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You may be right in that people are seeing how viable Linux is for gaming due to the success of the Steam Deck.
I’m not sure if steam deck is counted under Arch, but it’s definitely not Ubuntu, Mint, or Manjaro. It looks like the increase in Linux desktop is traditional desktop gaming.
I’m not sure if steam deck is counted under Arch
It must be, because there’s no way vanilla Arch is the most-used Linux distro, even among gamers.
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That, but also the splash buff of Proton making a lot of games work for Linux outside of Steam Decks has probably helped too.
Add the article says, the surge is entirely thanks to the Deck. There was a 35% surge in overall use but 43% of that use is the Deck so PC/laptop use has actually dropped.
I’d say some of that drop was punters like me who were already gaming on Linux and have just moved over to the deck now.
I have a dock for mine and it’s really the only thing I use for gaming now as my laptop is very old.
It’s been pretty good. So long as you stick to verified and playable games your experience is going to be pretty solid.
That and Emudeck.
The most seamless retro gaming setup I’ve used yet.
TBH I’ve yet to come across any game I haven’t been able to play (aside from the obvious VR/occasional anti-cheat), most unsupported games just haven’t been tested for most cases
Edit: out of curiosity I actually went through my library to see just how many unsupported games I could download and try (again, not the VR ones lol).
I ended up getting caught up playing Revita all day and it says unsupported but it definitely works! For anyone else interested in that game, it is having some development quirks but there’s a public beta branch of it that seems to be the “definitive” version of the game.
Uploaded a control scheme template for the beta since there wasn’t one I liked :D
Then I tried an old DOS game Litil Divil which also worked just fine. I’d have tried some others but like I said, addicting game be addicting
Same, I’m not a big multiplayer person so most of the time it works out. My latest has been Lethal Company, my first new multiplayer game this year 😂. Been a blast.
How many are there? I always see more games getting added
6 of the top 10 are verified or playable or 43% of the top 1000 games. But verified and playable is only a subset of the games that work, quite a few unsupported games do as well. If you go by medals the 7 of the top 10 are silver ranked or better (minor issues but generally playable) and 88% of the top 1000. So there are a lot of games that are playable that are still listed as unsupported on the deck.
You can see the numbers for various different things at https://www.protondb.com/ as well as different reports for all the games (including some tips on how to get things to work or work better).
Linux Mint 0.08% Yay!
It’s an excellent distro. My first, after a poor Ubuntu experience years prior. I’ll always have good things to say.
LMDE is Mint without the Ubuntu. Don’t mind me, just spreading the good word.
Oh yeah, LMDE is definitely the future of Mint. Good point.
I just removed Windows from my desktop and went straight Linux after seeing how well things ran on my Deck.
bill’s days are numbered
I mean, he’s not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
My guess is that most gaming Linux users have a dual boot setup and play games on Windows.
If not for games like Destiny, I wouldn’t even need that. Literally everything else I play runs great on Linux now
I used to keep a windows drive to run steam. But it honestly sees very little use nowadays.
Mostly I boot it every few months to see what shenanigans Microsoft has pulled with windows. Other than that, it’s just sitting there. Everything I play runs in Linux.
I run Tumbleweed btw.
Not anymore. I don’t even bother to check steamdb, games run anyhow flawlessly under Proton experimental.
(OK, maybe check if the game runs well before buying it)
Wel yeah, single player games almost almost work flawlessly. However games with kernel level anticheat are generally not playable on Linux.
My guess is that most Linux gamers tracked by Steam have a dual hardware setup with a Steam Deck and a Windows desktop PC/notebook.
Doesn’t it show +0.05% Arch? I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch. So if 0.15% is a blend of Arch and SteamOS-Arch, it seems to be growing in quite a few ways.
I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch.
No, that’s not the case. A separate listing for SteamOS leads by a lot. If you install pure Arch (or another distro) on Steam Deck or for whatever reason install and launch the Flatpak version of Steam, those won’t get counted as SteamOS but otherwise it’s pretty clear how big the installed base of SteamOS is.
Ohh, okay. Thanks for explaining it to me. I misunderstood.
Tell me why “market share” of commerical, proprietary games is important to Linux again?
Because of Valve, Linux is finally my main OS. I’m a PC gamer and it was a pain in the ass to dual-boot between Windows and Linux.
These commercial, proprietary games are one of the things that pushes forward the capabilities of personal computers. They are unreasonable, unoptimized resource-hogs. If a Linux system is as capable of running them as a proprietary OS (that has a deck stacked in it’s favor), it means they lose one another advantage over Linux. And it also means that your hardware now is more productive at less bs tasks, especially consumer-grade nvidia cards, who are better supported now than years ago.
If you are a Linux user and like commercial games, you probably would prefer them to work on Linux.
“Market share” on Linux aligns the vested interest of game makers and Linux game players. If the company thinks it can make money, it will do more to allow games to run, or at least do less to stop them.
Because it’ll be funny if Microsoft just gives up and makes “Windows” a desktop environment for Linux.
Starter edition - with no option of changing wallpaper and a 3 app multitask limitation.
Proprietary telemetry built into the kernel.
…Microsoft will die on that hill.
;)
That would be extremely funny
What would be great is they’d likely need to open source certain stuff for it to play nice with the kernel. Stuff like DirectX. And if that happens it’ll be a singularity moment for Linux compatibility and adoption.
There’s high potential overlap between the profile of a PC gamer (who is often also a PC builder and general computing DIY hobbyist) and an OS like Linux that extends your tinkering ability massively on the software side.
PC/laptop users are a shrinking demographic nowadays thanks to the advent of mobile devices, but they’re a high quality demographic made up of professionals and hobbyists with above average computer savvy. So lots of companies are trying to appeal to them because the choices they make in software and hardware can translate into many other IT fields.
Potentially more support for other things other than gaming, maybe… Hopefully
nvidia openned their drivers not long after they announced that was “working sith valve to givd a better gaming experience on linux”
That’s what many people miss. I know Value is doing a lot but I was hoping for some other large companies to get into the space.
A lot of people only play games on their computer, hence running linux doesn’t make sense if they can’t play games on it
Yup, a big excuse I used to see a lot was
I would like to run Linux, but I want to game more so will stick to Windows
And this has changed a lot with what valve has done which opens Linux to a much larger market of people that can now use it for their usecases.
market share leads to demand, demand leads to supply
this benefits you
this is measuring market share of Linux in the gaming scene, not the other way around.
Now I wonder what the gaming share of linux use would be. Probably very very small percentage. since the wast majority of linux installs are servers
I have at least 20 different devices that run some flavor of Linux. Servers, a laptop, TVs, AP/routers, probably more, if my other “smart” appliances run Linux also.
Do Android phones and tablets count towards Linux gaming?
PlayStations run a derivitive of BSD, maybe those should get honorable mention. ;)
Including phones would be significant. But in my (probably deranged) head android/linux is a different os from GNU/linux. The overlap of the kernel itself is not enough. In that case all switches/routers/storage appliances/toasters/washing machines/fridges/iot sensors often also run linux.
