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I bought a Steam Deck.
You are valid, and we love you
I run Bazzite. We are sort of the same.
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There is one dude with a Windows 8 laptop that turns it on once per month just to take this survey.
*8.1
Due to the optimizations Windows 8.1 is my favorite Windows version. When I compared it to Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon on my old (now dead) laptop, it performed slightly faster. It also somehow beat Windows XP which is what that thing was made for. Although a part of that could have been that half of the drivers only worked in XP, so it had more to load.
Maybe if they properly called it Windows 9, it would have caught on. It was definitely different enough from 8.
What does "perform slightly faster" mean? Boot time? App loading? CPU perf?
Yup. Boot time and loading of system apps. 8.1 was basically instant while XP and Mint had slight delay. Not a big deal though, just something interesting for being Windows. After all, it was made for tablets.
I also put Windows 11 on it despite being unsupported. That was slower, but still OK-ish with SSD. Definitely nowhere near Linux Mint though. The background processes were just killing the CPU. Thankfully, thanks to being made in 2007 the cooler could easily take 100% CPU usage. However, it would hover around just 6% with network disconnected. Hmmm...
The CPU was Core 2 Duo T7500 upgraded from T7100. I got it on AliExpress for €1. It seems some people were using them for... making keychains? Anyway, they were sold as functional.
I wish laptop CPUs and GPUs were still upgradable. The GPU was GeForce 8600M.
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Thats fuckin amazing.
I can still remember when we celebrated linux being at 0.8% and it was not long ago.
I think Linux reached 0.8% in 2018 iirc.
It's definitely accelerated a bit in the last two years.
Alas, all it takes is for Microsoft to tone down the insanity before it will plateau again. So best hope for now is too increase it as much as possible by welcoming refugees before Windows 12 comes out. Maybe gain another percent or two.
The rise of Linux in this is absolutely driven by SteamOS and the Steam Deck, let's be honest here. This narrative of people escaping Windows because of W11 changes that pretty much only get reported here is... a bit of wishful thinking.
The Windows 11 TPM requirement means a lot of people with fine computers can't update from 10, and computer parts aren't as affordable as they were 5 years ago. When Windows 10 goes end of life it will be my sign to go back to daily driving Linux.
Good for you, but that's a meaningless statement from a home user perspective.
Windows 10 "going end of life" only means security updates will stop trickling in. Drivers will work, software will work. As far as your aunt Rita knows, nothing has changed on her laptop when 10 goes end of life, and if she tries to upgrade and can't for some reason, she'll just keep using what works indefinitely. The only time you may notice is if you get new hardware that for some reason doesn't support 10 anymore at which point the hardware incompatibility issue is gone.
People will move to 11 how people always move Windows versions: by buying a new PC with it preinstalled. Because that's how people interface with OSs in the real world. The only time normies go out of their way to change Windows versions is when the new version is generally perceived as replacing a crappy iteration, like the 8 to 10 jump or the Vista to 7 transition.
All of that is to say that it sucks for MS to actively use a subtle security downgrade as a motivator for people to update their hardware and software combo. Not because people will be pissed and move to Linux, but because they won't move anywhere and there will be more vulnerable systems out there. Most won't have any issues until they get new hardware, but it's still bad praxis from MS's position of stewardship of many millions of home computing devices.
Does it matter where it comes from though? Do you think regular folks are like: "i'm gonna play on my WINDOWS MACHINE"? They just use whatever came pre-installed.
Well, yeah, exactly. All the people showing up as Linux because they are just using the consolified Steam interface on their Decks aren't exactly renouncing Windows and vowing to install Arch on their desktops forevermore, they're just using the custom interface that came in the box.
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Yeah wishful thinking but also a bit reassuring that this is then a meaningful if small shift. People are choosing Linux via steam decks or personally, and its been enabled via proton and wine rather than necessarily people fleeing win 11.
I do think win 11 changes contribute to people trying Linux more but I think it is Linux that is keeping people that is what has changed. I don't see some huge move to Linux though - just its growing faster as it supports gaming well and is increasingly easier to use and maintain (which has been a long trend). But win11 being increasingly anti user can't be a bad think for Linux long term.
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I can only speak for myself, but me getting a Steam Deck was step one in the process where eventually, about a year or so ago, I switched to Linux on my laptop, and I don't have a single regret.
I will never use Windows again when it's my choice.
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Looks like GoL has a plot over time. Linux adoption is starting to hockey stick, definitely above linear growth, this is getting exciting! I would guess, if it hits somewhere around 5-10% and keeps this hockey stick shape, we'll really start to see the game industry justify giving it more attention.
This will come with both good and bad, I expect it's only a matter of time before some game tries a native kernel level anti-cheat, aka root kit, on Linux.
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It seems comedic but I would imagine when one in 50 of your users falls into a certain cohort you start to consider them in your designs.
And that’s the most naïve way of looking at it. With more data you may be able to see if Linux users favour certain genres of games over others, so the number may be a lot higher than 2% for your game in particular.
There were some reports from game devs who said that the big reports from Linux users was worth it just for that.
He actually pulled together stats for it all, and it was 5.8% sales making 38% of the big reports, which tended to be high quality.
So from his experience as an independent game dev, he said it was worth it just for the QA you get out of it.
I think a lot of the libraries and tooling being updated to be more platform agnostic helps too. It's not "press button to support Linux", but it's getting a lot easier than needing to rewrite your engine for every platform.
English speaking it's a solid 5% now, so I'd say it's one in twenty.
More than 50% of people are using Win10 and M$ are about to stop supporting it. That's trouble brewing.
No it is not. MS stopping 10 support early sucks, but the average user doesn't know or care.
For reference, by the same point in Win10's lifetime, 40% of users were still on Win 7, and by the time they stopped Win7 support it was 20% still. Phone manufacturers advertising ongoing software support has made this a bit more relevant or prominent, but most PC users will only update as their OS tells them to, and if the OS goes silent they'll just keep chugging along. We know this, it's how it's been forever. "People still on Windows 7" was a bit of a meme even at the time.
How could you not mention Windows XP in this comment. MS kept up support for a surprisingly long time while encouraging everyone to upgrade (and rightly so), but even 5 years after they completely dropped support, they had to release a security update to protect against a widespread attack because a ton of organizations were still using XP.
Sure, that works, too. The reason I went with 7 is that it's well covered in the portion of the Steam survey one can easily check, but this type of lackadaisical transition leading to an increasingly frustrated Microsoft is such a staple of Windows history in general.
This.
The first time users start to change OS is when Chrome or Steam doesn't work because of the unsupported OS version.
We can push for 5% I can feel it!
I'm doing my part.
I’m pleasantly surprised Linux is way ahead of OSX. This looks really good!
Hmm. What games are for Mac OS? I have never played a game on a mac ever. Not even seen what can be played.
Not many are officially supported, but there are a few. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one surprising example. Many Paradox games are also supported, like Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley, Terraria and Hades as well.
At least chess:
Source: https://archive.org/details/Computer1985_6
^/j^
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Not many indeed. There's a switch in your settings to only show you games for your designated OS, or there are symbols below the games' vignettes that tells you which OS is supported: win / mac / steam
Frustrating is famous games from the 32 bits era, where they would be available to Mac but work only on macos pre-10.14 and not from 10.15 when macos went fully 64bits. Which means on top of reduced availability, some of this availability would only work on a mac from 2010 or so.
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Impressed by all the folks on Win7 and 8.
Also surprised to see double the MacOS users
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OK. The share of SteamOS within the Linux OS has increased by 3%.
So the amount of the active steam decks per month is about
0.4534 *2.32 *0.01 *150000000 ≈ 1,577,832
If you look into the data Steam OS Holo s listed and it is 45.3%. Arch separately is second at 7.9% and then third is the Flatpak installs across all Linux versions at 6%.
The changes are more difficult to interpret as Linux is growing overall so changes between Linux distros are difficult. For example a small decline in overall share may still represent an increase in total numbers. While Steam OS is up another 3% points, other distros combined are up more - Ubuntu and PopOS combined are up 5% points. That suggests the Linux growth is split between Steam Deck and PC users rather than purely one or the other dominating.
Thank you, friend.
@Vincente @mr_MADAFAKA I think no, it's not. If you go into Steam statistics and ask to only show the results per OS, you can see the statistics only for Linux. There you can see how much of each Linux distro is being used. Arc is not the first.
I'm surprised Arch is that high compared to other distros.
Also interesting that people are actually switching to windows 11, everyone I know is staying on win10 as long as possible because they're more used to the interface.
One of the things that got me to change my gaming desktop from Mint to Arch was the fact that you get the cutting-edge version of everything; kernel and amdgpu being the most important, but also getting the latest version of Lutris and things is nice too. Brought me from "usually about 50 fps outdoors in Elden Ring" to "usually about 60 fps" on the same machine.
Makes sense for a gaming machine to only include the services you actually want, which Arch enables. Supports my hardware better too - my audio gear works perfectly in Pipewire but is ropey in ALSA, so rather than "install Mint -> install Pipewire -> remove ALSA -> hope ALSA is gone", the sequence is "install Arch -> install Pipewire", which make more sense.
Other cutting-edge rolling release distros are available, of course, but once you learn Arch, it makes a lot of sense for gaming.
BTW: ALSA is never gone. It's the kernel sound driver. And Pipewire is more or less just a helper. But underneath it all it's still ALSA.
Don't forget the AUR. It's so much easier to use yay than it is to go to GitHub to manually check for updates/download/install a deb or rpm file.
AUR is reposnsible for the vast majority of -Syu into softbricks, and is little better than downloading random binaries (because you literally are most of the time)
That's what timeshift and btrfs is for! Really though it takes like ten seconds to roll back and each snapshot only takes like 40mb. There's a pacman hook to take a snapshot before updating.
AUR is just incredibly convenient for me. I don't have to think about it, I don't have to track anything down.
SteamOS is Arch-based. Could be that.
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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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