Huge surge in GNU/Linux Steam market share in November

That's just the div, in reality there a around a million linux users. Not really something to scoff at, don't you think? AAA devs are on their way out either way so i don't think that number is unsustainable.

they said that they would change their methods of calculation. if some account was launched for more than x hours per month on linux, then it counts as linux-only, even if it was used much longer on Windows during the same period of time.

>somehow macOS has a larger marketshare as well as more growth than the "huge growth" of GNU/Linux users
Why the fuck don't they support Proton for macOS?

>0.08% is a massive increase

Wow. Talk to me when Linux is actually usable and has more marketshare than macos

because:
>to run macOS you need apple hardware which most people do not already have nor wish to spend 3x times more for something they already have and just works and is basically the same
>macOS is commercial meaning there is always potential for apple to turn against them just like microsoft did. with linux valve can just make their own distro with their own rules as they did.
>apple doesn't give a fuck about games. they don't give a fuck about desktop desu
>there is already wine meaning all they had to do is already help and upgrade already existing project. with mac they'd have to start from scratch or almost from scratch
with all that said, 4% bigger market share isn't that big of a pro for macos

cool so 5 users joined linux

>Wow.
Yes, I know. Proton is a failure.
>Talk to me when Linux is actually usable...
It is already quite usable (dare I say better?) than competition except for gaming or professional multimedia/graphics work.
>...and has more marketshare than macos
That will probably never happen, except if Apple doesn't completely drop desktop but that will most likely not happen in 5 years minimum and by that time Valve will probable stop using Proton and make some trade-off dead with Microsoft.

"HUGE SURGE"
>"HUGE"

???

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stop posting suggestive transexuals on 4channel
this is family friendly website

>if some account was launched for more than x hours per month on linux, then it counts as linux-only
Unfair and misleading if true. This being said, they do have a problem calculating this as long as they don't add a "multiple operating systems" category. What am I if I add another SSD and install Wintendo on it and use it for Steam? I'm obviously still the GNU/Linux user but I'm also not exclusively using GNU/Linux or Windows for that matter.

All of what you just said doesn't make sense why they wouldn't make Proton available in the Steam client on macOS.
Wine and Proton can run on macOS, and are available for it, it's just not available in the Steam client for macOS users. There's nothing they'd have to do from scratch.
There's apparently so much Mac owners using Steam that their marketshare is bigger than people who run GNU/Linux to game on their already owned hardware. So the hardware and userbase is already there and stronger.

>Wine and Proton can run on macOS, and are available for it, it's just not available in the Steam client for macOS users.
ohh i didn't know that
guess you're right

I dont know about accounts. I do know games count towards "Linux" if you've played more hours on linux than windows. which makes the stat increase for linux even more remarkable if this is representative of how they count accounts.

>Perfect for normies who want technology that 'just werks'
You mean anyone that is trying to do real work instead of fixing their distro after every update?

what's her name

proton isn't fucking good enough.
It cant run anything I want it to.

I think we'll see the main benefits in a couple of years when developers release games which were developed to be more easily compatible, if not outright a linux version

she probably meant something like
click install game, play game
instead of
install game, get error, screw around with config.sys and autoexec.bat options and things like that for half an hour and then play game, or more modernly screw around with WINE and dll packages for two hours and play a half-working game

not sure what kind of distro you have that breaks things, that never happens to me. but I have experiences trying to get something to run in WINE and deciding screw this it's not worth it after wasting enough time to decide that's enough wasted time, it's not worth it.

interesting side-note, there's some native linux steam games that don't run without some tinkering (those based on Renpy) so they have some work to do.

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...

sigkillnificantly about 1% and we are done.

This shit (Proton) just werks. If you get a steam client update on Linux after signing up for the Proton/Steamplay beta, UPDATE! I've finished Prey, Hitman TM 2, and Grim Dawn so far on Proton with 0 issues of any kind.

That doesn't do Steam much favours. They're trying to cement Linux as the main platform and are giving it 100% of their attention in both development and marketing. Once proton is out of beta and linux starts really eating into Window's market share, Valve will put Proton on mac.

if that's a boy then I'm OP

As long as world of tanks and warframe do not run flawlessly among many other games, steam proton won't be a huge success. Of course in case of warframe it is the developers fault for writing such a faulty launcher but ey, tell that the guys that do not give a fuck and use windows.

based Gabe

I haven't use steam in ages but since they're putting this much attention into linux I'll reinstall it again. I can finally play quake on steam again without using wine!

that's a big sacrifice for one tranny

>Valve will put Proton on mac
They won't because it would be a long-term pointless effort. WINE is not an emulator, x86 is a requirement. Mac's will run a custom ARM CPU a few years from now. I realize the immensity of this information is hard to accept even though Apple's Mac machines have already gone through several different architectures.

if it was only as easy as getting world of tanks and warframe running. those are the games you like for some reason. I know a NEET who only plays GTA V and it won't matter if it's Windows or Linux or BEOS or ReactOS or TempleOS if that one game runs smoothly. Therein lies the challenge, there's a lot of games that are really important to a small percentage of the users.

To be fair windows can be fucking dreadful but most people cope with it because familiarity. The average Joe never feels the hit because they never fix their own problems or course.

>as world of tanks and warframe do not
Those are really niche games but OK. Steam is constantly being updated to support new games. Each game has a proton profile/config, and a lot of them arw just using the default config. Valve themselves works on whitelisting each game, and they do so based on two things:
1. fan demand
2. Major AAA releases like Hitman

So if your games are as popular as you think they are, rally some fans to Valve to put it on their shortlist.

use something stable and great. normies go for manjaro which is a mistake since it's the most unstable and downright broken distro imo.

I can only fully agree.

Looked it up and well warframe for example is out of all games on place 2 on the f2p "What's Being Played" list, even before Team Fortress 2. I wouldn't call that niche or something. Most of the time it isn't the fault of valve, but as said the fault of the devs.

>They're trying to cement Linux as the main platform and are giving it 100% of their attention in both development and marketing. Once proton is out of beta and linux starts really eating into Window's market share, Valve will put Proton on mac.
God bless Valve and Gabe

im happy that valve is trying to popularize gnu/linux and so but when are they going to open source their steam client?

fpbp

can you gamers fuck off with your idiotic fanfic
seriously, do you faggots ever stop dreaming up shit that isn't happening/will never happen????

Valve wishes that would happen, it doesn't mean it will

>+0.08%
>not even 0.1%
>"huge surge"

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i wonder how will mac users react to proton

It's officially only available for a smaller selection of titles that Valve has verified and officially sanctioned, but you can forcibly turn it on for all steam titles you own in the menus, with the caveat that Valve won't offer technical support. Doing this however, means you're effectively beta-testing their features which I guess Jow Forums has mixed feelings about.

Depends on the size of the developer. There are lots of devs that would be thrilled to reach 100,000 potential customers. Making your game work on Linux is super easy today, knowing there is an audience of 100,000 with few games to choose from is an opportunity waiting to be realized.

and with proton in play, they're basically competing for market share against all the big developers anyway so the niche of marketing towards those users is lost.

It's actually a million, 100k is just the amount of new users added in November. Well, sort-of, since in reality a minor amount of people got the survey so one Linux user could be 1k or 10k in the statistic. Anyway, 0.08% is the growth, 0.8% is the total of 125 million which works out to 1 million GNU/Linux players. That's a lot of potential customers you don't reach if it doesn't work on GNU/Linux.

I think it's turning out to be the best of Valve's pro Linux projects. Given it's continued growth I do think it will be successful long term.

>It is already quite usable (dare I say better?) than competition except for gaming or professional multimedia/graphics work.

Linux is a power house in 3d graphics. It is the platform of choice for animated feature films. Next time you see an animated film watch the credits for Linux development and system administrators. I've noticed a growing number of indie developers using Linux as well since Unity got serious about editor support in Linux. Creatives want OUT of windows.

Big publishers DRM fucks up Proton. The few AAA games that work well through Proton bring visibility to the whole platform, which is good for everybody.

Even better.

I see Proton being used mostly as insurance for Valve. They know that MS wants to slowly drop "legacy" Win32 and move to a walled garden model. Proton isn't perfect but it already works well enough that doing that would be disastrous for Microsoft. If Proton ever runs .exe based games better than Windows (for example, due to MS trying to push users into UWP) things could actually get interesting.

As long as MS keeps backwards compatibility though I don't see it doing that much. Gaming on linux as way better than it used to be but there's still no real reason to do it for a normal person

I get what you are saying with proton being insurance, but I think it's far more than that. Valve needs PC gaming to stay alive, Microsoft doesn't. Normies play games on consoles, not PC's. It's no secret PC gaming is stagnating into a decline, largely at the fault of windows graphics api's following consoles in lockstep. If Valve wants to b reak this downward spiral and revive the market that their business relies on they need to break the strangle hold of DirectX.

Phil Spencer wants to focus more on PC gaming.

You can be sure there's a team within Microsoft analyzing the probability of getting away with releasing Windows 11 with app-store only lock-in like Windows 10S has for "home" users. They would probably have to maintain a Windows Pro version for corporate customers who wouldn't accept that - and that would probably also be available for home users who want to pay $100 or something to "upgrade" from what came pre-installed on their laptop/desktop/whatever.

I'm not saying this will happen overnight. But I'm damn sure they plan on doing it and have focus groups and things like that to determine how much market share they'd lose compared to how much profit they'd be able to make from the app-store and upgrade-to-pro sales.

Proton uses vulkan here and there and apple doesn't let vulkan on their systems

Wanting and doing are seperate things. Given Microsoft's track record I don't see anything that gives me hope it will change. The simple fact is PC and Xbox compete against each other. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Microsoft can not push PC without hurting Xbox and can not push Xbox without hurting PC. For the good of PC gaming DirectX, Direct Compute must all die.

Talk about your manchild toys there

MoltenVK

I suspect you'll turn out to be wrong and that Microsoft will go for a strategy of XBox+Windows license if you buy a game for one or the other, you buy the game and register it to your Microsoft account and you'll be able to play on both. I generally agree that the PC and XBox compete but as of right now that's likely a minor concern: The console war is over and Sony's Playstation is the clear winner. That's the competition of concern. I'm fairly sure that's why Microsoft has been buying up game studios lately, they are probably looking to get exclusive titles (xbox and/or windows releases but no playstation release)

>It's no secret PC gaming is stagnating into a decline
I'm pretty sure it's the opposite, the biggest moneymakers are PC and mobile, dedicated consoles don't quite play in the same leagues as far as moneymaking goes. If you add up all 3 major consoles you might end up on a similar level to PC and mobile is far above that anyway. PC gaming has also been growing while the general PC market is declining.

If I were microsoft I think I would do it this way.

1. Disable "sideloading" by default in favor of their store. Offer an option to allow it with a scary warning, like Android and MacOS
2. Disable the option for Home users (maybe make a new cheap edition for new OEM users). In this stage there is still a registry hack available so the power users don't complain too much
3. Periodically break the registry hack with updates. Maintaining "sideloading" will be ongoing work like disabling updates and might break your system

Step 3 is enough for Steam to die probably, game developers will start targeting the store because normal people won't want to bother with those hacks.
That said this plan would be a hell of a lot safer if Proton didn't exist. I'm not sure it would be worth the risk for MS to do this now.

The problem with Proton is that it doesn't really offer anything to people who are happy on Windows. Proton merely aims to even up the playing field, but even if it manages to do that (it's not there yet for sure) there still isn't really any incentive for somebody who is happy with their PC running Windows to suddenly switch to Linux because of Proton.

As it continues to improve I most definitely expect more people to be drawn to it, but these will likely be people who already want to get rid of Windows and will take that opportunity when it becomes available. Getting people to ditch Windows for Linux + Proton is something entirely different, it requires a strong incentive which I don't think a compatibility layer for Windows software provides.

If Proton manages to increase the Linux userbase to some degree it might have the beneficial side effect of drawing more dev attention towards native Linux support, though even here it could be a sort of double-edged sword: why put in time, money and effort for native Linux support if Proton runs your Windows executable on Linux for you already?

The future of old win32 vidya will definitely be interesting. I wonder what ms does when wine reaches near parity with win10's backwards compatibility.

>For the good of PC gaming DirectX, Direct Compute must all die.
I think they will just merge Windows 10 with Xbox. All Xbox games + All Windows games = Jackpot.

Valve should introduce a higher tax for those who do not develop for Linux.

in reality they don't play new games, because every game is released on steam

They axe win32 from windows and allow people to install "Compatibility layer" from the Windows store, which is really just WSL with wine.

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Based.

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Well, I don't think Valve wants to nuke its profits over 0.8% of their userbase just yet.

Then they should lower the tax for those who do develop for Linux.

If large devs start doing it it's still eating into their profits.

>why put in time, money and effort for native Linux support if Proton runs your Windows executable on Linux for you already?

With good enough support it might be better to just get the .exe desu. Linux ports generally go through a compatibility layer anyway, and there's no inherent reason that Proton has to be worse than whatever the devs use. Especially since Proton can be improved over time even after release. Valve also has a larger incentive to make Proton work well going forward.

If you want to run a ten-year old game, what's more likely to work, the native Linux version or the .exe in Wine? It could easily be the latter desu. Although this is more a testament to how fucking stable Win32 is. It honestly deserves to live on just for that.

Microsoft makes money anytime an Xbox game is sold. They don't make a dime when a PC game is sold. How in the world will they make money by giving games away? How many people own an Xbox and a gaming PC? This strategy makes 0 sense so Microsoft might actually pursue it and fail as they usually do. Xbox/PC exclusives from Microsoft studios is the only strategy I see that has a chance to succeed and even that is slim.

I would love for it to be the opposite but PC gaming is a minority of the market. Feel free to prove me wrong, I would love to be wrong.

How does that work? Remember Microsoft doesn't make any money for games sold for PC that they do not publish. The financial incentive to support PC gaming is very small to non-existant for Microsoft. Valve is a different story.
Old windows games/software frequently runs better under wine than it does on modern windows.

I'm surprised they haven't put a Windows 10 S mode or whatever the locked down version is onto the Xbox at this point.
It doesn't really compete with OEM partners at that pricepoint at this day and age, doesn't affect it's ability to play videogames, it would give alot of traction to the Windows store and Edge. At this point I just think everyone outside of the Xbox department completely forgot about the Xbox.

>I would love to be wrong.
You are. The PC market alone is apparently of similar size to all consoles combined.

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Does anybody know why Linux is nonexistent in Asia? No japanese doujin game or software like SAI I've seen was available on Linux-based systems, also the % of linux users on Steam was higher but PUBG brought in Chinese who also are 100% Windows.

they only use windows though surprisingly they have some bsd users there

For the record, wine runs fine on macOS.

Wine already runs plenty of old (and some new) Windows software better than modern Windows. Hell, it runs some software modern Windows can't.

look at her hairline she got smacked by testosterone for a bit but damn still gorgeous

Chinks and Japs only use windows because they have a fetish towards America and their products.

Nice to see Heat Signature; that was basically all I used Proton to play.

Fuck why do I feel this is exactly what will happen

oh god

I honestly wouldn't even be surprised by this at this point.

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brobdingnagian surge must I add

Am I the only one who is scare by the rise in market share as far as linux is concerned?
The illusion of Linux being secure is because like less than 10 percent of the global population use it. When it starts to become popular what do we do? Go out and purchase the one and only anti virus for linux that isn't garbage?

Linux runs on a huge percentage of servers, people are always trying to exploit it. Difference it, Linux is inherently more difficult to exploit than Windows provided you have your shit set up right.

People are already trying to infect linux constantly, what are you talking about? If anything it might be more valuable, an unattended server is a goldmine for coin miners.
The only downside is you have to find a software exploit instead of just getting some moron to run not_a_virus.jpg.exe from their email

Bugs and security issues get fixed much faster in Linux, there's rarely anything to worry about for any length of time. If say, tomorrow a severe security issue were found in SSH, you could always disable it until the patch is released. I wouldn't get overly concerned about things changing much in terms of security.