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Linux Games

Steam On Linux Spikes To Nearly 2% In July, Larger Marketshare Than Apple macOS (phoronix.com) 99

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare. Phoronix reports; According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.

When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%. The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

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Steam On Linux Spikes To Nearly 2% In July, Larger Marketshare Than Apple macOS

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Look at the next one down. Part of the BIZ-X SEO technique is to put related stories in pairs. They don't have to be conceptually related, only by subject or keywords.
  • In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @09:40PM (#63736066)

    The Steam Deck is selling reasonably well.

    • Re:In other words... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by satanicat ( 239025 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:32PM (#63736142)

      It's a great piece of hardware!

      I have no idea the figures, but I do know not long ago I threw mint on a workstation I retired from work for my kids, and we put steam on it.

      Save for competitive games that have known anti-cheat software, which I believe are effectively rootkits, games just run. out of the box, and it feels almost like a turn-key experience.

      I say almost, because the first time they'd run a game, it would churn for a few minutes saying something that sounded like it was converting shaders to vulkan.

      But, with this type of experience, I feel like any kid with a parent's credit card could throw something together, install some form of Ubuntu and be late for supper because their raid queue is just about to pop.

      it's a weird time, but in this way it's actually a sort of fun time. =)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        I have been blown away by how painless the switch from Win7 to Debian was for me getting my games to run. I'd originally put SteamOS on a spare machine I picked up on FB marketplace, just to tinker with it, and got hooked. When I built a new machine I went directly to Debian 10 and thought I would have a nightmare getting stuff to run - and I worked in game dev for about 15 years, so I'm used to wrangling with broken and/or stubborn games.

        Every single game I have wanted to play, I have been able to get ru

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I say almost, because the first time they'd run a game, it would churn for a few minutes saying something that sounded like it was converting shaders to vulkan.

        Nice guess but unless you disable downloaded shaders, a lot of proton games use pre-compiled shaders. You can find the setting in settings->downloads, at the bottom.
        What's actually happening with many steam games, the first time you play them or after a proton update, for games that don't have native Linux support is, a custom wine prefix is created, then dependencies like directx, fonts, media codecs, dotnet, etc... are being installed using Windows installers. Each one of those custom wine installs a

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        From what I've read, if you don't have an actual Steamdeck with that exact hardware configuration, compatibility is a lot more hit and miss.

        • ...nope, it's been pretty plug-and-go. Even with stuff that isn't officially supported. I used the "Add a non-Steam game" option to install and run a bunch of Windows games from CD, and except for one or two unusual games that I (rightly) suspected on the front end might be tempermental (one was MechWarrior 3, which was optimized within an inch of not working even in 1999), it was seamless and painless. Actually less hassle than they were originally on Win98 or XP, in some cases.
          I was a diehard daily Win

        • Probably 85% of games work right out of the box on my linux laptop. Right click on it in steam > Properties > Compatibility > Check off 'Force Specific Compatibility..." and choose Proton Experimental. Proton is at the point of just being astoundingly good. If you ever fought with Wine, welcome to the future you couldn't even have dreamed of.

          The biggest issues are the same ones that bother Windows gamers: Stupid developers who think you need an account on their website tied to their game in order t

      • Save for competitive games that have known anti-cheat software, which I believe are effectively rootkits, games just run. out of the box, and it feels almost like a turn-key experience.

        Several Steam Deck games work just fine using Easy Anti Cheat. Though I have heard anecdotally that people believe they may have been banned for simply using their Steam Deck, but who knows, I figure if that were actually a case it would be more than a handful of complaints at this point.

        • Several Steam Deck games work just fine using Easy Anti Cheat. Though I have heard anecdotally that people believe they may have been banned for simply using their Steam Deck, but who knows, I figure if that were actually a case it would be more than a handful of complaints at this point.

          That's interesting, and maybe a little troubling.

          I don't consider myself much of a gamer, although I do from time to time play them. A while ago I bought New World on Steam. I never was able to get it to run on Linux through Steam. I could log in, see characters etc, but when attempting to actually join the game server it would drop my connection. Users in forums were posting my exact experience and I chalked it up to probably the anti cheat software not working (Mostly because that's what people were s

    • I dunno, with the 2025 end of support for Win10, people may be looking for alternatives. Gamers are (sometimes) sufficiently techy to make the jump.

      Case in point: Typing this from a new Thinkpad running Debian that also has Steam installed. I assume I'm part of the statistic from TFA...

      • Frankly we're at the point where Linux has the "it just works" advantage over Windows once you take away the preinstallation advantage.

        I have a nontechnical friend who needed a laptop, so I sent her my old gaming laptop. I couldn't get Windows to install on it, so I just left Fedora on it and mailed it to her. Steam "just worked" and she could play all her games, she figured out how KDE worked, and she remarked "hey, this is so much easier and more intuitive than Windows!"

        In a piece of irony, she also bough

        • Frankly we're at the point where Linux has the "it just works" advantage over Windows once you take away the preinstallation advantage.

          grandma will never learn command line flags, sorry. linux is made for programmers, but tries to capture the vast non-tech market... it cant do both. you shouldnt have to touch a terminal in 2023

          • I run Linux at home and Windows at work. I have gone into the command line of each at about the same rate... and mostly for the same reason. (Ping, traceroute, and DNS queries.) I mean, the GUI tools have gotten really good over the last 5 years.

            If you haven't tried Linux in a while, go grab Virtualbox and a copy of Linux Mint and try it out for yourself. A lot has changed. You may be presently surprised.
          • A total red herring. You shouldn't have to user regedit ever either, but you do. In both cases, so long as everything works, well, everything works. When it doesn't work you either give up or get your hands dirty (or find someone else who is willing to get their hands dirty). Case in point. I had a WiFi device on Windows that wouldn't connect to channel 13 because it wasn't tailoring to the locale properly. It turns out the Windows driver and the Linux driver are basically the same, and I was able to get a
            • I had a WiFi device on Windows that wouldn't connect to channel 13 because it wasn't tailoring to the locale properly

              granny doesnt know or care about locales and wifi channels.

              Anyway, you didn't address the point, which was that these days Linux is as likely or more likely to "just work" in which case you only use the command line if you want to.

              it says more about the years of disregard for the non-tech user linux has shown.

          • grandma will never learn command line flags, sorry. linux is made for programmers, but tries to capture the vast non-tech market... it cant do both. you shouldnt have to touch a terminal in 2023

            Make a text / pastable list of grandma's recipe files without a command window. I may have missed it, but irs 30 years on and gui doesn't cut it. Only programmers need lists. tables of contents. or glossary's printed? Everyone has to slum the command windows sometimes on a computer, deal with it.

          • My mother is the age of a grandmother; she isn't one only because my partner and I are not having children.

            And she runs Linux out of choice on her laptop.

            She hasn't had to learn command line flags, since she can do everything she wants using KDE.

          • Get a smarter grandma then.

      • I dunno, with the 2025 end of support for Win10, people may be looking for alternatives

        Could be. Then again, I'm pretty sure there were similar predictions about Win 10 because of the telemetry. I liked Windows 10 more or less from the outset. I wish they had stuck with then iterative approach like Apple, but... here we are with 11.

        • Honestly if they'd kept Windows 10 indefinitely as they initially stated they would, I probably wouldn't be trying to figure out replacements for Adobe Camera Raw and all my VSTs so that I can swap my desktop over to Debian. I'd probably still be sticking with Windows 10 despite the MS Edge, MS account and Windows Hello nag screens after every second update...

          But you're probably right - they're more likely to swap over to the MacOS camp :P

    • Valve have been successfully selling what's effectively a Linux-based game console using the Steam storefront. It would be a lot more surprising if there wasn't a corresponding increase in Linux share on the platform.

    • I agree with you, especially if it will have a bit of a discount it would increase sales very well, I think the guys are good at sales.
  • Thank you, thank you, I'll be here every night this week!

  • One in fifty, you say? How many are dual booting and just giving Linux a try? They're the ones you've gotta entice and convert and keep.
    • That's not going to be a problem. There's several ways to get new Linux Steam users. I originally installed Steam on Linux because I was dual-booting, and I had space free on a Linux partition that Windows couldn't read. (I did play with the ext2 IFS back in the day, but this was after that, probably ext3 or xfs.) When Proton got up to version 3 or so, I started to expect there might actually be a day when I could expect that I could reasonably do all of my gaming on Linux.

      When it was no longer feasible to

    • I commented on another post, it's kind of creepy how good it's getting. It's not just steam, there are other efforts, like Lutris, perhaps others, and perhaps they are more related than I am aware.

      but you can basically get away with throwing 2 year old hardware together into something that looks like a computer, install ubuntu, install steam and import your game library.

      I haven't seen a game (save those with anti-cheat software) that don't work out of the box with anything more than a first time run setup p

      • by Dadoo ( 899435 )

        sometimes better frame-rates

        One thing I've noticed is that open-world type games (that have to load a lot of data before they render anything) load noticeably faster on Linux - sometimes twice as fast.

    • Duel booting? What year is it?

    • If someone is ready to learn Linux they're generally (unless severely limited in computing power) better off using a VM to experiment and distro-hop rather than risking their main or perhaps only machine by buggering partitions and boot records.

      VMs are less work, less risk, easy to revert to clean snapshots, easy to copy and back up, and there are many free VM to download from sites like osboxes.org if one doesn't feel like doing a full install to quickly try different OS. Virtualbox is simple and beginner-

      • VM not only require more RAM and still are slowed by I/O overhead but also block direct access to gpu unless you use passthrough which requires two videocards. Having to go through host OS drivers wouldn't let it shine performance-wise.
    • If someone is dual-booting Linux and Windows do you think we should get counted as a Linux user, a Windows user, both, neither, half of each?

      I don't think there is some grand plan to trick people into using Linux based on a bandwagon argument that 2% of Steam users (at some given snapshot in time) are using Linux. Linux isn't like crack cocaine, we weren't giving away free Live CDs to get kids hooked for life on their first try.

  • This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

    Was this written by the same fuckers who perpetrated "performance uplift" on us?

  • If you're getting super excited about a 2% market share after 30 years, well, you're the 'This time for sure the year of Linux on the desktop!' people. Especially when you bring out being a higher market share than macOS, where nearly everyone just games on their phone/tablet because Apple doesn't give one f@#$ about desktop gaming (despite many aborted attempts to pretend they do).

    All my servers run Linux, but The Right Tool for the Right Job is just basic engineering.

    • Re:... yay? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:42PM (#63736166) Homepage

      If you're getting super excited about a 2% market share after 30 years

      Yah, there is a lot to get excited about. Linux has been around 30 years but its only recently there has been a serious push to bring games to the linux desktop. A 2% market share in that little time is something to take note of.

      • by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        Yes, this is what Linux on the desktop people said after KDE got established. I lived through that too.

        But look at it from the inputs side - there is zero reason for any game company (unless they have an ideological reason, which is fine) to target Linux. Unless something earthshaking happens, consoles and Windows will be the primary market and then Linux gets the crumbs (usually through a Windows compatibility layer), because Linux users are the cheap bastards of the computer world (that's certainly me o

        • I guess what most people do not get - I mean here on /.
          The are Linux enthusiasts, that run Linux for everything ... except ... gaming.

          The rest of the world runs Windows, and games on Windows.

          So, the Linux enthusiasts are happy to dual boot, to run a windows game, or run it in a VM.

          It is not so that Linux would not be a market. However Tool-Chains and bean counter analysis indicate: it is not a market.

          • >So, the Linux enthusiasts are happy to dual boot, to run a windows game, or run it in a VM.

            I wouldn't call it "happy". In most cases I've seen (including my own) it's more of a teeth-gnashing reluctant need to dual boot or keep a second system around.

          • by Sarusa ( 104047 )

            Yes, this. You can do anything you want on Linux except play the latest games. And there is zero reason for game companies to target Linux because Linux people won't pay for games.

            • I've got Metro Exodus running great on Debian 11.
              My buddy has Atomic Heart running FANTASTIC on Ubuntu.

              Want to try again?

              • by Sarusa ( 104047 )

                You are an outlier and an anecdote and absolutely not the norm, like the guy who swears up and down that he can do everything he wants with LibreOffice (and it's true for him). Rather than the 1%ers, you and your friend are the 2%ers.

                Is it really so hard for you to comprehend that Linux people do not pay for games on the scale of Windows or Console people?

            • I bought Baldur's Gate 3 yesterday. So did a friend who runs Linux on her laptop.

              So here are two "Linux people" who are quite happy to pay for games.

              • by Sarusa ( 104047 )

                Which is great, but you are absolutely the 2 percenters. Which is not enough for anyone to put Linux as their primary game development targets instead of it being an aspirational welfare thing. I sincerely hope that can change, but this '2% market share!' is not going to do it.

              • I didn't even realize this game existed but it looks awesome! I mean I may actually have a real solid reason to build a new system I keep putting off.

                Obviously it says Windows or MacOS but did you get it to work on Linux via Steam? If so, I might actually take the plunge. The game play videos look great.

            • If you say so mate.

          • There are also Linux enthusiasts who use Linux for everything including gaming. Like yours truly and some of my friends. I have a computer engineer friend who is very adept at running windows stuff on Linux who helps me. And if a game cannot run on Linux i don't bother to buy it, it is quite simple for me and my category of enthusiasts.

            If Linux isn't much of a market for big studios i guess it is for the reasons i mentioned in my post above.

            But the popularity of the steam deck is changing this a bit. Big ed

        • You are wrong when you claim linux gamers do not spend money on games. They do. They also spend money on their rigs. Maybe you don't but it is just your personal case.

          The problem lies elsewhere: The support costs. Maintaining a support team for 1 or 2% of your market is not worth the money which could be invested improving the game. That is probably why Blizzard was well known for having a good linux port of WoW but never released it to the public.

          For indies that may prove different. Many of them have repor

      • Gaming was the only reason I was dual booting. When I replaced my main PC last year, I realized it wasn't necessary any more - Steam just works.
      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        If you're getting super excited about a 2% market share after 30 years

        Yah, there is a lot to get excited about. Linux has been around 30 years but its only recently there has been a serious push to bring games to the linux desktop. A 2% market share in that little time is something to take note of.

        This, Linux was always meant to be and it's strength was always in being a server, it's only in the last 10 years has it really started to be competitive on the desktop... Then consider that most phones are powered by the Linux.

        This isn't 2% of desktops, this is 2% of steam users. So it's only measuring those who have Steam installed, meaning it's only a subset of Linux users.

    • What has Apple to do with Desktop gaming?
      Write a Game, and it runs on Macs just fine. What has Apple to do with that?

      • by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        Apple has nothing to do with desktop gaming because they don't give a f@#$ about it.

        And no, most games do not 'run on Macs just fine'. Is your entire sample Nethack?

        • I think they were implying that games written for Macs work just fine.
          And they'd be correct.

          The part they missed was, as you noted, Apple doesn't give a flying fuck about making the platform more attractive to game developers.
          Particularly since abandoning all standard graphics APIs.
    • If you're getting super excited about a 2% market share after 30 years, well, you're the 'This time for sure the year of Linux on the desktop!' people. Especially when you bring out being a higher market share than macOS, where nearly everyone just games on their phone/tablet because Apple doesn't give one f@#$ about desktop gaming (despite many aborted attempts to pretend they do).

      All my servers run Linux, but The Right Tool for the Right Job is just basic engineering.

      I think, now that Apple has essentially the same SoC running on Macs, iPhones, iPads, Vision Pros, AppleTVs and even Apple Watch, Apple has cause to have a little more faith in its ability to be a respectable Gaming Platform.

      This Article below (sorry about the link; it just had all the related links in one place) shows the steps that Apple is taking, such as the macOS Game Porting Kit, macOS Sonoma's Game Mode and certain Metal3 changes to make that happen:

      https://www.imore.com/mac/one-... [imore.com]

      • by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        I would LOVE to see Apple get more involved in desktop gaming - everything you said is true. They have just never given a damn about it, thinking it's only suitable for the mobile ghetto. Like you, I hope that can change.

        • I would LOVE to see Apple get more involved in desktop gaming - everything you said is true. They have just never given a damn about it, thinking it's only suitable for the mobile ghetto. Like you, I hope that can change.

          I actually don't generally give a #%[+**!? about Gaming either (which is why I've never been butthurt about Apple feeling the same way); but I think the success of the iPhone as a Gaming platform gave the pro-gaming factions within Apple some leverage to get some R&D funding and personnel dedicated to the subject.

          I watched the first video in the "Game Porting Toolkit" and I was really impressed. This was no weekend side-project by a couple of game-enthusiast Apple Engineers. There was real thought, effo

      • The Game Porting Kit is a bullshit rip off of MoltenVK and WINE.

        If they gave a shit about gaming on their platform for real, they'd give us working OpenGL and Vulkan libraries for their GPUs.
        Rather, they'd keen on leveraging their market share to push people into using Metal, an API that exists on their platforms, and no others.

        Microsoft would be proud.
        • The Game Porting Kit is a bullshit rip off of MoltenVK and WINE.

          If they gave a shit about gaming on their platform for real, they'd give us working OpenGL and Vulkan libraries for their GPUs.

          Rather, they'd keen on leveraging their market share to push people into using Metal, an API that exists on their platforms, and no others.

          Oh, you mean like DirectX?

          Yeah, that's a real Open Standard.

          From what I have read, OpenGL just isn't efficient enough to pump complex high-framerate stuff out. That's why DirectX and Metal exist.

          Microsoft would be proud.

          • Oh, you mean like DirectX?

            Why do you think I said, "Microsoft would be proud?"

            From what I have read, OpenGL just isn't efficient enough to pump complex high-framerate stuff out. That's why DirectX and Metal exist.

            Complete horse shit.
            It is true that DX12 and Metal are more comparable to Vulkan than OGL. 100% not true of DX11, however, and again- Vulkan exists.

            • Oh, you mean like DirectX?

              Why do you think I said, "Microsoft would be proud?"

              From what I have read, OpenGL just isn't efficient enough to pump complex high-framerate stuff out. That's why DirectX and Metal exist.

              Complete horse shit.

              It is true that DX12 and Metal are more comparable to Vulkan than OGL. 100% not true of DX11, however, and again- Vulkan exists.

              IIRC, Metal predates Vulkan by at least a year. So there is that. . . And of course, now that we have Apple GPUs no doubt consuming Metal Primitives directly, Metal or at least MoltenVK is the way to go when Targeting Apple hardware.

              • IIRC, Metal predates Vulkan by at least a year. So there is that. . .

                Completely correct. However, like Microsoft could have chosen to contribute to Open libraries, but didn't, Apple could have done the same.
                Vulkan was very much in the works when Apple started working on Metal.

                And of course, now that we have Apple GPUs no doubt consuming Metal Primitives directly, Metal or at least MoltenVK is the way to go when Targeting Apple hardware.

                There is nothing special about "Metal Primitives".
                We have working Vulkan and OGL drivers for M* GPUs in Mesa, now.
                Just can't run them on macOS.
                That means Linux on an Apple Silicon is a better games target than macOS is.

                And yes, MoltenVK has been an option for a long time. But the point is- we shou

                • IIRC, Metal predates Vulkan by at least a year. So there is that. . .

                  Completely correct. However, like Microsoft could have chosen to contribute to Open libraries, but didn't, Apple could have done the same.

                  Vulkan was very much in the works when Apple started working on Metal.

                  Why should Apple contribute to Vulkan, when they already had their own Solution going?

                  Companies usually only contribute to a F/OSS Project if they themselves are going to incorporate it in something they are developing, rather than building that same functionality themselves.

                  In this case, however, Apple was already a year into the Metal Project (with who-knows how much internal architecture planned around it); so, it likely made zero sense for them to abandon their efforts and already-working code in favor

                  • Vulkan is used by many desktop games.
                    OpenGL is used by many desktop games.

                    Metal is used by nearly none.
                    Ergo, undeniably, Vulkan is the superior solution, if they give a shit about games.

                    The bullshit drivel you're oozing from your failing intellect is the one of the saddest cases of corporate apologism I have ever seen.
                    It's a flatly boring regurgitation of marketing material.
    • If you're getting super excited about a 2% market share after 30 years

      Do you think global warming is a hoax because it was warmer in the past too? Just like global warming the significance here is not 2% in the past 30 years, it's 2% in the past year and a half. The rate of change is exciting.

  • by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @10:39PM (#63736158)

    I suspect a lot of this is due to the fact Steam is barely worth it on the Mac. Its a heavily neglected app that barely works and has had long running problems like videos freezing the app (I reported this bug around 6 years ago, and 3 macs later its still an issue) and just general poor system hungry performance.

    I may be wrong, but I dont actually think Valve has anyone working on the mac client, which is *weird* for a company of Valves size (Its a multibillion dollar multi-national)..

    Frankly its just not worth it. Most games of note end up on the mac via different paths anyway. The mac app store isn't great either, but at least its maintained. And if I *really* need to run something from the steam store Wine works just fine. If it runs on proton, it runs on wine on the mac, because proton IS wine.

    Or more likely I just cross the hallway and turn on my windows gaming machine. Windows is awful, but at least the games run good.

    • Its a heavily neglected app that barely works and has had long running problems like videos freezing the app (I reported this bug around 6 years ago, and 3 macs later its still an issue) and just general poor system hungry performance

      Steam is barely more than an embedded chromium instance. Sounds more like pebcak

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @11:40PM (#63736246) Homepage Journal

        Its a heavily neglected app that barely works and has had long running problems like videos freezing the app (I reported this bug around 6 years ago, and 3 macs later its still an issue) and just general poor system hungry performance

        Steam is barely more than an embedded chromium instance. Sounds more like pebcak

        When a game is running, the Steam sync functionality (I think I'm remembering the right component) has a tendency to hog one CPU core at full tilt and burn the battery to the ground. The only way to make Steam usable is to turn all of that off. It isn't a user mistake. It's a very, very badly broken app on the Mac.

        The latest versions have actually managed to get even worse.

        • by sodul ( 833177 )

          I second your feelings. I installed the Steam app on my personal MacBookPro years ago and it would launch itself and try to download upgrades every single time I would open my macOS user session. If it did that in the background with little cpu/memory I would not have been bothered as much but since I'm only a casual gamer and mostly use a playstation when I do, it was not worth it at all, and never tried it again.

      • No. Nobody has had good experiences running this thing on the mac. My understanding is that its a fairly ancient version of chromium under the hood on the mac, and it just isn't maintained. The problems that hit everyone have been reported for years and there just isnt fixes happening for them. It runs on a single core , doesn't use acceleration, regularly just locks up. Its a bad app, period.

    • Been using Steam on my M1 Air and M1 Max for a couple years now, no problems.
      Now Steam via Crossover? (Rosetta/x86+WINE) That is janky as fuck.
      • I still use it without problems on mac!
      • The July release finally made WINE work on Debian (Bookworm), so perhaps there's hope.

        A $125 Ryzen 5600G is plenty good for a boy's Steam desktop so no wonder AMD is dominating. Parents pay the electric bill!

        • so no wonder AMD is dominating

          Uh, they're not.
          Intel still has the vast overwhelming majority of sales.
          But AMD is definitely chipping away at that.

          Also, the 5600G has less GPU horsepower than a Steam Deck. It's *really* not good for gaming, even at the very low end.
          It is, however, an excellent low-power CPU.

      • Steam on crossover has been a bit hit and miss lately. It worked well for a while but lately theres something up with it that I cant peg down. Ugh.

        At least I got dwarf fortress installed and it can be run without invoking steam, so good enough for now.

        I *think* the video thing is sort of fixed. It still locks up, but not as commonly as it used to (It straigtht up didnt work) but honestly, compared to how it runs on my windows machine, steam on the mac is a hot mess.

    • There's no proton on mac to this date. If you want to run anything wine on mac, you have to rely on crossover (which is good) or some contraption, because even VK on mac is wonky (up to 1.2 supported via MoltenVK, dxvk is also supported to a degree, if I remember, up to 1.10.3 with some caveats).
    • Until the recent UI rework across steam platforms, the mac version barely worked at all.

      If valve put the porting toolkit Apple released a few months ago into their CI for any game that didn’t have a native version, pretty much every game that works with Proton would work on mac as well or better, though I don’t expect that to happen as it might convince some users to just game on their Mac Mini rather than buying a steam deck.
  • Part of the trend may be due to Steam's impending discontinuation of support for Windows 7 at the end of this year. Some people may be upgrading to Linux instead of Windows 10/11. I'm certainly debating which way I want to go.

    • It absolutely was for me. I was dual booting Kubuntu for work and Windows 7 for games. Things slowly got worse as support for 7 rotted. I was stuck on an old version of OBS and Steam announced that their support of Windows 7 would end soon (I think for the same reason, qt6 dropping support for 7). I built a new machine and decided to try gaming on Linux and I've been pleasantly surprised how good it is! I've only found one game that won't run so far after about 4 months. I've seen the shitshow that is Windo

    • Hardly. I'll count myself in the statistics, but not because I don't use a Windows PC. Steam Decks are selling insanely well, so much so that they are being cloned by several 3rd party vendors now.

      I am a windows gamer (who is currently playing many games on a Linux variant called SteamOS). I did not give up windows.

  • ...wonder how much this is due to so many Steam games never getting 64 bit conversion? I have a lot of games on Steam, but nearly all are 32 bit, so I couldn't run them on my Mac right now even if I wanted to.

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Agree! I've kept Steam on my Macs for years now but it gets less useful all the time. With the M1, I only have, I think 3 titles I purchased that still launch and run on it. Everything else in my collection is a "nope".

      And really? There's so little released for Mac in the way of games, it's been a long time since there was one I wanted to buy. I've been playing BF2042 for a year now and no Mac version of that one in sight....

  • I built a Ryzen 5700x System with a RX 6700XT video card and run Manjaro Linux using Wayland. I haven't had any issues running games. I have a bunch of Warhammer 40K games Vermintide, Necromunda, Space Marine and others. they run flawlessly @2k and High Details. Plus other games Boderlands series, God of War, Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein new blood, Star wars outcast, Squadrons.... all run very very well. My son was like why don't you run win 11, then his Win 11 started loading the generic ethernet dr

  • Could this really be the year of Linux on the desktop?

  • Thanks to Steam for all the work they've done in supporting Linux over the years. A good OS alternative for gaming is sorely needed and Steams efforts have been excellent in that regard. Please keep up the good work Steam!

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