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Comment by hero4hire | Hacker News Reader

Total marketshare was estimated at 1.5% for Linux gaming.

The survey comes direct from Valve's Steam Survey. Potential bias aside the Steamdeck alone is estimated at 40%. Arch and Ubuntu ~8% each.

Is there any other trustworthy metric of all "Linux Gamers" out there? I'm curious how much using the Steam Client effects or tilts results towards systems that easily run Steam. Self selection at it's finest. My logic side knows that with only a 1.5% rounding error to the total "PC" gaming isn't market significant. I should be happy with the trend.

I own a Steamdeck. But it's like how my friends use their Nintendo systems. As an extension of my PC windows I was already personal project time with SteamOS and SteamLink. Point is, I wouldn't consider myself in the 1.5% even though I game wherever.

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I can get behind the "Android isn't Linux" argument when it comes to claims of how numerous Linux users there are via smartphones. The userspace is quite distinct from anything GNU-like.

But the Steamdeck uses very much a full-blown Arch-derived Linux distro. So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".

The fact that AMD landed on the Steamdeck vs. NVIDIA or Intel is noteworthy. Their continued investment in mainline Linux support has clearly paid off.

Its not (just) about software support.

The Deck uses a special, low power (specifically targeting ~9W), graphics heavy AMD SoC. It was actually the first of a new laptop CPU line that AMD seemingly canceled:

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-2021-2022-roadmap-part...

AMD coincidentally had the right CPU at the right time. Intel and Nvidia had nothing comparable for Valve to use. In fact, the successor to the Deck chip is kinda an existential problem, as AMD's CPU-heavy laptop line (including the Z1) is less suitable.

Valve also had already spent considerable resources in making proton work well with AMD. even if an appropriate SOC was to be available from NVIDIA, it is possible that Valve would have chosen AMD.

Mind, proton does work well with NVIDIA, but my understanding is that AMD gets the most testing.

NVIDIA doesn’t have the license to make x86 chips with the modern patented features so they’d need to either have a dedicated GPU with an AMD/Intel CPU or develop, or invest resources into an existing, ARM emulation layer

Or sell a small die for AMD/Intel to package, ala Vega-M.

Or contract Centaur before they went defunct, maybe?

Both these things would be quite out-of-character for Nvidia.

> AMD coincidentally had the right CPU at the right time.

They have been there pretty consistently, for example they’ve been the SoC provider for a few generations of Xbox and PlayStation consoles, now.

Those have been desktop parts, not laptop parts.

They are neither, they are both fully custom.

One thing thats under-appreciated is the immense design/tape out cost (9 figures these days, maybe more?) of a fully custom chip. That is a huge flat expense, hence one does not simply make a custom design unless the volume (or margin) is absolutely enormous.

AMD/Nvidia/Intel can't just casually crank out an APU for Valve, as one might think. I'm not even sure MS/Sony can justify a die shrink this generation... Heck, maybe the PS6 will run commodity PC hardware.

Compared to what came before, the previous (Modified AMD Jaguar APUs) and the current-generation (Modified AMD Zen 2 APUs) consoles are commodity PC hardware compared to whatever bespoke cost-optimized ISAs consoles used to be built around. So in a way, it's already somewhat commodity PC hardware under very heavy TPM lockdown.

As others have mentioned they are custom parts, but if you were forced to qualify them as either "laptop" or "desktop" parts they are much, much closer to AMD's laptop lineup than the desktop ones. Monolithic design with integrated GPU is not what AMD's desktop lineup has looked like.

I don't think a next-gen APU for a Steam Deck 2 is going to be that big a problem. The Steam Deck's APU is officially designated: "AMD Custom APU 0405"[1], basically a mix and match of AMD's same-generation parts. With the success of the Steam Deck, a followup custom APU is all but assured, although I don't think it'll show up before next year. If I had to guess, I'd expect a 4C Zen5c and 12 CU RDNA 3.5 on 4nm in late 2024 which should offer a big bump (assuming they can improve memory bandwidth).

Note, we're seeing a lot of Chinese handhelds using 7840s already that while a bit behind at 10W, start beating the Steam Deck's performance (sometimes dramatically) at 15W+. Personally, I'd be pretty excited for a Strix Point handheld next year - AMD seems like they're finally getting serious on the iGPU side of things again (with Meteor Lake looking to be competitive).

[1] https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/03/05/van-gogh-amds-steam-de...

> basically a mix and match of AMD's same-generation parts.

It is not. Its a distinct die from the Zen2/3 laptop parts.

If AMD was going to continue the Deck APU line, we would have seen Dragon Crest by now... But its not there, and the Z1 is in its place.

Again, I reiterate, taping out a chip is massively expensive. Valve cannot afford a custom die, they are stuck with what AMD has at the moment when they need it... Though if AMD starts tiling their laptop APUs, Valve might be able to tweak the CPU/GPU config.

No, the Steam Deck would have never upgraded to Dragon Crest (2022 on those leaked roadmaps). In case you didn't realize, the Steam Deck wasn't released until Feb 25 2022, and only sold 1M units in 2022 (vs 3M projected in 2023). It's certainly successful enough now (and has enough marketing, like it had just a ridiculous amount of floorspace at TGS) that it's all but guaranteed there will be a Steam Deck 2 (but probably not until 2025).

Since all the details are NDA'd, I guess we'll have to disagree on the economics, but "tweaking CPU/GPU config" is the whole point of AMD's Semi-Custom Solutions group and if they can't handle delivering a solution for a product that has at least $2B in sales, then I don't know what customers they're supposed to serve (tape-out costs are expensive, but not nearly as expensive as you're imagining I suspect, when reusing existing IP blocks). But we can revisit in a few years and see.

> So I'm not sure it makes sense to categorize their users as anything other than "Linux gamers".

It depends on what you’re using this data for.

If you are a game developer deciding what platforms to support then Steamdeck is fully distinct from Linux, imho. Support Steamdeck, it’s likely worth it (depends on type of game)!

However supporting Steamdeck may not require a native Linux port. It turns out the best way to support Linux May infact be to simply use the Win32 API!

And even if you do support Steamdeck with a native Linux port it may not be worth your time to try and support Ubuntu and a billion flavors of Linux that are each broken in different ways.

Supporting Linux clients beyond Steamdeck is likely not worth it for most games.

Source: have shipped games with Linux support. Was extremely painful and not worth it.

"Linux Gamers" all have access to Proton/WINE. It's not some Steamdeck exclusive capability...

Steamdeck is a device with one hardware configuration, one set of drivers, one operating system, and one local environment. "Linux" is an infinite number of combinations derived from an a large and unbounded set of hardware, driver, OS, and environment choices.

The reason that "supporting Linux is hard" is the combinatorial matrix of broken ass shit. Supporting a single configuration is easy.

Proton/WINE works well on Steamdeck. It gets updated regularly by Valve for specific games when it doesn't. It is not as reliable for random gamer's random ass frankenstein setup.

It's a funny thing. I think what you're saying is exactly right from the standpoint of a dev. As a mere consumer, if you support Steamdeck via Proton, then it sure feels to me like you're supporting Linux, but I get why you wouldn't officially say that.

Yup. I think you get it.

If I were shipping a game today I would say “I support Steamdeck”. If any users complained about it not working on their particular Linux machine I would say “you’re on your own, good luck!”.

I would proudly advertise “Steamdeck support” and I would definitely never claim to “support Linux”.

IIRC for my Linux project something like 40% of support tickets were from the 1% of Linux users. Give or take. Never again!

Damn, so you are saying you get free testers from the small share the linux users are? That's actually a great incentive by itself.

> "Linux" is an infinite number of combinations derived from an a large and unbounded set of hardware, driver, OS, and environment choices.

So, sort of like Windows?

Not really, no. In practice Linux is radically more fragile and roughly an order of magnitude more expensive to support for two orders of magnitude fewer users.

The opposite of my experience (I write, build, maintain and distribute a cross-platform DAW).

Games may hit a different set of pain points than a DAW. A lot of the Linux pain is graphics driver related. Which you could say is not a Linux problem but an AMD/Nvidia problem. But from a game developer perspective that distinction doesn’t matter.

Actually, ironically, Linux graphics driver issues are among our most major issues.

Just not that that major in the overall scheme of things.

Just curious, what engine did you use for the games you shipped on Linux? And any differences in how well they did(n’t) work that corresponded to which store you shipped on?

Custom engine. Store made no difference.

FWIW Linux is easy to support if all you want to do is run a headless server on a single distro. Supporting more distros may require a little bit of dependency hell bullshit, but it's doable.

What's a bloody nightmare is graphics and sound and the infinitely large matrix of janky environments gamers have.

My current plans are Godot, Steam, and for Linux packaging the client to run in Steam’s container environment (“sniper”). Will be interesting to see how many problems that doesn’t solve.

    the infinitely large matrix of janky environments gamers have.

Raymond Chen ("The Old New Thing" blogger) would agree with this from the perspective of Win32 API!

The good news is you mostly don't have to support the graphics/sound/environments variations. If you test it on stock Ubuntu (and maybe SteamOS), it will probably work for almost all the noobs and everyone else can probably figure it out without much help.

My experience is that this is not the case.

> I can get behind the "Android isn't Linux" argument when it comes to claims of how numerous Linux users there are via smartphones. The userspace is quite distinct from anything GNU-like.

But why does having anything "GNU-like" determine whether or not something is Linux? Surely the fact that it is literally running Linux makes it Linux more than some related software (GNU) not being used.

Most people say linux, but mean GNU+Linux. Clearly, being a world-renowned software dev, and being in-your-face pedantic for literal decades isn't enough to get the point across for some people. Add whichever tooling you want (I've heard KDE+Linux before, and without looking it up, suspect Gnome+Linux wouldn't be wrong), but don't pretend Android doesn't use the Linux kernel.

I'll take my downvotes here for being an ass, but on a forum that loves being pedantic, I legitimately expect better. Android is Linux. Typically with an outdated kernel, without root, with a locked bootloader, and without the GNU tooling, but it's pretty hard to argue Android's not Linux.

GNU is a distraction here. In a decade or two there will probably be mainstream linux distros where all the GNU parts have been replaced by newer and better libraries (probably written in Rust). People say linux, but mean a linux system to which they have root access (or can phone up the sysadmin who does).

> but mean a linux system to which they have root access

Ah, like my Pixel 2. Respectfully, you might be on the wrong forum (and possibly the worst one outside XDA) to say "Most people here do not, and never did, have root access on their Android handsets".

If your distinction for what makes a Linux system a Linux system, is root access, recognize that many, many people here have met and cleared that bar.

Have most people on HN? Highly doubt it

If you include mobile games on ARM64 the the number of Linux gamers is significantly higher than x86.

I don't think that's very relevant when we're talking about AMD CPU usage, although it does mean that Phoronix may very well be technically wrong when talking about "Linux" gaming statistics. That said it's quite clear they mean GNU/Linux desktop gaming using x86_64-based systems.

I'll be pedantic and cynical;

- Android isn't quite Linux

- A good number if not the majority of 'mobile games' are gachas/cow-clickers.

At least to me, it's a bit like lumping old folks who play at churches into a 'Gamblers that visit casinos once a week' metric.

> Android isn't quite Linux

If we're being pedantic, let me be clear that Android is Linux. It just doesn't use the traditional userland, mostly implemented by GNU. So it's Linux but not GNU/Linux.

if we're being correct and practical, let me be clear that 'linux' is gnu/linux, so android uses linux kernel, but is not 'linux'

also, 'gaming' (union of pc and console) and 'mobile gaming' are significantly different demographics

Linux is NOT GNU/Linux

Gnu = coreutils + POSIX + gcc + others;

Linux = the kernel

Accurate, but in general terms... Linux desktop = GNU/Linux.

No sir. You can't win both sides of the argument whenever it's more convenient for you.

If you are going to write GNU/Linux, be consistent with its usage.

Linux is the kernel. My OS is Ubuntu, not just Linux. Android is also Linux.

Or KDE/Linux. :)

If we're being pedantic the traditional userland isn't mostly implenented by GNU. systemd, X.org, pulseaudio, gnome, KDE, qt, gtk, etc are not GNU.

This comment led me to discover that GNOME is no longer part of the GNU project

Ah this reckons me of this copypasta:

> Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

> At least to me, it's a bit like lumping old folks who play at churches into a 'Gamblers that visit casinos once a week' metric.

Slight aside, but in the past I've worked at some of those bingo halls that drew the sunday after-church old folks crowd. They were some of the most hardcore gamblers I have ever seen. Gods dandelions these ladies weren't.

Yep. And the same is true of mobile gamers. I’m not sure about the stats, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of hours spent playing crappy mobile games is greater than the number of hours spent playing PC games. Mobile games don’t always look like pc games, but they sure are a giant market.

To follow common sense:

There is GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd and Google/Linux.

If not indicated otherwise Linux is refers to GNU/Linux. Like America refers to the United States of America. Android refers to an incompatible custom userland by Google (anti GPL, closed-source PlayServices) and a usually heavily patched Linux-Kernel with many closed-source modules. Looking at Android 13 it is using an old 4.x Linux-Kernel as base.

Probably neither Google nor the FSF like that usage of terms?

That being said. I’m playing with Linux :)

There's no GNU/Hurd.

That's vaporware, never used by anyone for anything useful.

Haha ;)

While true, often people talk about the proportion of Linux gamers in the context of growing desktop Linux market share, "the year of the Linux desktop," etc. Since Android and desktop Linux programs are largely incompatible, mobile games on ARM64 don't matter in this context.

Compatibility is much less of an issue these days. My son apparently plays Android games on Windows in an emulator. I'm sure the same thing is possible on Linux. I plan to finally switch to gaming on Linux, because Linux support for games is much better than it was in the past, and even games that don't officially work in Linux, in practice often still do due to Steam Linux support. Even if you didn't buy the game on Steam, I've been told.

So I hope to soon join that 1.5%, and with the direction Windows seems to be going, I expect a lot more people will do the same.

What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

Your copypasta is out of date. https://www.gnu.org/gnu/incorrect-quotation.en.html. The updated version is:

A quotation circulates on the Internet, attributed to me, but it wasn't written by me.

Here's the text that is circulating. Most of it was copied from statements I have made, but the part italicized here is not from me. It makes points that are mistaken or confused... < original copypasta>

The main error is that Linux is not strictly speaking part of the GNU system—whose kernel is GNU Hurd. The version with Linux, we call “GNU/Linux.” It is OK to call it “GNU” when you want to be really short, but it is better to call it “GNU/Linux” so as to give Torvalds some credit.

We don't use the term “corelibs,” and I am not sure what that would mean, but GNU is much more than the specific packages we developed for it. I set out in 1983 to develop an operating system, calling it GNU, and that job required developing whichever important packages we could not find elsewhere.

Linux is an endless source of audiovisual issues and friends that use it join Discord and find their audio/mic is super low bitrate/crackly or simply doesn't work at all, consistently between the various distros that they move to every couple months, flavour of the week, etc.

I haven't gone back to trying linux as desktop since pop_os bricked my Dell XPS (even bios recovery doesn't work, it's completely bricked by some UEFI extension or something that pop rammed onto it).

Before that just getting multiple monitors to work consistently/each in their own specific resolution was an absolute nightmare.

The SD is really what Linux should be targeting: "it just works" but if you want, you can crack it open and change what you want. Linux is mostly still a pain in the butt to get up & running, plug monitors & other devices in and just have the damn thing work.

Let alone all of the _choices_: distro, window manager, audio manager, etc, etc. Nobody _cares_. That's why it's not been year of the Linux desktop yet; you install Windows or you buy a Macbook and you get Windows or MacOS. Try to decide which window manager to use based on the internet's option; you'll find forums & forums like HN of people bitching over which WM is superior etc.

The question is how many people are also just switching because they're being forced to go to 11 despite not wanting to, yet again, and so Linux seems like a stable reliable option for most of them?

Most don't do significant PC gaming, right?

Just browsing the web and sharing files, right?

Hmmm.... Many will just get the millenial in the family to install Ubuntu or mint and be done with it..

At least that's what has consistently happened in my family, with people rarely if ever going back to windows (without any real tech support, it "just keeps working").

Steam survey doesn't represent reality, imho. When was the last time you were asked to participate? On how many machines, assuming you have more than one.

I am sure Valve collects way more than they let on. Linux gaming is at a good place. However, I really wish AMD would release their CPU and GPU control software for Linux. Running newer AMF cards is painful because the stock BIOS settings are anything but sane. Gotta burn power to win benchmarks...

I get asked about every six months.

The field of statistics is kind of based on the idea that you can take a sample and it might represent a population. Maybe you have a more specific complaint about the Steam Survey methodology in mind that I'm not picking up on?

> might represent a population

So, you do agree that it's not hard data? Not sure what made you think I am "complaining" about the survey. Just pointing out it does not represent the full picture. It's supposedly random and voluntary.

When considering whether or not the survey reflects reality, I invite you to look at other survey methodologies and the error bars that are possible with as many as, say, 1500 randomly sampled survey participants. The voluntary nature might skew the data a little bit, but not so much that it completely invalidates the trends shown. Sure, not the whole picture, but probably quite close.

Maybe you are right. I cannot tell because I have no way of verifying the results.

Would you personally use the survey for actual real world research? Not talking about phoronix articles and blogs. Say, you are a marketing guy and the company you work for asks you to make predictions.

Personally I would not. And that is the essence of what I said.

He probably wants to imply there are PC gamers who don't use steam at all.

That's probably true. Now the question is, how many PC gamers use Steam and how many don't.

And this is one big important piece of data I don't have.

The survey is a random sample every month. I think a fresh steam installation also triggers the question if you want to participate in it right then.

A fresh install does not trigger it. I know because I made a number of changes, including Linux and Windows installatios, to several machines recently and was not asked once

>When was the last time you were asked to participate?

Recent enough I still remember being mildly annoyed as I went to opt out. Again.

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