1.85% of Steam users run Linux

Very exciting times for Linux gaming this year. With next quarter&#x27;s Intel Broadwell chipset - which incidentally runs off <i>official</i> open source drivers on Linux [1] [2] - we should have a pretty awesome Steam experience on Linux. As the Intel dude puts it :<p>* Intel’s Ben Widawsky, who works on Intel’s Linux graphics driver efforts, says that “Broadwell graphics bring some of the biggest changes we’ve seen on the execution and memory management side of the GPU… [the changes] dwarf any other silicon iteration during my tenure, and certainly can compete with the likes of the gen3-&gt;gen4 changes.”*<p>Pretty the much the only reason I&#x27;m putting off buying a laptop right now.<p>[1] <a href="http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/30/1550239/intel-releases-5000-pages-of-open-source-haswell-documentation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;13&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;1550239&#x2F;intel-releas...</a> [2] <a href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&amp;item=intel_broadwell_linux&amp;num=1" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phoronix.com&#x2F;scan.php?page=article&amp;item=intel_bro...</a>

Anecdote.<p>I actually installed steam yesterday (for the first time, I&#x27;m not a gamer) to see the available games for Linux.<p>I was pleasantly surprised that there were a few that looked okay. So I bought a couple. None worked -- mysterious launch errors, etc. No luck after a couple hours of debugging.<p>DISAPPOINTED!<p>I seriously question how many people actually <i>run</i> on Linux vs. login and browse the store? That said, I&#x27;m sure the experience will improve and it&#x27;s great to see Linux as a growing platform for games!

Out of the table, it seems 0.85 percent run some flavor of Ubuntu. That leaves the other 1.00 percent running some other flavor. I&#x27;ve got it running on Debian GNU&#x2F;Linux (Testing) and play TF2 and CS:S from time to time. I even picked up CS:GO during one of their mega sales for five bucks or so in the hope that they eventually port it over to Linux.

This percentage is <i>huge</i> since its fairly new and not all games are ported yet. When you think about this, majority of gamers were already rocking a windows dual boot or separate machine for gaming. This is 1.85% of the user base who switched over to Linux even though not all games were available to them yet.

This is great! To me it&#x27;s surprisingly high. I think this will be a slow process, because spending a day to backup &amp; reinstall your OS is not a fun process. When I have time to game, I just want to turn my computer on and start gaming. I support gaming on Linux, and honestly even I&#x27;ve been too lazy to setup Linux on my gaming machine.<p>I think the shift will happen as people upgrade their computers, or have to reinstall their OS because of malware. I wonder what percentage of these gamers are using a pirated version of Windows, because my anecdotal experience is that anyone who&#x27;s built a computer has pirated a copy of Windows. When building a computer on a budget, spending an extra $100 on your video card is more ideal than on the OS. So going legitimate and free would be a very attractive option for gamers.

I think the big story here is that ~4% of Steam users run Vista. The year of the Linux desktop is very, very, very far away.

Gaming on Linux still has a long way to go:<p>1) The drivers are still crappy. It&#x27;s getting better but it still needs a lot of work. To simply manage multiple screens or to change resolution requires a restart! Nvidia is still better than AMD drivers.<p>2) Many games just get the Linux ports to a &quot;working&quot; condition and leave it at that. The games are really buggy. Valve games are top notch and deserve a lot of credit for creating a good experience. Thank you Valve.<p>3) Ubuntu needs to create a stable platform people can build on. Getting people to use LTS is good but it is still buggy (I have a lot of issues with Unity). Also, LTS software gets stale really quickly - there needs to be a solution for this (without PPAs).

For what definition of &quot;users&quot; and &quot;run&quot;?<p>I signed up for Steam and installed it on linux, downloaded TF2 only to find that it would not work with Wheezy&#x2F;my integrated Intel GPU <i>(I didn&#x27;t investigate beyond some &quot;you don&#x27;t support GLX_WHATEVER message, it could have been either)</i>, then deleted the installation and haven&#x27;t done anything with it since.<p>I presumably am not counted in this statistic since I did not do that within the past month, but I wonder how many other people like that are.

Mac users are still very low. I am a Mac user and I play games on my laptop. I hope they can release more games for the Mac platform as well. Although BF4 is not on Steam platform, it&#x27;d be nice to have a Mac version.

My boys have used the Steam client on Bodhi Linux for the past 6 months or so - it probably registers as Ubuntu. Half Life, HL2, Portal, Team Fortress all work very well. They also play a lot of Minecraft on those computers (not on Steam obviously).<p>They make very serviceable gaming computers.

I took the survey while I was playing DotA2 on Ubuntu, but since taking the survey I no longer use Steam on Linux. The main reasons are that only 4&#x2F;50 games in my library are available on Linux, and because graphics performance still sucks (Intel HD4400).<p>I&#x27;ll try it out again whenever a new game is available or when there&#x27;s a graphics driver update, but at the moment I&#x27;d much rather reboot into Windows than pull my hair out over how bad Linux is for gaming.

I use steam on linux without problems on xubuntu. The problem is my main OS is debian wheezy and mesa is too old. That means I would have to backport libgl1 (iirc) and not fail (like the past 3 times).<p>I reboot into Xubuntu when I want to game though, and don&#x27;t have any problems. Well except when I hook up to an external monitor... but I have a hacky xrandr script for that. I don&#x27;t things are quite &quot;there&quot; yet for most people to game on linux.

I use steam on Linux extensively with a lot of more &#x27;Indie&#x27; type games like Awesomenauts, Anomaly 1&#x2F;2 and Guns of Icarus. Mostly no problems.<p>The thing that&#x27;s always surprised me about Steam for Linux is how close the numbers are to those for Mac users.

I wonder what percent of Steam games run on GNU&#x2F;Linux. From my experience this is currently a very small value, as most of the games I want&#x2F;wanted to play are&#x2F;were not available.<p>Let&#x27;s check my library... 82 titles total (not counting the junk&#x2F;demo&#x2F;beta entries), 18 of them have declared GNU&#x2F;Linux support, that&#x27;s 21%. Way more than I expected (before I started counting I thought it would be somewhere between 5 and 10%), but still almost none of the games I&#x27;d play (new ones I haven&#x27;t played yet or old ones with personally high replay value).<p>So, it&#x27;s still WINE and&#x2F;or dual-boot for gaming. No changes here.

What&#x27;s more interesting to me is 20% of the users are on Windows 8&#x2F;8.1

Keep in mind that this only shows how many Linux users run native steam clients. A lot of us also run Steam through Wine so that we can play Windows-only games. It&#x27;s a buggy experience, but what can you do...

Part of the reason I use linux is that I want control. I like games too, but Steam doesn&#x27;t give me control. I would prefer Steam didn&#x27;t manage my games, I want everything separate from each other. Until I can do that, I won&#x27;t use Steam (I&#x27;ve tried)<p>It wouldn&#x27;t surprise me if there&#x27;s a fundamental difference in thinking between linux vs other users. It&#x27;s great that Steam&#x27;s been providing Linux games, but that&#x27;s just not enough for me.

Bigger Question: Do linux folk spend money on software?

Don&#x27;t want to rain on the parade but - What is the error margin of this poll&#x2F;survey? A margin of error of +&#x2F;-2% would be very good for most polls.<p>There is definitely a need for a &#x27;third&#x27; choice when it comes to desktop gaming platforms, hopefully Linux can take off sometime in the future.

I would too if AMD made decent graphic drivers for Linux!

I must actually install native linux steam at some point, think I&#x27;m still running under wine!