1.85% of Steam users run Linux | Hacker News Reader

1.85% of Steam users run Linux

itsmdaily.com

141 pointsineov119 comments

Very exciting times for Linux gaming this year. With next quarter's Intel Broadwell chipset - which incidentally runs off official open source drivers on Linux [1] [2] - we should have a pretty awesome Steam experience on Linux. As the Intel dude puts it :

* Intel’s Ben Widawsky, who works on Intel’s Linux graphics driver efforts, says that “Broadwell graphics bring some of the biggest changes we’ve seen on the execution and memory management side of the GPU… [the changes] dwarf any other silicon iteration during my tenure, and certainly can compete with the likes of the gen3->gen4 changes.”*

Pretty the much the only reason I'm putting off buying a laptop right now.

[1] http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/30/1550239/intel-releas... [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_bro...

Anecdote.

I actually installed steam yesterday (for the first time, I'm not a gamer) to see the available games for Linux.

I was pleasantly surprised that there were a few that looked okay. So I bought a couple. None worked -- mysterious launch errors, etc. No luck after a couple hours of debugging.

DISAPPOINTED!

I seriously question how many people actually run on Linux vs. login and browse the store? That said, I'm sure the experience will improve and it's great to see Linux as a growing platform for games!

what is your video card?

I've had a 99.9% success rate with all that I've tried. That's over a dozen popular games so far.

In order to get a number like 99.9%, you'd have to have over ~700 games, even with optimistic rounding. "Over dozens" calls this into question.

The key was with all the ones I've tried. Not all the Linux games on steam.

The grandparent poster's point is if you played "over a dozen", say, 16 games and one of them failed, then 93.75% of games worked for you. Getting to 99.9% requires a lot more games to succeed for even a single failure.

Obviously in context you didn't literally mean 99.9%

Ah OK got it, you're right it was more "they/it/Steam work/works for me" not a scientific assessment, thanks. The percentage was supposed to be like witty or something. My system isn't even a serious gamer machine, cost like $1200 last year.

I bet you're just a joy at parties.

Using Xubuntu (and xmonad (though they aren't taking full advantage of wm hints)) I haven't had any problems with games. I have a laptop with a radeon driver as well as a laptop with an nvidia driver.

It runs great here. But I have basically just Ubuntu vanilla and a NVidia card.

I would expect games wouldn't run as easily on a different distro or on a heavily customized Ubuntu.

The Linux ecosystem is HUGE. I suppose that's why they are making SteamOS, so they can focus on one smaller part of this large landscape.

I use xubuntu with xmonad window manager and it works fine with a tweak (same tweak for fullscreen flash videos though).

I'm running Kubuntu with KDE, but fullscreen flash videos are also very bugged, how did you fix them?

It depends on what do you mean by "bugged". I don't use KDE, but I could probably help you figure out what's wrong. My email should be in my profile.

I run Steam on my Series 9. I basically installed it just to run Monaco (OT - AWESOME game!) and Team Fortress 2. Both run just fine for me. I do wish X-Com was available under Linux though.

Steam on Linux works perfectly to me. I have also used Steam with Wine for games that won't otherwise work on Linux. The experience with Steam + Wine is uneven; some games works perfectly and others don't; but Steam on Linux works fine for me.

> So I bought a couple. None worked

I had the same experience on Windows and OS X. I feel like playing russian roulette when buying games on steam. Some games run flawlessly and some won't even start.

I guess the problem lies rather with games themselves (short deadlines, product must ship before christmas, a gazillion of possible hardware configs, no time to test) than with steam.

Most games work, but the problems fall into a few categories:

1) Missing libraries: Almost always 32-bit/64-bit problems.

2) Missing executable: this is usually fixed sooner or later.

3) Graphics problems: This shouldn't be a problem on NVIDIA systems, and the Intel Mesa drivers are pretty good these days, but it still can occur.

Ergo StreamOS.

I wouldn't bother running Steam on a non-valve distro, it just doesn't seem practical given the options available (Win/OSX/SteamOS).

Full disclosure: I use Steam on OSX & inside a Windows VM. My biggest peeve is that Valve restricts the Steam client to a single runtime (meaning: I can't run steam on OSX & Windows at the same time "This account is logged in elsewhere"). So I'm always switching between the two, which causes a bit of user fatigue. Come on, just allow unlimited instances/logins from the same IP. I digress.

Or you know, since it's a distro, just get a Valve/Steam PPA.

> Come on, just allow unlimited instances/logins from the same IP.

This would only work for NAT victims, not a good way to go...

Steam on Windows isn't all that great either. It's 2014 now and Steam still ignores the "multi user" aspect of Windows.

Have Steam installed and want to logon automatically so you don't have to enter your password everytime? Great, just tick the appropriate checkbox.

Works great for me, but when my brother uses the PC with his own Windows account, you already know what happens when he tries to start Steam and wants to play using his Steam acount. Correct, he gets auto logged in into my Steam Account. Because as far as Valve is concerned, 1 PC == 1 Steam Install == 1 Steam User.

Granted, Windows wasn't always "multi user" but I think it has been for quite some time now ;) Seeing this and looking into their Linux efforts and their SteamOS for the "Family" and "Living Room" I really see some problems for them unless they finally change this behavior. In a family and in a living room you are bound to have multiple users with Multiple Steam Accounts and especially on a TV, I bet many people would like to log in automatically instead of having to log in manually using a controller to type out the password.

Last time I tried, I solved this with just copying the Steam folder and each person starts Steam from their own Steam folder. A lot of wasted space since we got duplicates of all games, but it worked.

windows supports symlinks, you might want to try symlinking the steamapps folder, each steam user has their own settings bits inside steam anyways.

I really hate it when proprietary software developers list only dependency to be - "your system should be capable of running 32-bit apps." Why no just simply list the actual lib packages needed.

I installed steam for Linux a few days ago. Machine is a Core Duo, nvidia GeForce 610 running Ubuntu 13.10.

So far I've installed and played Half Life, Half Life 2, Amnesia and Don't Starve with zero problems.

Of the two hundred or so games I bought on humble bundles and so forth, I've tried a few dozen of the games I've bought (haven't had time to try them all), and with the exception of two Early Access games, they work just fine.

The Humble Bundles I've bought are mostly indie games already ported to many platforms. Few of the AAA titles I have bought work on Linux.

I'm replying to myself to provide a bit more context for those asking questions about the games I was trying.

I'm very capable of debugging library and video driver problems. In this case, it seemed to be actual game-internal issues from a recent update. The specific game was built on the Unity platform, and they seemed to have resolved the issues for Mac and Windows but not yet Linux. I'm not annoyed at Steam or the developer (it's reasonable that Linux issues aren't their priority if it's only a tiny portion of users).

My intent was not to say that Steam on Linux is generally broken, just to share my own mildly-amusing experience. :)

On a positive note -- after the initial frustration, I eventually bought Counterstrike and it worked great. I think it's amazing that Steam supports Linux at all, so I wasn't really upset when things didn't work perfectly. I was happy to risk throwing good money after bad, I'm sure I'll be able to play those other games some day.

I'm sorry to hear that, I tried ~50 games and they all work. Out of curiosity what were those games?

Out of the table, it seems 0.85 percent run some flavor of Ubuntu. That leaves the other 1.00 percent running some other flavor. I've got it running on Debian GNU/Linux (Testing) and play TF2 and CS:S from time to time. I even picked up CS:GO during one of their mega sales for five bucks or so in the hope that they eventually port it over to Linux.

I'm running it on Fedora 20. Haven't tried any of the really complicated games yet, but just bought some new ones during the sale, so will know soon what's up.

As a data point: I wouldn't have bought anything during the sale, had they not had so many games that work with Linux. I reboot into Windows so rarely that it seems like an ordeal to do just for a game. Likewise, I'm considering canceling my Netflix account because I haven't used it in two or three months...don't want to reboot, and Amazon Prime videos work fine under Linux.

I'm running it on Fedora 20 as well, I play DOTA2 and Left 4 Dead 2 on it. I don't play either of those very often but they both work well. If they ever port CS:Go to Linux I'll probably have to take a sabbatical from work.

Netflix runs swimmingly well on my Ubuntu setup using the Pipelight plugin in Firefox. I haven't touched my Windows VM in forever!

Cool. That's relatively new. Last time I did research on the subject, you had to run a browser under Wine, and it was just too much trouble for me to go to the trouble to do it. Still seems a little complicated, requiring Wine, and a Silverlight install, but I guess it's an improvement. And, there are a bunch of things I want to watch eventually that aren't on Amazon for free.

The magic is that pipelight is actually still powered by Wine, we've just automated some of the more annoying steps through the use of packages. Pipelight even embeds its own custom version of Wine so you don't have to mess with any of that either.

pipelight is available for fedora 19 (but also works on 20).

http://fds-team.de/cms/pipelight-installation.html

Try Metro: Last Light. I haven't been this into a game since the first half-life. Also, it's 1/3 off for the next 15 hrs.

This percentage is huge since its fairly new and not all games are ported yet. When you think about this, majority of gamers were already rocking a windows dual boot or separate machine for gaming. This is 1.85% of the user base who switched over to Linux even though not all games were available to them yet.

But at the same time, it may be just a temporarily boost from all the Linux coverage. I myself tested it recently and abandoned it fast, and will not probably try again for a long time as long as almost none of my games are playable in Linux.

I didn't use Steam since switching to Linux in 2008 until now that it is officially available. Some of that 1.85% are new (or returning) customers.

This is not true at all. Most gamers aren't rocking dual-boots, and most gamers are still comfortably running with just a single Windows install of various flavors.

For a personal anecdote: I've been a gamer my entire life, but I didn't start dual-booting (or using two systems) until I decided to get serious with programming and hacking.

For me, even then, I didn't dual boot, for a long time I was happy programming in Windows and Linux was but a curiosity until I started working at iStock and one of the technical leads convinced me to give Vim a 2 week challenge where I immersed myself in it. Since then programming with linux as my IDE and Vim as my editor has ruined Windows for me, only thing I use it for now is XMBC + Netflix and Gaming.

I bought a dedicated laptop for programming. I have a dedicated box for gaming and one for media. With steam and pipelight it's the beginning of the end for my windows machines. I figure it's going to be gaming, as ever, that will keep the life support on my windows machine going, but it will be relegated to living in the utility room with my htpc if/when the Steam Machine streaming is proven.

1.85% of the user base who switched over to Linux

no, 1.85% of the user base tried Steam on Linux. we don't know what portion of those adopted it as their primary platform to use Steam.

This is great! To me it's surprisingly high. I think this will be a slow process, because spending a day to backup & reinstall your OS is not a fun process. When I have time to game, I just want to turn my computer on and start gaming. I support gaming on Linux, and honestly even I've been too lazy to setup Linux on my gaming machine.

I think the shift will happen as people upgrade their computers, or have to reinstall their OS because of malware. I wonder what percentage of these gamers are using a pirated version of Windows, because my anecdotal experience is that anyone who's built a computer has pirated a copy of Windows. When building a computer on a budget, spending an extra $100 on your video card is more ideal than on the OS. So going legitimate and free would be a very attractive option for gamers.

Thanks, that was my initial reaction as well. I'd have expected it to be a few enthusiasts, maybe something like 50.000 worldwide. 1.85 % of the Steam user base is more than a million players!

I think the big story here is that ~4% of Steam users run Vista. The year of the Linux desktop is very, very, very far away.

For me and my wife and me at work it was 2007.

By the time the year of the Linux desktop arrives, desktop computing will be a relic of the past. The year of linux computing however, is already upon us.

For me, year of the Linux desktop was 2003. Year of Linux desktop on my laptop (wifi and battery were an issue for awhile) was 2007.

For my wife, year of the Linux desktop was 2011.

You're right, and sometimes (when a kernel update is released for example), the Year of Linux desktop retoactively gets changed.

That hasn't been my experience and I run Fedora, which is known for running cutting edge technology, compared to more stable distros like Debian.

Admittedly, I know how to use linux, so I might not notice problems that beginners do.

The Linux desktop will come when Microsoft loses its leverage over hardware manufacturers and they start to preinstall linux and stop putting up barriers to adoption (e.g. remove windows -> lose warranty).

It's already better than the windows desktop (xubuntu anyway, not unity, however). The barriers to uptake are no longer technical and haven't been for some years. It's all market + legal now.

> It's all market + legal now.

And investing in re-schooling people to the new system and applications (Office suite would be probably the most notable one).

Retraining people to use LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) from Office 2007 is cheaper than training them to use Office 2013; the interfaces are almost identical. The municipality of Munich has proved this conclusively with their big roll out.

The only true bugbear is porting Excel spreadsheets with VBA macros.

Office is now easy to use on linux thanks to wine and crossover.

Everything else works pretty much the same anyhow. There's a minor learning curve for learning how to install software. That's about it.

A bit off-topic, I haven't been able to use a version of Office since they brought that ribbon thing in and moved the "Properties" menu option that used to be under "File". What year was that? 2003?

I recall spending ages trying to figure out where on the hard drive the file actually was without having to go via "Save As" (used to be File->Properties, and there it is). I'm sure it's trivially easy, but that interface change effectively made Office a whole new program to learn for me, with the predictable result that since I now had to relearn how to use it, it was on a level playing field with other tools - one of which I switched to. While I'm only one data point, making me relearn the interface meant Office suddenly had to actually compete again.

I also struggle to use any version of Windows beyond XP. I am a total cluster on Win 8 and it's quicker for me to find someone who can use it and get them to do it for me. The older I get, the more sure I becomes that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface; only convention.

> It's already better than the windows desktop (xubuntu anyway, not unity, however).

Disaggree. Unity is by far superior to the Windows Desktop. It's the most productive DE on a notebook I know (OS X included)

Dell is preinstalling Ubuntu. So is Asus.

Buying a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled is a PITA because you have to purchase it as a business which apparently means you lose all your consumer rights. I found this out the hard way when I was told that returning my XPS 13 would cost me a 15% "restocking fee".

Besides, they're preinstalling 12.04, and upgrading to newer versions (in my experience) requires blacklisting kernel modules and setting kernel params.

Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

When people buy something in a PC form factor they expect it to run windows. Linux on the desktop will not happen in a traditional desktop form factor because people don't want it and/or don't see the point. The one possible exception are chromebooks, because a laptop that only runs chrome and is therefore cheaper / lighter is something people see the point of.

Besides, linux as mass market OS has already happened, it's called android.

> Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

Those were gimp versions (distributions) of Linux though. We haven't seen what happens with a properly supported straight-up Ubuntu or such full-featured desktop.

They weren't gimped from the perspective of the desktop, just from the perspective of a programmer. They ran all the same apps, in a UI optimized for netbooks, with a simple easy store app to download additional software. A straight-up Ubuntu wouldn't be that much nicer for a "typical" user in my opinion.

>Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

Not exactly how I remember it. They sold like wildfire initially when linux was first put on it. Then MS started giving away windows licenses because they freaked out over linux adoption overtaking them.

Somehow them and intel managed to prevent all the hardware manufacturers from improving their specs (each year they got progressively worse).

Something very fishy went on with that market.

Yes, if I remember correctly Microsoft or Intel made some sort of requirement that netbooks couldn't be sold with over 1GB RAM. There may have been some other restrictions.

(BTW, congrats on having a post ID of exactly 7000000! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7000000 )

This is a great point. I remember people losing their shit when netbooks shipped with windows instead of "this linux thing that doesn't work with my work stuff." That's literally a quote from someone in my wife's office when she showed up with a little Windows netbook I bought her.

I think the linux desktop is farther away than ever. For the modern home user, some level of iOS or Android device will take the place of the "family" computer. Gamers and edge cases will exist, but in much smaller numbers. For a gamer, a Win8 OEM license is a trivial cost.

This is also why linux distros are stupid for chasing MS, instead of implementing their own vision and their own added value. Yet another WIMP, Open Office, Chromium box that serves no one but FOSS enthusiasts isn't going to win anyone over, especially when they can't use the Outlook/Exchange/IE/Office/Sharepoint stack they've become accustomed to. They've invented a poorer version of Windows when the demand for a Windows-like OS is at its lowest and people are shifting largely to mobile devices and keeping the big clunky desktop for work stuff that is deeply tied to proprietary MS or Adobe or Intuit software. For pros, Gnucash doesn't replace quickbooks. The gimp doesn't replace photoshop.

I'd love to see the business world standardize on some FOSS desktop solution, but that has so much politics and proprietary stuff attached to it, that its the same story we have today as we did when slashdot was telling us that Mandrake would take over windows in 2002 or 2003.

I guess you could call android a linux desktop, but that's quite a stretch. Its a linux kernel and a lot of mobile stuff Google came up with. That's a face-saving win, but in reality the linux desktop has been a massive fail in terms of adoptability and business penetration.

I'm not sure what you are trying to imply. :)

Vista (at least after the first service pack) is a solid OS. I still run it on my gaming PC (which also dual boots to Ubuntu) and I don't see any reason whatsoever to "upgrade" to W7 or W8.

Security vulnerabilities? Are they still supporting vista?

Vista gets security updates until 2017.

You didn't quite explain what you want to say here.

Questions that came to my mind when I read your comment:

- Is the number of Vista/Linux users declining or increasing?

- How long is Steam for Vista/Linux available?

- How many games are available for Vista/Linux?

My expectation is that Vista's falling, while Linux rises in that statistic.

I'd say the fact that Steam is 'new' for Linux and relatively restricted/obscure for now (Ubuntu centric) the percentage isn't too bad.

Given that a lot of games (mostly the oh-so-expensive so-called AAA titles in my experience) are still Windows only or Windows/OS X only, I find the number still quite interesting and not really disappointing.

Gaming on Linux still has a long way to go:

1) The drivers are still crappy. It's getting better but it still needs a lot of work. To simply manage multiple screens or to change resolution requires a restart! Nvidia is still better than AMD drivers.

2) Many games just get the Linux ports to a "working" condition and leave it at that. The games are really buggy. Valve games are top notch and deserve a lot of credit for creating a good experience. Thank you Valve.

3) Ubuntu needs to create a stable platform people can build on. Getting people to use LTS is good but it is still buggy (I have a lot of issues with Unity). Also, LTS software gets stale really quickly - there needs to be a solution for this (without PPAs).

The open source drivers for my ATI card are pretty good. Performance isn't spectacular but it's acceptable, and I've not run into any serious bugs for years, and I have no trouble changing resolution at all.

Is there any kind of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics? If no, then those drivers are pretty much useless for gaming.

There is hardware acceleration for the open source fglrx (radeon) drivers, nouveau (oss for nvidia), and closed source nvidia drivers.

For me, the open source radeon drivers do not work at all. I am on an AMD 7790 on Ubuntu 13.10. Is the hardware not supported yet?

Is the AMD open source driver better than the closed source one?

Support for the Radeon 7000 series in the open source driver arrived pretty slow. You should check to see what version of the driver is included with your distribution, as it could easily predate the 3d acceleration support.

For older hardware, the open source driver is getting competitive in terms of performance, and of course has the usual benefits of open source drivers.

Yes, there's hardware acceleration. For games like TF2 I never dip below 45fps and I'm usually up around 75fps

TF2 isn't exactly a new game, but neither is my graphics card.

The performance is acceptable. The problem is I have a weird flickering issue when I run Steam on a multi-monitor setup. The fix is to run a command like this:

xrandr --output DFP6 --auto --left-of DFP7 --output DFP6 --scale 1.0001x1.0001

I only had this issue with AMD (not Nvidia).

You're lucky. I get the choice of Steam or a laptop that can sleep. (nVidia)

In many ways it's a good thing, I get more code dOne this way.

1. Changing resolutions requires a restart for you? Why in the world would that be? Do you use ubuntu? Do you have to save settings with the GUI and then restart?

For instance I run a shell script which does some xrandr commands to make my external desktop work on Xubuntu (same for debian).

2. Agreed

3. LTS means more stable and packages are more tested. Getting newer packages will mean testing less, meaning less stable packages.

I think I better solution is game developers using the newest stable version of dependencies on popular LTS's instead of using newer ones just because. Basically this requires communication between game devs and linux package maintainers for mesa/xorg/nvidia/fglrx.

Yes, I use Ubuntu but I am considering moving to Debian or Suse.

To be fair, changing resolution does not always require a restart (but for my multi-monitor setup it often does). I can do most changes without a restart with Nvidia not AMD. Also, why should I change the resolution within the driver software...why not do it in the desktop like Windows or OSX.

I am really curious to know how Intel graphics drivers work on linux. Intel seems to be more linux friendly compared to AMD/Nvidia. Is the support a lot better?

> I am really curious to know how Intel graphics drivers work on linux. Intel seems to be more linux friendly compared to AMD/Nvidia. Is the support a lot better?

They ‘just work’ – you can change the resolution/screen setup any way you like at any time, either using xrandr directly or one of the many frontends (each DE usually has one called ‘Display Settings’). Of course, the drawback is that these are still just Intel on-die GPUs; enough for Portal (2), CS etc., but even KSP runs rather slowly/only at low details.

My intel gpu:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

actually doesn't just work. I think it says "DP error slip" or something similar. That reminds me I need to submit a bug report ;)

Intel drivers, lack of horsepower aside, are much better than either nvidia or amd at this point. You do not need to restart X to change resolutions or manage screens, it's just an xrandr command. It works very well.

That said, a lot of games on linux deal extremely poorly with multimon no matter what. They'll usually try to play over all screens with sometimes completely insane geometries.

> Intel drivers, lack of horsepower aside, are much better than either nvidia or amd at this point.

Sadly I have to disagree with you at this point. I used the Intel GPU on my i7 2600k (HD3000) since 2011 on Arch Linux and at some point about six months ago they stopped working properly. On a Displayport connector I didn't get video at all @ boot sometimes, other than by messing with xrandr and unplugging the cable the only solution was to try booting again.

That wasn't too horrible. What was horrible was the fact that OpenGL didn't work at all really. Every time I used anything that utilized OpenGL I would get "GPU hung, stuck in render ring blah blah" in my dmesg every minute or so and indeed the whole GPU and hence the screens would freeze completely for 5 seconds or so. The machine became unusable. No more GPU accelerated mplayer after that (vaapi or any of the opengl options). Google Maps with WebGL was especially hilarious, I only had to drag with the mouse a bit to make the GPU hang.

I tolerated it for a few driver versions but no improvement happened so I bought a passively cooled ATI HD7750 and use that with the open source drivers. KDE compositing doesn't work @ OpenGL 3.1 at all (even though it should based on the driver's specs) and with compositing enabled accelerated video crashes my Xorg so I had to start using Openbox but at least the screen doesn't freeze for 5 seconds at a time all the time.

Really disappointed with Intel, the drivers were extremely solid in the past.

For what definition of "users" and "run"?

I signed up for Steam and installed it on linux, downloaded TF2 only to find that it would not work with Wheezy/my integrated Intel GPU (I didn't investigate beyond some "you don't support GLX_WHATEVER message, it could have been either), then deleted the installation and haven't done anything with it since.

I presumably am not counted in this statistic since I did not do that within the past month, but I wonder how many other people like that are.

I had the same issue. If I recall correctly, there is a relatively simple solution on the Ubuntu forums somewhere.

The solution isn't so simple on wheezy if you want to keep your install sane. AKA don't install debs from ubuntu/other repos.

When I last checked, what was necessary is backporting a new verison of libgl1-mesa and possibly other things. Haven't had time to see if that fixes it yet though.

This is one area where Linux in general, and Debian in specific, isn't currently very gamer friendly -- graphics drivers languish at out of date versions for far too long.

Oh well, maybe 2015 will be the year of linux on the desktop.

For me and my wife and me for work it was 2007.

Gamers tend to use dedicated cards.

Aye, I understand that and wasn't expecting much.

FWIW: I just decided to give it another shot and Half-Life seems to work great, surprisingly at 2560x1700.

Every month Steam asks a random subset of Steam users a hardware survey.

OS choice is a new aspect of the survey. The survey's original intention was to find things like 64bit penetration, number of cores, monitor resolution, internet connection type, and power of GPU. Most of it is automated.

We don't know Valve's exact methodology. I would hope they take a random sample of users who logged in the prior month and send them the survey. If you get selected a window will popup and ask you for permission to run the survey. If you say yes then it gathers your system data. They should only count you as a linux user if you were on linux when you took the survey.

This still leaves room for Valve to cheat in the selection process but otherwise the survey should be meaningful.

Mac users are still very low. I am a Mac user and I play games on my laptop. I hope they can release more games for the Mac platform as well. Although BF4 is not on Steam platform, it'd be nice to have a Mac version.

Linux -> Mac ports and vice versa will be much easier than Windows -> Mac ports so you might be in luck!

I wonder how much work they have to do to support retina.

Retina is just Apple's marketing term for high-density display, and is something that's been common in PC gaming for a decade.

Before the age of LCD my monitor had a whopping 1920x1440 res, many gamers opt into similarly high (16:9) resolutions now.

The higher pixel density isn't necessarily a plus, though. I find 1080p does just fine for everything and want my gpu to be able to render with AA, anisotropic filtering (check out Skyrim with and without AF), and other details. There is a constant tradeoffs in an industry where software demands much more than hardware can supply.

Thanks. I know a couple desktop tools have issues with retina (or high-density resolution as you said) support that's why I asked. It seems like there might be addition code have to be added.

My boys have used the Steam client on Bodhi Linux for the past 6 months or so - it probably registers as Ubuntu. Half Life, HL2, Portal, Team Fortress all work very well. They also play a lot of Minecraft on those computers (not on Steam obviously).

They make very serviceable gaming computers.

I took the survey while I was playing DotA2 on Ubuntu, but since taking the survey I no longer use Steam on Linux. The main reasons are that only 4/50 games in my library are available on Linux, and because graphics performance still sucks (Intel HD4400).

I'll try it out again whenever a new game is available or when there's a graphics driver update, but at the moment I'd much rather reboot into Windows than pull my hair out over how bad Linux is for gaming.

I use steam on linux without problems on xubuntu. The problem is my main OS is debian wheezy and mesa is too old. That means I would have to backport libgl1 (iirc) and not fail (like the past 3 times).

I reboot into Xubuntu when I want to game though, and don't have any problems. Well except when I hook up to an external monitor... but I have a hacky xrandr script for that. I don't things are quite "there" yet for most people to game on linux.

>> I don't things are quite "there" yet for most people to game on linux.

You mean Debian Linux which is what you're running. Ubuntu runs Steam just fine even with the Unity interface. I can Alt+Enter to go back to the Desktop and do stuff then get back into a game.

No, I mean it's not there for Xubuntu/Ubuntu either. I have the same external monitor problem with both. The graphics drivers however have worked fine for me. However, my girlfriend who is running xubuntu with fglrx (radeon card) has slight issues with textures staying on screen.

I use steam on Linux extensively with a lot of more 'Indie' type games like Awesomenauts, Anomaly 1/2 and Guns of Icarus. Mostly no problems.

The thing that's always surprised me about Steam for Linux is how close the numbers are to those for Mac users.

I wonder what percent of Steam games run on GNU/Linux. From my experience this is currently a very small value, as most of the games I want/wanted to play are/were not available.

Let's check my library... 82 titles total (not counting the junk/demo/beta entries), 18 of them have declared GNU/Linux support, that's 21%. Way more than I expected (before I started counting I thought it would be somewhere between 5 and 10%), but still almost none of the games I'd play (new ones I haven't played yet or old ones with personally high replay value).

So, it's still WINE and/or dual-boot for gaming. No changes here.

What's more interesting to me is 20% of the users are on Windows 8/8.1

Keep in mind that this only shows how many Linux users run native steam clients. A lot of us also run Steam through Wine so that we can play Windows-only games. It's a buggy experience, but what can you do...

Part of the reason I use linux is that I want control. I like games too, but Steam doesn't give me control. I would prefer Steam didn't manage my games, I want everything separate from each other. Until I can do that, I won't use Steam (I've tried)

It wouldn't surprise me if there's a fundamental difference in thinking between linux vs other users. It's great that Steam's been providing Linux games, but that's just not enough for me.

Bigger Question: Do linux folk spend money on software?

I seem to remember some statistics showing Linux users generally donating more for Humble Bundles than Windows and Mac users.

That doesn't mean they are more inclined to buy Steam games of course, but it does seem to indicate they do not mind spending money on games.

Don't want to rain on the parade but - What is the error margin of this poll/survey? A margin of error of +/-2% would be very good for most polls.

There is definitely a need for a 'third' choice when it comes to desktop gaming platforms, hopefully Linux can take off sometime in the future.

Thats data that is automaticly gathered by steam - it's not a "survey" where you can pick OS.

Is it opt-in or opt-out?

Edit: Nvm found my answer

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Its optional. Also other people have mentioned that steam randomly chooses users to take part in the survey and then asks them if they want to participate.

I would too if AMD made decent graphic drivers for Linux!

I've found they've gotten pretty good. I have a 7970 and a couple of R290 GPUs, as well as whatever ATI GPU is in my laptop (a 6000 series Mobility GPU), they all seem to work fine under Linux. Admittedly, I don't do a lot of gaming, though I just bought a few new games in the winter sale, since they've added so many Linux games (and some of them are freakin' awesome games).

I haven't actually tried any of the really tough games, like Half Life or whatever yet...but, I'm actually super excited about playing Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux on one of the new GPUs. So, we'll see soon enough.

I have a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650(not very powerful and quite old now) and I can play Dota 2,Left4Dead and other games on windows with no problem at all,while on Linux(Ubuntu 13.10) I can barely open the games.

I must actually install native linux steam at some point, think I'm still running under wine!

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