> Gaming enthusiasts aren't running Linux.
More and more do today.
More and more do today.
However it's never been good enough. At first there just were no drivers, so I couldn't get acceptable performance from any game. Then came drivers, but I had to fight for days to get them to work on handful of games and even then performance was sub par compared to Windows. Last time drivers installed without any problems, but still from the games I tend to play only couple had native Linux support (in this case, they could be downloaded straight from Steam), but still most required Wine and that sucked the performance right out. Then there were bunch of games that didn't even work with Wine.
I'm first to admit that I do not have high end gaming PC, but 16GB of middle of the road RAM, i5 2500K, and nVidia GTX 970 serve me well on Windows side. Frankly, I see no reason to spend more money to get the same performance on Linux.
If you can get acceptable performance from your Linux PC while gaming then more power to you, but from my point of view we are still long way and I mean really long way from gaming being "viable" on Linux.
Only "native" Linux games I've played are Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and Insurgency. Beyond thous only game I've gotten to run smoothly enough that I could even consider playing them is Minecraft (which obviously runs even on a potato). But even with these I had some problems. CS:GO's FPS didn't quite keep above 120 all of the time and Dota 2 had few graphical glitches.
We do get our share of AAA titles, just not as many as on Windows. As it is, there are more appealing titles than I can ever play without cutting into work, chores, or (non-gaming) leisure time.
Most indie games benefit as well though; even though these do tend to work on less well-endowed GPU's, they simply look better with a heftier graphics card. I've got a desktop computer with beefy GPU exactly because I enjoy gaming; and it runs Linux, exclusively.
I also enjoyed Thimbleweed Park and I see the (excellent, btw) Wonderboy remake was released for Linux this week. Us Linux gamers are incredibly well catered for these days!
(Ubuntu // i5 2500K // GTX 970 with Intel proprietary drivers, FWIW)
-- Ron Gilbert
I don't choose a platform because it has "many games", I want to play games X, Y and Z and I want no issue, what OS should I play them with.
The answer in 99% of X, Y and Z combinations is Windows tragically
However, it's more than good enough for many games already, and Linux gaming keeps improving and growing. And not all games need super performance.
I can get around 40-50 fps in the Witcher 3 in Wine on Linux on max settings (minus hairworks), using AMD RX 480 at 1920x1200. Is that acceptable performance? It's somewhat lower than it would get on Windows on the same hardware, but it's pretty playable. More critical are rendering bugs that Wine developers are still working on.
However I've spent money on 144Hz monitors and for enough performance that the games I play run on at least constant 120 fps. Obviously it's not necessary if you are in it just for a story, but as mentioned in another post I exclusively play multiplayer games with my friends and if you haven't experienced playing games (or even just using a computer) with 144Hz (running at or higher frame rate) it's like a night and day.
I stay away from DRMed platforms, so incumbent consoles are no go for me.
About higher framerates - it should be OK, once AMD will merge FreeSync support in amdgpu driver upstream. My monitor is 60Hz anyway, but to have good experience without tearing on high frequency monitors, FreeSync can help. Today, to use it you'd need to install customized kernel from AMD.
>I stay away from DRMed platforms
I am not ideologically bound, I care about performance. If Linux is enough for you then more power to you, I wish it could be enough for me too.
If you care about performance, you'd stay away from consoles anyway. They are way too limited in comparison.
So I don't agree that Linux is much behind technically. Smaller market share is more of an issue.
As long as Linux is just sort of viable there won't be wide adoption, because why would you change everything about your computing life for something that's +/-0% gain. Even at 10% better experience you might have to consider hard if changing over is worth the effort. Linux needs to magically become superior in many ways for people to hope on board in large numbers.
It's recent, so its usage is gradually growing. Unity engine now supports it, with Unreal and Cry on the way. Once major engines will have it, it will implicitly be used in much larger numbers.
Yes, but we were talking about Linux's popularity as a gaming platform, and why it's not more widespread, and that's not an issue the huge majority of gamers share -- so they'd rather use a console.
You get near native performance in a VM, the downside being it's a little tricky to set up and you won't be able to use your 970 in Linux.
The rest are indie games tiny budget indie games.
So again, AAA or not AAA, quality is what matters, both artistic and technical.
Today, good studios are releasing games for Linux. Such as inXile, Obsidian and others.
The term AAA is analogous to Blockbuster in the film industry. It's a reference to both budget and expected unit sales. Blockbuster movies have budgets starting in the hundreds of millions where as Indie films budges are usually in the single to double digit millions. Video games are no different in that respect.
That's why I don't like the term AAA, it's way too confusing, conflating unrelated and often orthogonal issues (budget, publisher funding vs independent development, quality and so on).
Anyway, there are big budget games coming out for Linux, so above is really besides the point.
Budget is a good indicator of audience numbers regardless of quality.
You can say that there are plenty of good games on Linux and everyone should switch but the reality is that the games people want to play are either unavailable or lacking in some way that makes Linux on the desktop a non starter. C64 and Amiga probably have a larger base than Linux.
In way I don't mind that Linux gamers are getting better games on average, because of less mass market mediocrity, but more interesting (usually crowdfunded) releases that are reaching Linux gamers today. However it ties to the next point, of the market size:
> You can say that there are plenty of good games on Linux and everyone should switch but the reality is that the games people want to play are either unavailable or lacking in some way that makes Linux on the desktop a non starter.
That doesn't describe the situation well. Linux gaming is for sure a much smaller market than Windows gaming, but not only it's already viable (as many developers who sell Linux games demonstrate), it's gradually growing. So it's surely not a "non starter" anymore.
However, since it's smaller, having too many games can actually cause a problem, even if it sounds funny. Simply because it will be overcrowded developers wise, and they'll have harder time selling Linux games. So I'd say actually current amount of games healthily corresponds to the rate of Linux gaming growth.
Who says they are? There's plenty of crap available for Linux. I mentioned Braid because it's a very popular and very good Indie game available on both platforms. I surely wasn't implying that Linux only receives ports of the finest of games.
Also what makes a game "good" is subjective. From the perspective of hours played, Braid isn't very good.
> That doesn't describe the situation well. Linux gaming is for sure a much smaller market than Windows gaming, but not only it's already viable
It is viable for some small developers and for larger developer who are already using tools ported to Linux it can make sense to add support however for the majority of game studios making popular (not necessarily good or bad games) it doesn't make sense.
The market however is viable for everybody, but as I said, if everybody from the Windows gaming market will start releasing games for Linux now, it can actually hurt it, rather than improve it. Gradual growth is better, and it's already happening. Tools wise, the situation is getting much better as well, with all major engines gaining Vulkan support. Common middleware like Umbra 3D also often supports Linux these days.
Are there any numbers, I'm actually curious. I don't regularly see it on the Twitch.tv front page, so my impression was it was a bit behind the big names in esports (LoL, DotA, CS:GO, SC2, Hearthstone, Overwatch).
Here are the release dates with linux support date.
Tomb Raider: 2013, 2016
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: 2014, 2015
The Talos Principle: 2014, same day
Here are some other random selection:
Borderlands 2: 2012, 2014
Europa Universalis 4: 2013, same day
Pillars of Eternity: 2015, same day
Civilization 5: 2010, 2014
Civilization 6: 2016, 2017
Factorio: not yet released, already supports both
There is a clear trend towards more games with linux support and less lag between windows release and linux release. My impression is that the tipping point for newer games is already in favour of linux support than not linux support.
If you want to argue against linux gaming, I would argue with slightly older games that didn't receive a linux port and maybe never will.
The terms gamer and gaming community are used by people to lump anyone who plays video games into a small digestible nugget. There is no single gaming community and the sheer size of each of the countless gaming communities dwarf most other hobby or enthusiast communities.
Most people promoting gaming on Linux are so out of touch that they think having Tux Racer playable makes a Linux desktop computer a first or even second class gaming platform. Having The Witcher 3 or Tomb Raider on Linux is a novelty or a way to win brownie points.
I'm not a serious gamer by any means, my highest played game only logs 403 hours of playtime, I've see people with ten times that. With that in mind, none of the games in my top 10 list in terms of hours (~1800 hours) played are available on Linux.
At this moment they make up nearly 1.3 million concurrent players. The rest of the top 10 games that do not have a linux port accumulate close to 0.7 million concurrent players.
For a lot of players, CS:GO or Dota 2 are the only games they play regularly, so linux is a viable option for them.
You'll see all kinds of posts showing Min/Max FPS and how Linux beats Windows at this game or that but you rarely see any mention of Average FPS because they're usually pretty awful.
https://www.google.com/search?q=CS%3AGO+audio+delay+linux&ie...
In any case, it's the game developer's choice and not mine. Yet another problem Linux has for developers is that there isn't always a clear choice and the flavor of the day may not be the best choice long term. That's why frameworks like Qt and Unity are so prevalent because they abstract a lot of the crap away.
I feel like a large part of the group making who believe Linux is gaming ready doesn't understand that angle.
I only play multi player games with my friends, since single player games rarely keep my interest (last single player campaign/game I finished was Portal 2 since it was so short)
Then there's always "will this even work with wine" question. Like take any Blizzard game, the downloader/launcher simply does not work on Wine (or at least it did not when I last tried it). When a new game comes out that I want to play, I don't want to think if I can play it, I want know I can if I choose to. This is even bigger concern since most interesting games now days are not AAA titles, but various smaller games, mods, and early access titles. Game we've spent most time playing last month is easily Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and with quick look at Wine DB it's status is "garbage"
If I look Linux as separate platform then there is no hope I would be using it to play games.
This is exactly the stupid mindset I'm talking about. You can play different games! It's okay, really, to play different games! Other games are fun too!
Here's an incomplete list of multiplayer games that run natively on Linux, sourced from my own steam library and the popular linux games on steam:
- Rocket League
- CS:GO (and CS:Source)
- Rust
- Garry's Mod
- Terraria
- Insurgency
- Borderlands 2 (+ pre-sequel)
- Civ V
- Left 4 Dead (1 & 2)
- Dota 2
- Torchlight II
- Team Fortress 2
- Battleblock Theater
- Natural Selection 2
- PAYDAY 2
You like multiplayer games? Great! There's loads of them on Linux, and they're all super fun. You don't need to play the same games as Windows to have fun.
To me, they are:
- license cost (a small hurdle if you're buying $60 games)
- open source (mainly a moral/ideological advantage rather than a practical one)
- developer tooling (minimized if you use tools like Docker or Vagrant)
I'll also add:
- WAY more customizable and flexible
- Can enjoy a smug sense of satisfaction as Windows users are hit by ransomware
- Does not spy on you
- Runs great on everything, including >10 year old hardware
It's also not driven by corporate interests. The #1 goal of Microsoft is to make money, and they'll put that before the needs of the user. Things like Windows 10 forced upgrades, spyware, ads in Windows explorer, etc - none of this would fly on Linux because Linux is made by people who just want the best possible operating system, not the one that monetizes uses the most effectively.
This arrogant prescriptivism is what you did last time, too. You did this last time this came up by trying to slag me because I didn't want to waste hours of my life debugging weird edge-case issues with Linux as a desktop operating system (and, funny story, Ubuntu 16.04 hard-locks on my desktop when I plug in a bog-standard USB sound card, that's cool, and has DVI timing and desync problems between my monitor and the graphics card--this is fiiiine, everything is fiiiine). You have decided it's compelling for you. That does not mean stating "it's compelling" makes it so for a single, solitary other soul.
You are frothing and should chill.
Linux isn't "my software", so why would I buy hardware for it--especially when nothing else has a problem with it? Your OS is not special no matter how much you yell at people on HN about it. Your OS doesn't matter to anyone else no matter how much you yell at people on HN about it. Attempting to put the onus of "due diligence" on the people you want to do something is just straight-up nuts--and, tbh, the same rhetorical evasion that's come out of the Linux zealot camp for decades now because it's easier than acknowledging problems and that the things you like aren't universally appropriate.
And the thing is, you actively are providing great rhetorical reasons to not listen to people who do have a sense of user empathy--which you lack, it seems, as you would rather browbeat people into using it than understand why they don't and maybe make it a better value proposition--and want people to use Linux. You're literally, precisely acting against the interests you purport to hold!
When you're in a hole, just...stop digging, dude.
Re-reading this discussion only shows one of us being unreasonable and abrasive. I don't care to engage you any further unless you change your attitude.
But it's me being unreasonable. And abusive--I laughed aloud, dude.
I have had performance decreases and increases with Wine. I would not call the change drastic. The larger issue with wine is that not every game works.
I encourage you to measure both and see what the performance looks like in both places, then see which one gives you better options for improving that if performance really matters.
Unless Linux has exclusives (which it doesn't afaik) then it has lost the battle completely and utterly. Windows is the default choice for gaming PCs and unless something drives a significant change that will continue to be the case as linux is clearly a second class citizen.
As a user, it depends on what you're looking for. I bet most end users would have no problems on a Linux desktop, especially one like Cinnamon or KDE Plasma.
I have no idea what you're talking about, Linux on the desktop is great.
The main problems with desktop Linux as I see it are 1) crappy DEs (namely Gnome3, the most popular and pushed hard by Red Hat) and fragmentation in the DE space, video driver problems, and power-management problems (particularly on laptops, esp. with suspend/resume). My laptop also has a lot of trouble going from docked (w/ dual monitors) to undocked and back. This stuff actually works pretty well on Windows, but on Linux it's a real PITA and frequently requires reboots IME, and that's on a not-new Dell business laptop that's generally well-supported.
I agree with most of your gripes, but fragmentation is more an more just becoming a reality. UIs won't look the same anymore, it just doesn't make sense to. So people will experiment with different things and try to find something better, the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have.
Fragmentation, can be restated as "Community diversity" and it ain't going away because its a huge strength. Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.
>Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.
Not true; if Canonical had their way, everyone would be using Unity. Honestly, I don't begrudge them making Unity; it's good to have some diversity, but I do begrudge them switching to Gnome3 recently and abandoning Unity altogether. A lot of people liked Unity and its concepts. Instead of throwing in the towel and becoming yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, they could have adopted KDE, and then created a custom KDE theme or version of Plasma which looks and works like Unity and allows them to continue to explore those concepts which leveraging the existing KDE underpinnings and the superior Qt toolkit. The real problem IMO is the horrible Gtk toolkit: it's in C but bolts on a hacky OOP concept, it's undocumented, and it's constantly changing. I know of at least one commercial project which had to abandon it and switch to Qt because of the constant API deprecation, and there's at least one FOSS DE (Lxde I think) which also switched from Gtk to Qt for the same reasons, and got a performance boost in the process IIRC.
>the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have.
I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs. Lots of people were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but then it was deprecated and they were pushed to Gnome3 and it was terrible and they hated it. As a result, not 1 but 2 new DEs were created, just to satisfy people who wanted something more stable: Cinnamon and MATE. It's a complete mess. A lot of people were similarly pissed when KDE4.0 was released and they couldn't use KDE3 any more because the distros all deprecated it, and the new version was filled with huge bugs and didn't work. At some point, you need to aim for product maturity instead of constant churn. I've been using ssh for many, many years and I don't see that being deprecated any time soon and having to switch to some other standard, but somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?
3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3.
I agree that improved interop would be good, but I am grateful for how well it does work. Copy/paste and other common shortcuts and features work. But, I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper. A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this. The new the changed right click menu on the desktop would be really weird for the uninitiated too.
> I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs
It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up. I explain I never used it, but I can form better google searches than them so I can figure out how to do what they need (I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too).
The root of this is how does a UI designer improve the UI while keeping it familiar enough for previous users? How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?
No, it's still true. They didn't want to drop Unity at all; they did it because they were forced to. Didn't you read Mark Shuttleworth's blog postings about it? He was clearly unhappy about things. They gave up on Unity and Mir because they weren't working out in the market and it was costing them too much money to pursue that direction. If Mark had his way, Unity would be the most popular Linux DE.
>I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper.
Huh? I don't know what to say to this. Nautilus is Gnome software, not KDE. Why would KDE try to open Nautilus for anything, unless you've explicitly set it up that way? Now if that's what you've done because you like Nautilus, the problem is probably with the Gnome/Gtk devs. As I said before, they're infamous for not being amenable to cross-toolkit efforts. I would encourage you to ask them for their advice on this problem; they'll probably tell you "switch to Gnome3". :-/ I use KDE too, and personally I avoid GTK software if I can help it.
>A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this.
I agree entirely. It's garbage, and it shouldn't be this way. The Gnome devs are entirely to blame for this mess, along with all the distros that push Gnome3. They don't even want you to use a wallpaper with Gnome3; Jon McCann said so some time ago, saying that customization (even wallpapers) is bad because it makes different Gnome installations different.
>It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up.
Oh I entirely agree; all the UI people across the industry have gone collectively nuts. But I expect better from FOSS, for multiple reasons: 1) FOSS isn't for-profit (well, I guess Red Hat is, maybe that's part of the problem), so they shouldn't need to push unnecessary churn to justify pushing customers to "upgrade", and 2) FOSS is usually very resource-limited compared to commercial software, so unnecessary churn is a waste of developer time that's better spent fixing bugs, improving docs, making things more stable, etc. If I want to use the latest fancy BS, it would stand to reason that I'd go for commercial proprietary SW, because those vendors are all in favor of making "new" shiny stuff to get me to spend more money to do the same thing. The same shouldn't also be true of FOSS, but for some reason it seems to be.
>I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too
I don't. I consider it all an unnecessary waste, and I really don't like these new UIs at all. Thankfully I'm still stuck on Win7 at work for the moment, and minimize my use of Windows whenever possible as I do most of my work in a Linux VM (and don't use it at home at all), and I never even see any Macs up close. I put up with Android because it's the best of 2 bad choices, but also IMO it's not that bad: it's a touch UI designed for a handheld touchscreen device and it's OK at that, unlike PC stuff that they seem to be trying to tablet-ify.
>How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?
Whatever it is, the answer isn't trying to tablet-ify PCs, or using garish and nauseating color schemes. Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7 style UI for the most part, and why do we care about grandparents? Today's grandparents were using Win95 and XP, so they're perfectly used to that kind of UI. Grandparents today are not starting to use computers for the first time; that was 10-20 years ago. Anyone left now who isn't familiar with PCs to some extent isn't going to be alive for very long, and isn't interested in learning PCs now. And most older people with simple needs would be perfectly happy with an iPad or other tablet anyway, which is why the PC market is no longer growing.
It wasn't KDE software opening nautilus. It was random 3rd party software that decided to launch nautilus instead of asking what it should have launched.
> Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7
Sounds like someone who never worked on a help desk. There is someone new using a computer for the first time everyday. I would be confident this was true even if it were just grandparents, but there are poor subsistence farmers settling into cities and luddites turned everyday. I think you are letting your tiny view (we all have a tiny view) of the world make you think that every hold a decent professional job in a decent western and industrial nation.
And no matter how much you long for it the past is not coming back and any UI that requires clicking "start" to shutdown is in wastebin and rightfully so.
Citation needed. Windows 10 still requires this, they just don't label the button "start" any more (nor does any other UI I've seen in the last 10 years). Mechanically, it's basically the same.
It still has a few dialog from the nt4 era, some that use the snap-in nonsense, regedit is still a thing. Then for about half of what a typical user does they can use the nice pretty UI, as long as there are no unexpected errors.
No, but it is the normal result of an open source development process. Being able to fork at any time is exactly why the fragmentation exists. Don't like it? Use a commercial product.
Consider how different the iPhone and windows 10 are. Or windows 7 and windows 8. Because the community driven teams don't stop when they run out of money they stick around, but they also have really small marketshare.
Honestly, this whole "WinDoze is lame" attitude is so 2008. Windows 10 is a great platform. And I say this as an Arch Linux user who just wasted 2 hours dicking around with DBus and NetworkManager because there are still 3-year-old unfixed bugs regarding Cisco VPN connections.
I really don't know why people like windows beyond having their applications (That really is enough). It is limited, the tools they make are clearly more for checking off boxed on some marketing list somewhere because they rarely work right and often limited in their core performance. Even their tools like their expensive compiler and database does work as well for my worklaods as their free and open source counterparts.
It wasn't that long ago we saw the remotely exploitable flaw in Windows Defender that allowed arbitrary execution of code in a security product! Or more innocuous but no less annoying, the guy with the umpteen core ryzen getting blocked by some random mutex deep inside windows so his build was being throttled and he couldn't use his own CPU the way he wanted. It buggy, its lower quality, but they succeeded in having many make their software for it exclusively so it is
Then we can start talking about the ethical issues with it, like giving money to a monopoly that has tried to bribe standardization bodies and has been convicted several times of anticompetitive practices.
I used Linux for over a decade exclusively while good friends told me how great OS x was now. I finally had to support building an iOS app so I bought a MacBook.
Great hardware. the os is awful compared to Linux. the window manager is worse.
they have some really nice apis available. increasingly to use those you must sell your software in their store and give them 33% of your revenue.
I think a world where one or two companies get 33% of all software revenues is roughly maximally dystopian.
On the other hand unless a linux package has a post-install script that moves things around, I can just dump where everything landed by a simple package query. To each his own, I suppose.
However I was comparing the newer package manager and Windows App Store install models to Linux's package management, since that is the most comparable model. Both installation models are closer to the Mac model, where an app package gets installed to a single location. Universal apps are containerized, and don't use the Registry at all[0]. The PS package manager installs packages into a single location, where you can pretty easily remove them using the package manager, or manually, if you want.
[0] http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/windows-10-app-development...
This is news to me, unless its another one microsoft's crappy marketplaces, and I would like to do some reading.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/tools/package-manager...
I much preferred the UI/UX of the old Classic Mac OS. Apple should have just plopped that on top of Darwin (I would probably still be a mac user).
Fedora is good enough, and definitely breaks less often than a Windows install (which is a big change from even a few years ago).
My experience is completely different. Not with Fedora, but with Linux in general. I've never actually managed to hose my Windows system. Closest I've gotten is when installing custom themes on Windows 7 and done fucked my explorer.exe, so my GUI was gone, but I was able to fix it with cmd. On other hand I've mauled multiple Linux installations to a point where screens are just black or login screen won't even show or system doesn't even recognise MBR on the disk.
OSX so far I haven't been able to break, but it might be just because I haven't actually tried to tweak it in many ways. Currently I'm kind a tied in the Apple ecosystem, so I just run OSX on my laptop/hobby machine and Windows on my "gaming rig", but I use Linux daily for work.
I do own a couple of gaming consoles, but now that I have less spare time, my gaming preferences have definitely shifted toward casual games I can pick up and play for 20 minutes and then forget about for a week (so I'm a Nintendo fan these days).
And what's important is sales potential, which you can evaluate by sales percentages per OS for cross platform games. Steam doesn't publish such numbers. Humble Bundle does though.
People who use their Android phones to purchase and pay Humble Bundle, get classified under "Linux". You can see big Linux platform numbers even for bundles that don't have a single Linux game.
I wouldn't be surprised if a survey actually overestimated the number of Linux users. Using Linux for gaming is a choice and usually a more difficult path than gaming on Windows. So, Linux users are likely move vocal about their use of Linux, for various reasons: (1) it's often a principled choice; (2) by showing that a significant chunk uses Linux, more gaming studios will target Linux.
tl;dr: it would be nice if Valve released actual stats, but I think the survey is a good ballpark figure. In other words, the market is pretty much non-existent.
> by showing that a significant chunk uses Linux, more gaming studios will target Linux.
That's already happening, if you paid attention.
No matter which way you slice it, the Linux gaming community is tiny when compared to Windows and consoles. Sure, it's growing, and there are more and more games coming to the OS, and more choices = better of course.
But we are a long way from Linux being a platform that matters in the overall computer gaming world.
Linux gaming is obviously a subject that you hold dear - you've jumped in multiple times on almost every single top thread in this discussion - and that's ok, but ease off a bit..
Let your points stand on their own merit, you don't need to call people out because they're not as deeply informed on the subject matter as you are, or because they don't agree with your perspective.
Just to speak against this notion (which absolutely used to be true, no contest there): anecdotally, I don't find that to be true anymore, at least using Steam.
It works really smoothly for me, just as on Windows. In fact I'm just about ready to drop Windows as a gaming plaform. Maybe some titles aren't available for Linux, but I still have enough to fall back on.
If you choose to game on Linux, you are intentionally restricting the number of games you can play. And for some people that's obviously ok, but for most (as stats show), it's not ok.
Because they need permission from the user to collect the data.
Even if the data is undercounting Linux (maybe Linux games are less likely to take the survey) the trend is consistently down for ~4 years now. So you might make a case that the size is bigger than the survey shows, but not that it is growing.
From DRM-free stores, GOG unfortunately don't publish any stats, and stats from HB show pretty good Linux percentage.
I can also play on my Windows box/console/Mac etc.
Unlikely, as the PC market is basically stable or even shrinking slowly.
I tried using Linux on several occassions over the last 10-15 years. It was never easy or fun. All the GUIs felt like they were from the 90s and nothing worked out of the box. I tried Ubunutu, Mint, Arch, and a few others. My last attempt at it was ~2014. Maybe I'll hate myself enough to try Linux again in a year or two...
And the GP comment was right anyway, 90% of the Market is for sure not running Linux for gaming on PC. 1~2% is nice but it's hardly enough to convince large publishers to support Linux.
If you noticed, the main article speaks about how those "teams of developers" DON'T plan to support XWayland.
I don't. I run all my games on Linux. Unlike you, I simply don't play games that don't work on Linux ;) I.e. either natively or in Wine.
You can't deny that if the big AAA players supported Linux it would bring a (large?) influx of gamers. If they'd all just target the latest Ubuntu LTS or whatever SteamOS run on, the community would make it run on their own distros.
But if you are really so desperate to spend money on those who ignore us, Wine is improving all the time, and now already approaches decent DX11 support, so even games like Overwatch are now playable in it.
And the "this year is the year of the Linux desktop" (or gaming desktop) line has been going on since 1998. I was there, got the t-shirt.