Linux's Marketshare Drops in Monthly Steam Survey (phoronix.com) 59
What's Linux's marketshare on Steam? The Steam Survey numbers tell this story:
11/24: 2.03%
12/24: 2.29%
01/25: 2.06%
02:25: 1.45%
"The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error: According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month.
Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%].
AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.
11/24: 2.03%
12/24: 2.29%
01/25: 2.06%
02:25: 1.45%
"The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..." reports Phoronix. But they attribute this to an sampling error: According to the survey, it shows 50% of Steam users using the Simplified Chinese language pack [a 20% increase from the month before]. In prior months where there has been drops to Linux use, it's been correlated to wild swings in the Chinese use on Steam. This looks to be another such month.
Of the Linux specific data, SteamOS continues to prove most popular for that Valve distribution powering the Steam Deck [at 34.67%, with Arch Linux coming in second at 9.7%].
AMD CPUs power around 70% of the Linux gaming systems thanks to the Steam Deck APU and AMD Ryzen being quite popular with Linux enthusiasts.
I wonder (Score:1)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Carefully select who you include in the statistics.
Wait for a moment where the user is likely to be happy. So, don’t ask in the few 2 minutes, it’s unlikely for them to be super enthusiastic already.
Give them a free reward, or wait until they’ve successfully completed an important operation.
Then ask (in the app!) if they like the app,
Yes? Great! Redirect to the AppStore to rate.
No?: Ask for feedback (in the app, not in the App
Re: (Score:2)
Also, if an app interrupts me from whatever I am doing to ask me to rate it, I go to the Play Store and give it one star, citing the interruption asking me to rate the app as the reason.
Re: I wonder (Score:2)
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My rig is sick too. GTX 960 and 6th gen CPU. It needs a booster shot.
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If you want to try AMD out you can get a 5700 XT for 100 bucks pretty much all day long. Some of them are going to be old cryptocurrency mining cards but don't let that turn you off they're fine. You can even go with a gigabyte or an ASUS, for whatever reason for that one series of cards they were making decent stuff for AMD. though you should look for a sapphire or a XFX if you can ge
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I was just snooping around eBay today at video card prices. I did see a few 1080Tis for right around the price you stated. I would really like to get into the RTX series but even the 2060s are still getting around $250 or more. I miss the days of sanely priced new video cards.
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I miss the days of sanely priced new video cards.
I know what you mean! What a bummer has been the crypto and AI market so far for casual gamers and the like. Hopefully, ASIC will be made for AI like it was done for bitcoins and people interested in rendering videos can again get decent prices. ASICs (Application-specific integrated circuit ) are much more efficient anyway instead of using general purpose GPUs.
I'd suggest evaluating the other components of your rig as well. Plenty of RAM is king and RAM is quite cheap these days. Real NVME drives are a plu
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I had a Sapphire Radeon once. They made the card edge too long and it broke the end off of the slot in just a few days. Never again.
ASUS also now has the worst warranty policy in the business, so also never again. And I used to advocate for their hardware pretty hard.
I have mixed feelings about Gigabyte as my 770FX G1 Gaming died just after the warranty expired. But I do have one of their windforce GPUs and the low fan noise is nice.
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I had a Sapphire Radeon once. They made the card edge too long and it broke the end off of the slot in just a few days. Never again.
Amateures. We all know if you really want to break a computer you build a spontaneously combusting GPU power connector.
Re: (Score:2)
I find Nvidia's current exploits at the top end of the 40 and 50 series to be pathetic beyond all belief. I have been an Nvidia user for years now and every time I've used an AMD card (or before that an ATI card) I've regretted it except on laptops. I had one with a K6/2 400 and ATI Rage Pro LT AGP graphics running Gentoo, and now I have one with IIRC a 3125U running Devuan. The former worked OK and the latter works very well, so I will probably get AMD next. I have a 4060 Ti 16GB now, which is fine except
Re: I wonder (Score:2)
In case anyone cares, it worked.
Now just waiting for kernel 6.14 so I can use NTSYNC.
Re: (Score:3)
6th gen CPU
Counting all the way back to the Intel 4004?
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Back in my day, we'd have killed for a rig with a CPU. We had to make do with a couple of vacuum tubes and some electromechanical relay switches
The term "central processing unit" has been in use since as early as 1955.
A CPU made of vacuum tubes (e.g. IBM 702) or relay switches is still a CPU.
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LOL, relay logic for the win!
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I'm still using my GTX 970. Funny thing is, I can still run most games just fine at 1080p, where 4GB VRAM is plenty. AAA games have been increasingly CPU-bound. It's only this year that new games have required RTX-series ray tracing for some reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm perfectly happy with 1080p or less gaming. If I get at least 30FPS I'm fine too. The reason I am hoping to finally break into RTX cards is the reason you mentioned, more games are going to require it as time goes on. But then again I am perfectly happy with playing a game like Left For Dead 2 even to this day. Still fun and my "old" rig is more than enough to max it out. Dead Island is a hoot too.
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Steam Survey Swinging Across The Board (Score:3)
A data point, in isolation, can be used to read in any explanation you like.
Elsewhere, itâ(TM)s widely reported that Steam survey numbers are swinging wildly across the board as Steam has recently had an explosion of growth in the Chinese gaming community, who tend to agree to participate in the survey more than Western users, in order to get greater representation.
The average CPU has decreased, the average GPU has decreased, and also Linuxâ(TM)s market share has decreased.
But what the survey doesnâ(TM)t say is whether the U.S. or EU markets have actually changed at all. Or whether the large Chinese market has simply moved the global average points hard.
Meanwhile, those who donâ(TM)t account for that are making pronouncements about how Linux is used much less for gaming⦠while numbers of players, numbers of installed games, have all likely remained very much the same.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if we will start seeing more games catering to the Chinese market, like Hollywood movies started to a few years back. Actually it was more than a few years now, damn... Iron Man was 2008 and had extra bits for the Chinese market.
Meanwhile Chinese AAA games seem to be here now, with Wukong. The industry is in for a big shake-up.
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So it's Year of the (Score:1)
...Shrinking Linux?
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Steam (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It also shows how many people respond to the survey.
Do we really think that the number of users dropped anywhere close to 30% in a month?
Re: (Score:2)
2% of 132 million active monthly users is still a decent number of customers. Although it's not like Linux gamers have too many other places to spend their money.
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GTA V Online stopped being supported (Score:1)
Maybe a major title like GTA V Online suddenly being unsupported has something to do with it?
Although the cheating was so rampant it was unplayable on steam.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe a major title like GTA V Online suddenly being unsupported has something to do with it?
Although the cheating was so rampant it was unplayable on steam.
The Rockstar Launcher version of GTA V Online is full of cheaters, too. You pretty much can't play that game in a public lobby on anything except a console. Even then, my partner has an Xbox so I've seen that by going console you're really just trading all the hacks and mods on the PC for lobbies full of griefers and dumbshit kids.
For a game that's as old as GTA V Online, it seems silly to be saying this, but you either play with people you know in a private session, or just... play something else.
It's entirely my fault (Score:4, Funny)
I still haven't bought a Steam Deck. My bad.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd buy a Steam deck, but I'm struggling to think of a single Steam game I play that doesn't use keyboard and mouse (other than some VR games).
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Er, Steam deck supports USB keyboards and mice, and while game support is up to the game port, there doesn't seem to be many, if any, that don't.
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Jokes aside, I haven't turned mine on in February. It's not a holiday month. I would be reflected in the stats for December and January but I only use it when I travel. The variation between fixed and portable devices is very significant in usage over time, and it has an impact on Linux in the stats.
Support is needed (Score:2)
I'd use Steam a whole lot more if more titles natively supported linux, the amount of voodoo I needed to do to even get Deep Rock Galactic to work under Linux took a few hours of my time to troubleshoot, it should not be that hard.
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Same here. I only play table-top and boardgames online with friends (e.g. Lords of Waterdeep, Dune Imperium, Ticket To Ride) rather than low-latency higher action games. But even with these, if they manage to run on a default Steam install on Linux, they run really slowly and often have odd glitches.
So I dual boot. It's the only thing I use Windows for.
Are you saying that Linux is Dying? (Score:2)
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Also, we will need some confirmation from netcraft before it can be considered official.
Re: (Score:3)
Have you read the article? This happens every time there is a fluctuation in Chinese users on Steam. These happen quite regularly and mess up the numbers.
Re: (Score:2)
You have a 5 digit user number. Doesn't any of that sound familiar?
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers?
Clickbait marketshare. (Score:2)
”The February numbers show a staggering 0.61% drop to Linux use..."
Staggering? Perhaps we review the actual statistical accuracy here first. So the audience may better understand the staggering amount of clickbait sensationalist bullshit that can be shoved into a single headline.
Just curious, are we measuring Linux usage here, or the capability of language packs to make Linux statistics pointless?
Happens once or twice a year (Score:2)
Re: Happens once or twice a year (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
On Sloshdat.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
FFS. What happened to Slashdot?
Steam deck's hardware needs a v2 (Score:2)
If Linux usage on Steam is significantly SteamDeck, then the increasing age of the Steam Deck hardware is probably a good part of this. Unlike with traditional portable gaming consoles, people think of it as being more like a PC, and are less enthused to buy/use it when it starts to get creaky.
I would've bought a version 2 of mine ages ago if they would've sold one (a real version 2, not just the variant with the nicer screen).
Well so much for 2025 (Score:3)
Signal vs. Noise (Score:2)
A month-to-month drop of .2% is just reporting on noise.
tux takes a hit? not really... (Score:2)
It’s hard to take the Steam hardware survey numbers at face value when Linux barely hits the ~2% mark—and that’s on a good month. This month’s reported 1.45% share might look like a big drop, but any shift in Steam’s international user base (like that recent surge in Simplified Chinese users) can easily skew these tiny percentage points. If half your user base suddenly speaks Chinese, you’re looking at a very different slice of the overall data—one that says less ab
SteamOS is not counted in the Linux share ! +0.5% (Score:1)
When looking overall (Win, MacOS, Linux), SteamOS is not shown in the system statistics.
The best Linux is Arch at 0.14%
SteamOS appears in the "Linux Only" statistics (34.67%)
where Arch is 9.70%. (34.76*0.14)/9.7== 0.50039% of SteamOS overall
0.5% of SteamOS: if 132 millions active players, then, 6 millions SteamDeck. 1/25 of the number of Nintendo Switchs. A quite good result :-)
Linux is 3% outside China, less than 0% in China (Score:1)
Assuming a constant ratio of Linux between the two last surveys, and assuming "Simplified Chinese" means "China"
In maxima:
solve([x*0.5006 + y*(1-0.5006) = 1.45, x*0.2918+(1-0.2918)*y=2.06], [x, y]);
x = - 937 / 104400 == 0,008975095785
y = 304063/104400 == 2,912480843
Thus the Linux steam market share without SteamDeck is roughly 3% outside China, and 0% in China (China is 50% of the current market)
Sorry, that was my fault (Score:2)
I started playing Mines recently, which is just a plain old free open source game from the repos.
Speaking of which....