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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

Linux gaming has been improving rapidly lately, in another year I doubt windows will be necessary.

Biggest overstatement. Linux gaming, though becoming more possible, is nowhere near gaming on windows. Forget game availability, even most GPUs are not properly supported on most Linuxes.

> even most GPUs are not properly supported on most Linuxes

This situation is rapidly changing too with ATI and intels OSS GPU drivers.

Rapidly? How long since ATI/AMD has been talking about improving their drivers? A decade? No, if history is in any way predicting the future then these talks are completely hollow.

Intel drivers are Ok though.

And now they've released OSS drivers, it's action now, not just talk.

I've been hearing some variations on "getting better any time now" since about 2003. Stop trying to make the Linux Desktop happen. It's not going to happen. In fact, if you stop making it happen, maybe it will finally stabilise enough that it actually happens.

Not directly related to this thread but I want to have a little moan about the Steam client, so here goes:

When I open Steam it opens in the Store view in the main window, and the promotions pop-up also appears with sales and promo info. Great, except that 90% of the time the main store page and the pop-up are pushing Windows only games. I game on an iMac and occasionally on a Linux laptop. I have never bought a Windows only game. I send survey info to Valve.

If Linux (and Mac) gaming is to grow Valve need to try harder to get the games into my field of vision. It's silly that I click on the details button of the promo pop-up for a whole series of games only to scroll through the list and mutter "windoes only" to myself repeatedly. It simply is not content aimed at me at all, and they know who I am and the platform I am using.

Its ridiculous that they don't just pick this up automatically but you can specify what you're interested in from your profile preferences on the Steam store. My recommended games became so much more useful once I turned off early access games and filtered out open world survival and zombie games.

AFAIK, you can disable the the pop-up and you can set which page should be opened by default. Steam > Settings > Interface.

So have the consumer do the work that should be done by the for-profit company whose job is to sell, market and profit. I believe the burden of work lies with Valve, I don't need more games, it's up to Valve to sell them to me.

Given that the percentage of Steam users running Linux is declining, I'm not as optimistic as you.

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Hwsurvey-Febr...

A 0.05% drop is well within the expected margin of error with a perfect statistical methodology and large sample size. The steam survey is opt in, it's a good rough guide but you can't read anything into month-month changes.

Even if we generously agree that it's correct, how much has steam grown? A 0.05% drop could still be more total users than the previous month.

The usage share was 0.97% at the end of 2015, 0.87% at the end of 2016 and 0.75% in the latest survey. This might still translate to a growing absolute number of Linux users, but it would be nice to see the momentum start going in the opposite direction when it comes to those percentages.

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