Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November

www.phoronix.com Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Linux Gaming @lemmy.world

www.phoronix.com /news/Steam-Linux-November-2023

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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Steam market share is honestly probably a decent metric for adoption rate of Linux as a whole.
  
  The fluctuation in Simplified Chinese use makes me pretty suspect here. It was nearly cut in half in one month and suddenly 20% of Steam's users that used Simplified Chinese just didn't exist.
  Honestly that big of a fluctuation in regional selection tells me none of the other data means anything.
  
  And that's important because?
  
  Linux can be used to play commercial games > more people daily drive to linux > more companies port their software to linux > even more people switch to linux > Windows/macOS duopoly breaks, losing to open source alternatives
  I'm not saying playing call of duty on the deck will make windows fall, but it's a start
  
  daily drive to Linux
  Since when have you needed to commute to use Linux? 🤣
  
  Daily drive linux *
  Lmao my bad
  
  Because the more market share leads to better hardware and driver support
- 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.

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