I look at this and wonder
Why gog galaxy and epic client were ported to macos and linux users still didn't get native game binaries from epic?
Edit:
I didn't realize comments are formatted in markdown
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I think Proton is the smartest thing Valve has ever done. Thanks to that, Steam is going to get about 90% of all the Windows gamers switching over to Linux.
I so very much hope that the Linux gaming effect increases. Not only for gaming, but for the productivity world. If development of these 'compatibility layers' (Wikipedia) like Proton, Wine improves and maybe win-native software (thinking of CAD in particular) can be made working reliably on Linux using these packages, one or the other big player might adapt. That would be a much cheaper way of expanding the software's range than developing and maintaining a native Linux port...
... and maybe I am too naive.
noice
Looks like GoL has a plot over time. Linux adoption is starting to hockey stick, definitely above linear growth, this is getting exciting! I would guess, if it hits somewhere around 5-10% and keeps this hockey stick shape, we'll really start to see the game industry justify giving it more attention.
This will come with both good and bad, I expect it's only a matter of time before some game tries a native kernel level anti-cheat, aka root kit, on Linux.
Thanks for pointing that out! I made it into a shitty meme over at [email protected]
Impressed by all the folks on Win7 and 8.
Also surprised to see double the MacOS users
One of my old boxes is still win7. I'm never upgrading it and I keep it as a media thingo. I have an xp box in the garage somewhere, but I may have cannibalized the parts at some point. I'm pretty sure it works.
Mpd.
It seems comedic but I would imagine when one in 50 of your users falls into a certain cohort you start to consider them in your designs.
There were some reports from game devs who said that the big reports from Linux users was worth it just for that.
He actually pulled together stats for it all, and it was 5.8% sales making 38% of the big reports, which tended to be high quality.
So from his experience as an independent game dev, he said it was worth it just for the QA you get out of it.
I think a lot of the libraries and tooling being updated to be more platform agnostic helps too. It's not "press button to support Linux", but it's getting a lot easier than needing to rewrite your engine for every platform.
English speaking it's a solid 5% now, so I'd say it's one in twenty.
And that’s the most naïve way of looking at it. With more data you may be able to see if Linux users favour certain genres of games over others, so the number may be a lot higher than 2% for your game in particular.
A lot of that is probably steam decks
Essentially Arch Linux graph minus something.
We. Love. To. See. It.
We can push for 5% I can feel it!
I'm surprised Arch is that high compared to other distros.
Also interesting that people are actually switching to windows 11, everyone I know is staying on win10 as long as possible because they're more used to the interface.
SteamOS is Arch-based. Could be that.
One of the things that got me to change my gaming desktop from Mint to Arch was the fact that you get the cutting-edge version of everything; kernel and amdgpu being the most important, but also getting the latest version of Lutris and things is nice too. Brought me from "usually about 50 fps outdoors in Elden Ring" to "usually about 60 fps" on the same machine.
Makes sense for a gaming machine to only include the services you actually want, which Arch enables. Supports my hardware better too - my audio gear works perfectly in Pipewire but is ropey in ALSA, so rather than "install Mint -> install Pipewire -> remove ALSA -> hope ALSA is gone", the sequence is "install Arch -> install Pipewire", which make more sense.
Other cutting-edge rolling release distros are available, of course, but once you learn Arch, it makes a lot of sense for gaming.
Don't forget the AUR. It's so much easier to use yay than it is to go to GitHub to manually check for updates/download/install a deb or rpm file.
AUR is reposnsible for the vast majority of -Syu into softbricks, and is little better than downloading random binaries (because you literally are most of the time)
That's what timeshift and btrfs is for! Really though it takes like ten seconds to roll back and each snapshot only takes like 40mb. There's a pacman hook to take a snapshot before updating.
AUR is just incredibly convenient for me. I don't have to think about it, I don't have to track anything down.
BTW: ALSA is never gone. It's the kernel sound driver. And Pipewire is more or less just a helper. But underneath it all it's still ALSA.
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