, which is more than you can say about many others.
It’s not useless. None of the launchers are. I greatly appreciate the auto updating of games, earning achievements, among others things. Sure they have issues, but they would have been dethroned years ago if people didn’t like their software compared to companies like Epic.
lol you must be young,vvery young. valve is the fucking devil XD
Are you getting them confused with another company? Valve’s done bad things in the past of course, but they’re still a lot better than most other gaming companies that I know of. I typically put Valve alongside companies like Capcom and Sega as “one of the not bad ones” in terms of malicious practices.
No I’m not getting them confused them with anybody. I was there when they slapped their dick on the desk with half life 2 and always online DRM ,I’ve seen the rise of the counterstrike lootboxes and the blind eye valve turned to literal money laundering.
Fuck me they might be the worse ever but they somehow convinced you people they love you or something?
Again either you guys have a short memory or you are very very young.
I understand and that was one of the things I was thinking of when I said “Valve’s done bad things in the past of course”. But when you compare them to many other AAA publishers, I don’t see how Valve is particularly bad. Especially when you start bringing up lootboxes. Unlike many other publishes that go these same bad practices, and at a larger scale at that, value has done some good too, and is generally much more permissive about things like fanworks, and that does a lot to build good will. I don’t see what’s “short memory” about this.
And I’m not even saying that I love valve or anything either, but the devil? Compared to other publishers?
Well the thing you are missing is, steam is basically a monopoly and it sucks 30 fucking percent out of every game. Of course they don’t need to do shit anymore compared to eat and Ubisoft. THEY WON already. They de facto own the PC gaming space. But don’t be mistaken nobody has valves power in the PC space. Nobody. And they bought that position with immoral and illegal practices. I’m not gonna like them because it’s been 10 or 20 years. It’s the same company , they just are what EA would like to be.
Realise this: Before steam most games were pirated. Steam made it really easy to pay for games. And ~20 years later we can still play these games.
we can still play all games, no need for steam.
Too young for what? I’m older than the company is and I don’t recall any devilish controversies.
Hardly surprising, especially with SteamDeck’s popularity. Great news regardless! Steam is really making a difference here.
Yes! Not only do I have a Deck, but I’ve switched my main PC to Linux. Sick of Micro$oft’s shit!
I would fully switch to linux - I have done some dabbling with it, including setting up a media PC w/ steam on it - but I cannot run any of my business or productivity apps.
Specifically, Autocad, Revit, and VR software do not work. So wahwah
On the same boat, I would gladly change, but most of my collaborators still use software you can only use on windows, I could use VMs or emulators, but it usually breaks my workflow anyway.
I’m one of these statistics. I got a cheap SSD on Prime Day and installed Pop!_OS. The first thing I did was install Steam.
I still boot to Windows the majority of my time because of other apps or games that I need but I’m trying to get away from Windows.
I did my first Linux Steam hardware survey yesterday so I’m doing my part!
man, I missed it! Is it still going on?
Valve claims it’s monthly but my previous survey was October last year so I doubt that. I don’t believe it was related to the article in the OP. They seem to just randomly pop up after an update. A surprise to be sure but a welcome one.
Linux FTW. Number 1 on servers, now number 2 on Steam! Watch out, Microsoft /s
I’m doing my part, I have installed Steam on two new Ubuntu installs recently, lol.
NixOS on steam deck is currently my daily driver because it’s dedicated, portable linux hardware with better than iGPU performance I can actually afford. Having said that I’m only about a week in, but adding Jovian NixOS modules to my previous configs has been enough to make it a pretty solid experience so far. Amazing portable gaming is a nice bonus.
Count me as one of those new Linux users. I’ve been trying to switch since the 90’s and Linux gaming is finally viable. I know this is in large part thanks to Valve, so thanks, Valve!
If the games you are playing don’t run on linux than you are mostly playing crap designed by people who’s main goal is to empty your pockets and who think that you are stupid
Or you are playing games made on a tight budget focusing on the largest userbase: windows (>90% according to Steam hardware survey)
That clearly does not apply for most of the games holding people back from switching to Linux. It’s mostly going to be games like Destiny 2, PUBG, Rainbox Six, Call of Duty, Battlefield, heck probably even Roblox now.
And funnily enough a lot of indie games do support linux, mostly because are build using engines that make it easy. So I personally reject the claim that it’s games made on a tight budget. Those are going to be few and far between.
why are you guys downvoting him, he’s right
I know countless amazing indie developers who can only afford to target and support Windows as Linux doesn’t generate them any or enough income. They certainly aren’t trying to empty anyone’s pockets, instead supporting their games for years and constantly adding new content for free.
Linux gamers don’t buy every game that developers have put the time and effort into shipping native binaries. Proton is the ideal stop gap until Linux has a bigger user base that can result in a return on investment for native binaries.
yeah and those games usually dont ship with kernel level anticheat…
“Don’t run on linux” does include via Wine/Proton.
I wouldn’t call them amazing if they would rather focus on free/pay content rather than releasing binaries for linux. I wouldn’t call them amazing either if they consider releasing binaries as an investment.
There’s plenty of devs who work on their games without the ambition to bank the stock market.
Did you just wake up today and decide to be an asshole, or is this your usual temperament?
-311 comment points in 8 days. Clearly their usual temperament.
It’s festering toxicity like that user displays that turns developers away from Linux. Would you want support tickets from someone like them?
I also found it hilarious they linked a wiki I’ve been contributing to for years hahaha.
Ugh right? People like that make others not want to use Linux out of spite.
Good, now we need devs to officially support Linux.
I just want games officially supported for proton. Linux ABI is still way too inconsistent compared to Wines, and a bitch to work with. Not to mention, performance tends to be better on proton games lol.
I noticed that wine/dxvk/proton works better than many native Linux versions. This is usually because the game studio does not think Linux is a priority and ships a half-assed implementation. Better to use the optimized version through wine/proton/dxvk.
not really
Well, “officially support” can just mean check if their game runs via proton on the Steam Deck at launch. Fine by me, that is the bare minimum I expect, but to be fair launch day support on linux is still a fairly new thing. Not something I would have expected just a few short years ago.
It’s awesome that Linux is becoming almost a mainstream desktop operating system. The year of Linux is here just another year or 2 and gaming on Linux will be near perfect. But sadly we will not able to play any kernel anticheat games like valorant but who gives a fuck about that game anyways lmao
Does kernel anti cheat really help anything, though? I’m curious about it. Like, how much worse would cheating be without it? I play Apex on Linux. It runs EAC and yes, there are some cheaters but it’s not that bad from what I can tell.
it doesnt
Yes, I’ll switch from Windows to Linux but at the moment I dont trust myself to be able to use Linux as I cannot code and havent any deep knowledge about cpmputers. So I hope that in the next few years there will be the compatibility and ease of use on Linux like there is on windows now.
Edit: ok, thanks everyone.
I am very pro open source and very pro linux (obiously)
With “coding” i ment doing stuff with the terminal. I am mostly concerned with stuff not working when it should and then that the fix is only doable in the terminal and requires trial and error and knowledge and so on…
I was mostly discouraged by the LTT videos about Linux as a daily driver, haming and working on linux and so on. And they made it look that you have problems significantly more frequent than on a windows machine.
And yes, i need to use full office suite, most other programms can be FOSS or linux alternatives tho.
You definitely don’t need to know anything about writing code to use Linux! The closest thing to it is the terminal, which is something you basically never need to use on a standard setup like Pop!OS or Mint. I’ve gotten plenty of my friends using Linux, many of them have never even had to look at a terminal.
The LTT videos assume that you are unwilling to spend a bit of time learning your OS. If you can accept that it won’t be a perfectly smooth experience from the start and that you’ll have to put in a bit of effort to make it do what you want, there’s no reason to not try it out.
I recently went for it and left windows for dual-booting, but the only time that I had to boot it was after finding out that if you mount an NTFS partition in linux without first disabling fast boot on windows, it’ll get broken sooner or later.
Now I’m at a point where troubleshooting stuff on linux is far easier than on windows. Because it’s modular and community-driven, you can always get to the root of a given problem with some googling or asking on one of the many great forums. Windows on the other hand is a proprietary monolith and if something stops working, you can only fiddle around with settings or hope for microsoft to fix it.
Getting there took me about 50-70 hours of troubleshooting total spread across a few years. I wasted a lot more than that trying to troubleshoot windows.
I mean I would accept to get into Linux for the start but I am afraid that my OS will be “a ongoing project” so to say.
I found that it’s different from windows, but not really more work. I get annoyed by small things easily, so finding out you have to tweak the registry to set some things in windows has just been frustrating while I can just customize the little things how I like them on linux by changing a config file or even find that there’s a good GUI for it, like with the task bar for example.
If you’re fine with ignoring the little annoyances on windows, you won’t have issues on Linux either.
There will not be the equivalent compatibility at first. But there will be enough compatibility for most users to not care about it anymore. The equivalent compatibility will only exist once literally every hardware and software manufacturer supports Linux on their own as first-class citizen. And they will only do that once Linux has signifikant desktop marketshare. But it doesn’t matter as long as most stuff still runs no matter what. Which is currently the case. And it’s also gotten easy.
another barrier is for nvidia-based GPUs, it just seems like gaming on Linux with AMD works a lot smoother.
Nvidia here under Linux, been running Nvidia hardware/drivers for about five years now with little in the way of problems. The latest hardware is supported on release, and my performance while gaming is fantastic.
Even Wayland support is maturing under Linux running Nvidia hardware/drivers, to the point whereby it’s mostly as usable as Wayland gets now.
At least you have the option of running the latest Nvidia hardware under Linux, it seems dedicated GPU support under MacOS is dwindling by the month.
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Not surprised. Steam on Linux just works. Click a checkbox in settings to use Proton. Then only way it would be easier is if it would automatically detect Proton and use it. I don’t think it does yet?
I think enabling steam compatibility for all titles do exactly that?
