Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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This is usually true, in my experience, but I experienced an anomaly a couple of weeks ago when the survey popped up on my desktop twice (Arch and Win11) and my laptop twice (CachyOS and Win11) in the same day. I was very surprised.
Huh. That’s odd. I guess it balances out though.
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People care a lot about macOS because you can charge users $15 for a GUI wrapper around a terminal command and they will pay and even recommend your app. I’m not even joking, there are a thousand examples of apps like this. If your app actually does anything, you can charge $30 and they will pay.
Now on Linux you could release the cure for cancer for $0.99 and you’d get screamed at. And I say that as a Linux user. Which means you need significantly higher numbers than macOS to achieve the same revenue, which also means the companies developing the commercial software that holds back adoption of Linux will take a long while before starting to care.
In all seriousness fuck charging for cures, especially for cancer. Life is about more than getting paid. I just lost someone yesterday to cancer so I’m sure this is an outsized response, but seriously, cancer fucking sucks.
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I’ve been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It’s a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.
My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.
Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don’t shove AI down your throat, and don’t steal your data for profit. The time has come.
Your son is a badass.
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We’ve achieved fusion too. We just can’t extract more energy than we put into it yet.
Technically they can extract more now, it’s just a really really small amount.
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Yeah, by a whole permille I bet.
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I did the same with AMD+ NVidia gpu combo but it is not without problems. Do you play through Steam/proton db or are you using something else like Lutris?
Historically I’ve used lutris but more recently I’ve been observing more broken scripts than not. But Lutris is extremely handy for mapping to a pile of game data that I might grab from Itch for example. I also havent been gaming as much lately so maybe I’m just hitting some weird games and that’s all.
I’ve heard good things about Heroic Launcher which apparently is actually sponsored by GOG, but I’ve yet to try it on my Linux machine
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People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers.
The Steam Deck shows up as Arch Linux in the steam numbers; Arch is only 10.7% of the Linux user-base on Steam. And this is on top of the fact desktop Arch Linux is a thing as well sharing space in that line-item.
The Steam Deck (and Microsoft tomfoolery) certainly was the catalyst for the current wave of adoption, but it is barely a notable percentage of Linux installs on Steam.
but it is barely a notable percentage of Linux installs on Steam.
0.3% of 130 million is still a fuckton of people. If even PewDiePie is going to Linux, that means desktop Linux has hit a point it certainly hasn’t ever before
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Just tried gaming on Linux because I forgot my Ally and was stuck on my laptop. Sorry, guys, it still sucks. It’s getting better, though. Perhaps in another 10 years.
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“Fixing it” has been a lot easier to do lately as well. Most distros set up a rollback feature of some kind these days.
I don’t remember what i did… but i completely fucked my system up… linux wouldnt start at all…
I tried looking online for help and i basically needed a flash drive with linux to “fix” the issue…
I didn’t have that, i lost it or whatever…
I took a shot with asking chat gpt and for all its hate… it was somehow able to explain some weird boot loader thing I’ve never heard of and i punched in some commands into the command line, and everything was fixed…
Im not sure the point of the story, but don’t go changing system level shit when your trying to fix your graphics card from crashing while playing no mans sky… i did fix the issue though changing the desktop from cinnamon to xde or something…
But its like a memory bug or something that hopefully gets fixed for amd at some point
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In all seriousness fuck charging for cures, especially for cancer. Life is about more than getting paid. I just lost someone yesterday to cancer so I’m sure this is an outsized response, but seriously, cancer fucking sucks.
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Yeah, “linuxism”, that must be it… That or it’s possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.
Linux dominates on servers because of that yes. Also because of its licensing costs, being open source, stable, secure (please don’t try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please), better performance and lesser response time. Because a Debian stable will never break with simple security updates. I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.
Finally, do tell me where I mentioned MacOS. Unless you think that MacOS and Linux are the same? That wouldn’t surprise me considering your apparent knowledge (or lack of) about Linux. FYI MacOS is based on a BSD kernel.
The big benefit of linux servers for most businesses is that they tend to be configure-once systems, where you set it up, verify it works then no further maintenance is needed beyond applying updates in line with your update schedule and downtime windows. Sure there will every once in a while be something that changes but far less than you see with Windows Server where some registry values stopped working with a recent windows update without warning so now you have to track down new registry values to recreate the behavior. That and tracking down why Windows decided to ignore all of your settings and reboot this time (and how to stop it again)
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Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.
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Are there really people playing VR stuff regularly? I only know 2 people in my circles that bought equipment for it, and both of them got sick of it after a couple weeks.
I don’t know, what I’ve tried was fun for about 10 minutes, but that’s about all I could take before the headache starts.
on a vr headset for everyday for the past 3 days. Each day around 4 to 5 hours
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Technically they can extract more now, it’s just a really really small amount.
We have made more than we put in to the reaction, but that’s a far cry from making more energy than we put into the reactor, or extracting any of that energy at all.
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We have made more than we put in to the reaction, but that’s a far cry from making more energy than we put into the reactor, or extracting any of that energy at all.
Oh, that makes sense.
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Honestly, I kinda suspect the tariffs are speeding this up. I recently upgraded my desktop due to the suspicion that prices are gonna go bonkers shortly and since I was basically rebuilding it anyway, I went ahead and switched my last windows PC to Linux. Been a lot smoother than I had suspected, highly recommended.
I actually watched the prices increase by about 10-20% while ordering computers from work. This was through Dell so clear as mud normally for any given computer but the value of my invoices jumped by a clear 10-20% after the tarrifs started biting back in April
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Just tried gaming on Linux because I forgot my Ally and was stuck on my laptop. Sorry, guys, it still sucks. It’s getting better, though. Perhaps in another 10 years.
uh oh you said something against Linux on Lemmy
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Very true, if I find a DE that works with Embrilliance this weekend, I could use my Ventoy stick and see if she vibes with it. Good call!
Ventoy even supports persistence! It’s a bit poorly documented but you download the 1-2GB persistence volume, configure ventoy to include that feature and which ISOs to associate with which persistent volumes and you’re off to the races
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I don’t remember what i did… but i completely fucked my system up… linux wouldnt start at all…
I tried looking online for help and i basically needed a flash drive with linux to “fix” the issue…
I didn’t have that, i lost it or whatever…
I took a shot with asking chat gpt and for all its hate… it was somehow able to explain some weird boot loader thing I’ve never heard of and i punched in some commands into the command line, and everything was fixed…
Im not sure the point of the story, but don’t go changing system level shit when your trying to fix your graphics card from crashing while playing no mans sky… i did fix the issue though changing the desktop from cinnamon to xde or something…
But its like a memory bug or something that hopefully gets fixed for amd at some point
If the game was crashing to desktop, it was probably not a graphics card thing, but that you were running out of ram and the system was just automatically killing the program when that happened. That’s a system stability thing, it prioritizing the needs of the system and desktop over a program so as to prevent the whole system from crashing.
The easiest solution to that is to increase the “swap” size (IE a bit of storage that gets set aside to act as back up memory). That is a system level thing, but it’s not really a big deal to change.
If you were getting to the command line, Linux was running, although, if it was just the command line then it may have been an issue with the desktop or window manager not starting. And if it was an issue with the desktop or window manager, then I could see changing some boot loader settings fixing that. Like, making sure the boot loader automatically starts the desktop when the computer boots. not sure how you got from messing with graphics card to the system only booting in command line, but, shit happens. I’ve broken my system in weirder ways while pulling at the guts.
By switching from cinnamon to XFCE desktop you may have solved the issue with the game crashing simply because you had more memory available, as XFCE is a much lighterweight desktop.
If the games was slowly slowing to a crawl before freezing up completely but not outright crashing to desktop, that could have been an issue of running out of video ram for the the GPU, I’ve had that happen with helldiver’s 2. I don’t remember exactly what I did to fix that, something with the launch options that affected the graphics settings or capped the frame rate I think. Not sure how changing between desktops could have fixed that though.
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Ventoy even supports persistence! It’s a bit poorly documented but you download the 1-2GB persistence volume, configure ventoy to include that feature and which ISOs to associate with which persistent volumes and you’re off to the races
Nice! That’s good to know for other things!
