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> their own survey indicates that only <1% of users are on Linux

This is interesting to me because I spend 99.5% of my time on Linux (even for most of my gaming), but I still boot into a different OS when I want to use Steam, so I don't show up on the stat sheet. I wish I did. Two reasons I do this:

1. The Steam installation is kind of messy on my OS (Arch Linux). It involves a big client that doesn't integrate into the OS very well, requires a lot of 32 bit compatibility libraries that I wouldn't otherwise need, and leaves a bunch of large data files all over my home folder.

2. It simply feels weird and uncomfortable to run closed-source DRM-including software on Linux. I can't explain it any better than that, because it really is just a mental "purity" thing. I'd rather completely separate the "foreign" software that I have this instinctive distrust for onto a separate system entirely, where I already don't trust the OS.

I'm still grateful to Valve for the support, because it encourages developers to get their software to run on Linux, even if most of the games I play are DRM-free binaries purchased from the developer.

To me it feels weird to use binaries from outside the repos, period. On Windows double clicking an exe file feels natural. On Linux "chmod +x something && ./something" is icky.

That's a good point! Maybe that's the source of it. I've gotten used to it for a couple of statically compiled long-lived binaries (games), but other than that even software I compile myself gets packaged before I install it.

You can run GPU accelerated apps in a container. You just need to install the same video driver and expose the x11 socket and card device. The app could still be evil and screen scrape or key log but at least it has no access to your filesystem and when the container is off it is truly off (assuming reasonable container security). There are several tutorials out there for at least browsers.

You forgot sudo. IIRC Windows Steam asks for Admin rights.

You are correct, it does.

Uhm, sudo on a proprietary binary outside the repo? ...Yeah no thanks.

What difference does it make really. Running a program on linux as a regular user can access all of your files, record your screen, keylog you, grab your passwords from your browser, do basically anything. Run it with sudo and what more can it do? Mess up your grub config? If a malicious program was run as a regular user it could basically ruin everything you care about unless you happen to be sharing a computer with multiple people but even then it could just wait until you run something with sudo and keylog your password.

How could a unprivileged program keylog my sudo typings? (I am running Wayland)

What CPU are you running? Spectre mitigations enabled? Hyper Threading?

Greater issues with possible persistence, control over daemons and sockets, access to lots of files I don't let regular users have access to, etc.

Plus the other half which is the whole proprietary binary side of things. IMO, lack of transparency invites more bad behavior.

Multiplayer Windows games in general ship anti-cheating software implemented as kernel modules that are more invasive than even draconian DRM.

I've played several multiplayer games for Windows and I've only seen Fortnite do this.

Many "serious" multiplayer games will feature this. I mean VAC, EasyAntiCheat, BattlEye. They all have a kernel module component.

Not necessarily. [0]

Also, it is actually quite trivial bypassing UAC prompt in Windows. It simply gives a false sense of security.

Something as simple as SilentCleanup [1] still works to this day. This will bypass UAC with little effort.

Even worse, following that, it is also trivial to get NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM using Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription. [2]

I've done it as an exercise in Go out of all languages and it ended up fully undetected both on disk and during runtime.

So Windows simply provides a false sense of security. After all Microsoft themselves said [3]:

  One important thing to know is that UAC
  is not a security boundary. UAC helps people
  be more secure, but it is not a cure all.
  UAC helps most by being the prompt before
  software is installed.

[0] https://amonitoring.ru/article/steam_vuln_3/

[1] https://enigma0x3.net/2016/07/22/bypassing-uac-on-windows-10...

[2] https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1084/

[3] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/e7/2009/02/05/update-on-uac...

> On Windows double clicking an exe file feels natural.

Isn't that just because the system is less structured in general, so you've been beaten into submission?

After spending years on Linux pretty much everything on Windows feels like it's potentially spewing ick all over the place (registry, arbitrary folders, etc, not to mention the lack of reproducibility)!

This is how I feel when I use Linux!

Windows is moving towards apps living only in their own little containers, nice little isolated folders that they can't write outside of, with the exception of their reserved folder in AppData.

In contrast, *nix bunches executables up en-masse into a handful of folders.

It likely comes down largely to what you are used to.

It's an issue of familiarity. I still feel that everything installed by distros' package manager or via "make install" is spewing ick all over /etc, /usr, /var, and God knows where. On Windows, almost everything only ever sticks to a) its installation folder, and b) the registry.

Truth is, Windows is a mess when installing stuff also. Beside installation folder and registry, there is also user's AppData folder, \ProgramData in system drive, and then installers tend to leave some MSIs in \Windows\Installer, all the libraries in System32 and sometimes, they also place stuff in Program Files\Common files.

The best at isolation has historically been macis, and then again you have plenty of packages installing to /Library, kernel extensions, uninstallers being placed in Applications/Utilities, MS updater being placed in /System and so on

I use separate debian nspawn containers for this kind of crap.

It doesn't bother me to turn on multilib support in a rootfs I only boot in a container just to run steam client and its games. Though I do have to reboot into a kernel w/32-bit support first which can be annoying.

> Though I do have to reboot into a kernel w/32-bit support first which can be annoying.

Isn't that in by default on pretty much everything? I'm not aware of any distro shipping an x86 kernel with 32-bit support disabled, anyways. Are you intentionally building your own kernels and removing 32-bit compatibility? Seems like an easier thing to fix than having to reboot every time.... (Unless I've misremembered and that is a default, in which case please correct me because that throws it the other way)

I build my own monolithic kernels, and only enable the features and drivers I use.

My host is all 64-bit userland, it's just exceptions like Steam stuff that need 32-bit support (even the Steamworks/Steampipe developer side is annoying like this). So I boot into that kernel when doing those things, and keep those userspaces in separate containers which also get "booted" when needed.

I run Steam under a different user account (and X server). It takes care of the junky home directory problem. However, the main reason is because I don't trust all the random game developers.

Why not just Flatpak Steam?

1) You complain of messiness on ArchLinux? Clearly you are not the target for ArchLinux and would be more suited to an easy to use distro, instead of one of the hardest to use.

I don't think Arch is messy. Difficult to use, certainly, but architecturally it's far more clean than Ubuntu.

Linux and Steam OS will continue to be an escape hatch, it is in their business interests to continue hedging their bets.

Just because the Microsoft Store didn't pan out a few years ago doesn't mean they won't try again.

An utopian escape hatch, store now also does Win32 and MSIX is the way forward.

Every year since XP I keep reading how PC gamers will switch in droves to Linux because of X, instead those of us that really enjoy gaming and high performance graphics are on Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony and Nintendo platforms.

>gaming and high performance graphics

>Apple >Nintendo

What? Nintendo and apple do not provide high performance graphics for gaming. Apple actively tries to kill gaming on their platform by not supporting vulkan and killing open gl and nintendo has never had high performance graphics.

They do more high performance graphics than the large majority of GNU/Linux "gamming" environments.

Apple is not killing anything, anyone that has a name on the game industry already supports Metal, because professional game studios care about performance and productive tooling not about API religion wars.

Game consoles, outsolding any Linux based platform, also don't support Vulkan, so they are also killing gamming?

Yes, Switch does Vulkan, but their main 3D API is NVN and most of their titles are being done in Unity/Unreal, with Unity already having over 50% of Switch titles.

You are very uneducated on the topic if you think macos is a more suitable setup for gaming than Linux. The Mac gaming community consists mostly of casual gamers since the only hardware available is weak laptops or $10,000 workstations. Proton being built in to steam means that most games just work on Linux with a high level of performance. AMDs open source drivers are very good and included with the Linux kernel.

Currently there are no game consoles you could consider high performance but the switch is by far the lowest performance. Which is fine for what it is but it not even close to something you would substitute PC gaming with.

I bet I have been in more GDC events and some AAA studio offices than you have...

It appears to not have done you any good.

Not only did you get significant details wrong, but when faced with criticism, you immediately do an appeal to authority.

Not a good look.

Well, I am used to FOSS bias against what professional game developers care about, to the point that even random accounts get created just to reply to me.

First learn about what the corridors of IGDA, PAX, GDC, GDCE, Reboot Develop look like, then do your religious wars on graphics APIs.

Why have a war on graphics APIs when Linux and Wine implement most of them including the proprietary ones?

I have spent more hours playing warframe on linux at 144fps than I would like to admit.

Agreed, Linux gaming has finally gotten to the point where it's actually pretty good, largely thanks to Valve's efforts. I'm grateful to them for that.

I do also worry that it'll eventually stop, but right now, with the competition essentially actively discouraging native Linux ports (EGS exclusives with no support for Linux downloads)... well, I'll take whatever I can get with open arms.

You say that but while there's a few good games but not that many and if you talk to anyone that games on Linux I guaranty you that we all own all those games.

I think the author above is including Proton, which actually works pretty well for many Windows games running on Linux.

Eh, who cares how it works? What matters to me is that I want to play games on Linux[0] and I can.

[0] Well, I say want to, but I literally do not own a Windows machine, so it's more that I only can play games that work, in any reasonable way, on *nix.

I don't understand such comments. Maybe if you're chasing the latest AAA game. But all the last games I bought had Linux versions. Back in the era of Loki games, maybe what you said was true, but that's 20 years ago now.

It's easier to count the games that are hostile to Linux these days, and they're usually exclusive to Epic anyway.

I'm talking AAA games available on steam without having to run something like WINE.

I like games with strong immersion and narrative and on Linux that's restricted to Alien Isolation, the BioShock series, the Metro series, etc. and that's something which is rare on Linux unfortunately.

I, like many Linux users, have a windows boot partition just for games and the few Windows applications that I can't get on Linux I'd rather not have to do it but it is what it is.

I don't understand the need for the arbitrary "without running something like wine" distinction. Wine has gotten head and shoulders better in the past year or so. Between the gallium nine direct 3d state tracker which gives better performance in Linux than in windows for directx 9 games, (!!) dxvk giving directx 11 support, <edit> vkd3d adding directx 12 support,</edit> and Valve's seamless integration of wine in the Linux steam client, wine is just peachy.

If your objection to wine is philosophical as opposed to practical, why is dual booting into Windows an alternative?

I must admit I didn't realise Valve had WINE integration into Steam. When I used to do it I had to have a separate steam client which ran under WINE.

Basically I don't have the time to tinker anymore, I want things to work and I don't want to violate licensing agreements.

It's an option in the menu now and it just works.

Nice, I'll have to check it out.

>This is amazing work from Valve, but I have to admit some fear that it'll eventually stop. They started to put a lot of work into Linux gaming/Steam Machines when the Microsoft Store was a potential existential threat on Windows, but with the multitude of stores now present -- Battle.net, Ubiplay, Origin, Epic -- that no longer seems to be as terrifying as it once was. In the meantime, their own survey indicates that only <1% of users are on Linux (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw.... -- click the "OS Version" entry in the table).

While this is true, I can also definitely see the logic in continuing to invest in a Plan B to protect the company from future external threats. I'm thinking along the lines of Apple maintaining an x86 port of MacOS for years before it ever became a public thing just in case.

Valve certainly has the resources to keep such an escape hatch open for themselves.

The thing is, Valve put in the initial investment to support Linux in a big way. Now that things seem more stable, they could pull that support and save money. But how much money would they save? Maintenance of what they have now is far cheaper than the initial investment.

So why not continue support? It’s always, always nice to have an escape hatch you can point to should Microsoft get that look in their eyes again.

Maybe this is part of an effort to build a Google Stadia competitor

This is the right answer. With Proton, Steam has a very good start for their Cloud Gaming offering.

Also, you already can play Steam games via in-home streaming on your TV or Android phone.

There is also a program that lets a remote player connect and play with your local computer. This way, you can play couch multi player games via the internet together.

Also, there was a reveal regarding steam gaming cloud recently: https://youtu.be/GqY5WYBDyyQ

OT but pretty keen to figure out why someone decided that they needed to invest in a 52 core gaming rig last month (check the last line of the Linux table) https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

Does anyone know or have theories why Valve is doing all of this work? I mean, I love it. I use Steam on Linux and almost my entire library works perfectly. I couldn't be happier. But with Steam Machines seemingly dead, and such a small Linux base, why is Valve doing this?

And yes, seriously, _thank you_ Valve!

Their streaming service can easily use Linux, like Google does with Stadia. That would be a very obvious way to benefit from their own investment into Linux gaming ecosystem. Especially, since unlike Stadia, they are aiming at making their whole catalog work on Linux, using Wine (Proton) and etc.

> Does anyone know or have theories why Valve is doing all of this work?

I believe the running theory has been that it's a defense against Microsoft being Microsoft. If MS tries to do something like force all NT apps through their own store and take a cut of every sale, or anything else that poses too much threat to Valve, then Valve has an escape hatch in the form of Linux support. "You want 30% of our sales? Screw you, we'll tell our users to switch to Linux!" is a bit extreme, but it just needs to be a deterrent.

And they will get as many to switch as when DX 10 was only Vista, and other hurdles announced as the opportunity for GNU/Linux take over the gaming world.

Linux dominates mobile, supercomputing, servers and embedded.

There is no fundamental reason why it can't eventually take over gaming, or even desktop.

The fundamental reason is that there is no big company pushing Linux on the Desktop. The Linux Desktop community has thus far proven, if I'm being frank, completely retarded at making anything people actually want to use.

It's not as bad as you say. Ubuntu has made a decent attempt, with some (albeit minor) success. But Ubuntu seems to be moving away from desktop to also focus on cloud stuff. Valve has done a lot of work with Windows compatibility.

One thing I'm observing is that macOS and Windows are basically regressing to have the same type of nonsense and quality issues that are indeed typical on desktop Linux. It's possible (but not certain) that they'll eventually cross paths. Linux might not take over the consumer desktop market (unless it's under a proprietary shell, like Android / ChromeOS), but Linux could possibly take over the high-end/power user/workstation market.

Maybe, but that will still either require some big player to come in and make sane decisions to tear the Desktop portions away from the garbage way they're done now, or for the community to get it's act together. I have been waiting 20 years for the latter and do not expect it to ever happen at this point.

Android and iOS dominate mobile.

The kernel used by Android is completly irrelevant to userspace and can be changed tomorrow at Google's will, and only OEMs and rooted devices will actually notice it.

On embedded there are plenty of OSes to choose from, with FOSS embedded industry support moving to MIT/BSD licensed kernels, as OEMs don't want to deal with shipping GPL code on embedded devices, specially after v3 happened.

Steam would cease to exist and so would the thousand dollars worth of games people have accumulated in their accounts. As long as proton works there is a huge incentive to switch.

I bet that would happen as much as the massive gamer migration that has been going on since XP, which is to say, not really.

I dunno. If Windows continues its downward slide Linux will eventually be the lesser of two crap-piles and Steam will be well positioned to take advantage of it. How long will it take EGS to catch up with that?

Same. Many thanks to Valve for their work. I went linux only before proton for ideological reasons and the relatively recent strides with proton, the steam client, and moves like this really make me happy to continue to be one of the 1%rs running steam on linux and support valve for their efforts. I can't wait to buy an index vr headset and try to dev with it in godot.

Valve, if you are reading this, just please make sure source 2 has a linux compatible editor! One thing I miss is modding source games.

> Battle.net, Ubiplay, Origin, Epic

Not sure how relevant are the first 3 of those in this context. Battle.net, UPlay and Origin are basically just download/update systems for Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA and not a real competing store that could take over the whole market.

Epic's store is the only one that sells 3rd party titles.

More relevant competition would be GOG and to some extent itch.io (recently surpassed 200k titles in their catalog, but it's mostly very small indie games).

I'm with you in that tiny minority. And fully share your perspective. Thanks to the folks making this happen!

macOS has a 14% market share, yet there are many products developed exclusively for macOS that are highly profitable.

Linux may have a 1% market share, but when you release on Windows, you will not only target a larger audience, but you will have to share that audience with a large number of studios. The AAA studios will take the lion share of the revenue.

I think in Linux there's still some room for indie games to thrive. Sometimes all it takes if you are using a game engine like Unity is to simply create a cross platform build that may work out of the box.

gotta wonder how small the % of linux users was prior steam

not exactly what your asking for, but you can check out which OS's users were using for Steam for the past decade

https://web.archive.org/web/20160201000000*/http://store.ste...

Nice