Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark

> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

And backwards compatibility.

They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.

I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.

My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.

How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?

So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.

I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.

Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.

I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.

I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.

For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.

Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.

It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.

I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.

[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.

I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.

> No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning

Windows really needs to catch up with this. Multiple monitors have been a thing in Linux pretty much since the beginning of X.

Why can't I plug a Windows laptop into a docking station, and expect the screens to come up in the same order they were in last time? Why is it so hard?

> and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net

Funnily this is the same thing I tried to do just last month, Installed CachyOS after not having Linux on my desktop for a very long time, tried installing Battle.net and just ran into too many issues and haven't come back yet (to be honest I didn't try too many avenues to fix it).

If you don't mind me asking what was the tinkering you had to do to make this work? Thanks!

I recently converted a large SVN repository to Git using git-svn.

Started on Windows. After five days it failed for some reason so I had to rerun it (forgot an author or along those lines, trivial fix). Meanwhile I looked into why it was so slow, and saw git-svn spun up perl commands like crazy.

Decided to spin up a Linux VM. After fixing the trivial issue it completed in literally a couple of hours.

Interesting, I wonder why DEP would degrade process creation performance. My understanding is it's just a flag in page table entries to forbid execution, I am not sure how this could impact performance so much (except that data and code now have to be mapped separately).

Clicking through to their source, it seems true enough despite their protests.

Its not entirely built with React Native, but React Native does seem to be responsible for at least one element of the start menu that appears initially when the menu is presented.

The Windhawk Start Menu Style[1] uses XAML to modify the Start Menu, and I doubt that they are translating XAML to React

[1]: https://windhawk.net/mods/windows-11-start-menu-styler

Uh, AMD drivers have most assuredly not always not just worked. They do now, and they have for something like 10 years, but before that they were a steaming pile of locked in garbage.

File search is also the fastest thing among all the 3 OS it's not even funny. Just use the Everything search app and a good file manager that can integrate Everything.

And there really is no excuse, take a look at this indie dev blowing the default explorer out of the water: https://filepilot.tech

I still don't understand how search just can't file files with the string I write in the search bar on the name. Or menu items either.

Some file browsers on Linux have this problem too, and the KDE launcher had it for years (it's fixed now).

It regressed compared to Windows 10 too - I have a folder with photos, I normally have them sorted by date taken. On windows 10 I would open the folder and they were always sorted correctly the moment I opened the folder. Maybe there was a point in time at the start there the system had to sort them for the first time but ever since they were always shown correctly the second I opened the folder. On windows 11? Every single time it opens unsorted, the photos are in some random god knows what order, and literally 10 seconds(!!!!) later they suddenly move themselves to the correct position. Every single time. That's with maybe 200 photos? On a machine with 16 cores and 64GB of ram. People coding on 16kHz chips decades ago could do this faster than whatever microsoft is doing.

The “Everything” application is what you want:

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

It is quite honestly faster to start WSL then use grep or find.

If you have a 60Hz display and the game is locked to 60fps, when you take an action it may take up to 16.67 milliseconds for that action to register. If the game is running at 500fps, it registers within 2 milliseconds, even though you won't see the action for up to 16.67 milliseconds later. At extremely high levels of competition, this matters.

Also, there are 540Hz displays.

You want your minimum FPS to be your refresh rate. You won't notice when you're over it, but you likely will if you go below it.

In Counter-Strike, smoke grenades used to (and still do, to an extent) dip your FPS into a slideshow. You want to ensure your opponent can't exploit these things.

Not OP but got quite a bit of experience with this playing competitive FPS for a decade. You're right that refresh rate sets the physical truth of it, e.g. 180 FPS on a 160 Hz monitor won't give you much advantage over 160 FPS if at all. However reaching full multiples of your refresh rate in FPS – 320 in this instance, 480, and so on – will, and not only in theory but you'll feel it subjectively too. I get ~500-600 FPS in counter-strike and I have my FPS capped to 480 to get the most of my current hardware (160 Hz). Getting a 240 Hz monitor would make it smoother. Upgrading the PC to get more multiples would also.

To certain extent for online games it can be advantage (atleast it feels like it to me). AFAIK The server updates state between players at some (tick) rate when you have FPS above tick rate then the game interpolates between the states. The issue is that frames and networking might not be constantly synced so you are juggling between fps, screen refresh rate, ping and tick rate. In other words more frames you have higher the chance you will "get lucky" with latency of the game.

> Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

The reason is triple buffering:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Multiple_bufferin...

I just quote the central relevant sentences of this section:

"For frames that are completed much faster than interval between refreshes, it is possible to replace a back buffers' frames with newer iterations multiple times before copying. This means frames may be written to the back buffer that are never used at all before being overwritten by successive frames."

Tying the input and simulation rates to the screen refresh rate is an old "best practice" that is still used in some games. In fact, a long time ago it was even an actual good practice.

I run a 500hz monitor. Generally, you want your FPS to match your refresh rate.

I think it was just to show that the performance is comparable to Windows, implying that it also will be fine for games/settings where fps is in the range that does matter.

Modern games are not just shooting stuff in competitive mode.

There exist a gazillion of other games too, without anti-cheat.

Games these days, just as before, are fantastic. Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring(Nightreign), etc. And I've not even listed quite a few of my favorites cause they're not popular enough for most people to have heard of them.

Weird to say you don't game these days but also make blanket statements about games these days :p

For 90+ percent of Windows-only games I wanna play, the process for getting them to work on Linux is the following:

1. Hit the download button in Steam

2. Wait for it to download

3. Hit the play button

Granted, my taste in games doesn't include things like generic AAA first person military shooters, which are the ones which tend to be the most difficult to get to work due to stuff like anti cheat. But it sounds like your taste doesn't include those either,

There are a lot of indie or other types of games that escape this. I mostly play games with local multiplayer, so I'm hanging out with people and playing at the same time. Recently got into Brotato, which has no 3d engine at all lol

ARC Raiders is currently all working perfectly for me. Such a blessing. I hope it stays this way.

While you don't have to use it much, if you spend a year daily driving Linux, it's a near certainty that you'll have to use the command line.

I agree with your first statement, but raise an eyebrow at the second. The desktop already is the "friendly" version of the CLI.

I am skeptical there could be any magical technological innovation that would make terminals friendlier. That space has already been thoroughly explored. There are dozens of terminal variants with various quality of life improvements, but the fundamental user experience of a command line interface will always be daunting to a non-technical user, no matter how "innovated".

NixOS has been even better since it sees my whole system config and doesn’t need to derive the state from queries. I started with hello world and iterated into my perfect desktop env over a week.

They can ship the same destop/window manager combo they ship on the Steam Deck, where you can switch between the "full screen mode" (don't remember what it's called) and a proper desktop. I'm sure most people stay in the full-screen mode, it has all the settings and everything, even works with an cursor if I'm not mistaken, but can fallback when you need a terminal or whatever.

If they make their own distro, though, they're not really gaining more control. They're just enabling even more choice for someone who's looking for alternatives.

Let's say, hypothetically, that Valve releases SteamOS to the general public, and it's received generally well, and it becomes much more common for people to use "that Linux thing" than it is today. Then let's say, hypothetically, that Valve turns evil and... I dunno, starts charging money for updates? At that point you've got a large population already using Linux, I'm sure there would be a pretty big migration to Ubuntu or some other mainstream Linux desktop.

I actually totally agree. This was because a friend who lives a thousand miles away also plays it (and his parents have different views on what Fortnite means). I'm sure gaming companies optimize for peer pressure effects, because that's so powerful.

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DRM can work on Linux, it's just developers choose to not enabled support, and in some cases (Epic Games) actively update games so it won't work with Linux.

The problem is anti-cheat, not DRM.

Sometimes also a game will have a native linux binary but the Windows version with Proton works better (or at all) anyway...

I start non-Steam games with Wine and they run just as good.

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=category&i...

It already was the default for SteamOS, but not for overall Linux until recently, I believe.

Consoles support kb and mouse. Most popular fps games support it.

Is SolydK not good enough? There's also Mageia if you can stomach RPM instead of Deb (I prefer RPMs, but recognize it's a matter of personal taste).

Tried Mint?

> I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.

The speed of light makes this _marginally_ problematic to do. It is possible that a unit might move out of the fog of war, or out of cover, during the latency to the client (or between server ticks). You'd effectively have pop-in during some scenarios - but it would be minor and the net benefit would probably make it worth it.

I recall one of the MOBAs adding this during its lifecycle, HoN I think?

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Those are generally not the same anticheats with the same levels of functionality. As an analogy it's like saying Excel supports iPad. Or a gaming example that used to be way more common: Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 is supported on Game Boy Advance.

It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.

Well EAC for example is user space only because it has to be, which some games decide is not an acceptable level of security.

This is just factually incorrect.

Why would it be strange that there are steam decks that sit unused ? I have a switch and a PS 5 that go untouched for months (even with a 4 year old who I occasionally let play some games). I think most people in my friend group are similar in that they have some gaming gear but rarely the time to use it. Still nice to have once you do.

Alternative options:

- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.

- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks

- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.

Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.

#1 Is MAU. I wouldn't find it out of the realm of possibility that only 25% of owners played in the prior month. I wonder what this is for other consoles. I personally contribute to bursts of playing then months of not even touching some of my consoles.

Isn't the more obvious answer that the market research firm got their number wrong?

I have a Steam Deck. Haven't booted it up in months. It convinced me that I could game on Linux, now I game on my Desktop.

They likely stopped using them altogether.

Or, you know, most steam deck users aren't using them constantly and so they don't get picked up in the survey.