Linux overtakes macOS users on Steam thanks to Steam Deck
3 years ago by mesamunefire to c/linux_gaming
Mac OS does have 15x the number of users (in the US at least, closer to 6x the users outside the US), so this is still an accomplishment in my opinion.
I used to work in the video industry so I know dozens and dozens of Mac users and I'd say under 10 of them play games. And only one of them plays games on their computer.....by dual booting to windows.
I bought a mac book pro once because I was getting into graphic design and bought into the hype that mac was the way to go even after being a windows user for 10 years at the time.
But...I still had to integrate with windows networks for administration work, had to use windows only applications for work, use windows for the bulk of my games...
Obviously I ended up dual booting with windows for a while, but in the end I just stopped using the mac os.
I really hope the Linux area keeps growing and helps push for like better drivers.
I'm praying they NVK becomes as good as proprietary stuff. I would contribute if I was more knowledge đ
This is awesome. As someone that games on all 3 platforms, Iâm happy to see that Linux usage has gone up so rapidly, even if it is only because of the steamdeck. Itâs a great way to introduce people to the wonders of Linux! And yes I do game on my MacBook. The sims lol, it is actually nice to have SOMETHING to play when I feel like not working. And a surprising # of my favorite games work on Mac wonderfully like cities skylines and the 2 point games and many more. Iâm always happy when any platform other than windows can play games as collectively these smaller platforms need to dethrone windows, in my opinion.
Two decades ago, we at KDE always said that 5% was the magic number. If we got to 5% market share on the Linux desktop, then commercial games, applications, etc. would directly target it rather than ignore it. The steamdeck is wonderful, and if you include it, Linux is at about 3% right now. But it actually caused a huge acceleration in game adoption. So gaming is now ahead of that projection. Applications (i.e. Photoshop) probably still need 5%. Although we made that projection two decades ago, so it may no longer be valid due to cloud apps.
(I'm no longer involved with KDE, but was for a decade. It was an awesome decade.)
Thanks for all your work on KDE! My favorite DE, hands down. O7
I started using Linux / GNU/Linux based operating systems for more than a day or so at a time when I got Puppy Linux on my USB drive back in 2016 or so. Ever since then I put Fatdog64 and other Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint on my laptop.
And yet some developers decide to pour over resources to make a MacOS native port over a Linux port
People who buy Macs probably have money and are willing to spend it.
...it their money aren't already gone for a 999$ monitor stand.
SteamDeck buyers on the other side...
@emergencyfood @UnaSolaEstrellaLibre I would spend money on a great Linux laptop that could game at 1440p max settings but I have not found the one, yet. Any recs?
I've had a terrible time with them. The laptops all have the same issue with the hinges.
A mac port gets you mac users.
A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
Apple's new porting helper is nothing but Wine + D3D to Metal wrapper + Rosetta x86 emulation.
Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is âcommunity drivenâ. Fuckâem, we will manage without them like we always have.
SteamOS isn't a community project. It's a corporate project. It's just that Valve themselves aren't even pushing for native SteamOS games. There was an interview once with one of the SteamOS guys who merely said in passing during an interview that native games are better but that remark was lost in pretty much all reporting. Even developers of games based on Unity don't care to export Linux builds because Windows builds work just fine (until they don't because a Proton update breaks something).
Well, they probably use Macs.
Quick search shows only like 30 of developers as a whole use Mac's and I'm sure share is lower there because I know plenty of devs using macbooks that are running Linux or Windows. If we are talking game developers as a whole then that percentage of osx devs is far far smaller than the general usage. Windows using devs still dominate as a whole, Linux is not far behind, MacOS is a very vocal yet, smaller in reality group.
We don't bother with Linux ports anymore, instead they just added directX and win32 application support to Linux so it can just run the native Windows application.
I've been gaming on Linux for a while now. The pace of improvement in Proton has been staggering since the steam deck was released. I noticed the other day that I've gotten so used to games just working now that I don't even bother to check to protonDB before I purchase. I'm sure that won't bite me any time soon -_-
I usually check PCGW first, because the issues with most games are usually cross-platform.
I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don't care anymore. I'm more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn't be happier.
Every time I have to use a Windows VM for something, I become more and more grateful that I don't have to use their crap anymore. What got me recently was finding out that you are forced to create an account and be online to even install the latest version!
Technically there are still workarounds like disconnecting from the network or editing the installation sources, but it's still anti-user and worse than in older versions. Win will continue to get worse over time. Look at a freshly installed, default W11 Home consumer desktop for example. What most people probably use. Just open the start menu. It looks like the OS needs an exorcism first, before you can use it. But maybe many people have already become used to things being this bad
Can I ask what got you initially interested, and were there any speedbumps you had to deal with on the way? As a long-time Linux user, I see a lot of pushback against it from gamers online, and I'm curious to hear about your pathway.
Not OP, but personally i got bored of windows and wanted more control over my OS, especially as internet surveillance and data harvesting continue to be on the rise.
In my opinion a lot of the pushback comes from the fact that most distributions(especially recommended starters like Mint) don't come with the packages you need for gaming out of the box. Things like Lutris/vkd3d/gamescope/dxvk/gamemode/mangohud/WINE/ProtonGE, etc.
As someone who shifted to linux over the past year or so there was a metric fuckload of things i needed to learn and things i needed to tweak, especially when things went wrong. To the point i have over 10-20k character count tutorials i wrote for myself whenever i need to reinstall from scratch. These days i can get everything up and running fairly quickly, but that initial learning experience wasn't all fun and games for sure.
I had a leg up by already having my feet wet in linux server/virtual machines, but for someone who's coming directly from windows with zero experience and wants things to just work out of the box i can see why so many aren't interested. It doesn't help nvidia drivers are still horrible(in terms of desktop feel) for one of the most popular desktop environments for windows converts out there, KDE. Don't get me started on how you somehow need to know to disable compositing(or toggle via hotkey constantly like i do when i'm forced to use xorg instead of wayland) if you have more than one monitor in KDE or else your FPS will effectively halve itself.
Linux as a whole has a MASSIVE user experience problem if you want to do anything outside of basic office work and web browsing. Distributions like Garuda(my personal choice) help a lot because they give you the ability to have all of that stuff in the OOBE or an easy to use GUI, but that still only goes so far when little niggling issues crop up and you effectively need to relearn your entire workflow. It's just not something everybody is willing to do for the sake of not having Satya Nadella know when and where they poop.
My biggest hope is valve finally publishing SteamOS as an actual desktop OS. Because i know they could do it well as they seem to be keenly aware of the needs of the average gaming user, unlike most distribution maintainers these days which just assume you're a linux intermediate by default and have completely forgotten the long and arduous path to mastery the OS requires compared to rock-dead-simple windows.
Did you try the Nvidia version of PopOS? IME the "out of box" experience is loads better than Windows, and the install/configuration takes like 1/4 of the time.
Imagine if MS let them have Halo. The world would be so different. Gamers would have flocked to macs instead of Xbox.
I don't think the Halo brand would be nearly as widely known as it is now.
I'm as happy as you all, but having a teenager that starts to mod games, I realize the whole modding ecosystem of many popular games is Windows only.
Many peoples say you should play on pc because of modding. I would say from a Linux perspective, having the modding community switching to Linux is the next big step.
What kinds of things are you having a hard time modding in Linux? I generally stay away from AAA games and especially AAA games that don't have mod support. There's gimp. There's blender. There's audacity. There's an abundance of good text editors. Almost every file explorer is easier to use and more powerful than the one in Windows. Java development kit kind of sucks in Linux with that export path variable nonsense that never ever works correctly but other than that, I don't think I could do half the modding in Windows that I do in Linux.
When the game has no official modding support you need base modifications probably already compiled by someone else with who knows really what exact modification.
An example is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Base, unmodded game is actually Platinum on Wine's AppDB. But when you mod (by running injecting scripts via a modified dinput8.dll file) the game gets very unstable no matter what mod unlike on Windows.
So someone just needs to be interested enough in playing it to jump into a Wine staging dev and do the leg work to fix what breaks.
That's exactly how Wine has continued to expand what it can do for over 30 years...
You mean mod managers? A lot of those actually still work under WINE and you can even run them in a game's prefix using Winetricks and Protontricks (which is how a lot of us do it)
It performs exactly as expected, all mod managers really do is automate putting files where they need to go.
Is this finally the year of Linux "Desktop"...?
Well, you COULD, but very few companies port now due to Apple refusing to update their OpenGL drivers in favor of Metal. Nowadays it's a bit better, with MoltenVK providing Vulkan support, but you're still mostly limited to Apple Arcade games and emulators for your gaming needs
Yeah. There was a whale event in TF2 back when it was ported where you got Apple earbuds ingame if you played the Mac port during a certain timeframe.
Since maybe 2010? That's when I first played portal and it was on a Mac.
No
You will be unable to read bullet #1 without using Apple's undocumented, unversioned mystery Apple Silicon translator that "Just works" *
* it does not, in fact, "just work"
Steam deck and my desktop. The only thing that would be useful is if I could find a program that would work with excel macros for union business. I basically have always used computers for gaming and browsing.
I've replaced everything I actually use which is something I haven't been able to do before. for anything else there's VirtualBox.
2020 2021 2022 2023 the year of the Linux desktoop
I'll read up on it myself, but can virtual box run a windows instance from inside my Linux partition? I've never done any virtualization but that would be about the only thing from windows that would be useful. Just so I could use our excel doc to do billhead.
You can run windows in a vm in linux yes, with the caveat specifically for gamers that games with overzealous anti cheat can detect that they are running in a VM.
No need for windows to game anymore, steam/proton, lutrus and wine handle what I need just fine these days. This is more about using Microsoft excel as I have some union business that operates out of an excel file and Google sheets and libreoffice do not play nice with all the macros going on in it. Literally just to run excel.
That's the whole point.
I joke it runs faster than on bare metal but because you don't use it for everything and can in fact have a fresh install for each program it probably does.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I just never needed to do it before but I'm getting to the point that it would be very useful for me. đ
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts. That's a great question though and one I should explore. When I actually spring for excel/365 I can check out the web version while on Linux and if it doesn't work, look into setting up a virtualized Windows setup.
As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts.
True but they're constantly improving and they may be good enough, depending on the use case.
I did not know that. I'll have to check it out. Thanks. This has been a very informative comment chain. đ
lol! Weirdly the upcoming release of MacOS actually will be the most theyâve tried in decades.
Their translation layer is basically a rip of Proton. Obviously this isnât going to replace anyoneâs Desktop or gaming laptop. But itâs nice to see Mac users are at least being thrown a bone.
Their translation layer is basically a rip of Proton.
Of CodeWeavers' Wine which I already mentioned. Proton is more than just Wine but Apple's implementation does not use the Vulkan translation but their own Metal wrapper.
and there was much rejoicing!
This is kind of like saying youâve beet a Toyota Prius on the track.
Prius vs Camry vs Porsche
The topic of market share, and ports and lack of them, are nuanced but I highly doubt Linux won't overtake macOS even more each year unless Apple wakes up. Valve and Linux community are a force to be reckon with. There are other individuals in the scene as well, who are chipping away at improving the gaming ecosystem, such as System76, Redhat and Canonical.
I switched to Windows for gaming this year. With advances in Wine/Proton it was super easy; there's nothing I play that isn't perfectly convertible to Linux anymore.
Even using an Nvidia card in my desktop seems fine.
You switched to Windows?
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then that's my go to one!
Only game I had to do that was for Tabletop Simulator due to a memory leak in the Linux release due to my colossal amount of subscribed Workshop items. But other than that, if there is a Linux release then thatâs my go to one!
May I introduce you to crap like Alien Isolation where the porting companies went all-in on Nvidia-exclusive features and the version with higher compatibility is indeed the Windows release.
It was supereasy! Barely an inconvenience!
Not sure how the happened haha. Thanks for the call out!
I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS
Apple's GPU cores suck. As much as you can genuinely praise their CPU work (which you can somewhat easily upscale with more cores and more cache), even the most high-end ARM Mac has a GPU that's just an iPhone GPU with more cores but without any actual high-end features such as raytracing (more of the same limited cores can't just magically become a raytracing engine). Even Steam Deck's GPU is capable of raytracing because it's not an upscaled phone GPU but a downscaled high-end GPU.
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@lemmy.world
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
That includes posts generated by LLMs. It doesnât matter if you âdonât have the timeâ or âwouldâve written the same anywayâ, or if âeveryoneâs doing it geez get with the timesâ.
For now itâll also include âAIâ-assisted projects that haven't had at least two months of (public, verifiable) dev time behind them.
Resources
Help:
- ProtonDB
- Are We Anticheat Yet?
- r/linux_gaming FAQ
- Fork of an earlier version of the above
- PCGamingWiki
- LibreGameWiki
Launchers/Game Library Managers:
General:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
go to feed...
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