Valve's Steam Hardware Survey Shows Progress for Gaming on Linux, Breaking 1% Marketshare

[AleksandarK]

When Valve made a debut of Proton for Steam on Linux, the company committed to enabling Linux gamers from across the globe to play all of the latest games available for the Windows platform, on their Linux distributions. Since the announcement, the market share of people who game on Linux has been rather stagnating for a while. When Proton was announced, the Linux gaming market share jumped to 2%, according to a Valve survey. However, later on, it dropped and remained at the stagnating 0.8~0.9% mark. Today, according to the latest data obtained from Steam Hardware Survey, we see that the Linux gaming market share has reached 1.0% in July, making for a +0.14% increase. What drove the spike in usage is unknown, however, it is interesting to see the new trend. You can check out the Steam Hardware Survey data here.


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[Space Lynx]

I just switched to Linux Mint (latest beta release) I AM FREAKING IN LOVE!!! TAKE CARE WINDOWS 10 and 11 LMAO

So first impressions so far today... it's smooth!!! So smooth! It's very user friendly... I have already installed Steam with two clicks, updated all my drivers from the welcome window that pops up on first install, installed proprietary Nvidia driver, got gsync working. Steam has an awesome...

www.techpowerup.com

TO THE MOON

 

[AusWolf]

Interesting, though I wouldn't really call it a breakthrough with Windows 10 alone occupying almost 90% of the market.

 

[Space Lynx]

Interesting, though I wouldn't really call it a breakthrough with Windows 10 alone occupying almost 90% of the market.

AMD started at $1 a share 6 years ago, now its over $100 a share. Have some faith lad! If that is possible, anything is!

 

[Vayra86]

AMD started at $1 a share 6 years ago, now its over $100 a share. Have some faith lad! If that is possible, anything is!

With Linux market share its a bit like the apocalypse.

They keep announcing that its coming and yet here we are.

 

[AusWolf]

AMD started at $1 a share 6 years ago, now its over $100 a share. Have some faith lad! If that is possible, anything is!

With time, everything is possible. The only thing that keeps me on Windows is the better driver and game support, and I'm sure many other people feel this way.

Edit: I'd love to make the big change, but I can't see Microsoft releasing their grasp of DirectX, unfortunately.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

96% windows, i can't see that changing too much for the foreseeable. For me 1% is no where near enough to even look at Linux as main OS

 

[ixi]

When on linux will be supported games by native, like day-z, arma 3, wow, gta, rdr2 and few others when I'll think about it. Meanwhile - no, thanks.

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

Wow 1% after how many years? At rather optimistic, not even linear rate it'd be what? A century for 20%?

 

[Ja.KooLit]

YES!!!! and if Steam Deck will be successful, the figures will climb up more. And soon all games will be optimized for Linux-Gaming....


Boooo yeahhh




surprised to see Arch in there. No Fedora or Open Suse

 

[Aleksandar_038]

Steam is investing lot of resources to Proton & Linux, but Steam can't take on Windows alone without serious support from other sides.

And as much as everybody loves to bash Microsoft and Windows, it is still a fact that Linux is very far away from being usable as desktop OS for 99% of people.

What can bring Linux to more PCs are Android and ChromeOS, but then it is just matter of replacing Microsoft with Google which is... well, not a good idea.

We will sooner have Cloud PC solutions, for business and gaming, than to Linux being mainstream Desktop OS. Not that I am happy about that, it will be nail in the coffin of personal computing...

 

[looniam]

~5 years ago:

 

[SiJiL]

I've been looking at dual booting Linux and Win10 recently, but the big hardware manufacturers need to get on board to make it more viable IMO.
For example, there's no official Corsair drivers or control software available (and the unofficial ones locked up my machine when I tried them), so I can't control the backlighting on the keyboard or DPI on the mouse.
Similarly, I couldn't get photos off my Sony camera without alot of messing around. And there's nothing at all for the ambient backlighting on my LG monitor, so it defaults to the red glow which is just awful!
So before I even attempted gaming, I was put off by not being able to use my hardware properly.

 

[Ravenas]

I love Linux, and right now personal favorite is Pop OS. SteamOS was my favorite, but hasn't been updated in sometime (Steam Deck will change this with Arch 3.0). The problem is feature sets are missing for high end pc gaming, and lack of overall support of many different software packages.

Some examples:

• No HDR support.
• FPS loss due to Vulkan / OpenGL versus DirectX, developers don't spend enough time optimizing.
• Lack of full feature GPU driver packages. AMD cards, WATTMAN no solution. Thanks for MESA, but we need more.
• Lack of peripheral software package, i.e., gaming headsets (many rely on driver packages for virtual surround and other features) and keyboard.
• Lack of great game support outside of Steam... PROTON THANK YOU VALVE. However, Lutris just isn't enough for some of the smaller subset of games not on Steam.

The benefits of free and open come with cons as the platform is still under polished development, but has made tremendous strides.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

The Linux market share increase on steam is mainly due better driver development by nvidia and amd, m$ did their best to sabotage linux from gaining popularity for forever.

 

[Mescalamba]

Oh, it will flip Win market soon! /s

 

[XiGMAKiD]

We need Valve to become trillion dollar company with primary focus on open source development for gaming, that's the only way to make Linux much more appealing for gaming.

Proton is a bandaid, native is the best way to seriously gain marketshare.

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
Yeah spike lol
Linux is it's own worst enemy
There's way too many linux spawns which is about the only thing that changed on the list from 5 years ago otherwise usage was only +0.06% that is hardly a spike.

 

[Ravenas]

We need Valve to become trillion dollar company with primary focus on open source development for gaming, that's the only way to make Linux much more appealing for gaming.

Proton is a bandaid, native is the best way to seriously gain marketshare.

Developers won't go native linux moving in to future because of Proton. Proton translation layer makes it extremely easy for developers to make their games work on Linux, with little development dollars. Why would developers begin making native versions for Linux when the Linux market share is ~ 1%.

 

[TheDeeGee]

I remember people saying 10 years ago: "10 years from now... yada yada yada".

 

[Fierce Guppy]

I was playing Battlefield 5 multiplayer on Linux in January. Then months later I heard that others got permabanned for doing the same. The translation layer between DirectX and OpenGL/Vulkan was detected as a cheat by Fairfight. Those people got no sympathy from EA. It is too bad Fairfight doesn't work on cheaters. I stick to single-player games. Cyberpunk 2077 performance is OK-ish using Valve's proton (experimental), but not that great for an RTX 3080. Panning is very jittery compared to the game on Windows 10. I tried loading WW3 the other day which was also a Steam bought game, but can't get past the anti-cheat screen. Yeah, so that's my Gaming on Linux experience so far...

 

[Ravenas]

I was playing Battlefield 5 multiplayer on Linux in January. Then months later I heard that others got permabanned for doing the same. The translation layer between DirectX and OpenGL/Vulkan was detected as a cheat by Fairfight. Those people got no sympathy from EA. It is too bad Fairfight doesn't work on cheaters. I stick to single-player games. Cyberpunk 2077 performance is OK-ish using Valve's proton (experimental), but not that great for an RTX 3080. Panning is very jittery compared to the game on Windows 10. I tried loading WW3 the other day which was also a Steam bought game, but can't get past the anti-cheat screen. Yeah, so that's my Gaming on Linux experience so far...

My performance on all games is great using Proton. For a native game such as dota 2, valve hasn't optimized the game as well for Vulkan versus DirectX.

Valve is working with developers to allow proton layer to work with anticheat software.

 

[R-T-B]

Frankly, my bet is the announcement of Windows 11 did this "spike" more than anything.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I was playing Battlefield 5 multiplayer on Linux in January. Then months later I heard that others got permabanned for doing the same. The translation layer between DirectX and OpenGL/Vulkan was detected as a cheat by Fairfight. Those people got no sympathy from EA. It is too bad Fairfight doesn't work on cheaters. I stick to single-player games. Cyberpunk 2077 performance is OK-ish using Valve's proton (experimental), but not that great for an RTX 3080. Panning is very jittery compared to the game on Windows 10. I tried loading WW3 the other day which was also a Steam bought game, but can't get past the anti-cheat screen. Yeah, so that's my Gaming on Linux experience so far...

Sadly, the same thing reportedly happens in Destiny 2. I think any multiplayer online game with some sort of anti-cheat software will banhammer a Proton user, and these days, bans can really hurt with all the upgrade transactions you face. Devs don't seem to care, perhaps because it costs real money to support Linux and the marketshare just isn't there.

I'm all for Linux. For the times I leave MacOS, it's to Linux, not Windows.

 

[ironwolf]

So does this mean that 2021 is *the* year of the Linux Desktop?