Can we talk about the definition of a “surge”, please!
What percentage increase do you feel is required for surge to be a reasonable definition. A 35% increase feels surge-y me.
The council planted a new tree on my road, trees surged in population from 1 to 2 yesterday
100% surge is legit
That’s why we’re talking about relative percentages.
In your example we would need to know how many trees existed on your road/city before. If there were less than 3 or 4 trees in your city before this, saying there was a surge is likely fine.
I gave you that information, I said “from 1 to 2” and added context of “a tree” (singular)
My terribly made point is that although technically correct when talking about relative increase it’s dumb as fuck to say trees “surged in population” after adding just one more on one street. It’s a drop on the ocean.
I feel like the term surge respects the final total relative to what its maximum could be as well as the relative increase. But obviously language is regional and up for interpretation
I’m super confused by your point.
In this case we’re looking at Steam.
I have no clue how many people submit to the steam survey, but I’ll assume it’s representative.
A quick google suggests steam has about 120 million active users.
Linux went from about 1.4% to 1.9%.
Rough math says Linux went from 1.7 million to about 2.3 million.
Or an increase of 600 000.
That a lot, both in relative terms and in real terms.
Here’s a counter example for you.
You own stock in banana company. Over one day the price increases 2x. All the news agency’s are talking about how banana surged in price today. Will you then suggest that banana didn’t surge in price because it only makes up 1% of the overall stock market?
Given the sheer amount of Steam users, it’s still not a bad increase.
Sergei?
sir gay?
It’s not just a percentage thing. 1 person yesterday to 2 people today is a 100% increase. Not much of a surge, at least in terms of news worthiness. Going from 6% to 10% sounds more news worthy than going from 1% to 2% despite the latter being a much larger percentage increase.
Considering the many millions of steam accounts. A 1% increase is nothing to sniff at.
Of course, percentage just help show relativity. It’s why people can look at a 0.5% increase and dismiss it as not significant.
Would it help if I translated the percentage for you? Linux surged 600000 to 2.3 million.
It’s not the percentage total but the speed of increase.
Small number random samples in big data sets have huge error margins. You need to smooth this over time to see the real trend.
A delicious canned energy drink from the 90s.
Josta was better.
Click bait media
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You may be right in that people are seeing how viable Linux is for gaming due to the success of the Steam Deck.
I’m not sure if steam deck is counted under Arch, but it’s definitely not Ubuntu, Mint, or Manjaro. It looks like the increase in Linux desktop is traditional desktop gaming.
SteamOS is 42.99% of the Linux share on there, with the lion’s share increase of 0.68%. This ‘surge’ is pretty much just from the Steam Deck.
I’m not sure if steam deck is counted under Arch
It must be, because there’s no way vanilla Arch is the most-used Linux distro, even among gamers.
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That, but also the splash buff of Proton making a lot of games work for Linux outside of Steam Decks has probably helped too.
Add the article says, the surge is entirely thanks to the Deck. There was a 35% surge in overall use but 43% of that use is the Deck so PC/laptop use has actually dropped.
I’d say some of that drop was punters like me who were already gaming on Linux and have just moved over to the deck now.
I have a dock for mine and it’s really the only thing I use for gaming now as my laptop is very old.
id like to think this is because I alone decided to install opensuse (its been an awful experience)
Do you mean Linux in general or just Open suse? Never used it other than booting it up and trying out the live environment
Feel the pain 😂.
If you’re referring to openSUSE rather than Linux in general, I have had the opposite experience. I had been on Manjaro for the past couple of years and decided to switch to openSUSE Tumbleweed on a whim and everything for the most part has just worked out of the box with minimal troubleshooting (or just a lot less than I remember when I was originally configuring my Manjaro install). What all have you had problems with?
Heres my biggest complaints so far:
it takes like 45 seconds for my OS to wake from sleep
sometimes my login screen is on my left monitor, sometimes on my right, sometimes on both!
It took me 3 hours to get wallpaper engine running
My package manager keeps telling me I am missing dependencies that I have verified exist.
video games dont perform as well on Linux as they do on windows (even baby games like Risk of Rain Returns which should run on pretty much anything perfectly)
half the time I reboot my computer I get some weird nvidia error, other times I dont at all. Generally when I reboot my computer it just stalls for like 45 seconds before actually rebooting.
it was very unclear what I needed to install to get the latest nvidia drivers installed. Got it working after a few hours of trial and error.
theres some more complaints but those are the ones off the top of my head.
oh also applying themes seems very broken. Every time I apply a theme it grabs icons from a completely different theme. For instance I applied a theme called dracula, didnt like it so I switched back to the opensuse default theme, after a while I found a different theme and applied it but suddenly all of my icons were dracula theme again… also its very hit or miss whether all of the theme actually applies.
Opensuse is a challenge after living in Debian world for a while.
Pop-os is where I eventually ended up. Ubuntu with built in i3 style tiling and none of the snap garbage.
Linux Mint 0.08% Yay!
It’s an excellent distro. My first, after a poor Ubuntu experience years prior. I’ll always have good things to say.
LMDE is Mint without the Ubuntu. Don’t mind me, just spreading the good word.
Oh yeah, LMDE is definitely the future of Mint. Good point.
I just removed Windows from my desktop and went straight Linux after seeing how well things ran on my Deck.
bill’s days are numbered
I mean, he’s not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
My guess is that most gaming Linux users have a dual boot setup and play games on Windows.
If not for games like Destiny, I wouldn’t even need that. Literally everything else I play runs great on Linux now
I used to keep a windows drive to run steam. But it honestly sees very little use nowadays.
Mostly I boot it every few months to see what shenanigans Microsoft has pulled with windows. Other than that, it’s just sitting there. Everything I play runs in Linux.
I run Tumbleweed btw.
Not anymore. I don’t even bother to check steamdb, games run anyhow flawlessly under Proton experimental.
(OK, maybe check if the game runs well before buying it)
Wel yeah, single player games almost almost work flawlessly. However games with kernel level anticheat are generally not playable on Linux.
My guess is that most Linux gamers tracked by Steam have a dual hardware setup with a Steam Deck and a Windows desktop PC/notebook.
Doesn’t it show +0.05% Arch? I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch. So if 0.15% is a blend of Arch and SteamOS-Arch, it seems to be growing in quite a few ways.
I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch.
No, that’s not the case. A separate listing for SteamOS leads by a lot. If you install pure Arch (or another distro) on Steam Deck or for whatever reason install and launch the Flatpak version of Steam, those won’t get counted as SteamOS but otherwise it’s pretty clear how big the installed base of SteamOS is.
Ohh, okay. Thanks for explaining it to me. I misunderstood.
Tell me why “market share” of commerical, proprietary games is important to Linux again?
Because of Valve, Linux is finally my main OS. I’m a PC gamer and it was a pain in the ass to dual-boot between Windows and Linux.
These commercial, proprietary games are one of the things that pushes forward the capabilities of personal computers. They are unreasonable, unoptimized resource-hogs. If a Linux system is as capable of running them as a proprietary OS (that has a deck stacked in it’s favor), it means they lose one another advantage over Linux. And it also means that your hardware now is more productive at less bs tasks, especially consumer-grade nvidia cards, who are better supported now than years ago.
If you are a Linux user and like commercial games, you probably would prefer them to work on Linux.
“Market share” on Linux aligns the vested interest of game makers and Linux game players. If the company thinks it can make money, it will do more to allow games to run, or at least do less to stop them.
Because it’ll be funny if Microsoft just gives up and makes “Windows” a desktop environment for Linux.
Starter edition - with no option of changing wallpaper and a 3 app multitask limitation.
Proprietary telemetry built into the kernel.
…Microsoft will die on that hill.
;)
That would be extremely funny
What would be great is they’d likely need to open source certain stuff for it to play nice with the kernel. Stuff like DirectX. And if that happens it’ll be a singularity moment for Linux compatibility and adoption.
Steam market share is honestly probably a decent metric for adoption rate of Linux as a whole.
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And that’s important because?
Linux can be used to play commercial games > more people daily drive to linux > more companies port their software to linux > even more people switch to linux > Windows/macOS duopoly breaks, losing to open source alternatives
I’m not saying playing call of duty on the deck will make windows fall, but it’s a start
daily drive to Linux
Since when have you needed to commute to use Linux? 🤣
Daily drive linux *
Lmao my bad
Because the more market share leads to better hardware and driver support
Potentially more support for other things other than gaming, maybe… Hopefully
nvidia openned their drivers not long after they announced that was “working sith valve to givd a better gaming experience on linux”
There’s high potential overlap between the profile of a PC gamer (who is often also a PC builder and general computing DIY hobbyist) and an OS like Linux that extends your tinkering ability massively on the software side.
PC/laptop users are a shrinking demographic nowadays thanks to the advent of mobile devices, but they’re a high quality demographic made up of professionals and hobbyists with above average computer savvy. So lots of companies are trying to appeal to them because the choices they make in software and hardware can translate into many other IT fields.
That’s what many people miss. I know Value is doing a lot but I was hoping for some other large companies to get into the space.
A lot of people only play games on their computer, hence running linux doesn’t make sense if they can’t play games on it
Yup, a big excuse I used to see a lot was
I would like to run Linux, but I want to game more so will stick to Windows
And this has changed a lot with what valve has done which opens Linux to a much larger market of people that can now use it for their usecases.
market share leads to demand, demand leads to supply
this benefits you
this is measuring market share of Linux in the gaming scene, not the other way around.
Now I wonder what the gaming share of linux use would be. Probably very very small percentage. since the wast majority of linux installs are servers
I have at least 20 different devices that run some flavor of Linux. Servers, a laptop, TVs, AP/routers, probably more, if my other “smart” appliances run Linux also.
Do Android phones and tablets count towards Linux gaming?
PlayStations run a derivitive of BSD, maybe those should get honorable mention. ;)
Including phones would be significant. But in my (probably deranged) head android/linux is a different os from GNU/linux. The overlap of the kernel itself is not enough. In that case all switches/routers/storage appliances/toasters/washing machines/fridges/iot sensors often also run linux.
