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Nearly 40% of Linux gamers on Steam are on Steam Deck

By - | Views: 37,431

The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for June 2023, and it shows just how much the Linux share is now influenced by the Steam Deck.

Overall the Steam Deck has kind of taken over Linux gaming and June 2023's statistic are pretty striking. For the last few months SteamOS was sitting in the low to mid 20% but it seems there's been a big uptick over the last month because it's jumped rather a lot.

According to Valve's stats:

  • SteamOS Holo 64 bit 39.33% +14.01%
  • Arch Linux 64 bit 8.33% -1.66%
  • Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS 64 bit 7.87% -1.85%
  • Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.02% -1.25%
  • Linux Mint 21.1 64 bit 4.55% -0.91%
  • "Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 4.37% -1.42%
  • Other 29.54% -3.38% 

We can expect that SteamOS Holo count to increase again, considering how well the Steam Deck is selling during the Steam Summer Sale 2023. Something to keep in mind though, is that for a lot of people the Steam Deck will be an additional system, not their only one used by Steam but you usually only get the survey on one machine.

The overall stats are:

  • Windows 96.77% +0.63%
  • OSX 1.79% -0.60%
  • Linux 1.44% -0.03%

Going by what Valve list that puts Linux use almost as high as the remaining Windows 7 and 8 machines noted in the survey results. 

Latest details of the Linux user share over time can be seen on our dedicated Steam Tracker page.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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37 comments
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TheRiddick Jul 4, 2023
Scaling is hard to get right when everyone uses a completely different window backend. In saying that they should get it right for each of the major desktop engines like XFCE/GNOME/PLASMA/CINAMON etc... It's important to keep in mind that Linux desktop is going through a revolution phase atm so things are changing so old was stop working.
Quoting: TheRiddickScaling is hard to get right when everyone uses a completely different window backend. In saying that they should get it right for each of the major desktop engines like XFCE/GNOME/PLASMA/CINAMON etc... It's important to keep in mind that Linux desktop is going through a revolution phase atm so things are changing so old was stop working.
The old client worked perfectly well. It didn't have hardware acceleration, but at least the overlay worked back then. It was broken months ago in Beta, and now it's broken in Stable, so I have to assume this is very low priority for them. I wouldn't harp on about this except it makes partying up with friends much more annoying.

At a minimum, they should get it right for GNOME and KDE. The other desktop environments use either GTK or Qt, so it's unlikely for compatibility to be perfect in GNOME but absolutely broken in XFCE and Cinnamon, for example. Each has their own Wayland compositor, of course, so that makes things a bit trickier.

Presumably. I don't pretend to know much about the graphical side. Or much of anything, really.
Bogomips Jul 4, 2023
Quoting: pleasereadthemanual
Quoting: TheRiddickScaling is hard to get right when everyone uses a completely different window backend. In saying that they should get it right for each of the major desktop engines like XFCE/GNOME/PLASMA/CINAMON etc... It's important to keep in mind that Linux desktop is going through a revolution phase atm so things are changing so old was stop working.
The old client worked perfectly well. It didn't have hardware acceleration, but at least the overlay worked back then. It was broken months ago in Beta, and now it's broken in Stable, so I have to assume this is very low priority for them. I wouldn't harp on about this except it makes partying up with friends much more annoying.

At a minimum, they should get it right for GNOME and KDE. The other desktop environments use either GTK or Qt, so it's unlikely for compatibility to be perfect in GNOME but absolutely broken in XFCE and Cinnamon, for example. Each has their own Wayland compositor, of course, so that makes things a bit trickier.

Presumably. I don't pretend to know much about the graphical side. Or much of anything, really.

Yep, the new client is a pain in the ***, not faster for me, full black screen on first load of every window (friends, store, etc.) CS:GO overlay crash (indeed -vulkan parameter is the only way to fix it permanently but it is unplayable because of the stuttering) is a problem from the beta https://github.com/ValveSoftware/csgo-osx-linux/issues/3172
The loss of real estate and flimsiness selection on contextual menu (right-click) is annoying AF.

And if you force the old client (-vgui) the friends network doesn't work anymore.
fabertawe Jul 4, 2023
I'm always amazed at people getting the survey regularly... I just had it on my desktop for the first time in living memory (admittedly mine's not that great!), at least ten years I reckon. During that time my desktop's changed MB's, drives, GPUs, CPUs at least three times. And I ran Steam most days for the whole period.
Pengling Jul 4, 2023
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Quoting: BogomipsYep, the new client is a pain in the ***, not faster for me, full black screen on first load of every window (friends, store, etc.)
I randomly had weird issues of this type for the first day. I cleared the Steam client cache after that and haven't had any more of them crop up since.

The only one still hanging around for me is notifications stealing focus, which was apparently reported during the beta.


Last edited by Pengling on 4 July 2023 at 10:07 am UTC
Bogomips Jul 4, 2023
Quoting: Pengling
Quoting: BogomipsYep, the new client is a pain in the ***, not faster for me, full black screen on first load of every window (friends, store, etc.)
I randomly had weird issues of this type for the first day. I cleared the Steam client cache after that and haven't had any more of them crop up since.

The only one still hanging around for me is notifications stealing focus, which was apparently reported during the beta.

After the update I installed the new client from scratch (without any cache/config files) to try to solve the issues. And when I tried to set the default proton version in the settings all the non native games files needed to be reloaded, it took me a week to rebuild my library downloading more than 200 GB of data with my poor bandwidth…
Eike Jul 4, 2023
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Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: PhiladelphusLooking at those numbers: bets on whether Linux exceeds MacOS in Steam share by the end of the year?

Wow, this is hefty!

Linux 1.44% -0.03%
OSX 1.79% -0.60%

So it's 2.39 => 1.79 in a single month, and this cannot be due to China, or Linux would have seen a similar drop!
Actually, I think it could be due to China.

I should have mentioned the China numbers in my post.
Chinese grew from 25.54% to 27.59%.
So there might be a little change in Mac explained by this, like 3% - but it's a staggering 25% less (1.79/2.39)!

I don't think even ARM can explain this, there couldn't be 1/4 of Mac users changing there hardware in a single month. So, I'd expect this to be something jumping back next month.


Last edited by Eike on 4 July 2023 at 10:34 am UTC
Pengling Jul 4, 2023
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Quoting: BogomipsAfter the update I installed the new client from scratch (without any cache/config files) to try to solve the issues. And when I tried to set the default proton version in the settings all the non native games files needed to be reloaded, it took me a week to rebuild my library downloading more than 200 GB of data with my poor bandwidth…
Oh yikes, that's really not cool!

Maybe I was lucky to have had very few problems?
sddt Jul 5, 2023
Quoting: Bogomipsit took me a week to rebuild my library downloading more than 200 GB of data with my poor bandwidth…

That's rough, no fibre available where you are?

We may not be able to buy the Steam Deck here but at least the vast majority of the country has gigabit fibre available.
Purple Library Guy Jul 5, 2023
Quoting: sddt
Quoting: Bogomipsit took me a week to rebuild my library downloading more than 200 GB of data with my poor bandwidth…

That's rough, no fibre available where you are?
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