Hacker News Reader

Comment by herpdyderp | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally I saw the latest Steam hardware survey results[0] just about an hour ago which says that Windows is dropping and macOS and Linux are both gaining:

  Windows -0.16%
  macOS   +0.10%
  Linux   +0.06%

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

View on HN

It's very interesting to me that Arch Linux is reportedly the most popular distro among Steam users. I wonder if that's actually accurate, or if people who use other distros are more likely to decline the survey for privacy reasons, and people who use Arch like sharing because of the "I use Arch BTW" meme

Edit: SteamOS != Arch Linux[0]

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

It's the most convenient to use for gaming, ime. The AUR and being always up to do date really helps.

Same - I use Arch on my desktop and SteamOS (arch) on steam deck, I have had 0 issues with game compatibility in ~ 2 years

Isn't SteamDeck's OS based on Arch? So that probably is large factor.

IIRC Steam OS is Arch based. So most steam decks will be running arch, and I bet those make up a hefty chunk of Linux “desktops” in the survey!

That's tracked separately. Arch is the biggest desktop linux there.

"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 40.53% -2.46%

"Arch Linux" 64 bit 7.85% +0.04%

No it's not. It's counted differently.

SteamOS on Steam Deck is based on Arch Linux.

it's not called Arch Linux in the survey. So not counted together.

Is this because SteamOS is based on Arch? (maybe I did something wrong but it doesn't seem to appear as SteamOS in their stats)

It's not really. The most popular distro is actually SteamOS Holo with 40% of the pie. For whatever reason Steam doesn't report SteamOS in the overall Linux stats until you drill down. It's also hard to tell if Arch is really the top non-SteamOS Linux distro because 5% of users are using the Steam Flatpak which could be on virtually on any distro.

I missed the Flatpak line. That definitely throws a wrench in the stats.

Flatpak does not change much the deal, you can see another data source here showing its real size at least for gaming: https://boilingsteam.com/goodbye-manjaro-update-on-the-evolu...

Arch being popular among desktop distros is believable. It also aligns well with the existence of ArchWiki and EndeavourOS (easy to install Arch derivative).

It's because they break the other distributions by version.

Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS 64 bit

"Arch Linux" 64 bit

Other Ubuntu versions appear to be in the "Other" category.

I'm not too surprised about gamers aligning with a somewhat minimal rolling distro that is quick to update packages, especially considering how comparatively slow the other big distros are.

Arch is in general a quite popular and quite decent distro, and the complexity of using it has decreased quite a lot in my opinion. I still wouldn't recommend it if there's a risk I end up having to handhold the person afterwards though.

Same. I would also add that a lot of gamers also seem to be power users and/or tinkerers, and Arch is (IMHO) the best distro for that as well.

> aligning with a somewhat minimal rolling distro that is quick to update packages, especially considering how comparatively slow the other big distros are

Is that an issue besides GPU drivers? I assumed (though I haven't really tried it) that Steam is pretty relatively self-contained on Linux and doesn't really rely on system packages that much (most games are running on Proton/Wine anyway).

The "GPU-driver" also includes all the the Vulkan and GL runtimes and user-space machinery for shader compilation and what-not. Being on latest and greatest can make a significant difference there that I'd expect gamers to chase.

Steam also still relies on e.g. your display server.

Does Arch handle Nvidia's drivers properly? I'm using Open SUSE and it's a horrible experience, they provide multiple ways to install them and none work, so ended up just having to use Nvidia's installer directly.

If you're going to be a Linux gamer, you have to be a fan of the game of Linux. Most games are going to need some tweaking or a weird package in order to work. Arch makes a lot of sense for that crowd.

This was the situation 5+ years ago.

Most games work without extra steps nowadays (as long as steam is involved).

I remember wasteland 2 (from steam/wine) crashing on Linux when you finally entered the rangers headquarters. Luckily a linux kernel developer played the game and figured out what was going on. He told everyone how to fix the game with some arcane commands, increasing max counts, etc. Was pretty wild.

This is honestly one of the things that IMHO gives so much value to SteamOS. The Valve engineers find out about these things and apply them at the base. I've had a pretty good overall experience with gaming on my Fedora machine, but I've had to learn a couple of those things the hard way (mmap settings in the kernel, missing 32-bit libc (even though it's there), etc)

It is still very much true today in my experience. I have tried to be a linux gamer occasionally, and there are almost always things that need to be done for compatibility. Few games live up to Steam's promise, even when Steam is involved, unless you are playing on one of Steam's 2-3 anointed distros.

>unless you are playing on one of Steam's 2-3 anointed distros.

For sure. That is a pretty good state to be in---most games work in a few well known distros. If you use something else, you have to DIY some compatibility steps once in a while.

You should know that Ubuntu is not one of those anointed distros. The distros where steam just works are distros specifically set up for linux gaming.

I use Arch, and everything has just worked.

I’m not surprised that Ubuntu isn’t too well. Interestingly, Debian works well from what I have heard.

Nobody should be using Ubuntu in 2024.

The most hacking I've done to get a Steam game working on openSUSE Tumbleweed is some copypasta sed magic to bypass the Private Division launcher app for Kerbal Space Program 2. Other than that, setting a command line parameter to ensure my eGPU gets used (which should be a relatively uncommon scenario), and forcing a few games to run through Proton, everything just works.

It's accurate. See more data here: https://boilingsteam.com/goodbye-manjaro-update-on-the-evolu...

Or maybe the "I use Arch BTW" meme is there because a lot of people using it makes it so that a lot of the loud people uses it.

Is there any reliable way to compare distros usage?

it was a couple years ago, but when i tried to game on Debian i was shocked by some 4+ year old packages that i wanted to try gaming with, nothing worked.

it's probably better today, but i definitely recommend a very up to date distro for gaming, and arch is literally the most up to date there is. happy with arch myself, except the nvidia issues, if you run an nvidia gpu i don't recommend it just yet (getting better really quickly though)

IMO the best approach is to use PCI passthrough to give the Nvidia GPU to a Windows guest, especially if what you're trying to do is game.

Arch wiki has a great write-up on it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PCI_passthrough_via_OVMF

TL;DR you boot your Linux host kernel with special VFIO params to ensure the entire IOMMU domain of your Nvidia GPU is ignored, and pass that to Windows guest (which sees it as an entirely normal nv GPU).

(My hope is that in the next couple of years the open source Nvidia driver landscape dramatically improves, and modern distros ship with rock solid Vulkan/OGL impl for all Nvidia cards made in the last decade or three)

I have using Debian testing, since half year, as my daily driver and to play games without any issues.

been doing the same with pop_os (regular releases not the LTS)

Maybe the factors in someone selecting arch linux are the same for someone likely to game on Linux?

Arch is weird. I consider myself a Linux power user, including kernel hacking but no way I'm going to manually set up partitions and type gazillions of commands to set my system up. This is off putting, I have no idea what's wrong with an installer. WTF Arch?

Well, there's some curses wizard called "archinstall", but yeah, I too opted for just the Garuda flavour of Arch when I chose to go non-VoidLinux (ie. when failing to get a new machine with nvidia drivered up swiftly and just-works-ly) rather than any console-driven setup.

That is the Arch way, Arch is not built for convenience but for customizability. If you want a graphical installer, you can install it yourself ;). Also there are several Arch-based distributions that include (opinionated) graphical installers to get you going faster. ArcoLinux is a good one.

A few notes to keep in mind with that data:

* That's a change from 96.56% on Windows to 96.40%. That's a small enough shift to be attributable to noise.

* In the December 2022 survey [0] (one year earlier), Windows had 96.15% share. So to the extent these tiny shifts mean anything at all, the trend for Windows market share was actually up slightly year-on-year.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230103095707/http://store.stea...

I've learned to take the Steam hardware results with a grain of salt, sometimes they're stable, but then some months they vary wildly.

Is that year to year or month to month? Could not find any note on that?

But then again the share increase compared to share of Linux users, is quite large.

Interesting that only 0,06% are using Win 7 which I would name MS' last good OS.

>Interesting that only 0,06% are using Win 7

I think it's interesting that there is that many people still on it.

Mainstream end of life was almost a decade ago, Steam dropped support for it, etc. Is there anything that actually still supports 7?

> Is that year to year or month to month? Could not find any note on that?

"Steam conducts a monthly survey to collect data", says it on the page.

> Interesting that only 0,06% are using Win 7 which I would name MS' last good OS.

Probably because steam for windows 7, 8 and 8.1 are EOL

> As of January 1 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 operating systems.

>Interesting that only 0,06% are using Win 7 which I would name MS' last good OS.

Above it, the survey says that Win 7 64 bit is at 0.68%.

> Interesting that only 0,06% are using Win 7 which I would name MS' last good OS.

No DirectX 12 support for Win 7. And even games that don't require DirectX 12 now usually support Windows 10 and up. Sometimes because they don't want to test on older OS, but Windows 10 has legitimate API improvements that are worth taking advantage of.

On top of that of course the general security reasons not to use an unmaintained OS release.

Getting games to run on Linux often requires tinkering and the people who like to partake in this stuff and have the skill for likely run one of those “hardcore” distros like Arch.

Those who don’t want to tinker and stick to already supported games would probably just run SteamOS to begin with (or a proprietary OS).

This hasn't been true for a while now. Many games have Linux builds, and for those that don't, Steam Proton works incredibly smoothly, and is integrated with the most popular game launcher, Steam. For the most part all you have to do to play games on linux now is click the checkbox to opt into Proton, and then click play.

The biggest remaining issue is anticheats for some competitive games

Somewhat recently Apex Legends got Linux support for easy anti-cheat and it works well.

Hopefully it'll start a trend!

Surprised that macOS is gaining more than Linux. For some reason, I imagine there are more Steam Deck sales (Linux) than there are macOS users deciding to download Steam but maybe it's a numbers game.

Games tend to ride the new release schedule more than most other forms of media (except maybe new movie releases in theaters), and there have been a few notable releases in the past few weeks. Apple had a big push with Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 4 Remake in the past few months; if you already own those games on Steam, you got the Mac versions of those games at no additional charge. Also, Baldur's Gate 3 (which is widely regarded as one of the best games of 2023) got a native Mac release in Q4.

As for it being a numbers game, neither Apple nor Valve release direct hardware sales numbers, so only they will know.

The Mac versions of Resident Evil 8 (not 7) and RE4 Remake are exclusive to the Mac App Store. They aren't on Steam.

I think it's more about the games people want to play. I certainly wouldn't buy a mac to game on. But if you already have one and it runs the games you want to play (factorio, for example), then why not just use it?

The ARM Macs are actually quite decent for less demanding games, even when running under Intel emulation. FWIW I started to play a couple of strategy games on my Mac over the holidays because I was away from my gaming PC and only had my Mac available.

Good luck finding macOS games in the first place. I've had to pass on quite the few games because they were only made for Windows...

For the niche of realtime strategy games it's actually not too bad ;)

Also good luck running most macOS games that were published 5-10 years ago or more and not updated. Apple really doesn't care about backwards compatibility at all which I think is a bigger issues for games than most other software. MS OTH is doing an exceptionally good job at this in comparison.

At the cost of ARM compatibility. Microsoft is doing as atrocious a job at ARM Windows than Apple is at its gaming ordeals. All that being said, I would never want Apple to change its ways. They've given us extraordinary ARM laptops that don't even have fans!

Baulders Gate 3 has quite great Apple Silicon & MacOS support. I know of a few normally-non-gamers who loaded that up on their Mac over the past couple months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com