Steam On Linux Ends 2024 With Small Marketshare Boost, AMD Linux CPU Use Near 74% (techspot.com) 23
Phoronix reports on Valve's "Steam Survey" results for December 2024, saying the new numbers "reflect a nice upward trend for the Linux gaming statistics and a high point in recent times."
In November the Steam Survey reflected a 2.03% marketshare for Linux... Roughly inline with what we have been seeing for Linux right at around the 2% threshold. With the just-published December survey numbers, there is a 0.29% increase to 2.29%...! When looking at the Linux numbers, SteamOS Holo accounts for around 36% of all Linux gamers... SteamOS Holo being the operating system of the Steam Deck and beginning to appear on other devices as well... Driven in large part by the Steam Deck relying on a custom AMD SoC/APU and AMD being popular with Linux gamers/enthusiasts for their open-source driver support, AMD CPU use on Linux commands a 73.6% marketshare.
In fact, December "saw AMD reach another record-high share among participants of Valve's survey," according to TechSpot — "up 3.02% last month, taking its total to 38.7% as Intel fell slightly to 63.4%..." Elsewhere, Windows 11 is now comfortably the most popular OS in the survey. It pulled ahead another 2% to an almost 55% share in December as Windows 10 dropped to 42.3%... However, it's a different story when looking at global users: Windows 10's share has increased two months in a row to 62.7% while Windows 11 has declined to 34.1%. Rounding up the rest of the survey, 16GB of RAM remains the most popular amount of system RAM but it's lead is declining as second-place 32GB grows; a trend that is mirrored in the VRAM category...
Phoronix adds that the Windows percent "pulled back by 0.51% to 96.1% while Apple macOS also gained 0.22% going up to a 1.61% marketshare."
In fact, December "saw AMD reach another record-high share among participants of Valve's survey," according to TechSpot — "up 3.02% last month, taking its total to 38.7% as Intel fell slightly to 63.4%..." Elsewhere, Windows 11 is now comfortably the most popular OS in the survey. It pulled ahead another 2% to an almost 55% share in December as Windows 10 dropped to 42.3%... However, it's a different story when looking at global users: Windows 10's share has increased two months in a row to 62.7% while Windows 11 has declined to 34.1%. Rounding up the rest of the survey, 16GB of RAM remains the most popular amount of system RAM but it's lead is declining as second-place 32GB grows; a trend that is mirrored in the VRAM category...
Phoronix adds that the Windows percent "pulled back by 0.51% to 96.1% while Apple macOS also gained 0.22% going up to a 1.61% marketshare."
More Arch Linux users than Windows 7 (Score:3)
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Supermium runs fine on XP, and current project goal is to get it to run on 2k. 98 is probably too much to ask because it's a DOS-based OS, not NT based.
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Windows 98 probably won't run fine on a modern CPU, even if the firmware has a BIOS option and you find some drivers. For Windows 98 there existed all sorts of CPU speed bugs, memory size bugs, ACPI bugs, CPU multicore bugs and whatnot. Even Windows NT 4.0 would be a better bet than any Windows 9x. If you just like the UI, Windows NT 4.0 can be upgraded to the Windows 98 UI by installing IE4. If you want to play (old) games, then Windows 2000 or XP is the way.
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Recent forced steam update broke windows. It doesn't just not start, it often hard locks the OS. That's why windows 7 numbers on SHS are down. You can't start it on windows 7 any more because valve intentionally broke it on that OS.
Before that, it ran just fine while being almost a year past "not supported".
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How do you know this was intentional? It seems more likely that Valve no longer does any backwards-compatibility testing on Windows 7 because it's not supported. So, if they accidentally broke it on Windows 7, they wouldn't know.
Incidentally, Ubuntu runs great on hardware that ran windows 7, and Steam runs great on Ubuntu. And it's free.
You can even run Ubuntu from a flash drive so you can recover any data files you want from the machine before upgrading it.
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>So, if they accidentally broke it on Windows 7, they wouldn't know.
Update to chromium they did required intentionally removing compatibility libraries. You don't just "oopsie, we removed compatibility libraries for this OS, and we didn't even know we did it". That's not the way anything works.
As for your last two paragraphs, it's stuff like this that makes "linux on desktop in current year" a meme spanning decades.
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I know it was intentional because Steam told me via popup message. I was one of those stragglers that stayed on Windows 7 up until spring of last year. Steam upgraded to a new version of Qt which doesn't support Windows 7 (had this same issue with OBS). I think they also upgraded Chromium which also dropped support for Windows 7. In the face of degrading software support for that ancient (but less annoying) OS, I made the switch to Linux fulltime, no Windows installs at all. I gotta say Proton compatibility
Proton considered Linux or windows? (Score:3)
I couldn't find this in the report... Does anyone know if windows games run via proton would be reported as on windows or on Linux? I only wonder because I was having some troubles with a steam deck game recently, which I fixed (under advisement) by switching from the native Linux version to the windows version running under proton...
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I don't see the methodology listed but the moat accurate results would come from the launcher/store gathering the data.
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Proton is still considered to be Linux, as the steam hardware survey cares about the platform running Steam, not the runtime used by games. That is, unless you run Steam itself in Wine, which I guess would report as one of the "Others" Linuxes.
Incidentally, that's also why you see people using "Ubuntu core 22" (the steam snap) and "Freedesktop Runtime" (the steam flatpak).
Then what happened to BG3? (Score:3)
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What do you mean ? Via Steam or other ? I still see it on steam store and I play it on steam deck (so Linux)
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Did you somehow forget to switch on again the compatibility mode (Proton) for the game?
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There was never a BG3 download for Linux, it's been the Windows version all along; you must have dreamed that. They've had good Proton support as a verified supported Steam Deck title since game launch however, so maybe that's how you got confused.