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Steam On Linux Usage Spikes To Nearly 2% In July, Larger Marketshare Than Apple macOS

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: …steampowered.com/…/Steam-Hardware-Software-Surve…

timkenhan ,

Hardly surprising, especially with SteamDeck’s popularity. Great news regardless! Steam is really making a difference here.

PersnickityPenguin ,

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

desconectado ,

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.

Swarfega ,

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.

circuitfarmer ,
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

featherfurl ,

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.

chockblock ,

How does NixOS compare to SteamOS on the Deck? Does it work just as smooth? Also, is EMUDeck compatible with NixOS?

XEAL ,

I’m doing my part, I have installed Steam on two new Ubuntu installs recently, lol.

littlecolt ,

Yes! Not only do I have a Deck, but I’ve switched my main PC to Linux. Sick of Micro$oft’s shit!

grimaferve ,

I did my first Linux Steam hardware survey yesterday so I'm doing my part!

masterairmagic ,

man, I missed it! Is it still going on?

grimaferve ,

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.

Kaped ,

Let s fucking go

MaxPower ,
@MaxPower@feddit.de avatar

Linux FTW. Number 1 on servers, now number 2 on Steam! Watch out, Microsoft /s

cipherlab ,

I’m sure 99% of it is Steam Decks

ezahn ,
@ezahn@mastodon.uno avatar

@cipherlab @pnutzh4x0r Nonetheless, it's quite the achievement. That's exactly what Linux needs: visible, tangible and reputable hardware that's ostensibly better than the competition. It's great to be flexible, but you still need to have a face.

MaxPower , (edited )
@MaxPower@feddit.de avatar

The post says ~42 % is Steam OS

altima_neo , (edited )
@altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

Due to the steam summer sale perhaps?

snowbell ,
@snowbell@beehaw.org avatar

This is what finally got me to buy one.

Scout339 ,

Actually its only 44% steam decks!

shirro ,

Less than that though they are a large slice.

Most Windows and practically all Mac instances are preinstalled by the hardware vendor. There are very few companies selling preinstalled Linux gaming machines other than the Steam Deck. I expect they might be a majority of new Linux steam users for some time as they are by far the lowest entry cost in terms of hardware, prerequisite technical knowledge and time.

Many gamers who dabble with Linux are still taking the path of least resistance and dual booting for gaming. Linux first people like myself will continue to grow in number but as long as it is a DIY thing realistically we will always be a few percent at best as most people want a simpler out of box gaming experience.

ReakDuck ,

I found way to many Linux gamers in the wild. So no, they are not Steam Decks.

Pollux ,

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

brihuang95 ,
@brihuang95@sopuli.xyz avatar

another barrier is for nvidia-based GPUs, it just seems like gaming on Linux with AMD works a lot smoother.

Pollux ,

Yes this is true as lots of Nvidia users have told me otherwise, when I used a rtx 2060 on Linux for about 6 months before I switched to a amd rx 6700 and it’s been the best experience I have ever had in gaming on a PC in general honestly. Nvidia “works” in terms of installing the driver, playing games do “work” but the big issue is vulkan shader loader on steam and then third party games that run on lutris, bottles that require specific environment variables for the game to not stutter or to switch to dxvk async as a instant fix for loading shaders but async is being kicked out because it’s a hack and includes a lot of patches the devs don’t like.

You can turn off the vulkan loader as Nvidia has a way of loading shaders rather quickly, but it does it in the most stupid way possible that example in apex I had to wait 5minutes in the lobby to load all of my shaders so that the game wouldn’t stutter when I entered a game. It pinned all of my cpu cores to 100% to load it instead of the GPU doing it which is so weird, this is supposedly already fixed in the “vulkan beta Nvidia driver” but who the normal user is gonna fuck around in the terminal to install a beta version of a driver that could easily break something.

While on amd all you need for gaming is mesa 23.1 or above so that you have gpl/graphics pipeline library, and then you can disable the pre caching vulkan loader, then that’s it, everything else is smooth sailing already as drivers are already preinstalled, Wayland is more supported on amd because of its open source nature, and games run amazing on it. Best investment you could make if you want to fully switch to Linux as your main operating system ngl.

The only upside to Nvidia is that your new gpu’s will mostly work out of the box while the newest amd cards will need to mature for a bit before buying but if you run something like arch and you use mesa git + the newest kernel patches then the experience will get better and better everyday as the drivers mature for those cards

littlecolt ,

Pop OS does wonderfully with Nvidia nowadays. Check it out!

Bulletdust ,

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.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah I’m fine with that personally. If a game wants that level of fuckery I’d rather just go without it anyway tbh.

Pollux ,

Exactly :)

Freeman , (edited )

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.

throwsbooks ,

I don’t think you need to wait years for user friendly Linux tbh! I recommend checking out Linux Mint. It’s basically designed for people used to Windows and handles the technical stuff for you.

You can do almost everything through the GUI rather than the command line, so for things like updates, it’ll show you a little notification in the corner by the clock like you’re used to, you open up the software manager, and click the update button.

And most software nowadays can either be downloaded through an app store like interface, or by downloading an executable file from a website.

And if you’ve ever used a mac, there’s a time machine equivalent built in (timeshift). So you can set up an automatic backup daily/weekly/etc and if you mess up something, in most cases you can revert back to a point when it wasn’t messed up.

I say give it a shot, you can always go back if it’s not for you! But usability has improved so much in the last few years.

raptir ,

You don’t need to know how to code certainly. If you choose a “fire and forget” distro like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc… the only thing you would really run into any challenge with is running Windows software. Games are pretty well handled by Steam/Proton at this point, but other Windows software like, say, Word or the Adobe suite can be a challenge. If you’re okay with using alternatives (libreoffice, darktable, gimp) you’ll be fine.

Pollux , (edited )

I don’t even know how to code LOL I know the bare minimum of installing packages either through the gui or through the terminal which isn’t coding, just simple commands for installing packages that the gui would do for you

You have gui stores like gnome software, kde plasma discover gui store that let you install application super easy with one click install buttons that’s it

Example installing discord on Ubuntu through terminal Sudo means root, apt the package manager that’s gonna install the package for us, install telling apt to install said application/software, discord the application. That’s it, you type y and it will install said application.

And I even started a YouTube channel called Linux benchmarks with plenty of simple tutorials of how to setup things like proton and learning those things in apps like lutris or bottles or heroic games launcher which are all gui applications for setting up games.

Editing I use kdenlive another gui application, gimp another gui application, updating it through the store as well or you can do the terminal either one they do the exact same thing.

Here’s my thoughts about using Linux on both a Nvidia setup and now a full amd setup for one year :)

youtu.be/55_TtnN7dnk

datendefekt ,
@datendefekt@lemmy.ml avatar

My daughter can’t code (apart from dabbling a bit in Scratch) and she can use Fedora on her laptop just fine.

Hexarei ,
@Hexarei@programming.dev avatar

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.

nottheengineer ,

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.

Freeman ,

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.

nottheengineer ,

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.

kyub ,

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.

littlecolt ,

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.

Pollux ,

Well it can stop users from plugging other devices into their computer when they have valorant launched, so things like hacks on a USB wouldn’t be possible, and that it can see all of your usb devices on your pc, and then it can see what’s being opened on your computer, it basically can see everything your doing which is a huge privacy concern. that’s why people had been talking about that someone could easily use the rootkit to do some malicious shit with it, while on eac on Linux it can only see our home partition lol, but on windows it can see a bit more of your file system as permissions aren’t rlly a thing on windows Sept the admin stuff. Apex handles cheaters kinda well these days so it’s more about reporting and banning those people. Anticheats are only supposed to stop the user from loading cheats but if it fails to do that which it usually does then it’s up to the support team of that game to ban them

stappern ,

it doesnt

Mandy ,

Damn this zer0 really has it out for people enjoying things today I hope whoever pissed into your chereos stops soon

Rhabuko ,
@Rhabuko@feddit.de avatar

Free software fundamentalist that probably worships Stallman too.

Mandy ,

I feel like such an outsider cause for me proton is such a piece of shit that it barely if ever works even if the title is rated platinum

No matter the district either

BearJCC ,

I have yet to have any issues with the 50ish games I have played on Proton.

Mandy ,

Im genuinely happy for you to have things actually work out

I wish it would be the same for me

I even had shit break after restarting it 5 minutes after closing it

Zetta ,

That’s so odd, maybe there is an issue with your specific distribution.

Mandy ,

As mentioned in another comment I had the same problem over 3 wildly different distros I also never fiddle with any system files or anything

Kaped ,

are you using nvidia like a removed?

Mandy ,

Yes? I have a 1050ti

What else am I supposed to use? Nouveau? Like some sort of redacted? ???

lemillionsocks ,
@lemillionsocks@beehaw.org avatar

I wonder if it’s a software or hardware issue on your end that might be causing it.

Been using proton since it started and it’s definitely not always as seamless and requires tweaking or going to protondb and checking bug reports, changing your proton version, and etc, but generally it has worked with me on multiple iterations of hardware.

Mandy ,

I wish I knew man, protondb tweaks never once helped me either

I never noticed anything else be as freaky as proton

scorpiosrevenge ,

What OS/distro are you using?

Mandy ,

Currently im on endeavouros But had the same problem on mint and solus

brihuang95 ,
@brihuang95@sopuli.xyz avatar

lol that’s the funny thing about linux right? and with all the various distros and setups it can be rather hard to diagnose what the issue is.

Mandy ,

The inability to use proton correctly is a constant over 3 wildly different distros

phar ,

I am not sure how you can mess up using proton but somehow this seems like user error. Every distro I have tried it on, with multiple DEs…it just works.

Mandy ,

The classic Linux moment, when it doesn’t work, blame the user

Hexarei ,
@Hexarei@programming.dev avatar

Most of the time, it’s the user. And when it isn’t, it’s the user

Mandy ,

fair enough lmao

phar ,

Seeing as you are the only person who really has this issue, it’s either your hardware or it’s you. If you try it on other hardware and it still happens, it’s you.

Mandy ,

oh yeah its totally me when this happens on a stock distro, it cant possible be that the software isnt the problem, it must always be the user even if its what you claim a rare problem

phar ,

Umm…yes? It works for the rest of us on different distros across all different machines. So either it’s your machine, or you are doing something wrong. That’s it, there really isn’t much else to it.

scorpiosrevenge ,

Try XanMod kernel and ProtonGE - I’ve had great performance and stability and been using those for couple years now with steam Linux gaming

Mandy ,

If it doesn’t work on stock Idk if I trust a random what I assume is a kernel mod

Protonge was only marginably better and it only worked like that through lutris

Rhabuko ,
@Rhabuko@feddit.de avatar

Nice. Steam with Proton works really great for me so far. If only wine would be as good for other software. Trying to get my Affinity products to work on wine or DAZ Studio is a nightmare and I probably will just use a VM 😩.

masterairmagic ,

I used to check winehq or protondb before buying games. I don’t do that anymore because everything just works in Linux these days.

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