Valve shows a drop in Linux gamers for march, but the numbers are questionable

is it possible to correct the data using kpi's from steamcharts?

https://steamcharts.com/

I don’t think anyone who understands market share thinks that a drop in market share means fewer users. But it does mean that your product has stagnated and commercial interests are going to be focusing their energy elsewhere where it can have a more outsized ROI.

A constant market share as the pie grows is great - it means your attractiveness as a platform is keeping up with overall growth. If someone needs a 2% growth to edge out competition, targeting Linux could be valuable. A shrinking market share means I should invest elsewhere. Linux has remained niche because you need to get about 5-10% to warrant commercial interests because there’s a non 0 cost porting to Linux and providing some level of support. Also your potential customers have to spend money which is less clear from these numbers who the Linux community fares vs others. For example iOS customers tend to be more valuable than android because they are typically higher income, there’s a lot of them in terms of market share and absolute numbers and spend more money on the App Store / in app than the typical android user.

As a SD owner, it's only a "better" version of the Switch through the eyes of Gamers. It's heftier, more expensive, has worse battery life, a worse screen, doesn't have the dock included, and doesn't have Nintendo's back catalog. The average person buying the Switch isn't looking to buy a Linux PC that may or may not support PC games; they want simplicity.

It’s not strictly better. It has many advantages, but it’s heavier, larger, hotter, louder and more expensive, without the ability to detach controllers. Not to mention it lacks the ability to easily play Nintendo titles.

It’s better in many ways which many people care about, but it’s not strictly better.

Created a Steam account a few weeks ago to buy one. Was promptly told I needed to do a bunch of stuff to verify I wasn't committing fraud (or something like that), including resending them a bunch of info they already had, plus a picture of my ID. Support personnel seemed to be hired based on their skills at being unhelpful smartasses. Promptly closed the account without awarding them a single thing they were demanding, ain't nobody got time for that shit.

Can I play BotW on a Steam Deck legally? Not everything is as simple as "higher number better"

I bought a used (but good condition) Switch Lite a few weeks ago for £105, and the new-in-box retail price is £188.

The cheapest Steam Deck costs £349, which is almost double the Lite's RRP. Price matters a lot, especially when these things are often bought for kids.

The people I know with Switches want specific games that are exclusive to them and are only interested in buying those games legitimately.

Maybe for playing The Witcher 3. But I'd argue they're aimed at different audiences (hardcore vs casual gamer).

Linux gaming for CS2 will be relevant only when major desktop environments (Gnome and KDE) fully implement Wayland screen tearing control and adaptive sync. Overall input lag on Linux is too high for competitive shooters.

I've been using it for about 12 years now.

It was much rougher in the early days, as there were massive fundamental changes - adopting systemd, /lib becoming symlinks, etc.

But now I wouldn't use anything else. I have my configurations synced with a Gitlab repo via chezmoi, and have a bootable customised USB stick built with ALMA - so I can easily set up the same system on different machines. In that time I've used different set-ups - dwm on an 11" netbook (could only have one app per workspace and they had to be full-screen), xmonad and awesome-wm for a bit, and now i3.

One issue to note on the Steam Deck though is that it's immutable by default. So atm to install the xone drivers for example, you have to enable system mutability and reinstall them after every system update.

But it's so nice having something that is up-to-date - e.g. for kernel hardware support, bug fixes, etc. but also won't change much unless you want it to. I even use it on my work computer now since my company allows it, and it's so much better than losing hours to intrusive updates on Mac (or Windows).

As a Linux noob I decided to try Arch Linux 4 years ago because I wanted to actually learn how the various parts work that make out a whole Linux distro (things like the bootloader, systemd, various desktop environments etc). Other distros give you everything ready out of the box, which made it hard for me to actually dig deeper under the hood, because I had no clue where to start. With Arch Linux you more or less build a whole Linux system from the bottom up.

Following the Arch guides to get a fully working system was easy enough for a complete Linux noob like me. But you still need some basic knowledge about computing, for things like networking, file systems, drive partitioning and such. If you learned this knowledge from other operating systems then Arch Linux is fairly easy to setup by just following their guide.

I have been using Arch for more than 10 years and it is great.

It has great Wiki to start using it, and it is very stable considering it is a rolling release distro.

Back in the day Ubuntu upgrades were extremely painful for me because I had to use a few custom repositories to get up to date versions of common software and they broke upgrades. On Arch it is not really an issue because everything is up to date. And even if something breaks once in a few years, if you set it up yourself (not using Manjaro) you will most likely have a better understanding of Linux and you will be able to fix those issues. And if you check Arch news before updating, you will never run into those problems in the first place. :)

There’s user friendly variants like Manjaro.

Also you don’t technically have to know what you are doing. Their guide is very helpful at guiding you, but it’s all commands you have to type out on the command line until you get to a more GUI environment.

I absolutely do not know what I am doing, and managed to get an Arch Linux setup working on a laptop.

It's complicated, but the Arch Linux docs are fantastic.

Didn't try gaming on it, though - I have a Steam Deck for that ;) Though I can plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and switch to desktop mode on the deck if I need to work, so maybe I'll just use that as my laptop now

There is once again a TUI installer, but also a lot of the standardisation of hardware platforms (UEFI), GPU landscape (Intel and AMD graphics "just work"), printers (IPP/AirPrint), the desktop Linux foundational layers (systemd), have combined to make Arch much easier than when it earned that reputation a decade ago.

My hot-take is that people trying Arch derivatives as their first linux has and will continue to hinder linux desktop uptake.

That being said I believe the Steam Deck OS is an arch derivative. I will allow this one to be the exception to the rule.

You have to know what you're doing to install it, which is a moot point if it comes pre-installed.

That's even less true these days, now that there's an official installer, and variants like Manjaro exist.

It's begun at least:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-HDR-Linux-Gaming-Begins

I think the questionable but was referring to the fact Chinese users doubled this month which seems unlikely as they went from about a quarter of all steam users to about a half.

That would be a lot of new people if at all accurate.

I have a Steam Deck and personally haven't played it much last month. The big releases were AAA games that generally ran poorly on the Deck. I imagine most gamers were like me and decided to play Hogwarts Legacy on their main PC or PS5.

Yeah. Anyone that’s even keeping an eye on this probably has an axe to grind.

I don't know what else you'd call chinese jumping from 27% to 51% of all steam users in one month.

Because Windows at >90% of the world's entire personal computing market is totally OK.