Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey
The Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for October 2024, and the Linux user share has gone back up again to exactly 2%.
Why not just link to the survey instead of some blog about it?
Less than 4% 4K primary display? That’s kinda crazy.
I’m not surprised. Very few people can afford hardware to drive such displays at native resolution so 1440p is usually though of as a good balance. The other issue would be that it’d have to either kinda big or you’ll have to deal with display scaling which is not great on Windows.
I'm in the double minority of linux and intel arc. It's... less than amazing
Don't do two weird things at once, the combo isn't getting taken care of.
I was tempted by Arc. Intel drivers always "just worked", but they are just slow. Arc didn't address the problem like I'd hoped, and AMD really got their shit together in the last 5 years or so.
Arc is actually decent on windows, but the combination of linux and arc is less than ideal
I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.
Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.
I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.
After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.
Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.
Literally never had the need to disable defender or change anything about my Windows install. Driver support is far better on Windows than Linux.
Literally never had the need to disable defender or change anything about my Windows install.
This doesn’t mean anything if you’re not saying what hardware are you running. I saw what was happening in task manager no matter how much time I gave it. I don’t have time to debug a product I paid for, especially if the free alternative „just works”.
Driver support is far better on Windows than Linux.
For things that Linux supports (which is most of it and the older the better) it’s a much better experience since everything just works out of the box. You might have trouble with bleeding edge hardware but in year or two stuff gets done and keeps working. You might encounter issues on some cheapo laptops with broken ACPI implementations but those are just trouble in general.
2% and we have steam deck out there?
Yup, that's how niche the Steam Deck is at the moment. It's ~37% of 2% of all Steam users.
Then again the user numbers on Steam are insane. Would be nice to compare it per region.
I switched to linux because windows 10 is going end-of-life, and I can't upgrade to windows 11 even if I wanted to.
It's been fine, other than some trouble getting mint to dual boot the first time.
