Valve's latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out now for December 2023, and it shows that Linux and Steam Deck overall finished 2023 on a very positive note.
Something I continue showing over time on our Steam Tracker, we can see that December 2023 is the highest it's been in multiple years. Only just beating the previous high of July 2023 by 0.01%! This is all largely thanks to Valve's Steam Deck that ships with SteamOS Linux, and Proton that continues to help tens of thousands of games be playable on Linux systems.
Here's the December 2023 overall operating system results:
- Windows 96.40% -0.16%
- Linux 1.97% +0.06%
- OSX 1.63% +0.10%
And just on the Linux side the most popular Linux distributions for gaming on Steam are:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit (Steam Deck) 40.53% -2.46%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 7.85% +0.04%
- Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS 64 bit 7.04% +0.37%
- Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.22% +5.22%
- Linux Mint 21.2 64 bit 4.70% +0.45%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 3.64% -0.15%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 3.03% +0.35%
- Other 27.99% +1.51%
It's worth noting that the Steam Deck has been a top seller over the last few weeks too. For the week starting Tuesday, November 14th it went back to 1st place globally on Steam (in supported regions obviously) and remained number 1 until Tuesday, December 19th where it dropped to 2nd place and has remained 2nd the following week up until today. So clearly Valve are still shifting plenty of units.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I wonder what thos spikes down in may are ?
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Quoting: tonitchI wonder what thos spikes down in may are ?
They are usually caused by sudden rise in Chinese steam on Windows usage. A phenomenon not well understood but which tends to occur every few month.
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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualbecause I already own enough Linux machines.I keep telling myself that. Then my New Year's resolution ended up being to self-build a desktop machine (in spite of being entirely portables-focussed) at some point this year, just because I've always wanted to do it and feel it'd be a handy skill to have. Apparently there's no such thing as "enough Linux machines"!
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hardpenguin Jan 3
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slaapliedje Jan 3
Quoting: PeffseI recently have ran into another case of 'why do people use macs? Linux lets me do what I want...' I have a 'gaming table' that I set up four 4k monitors on and was trying to drive all four + another screen for running FoundryVTT (browser based). Firefox on the macOS doesn't seem to be able to go to full screen mode (F11 on the mac does not do the same as it does on Linux / Windows), and while the mac was able to drive its own display and the 4x4k monitors, the way it's workspaces and 'fullscreen' Firefox was working was trash. It'd blank out all screens and create a new workspace for every browser I pushed F11 on, so it would not let me display them all at once.Quoting: HighballWhat kind of system were you testing out?Oh it was entirely too old. 2005-ish gaming PC. I knew the chances were slim but I wanted to try anyway. The fact I got as far as I did is a testament to how versatile Linux desktop is nowadays.
On the flip side, I have a Yoga 9i, and while it's not powerful enough to run all the displays at 4k, I did get them to run at 1080p, and four browsers with different profiles all running at once. Performance isn't what I'd like, but it's close enough to run it all.
Simply a (very niche) use case where Linux is vastly superior.
2 Likes, Who?
Mountain Man Jan 3
Now we just need to convince everyone using a Steam Deck to ditch Windows and install Linux on their desktops because they're already using Linux.
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Quoting: Mountain ManNow we just need to convince everyone using a Steam Deck to ditch Windows and install Linux on their desktops because they're already using Linux.
If Linux could support 100% of the games on Steam, why use Windows, right? Unfortunately, there are some software that doesn't play nice with Linux like those anticheat software from Activision, EA, Epic and many others and if they could allow it to run on Linux, then ditching Windows would be a no brainer.
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slaapliedje Jan 3
Quoting: Mountain ManNow we just need to convince everyone using a Steam Deck to ditch Windows and install Linux on their desktops because they're already using Linux.Ha, just pick a 'proper' Linux distribution. PopOS was one for me... until I attempted to update some old install on a laptop I sold to some friends for cheap. PopOS ate itself in a spectacular way! Back to Debian for you! On that note; seems every new Debian release there are less and less things I have to tweak post-install for it to work the way I want it to. And at this point it's mostly just installing ublock on Firefox and changing it's default search engine away from Google.
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Quoting: slaapliedjeSounds like you should start backing up your Firefox profile. ;)Quoting: Mountain ManNow we just need to convince everyone using a Steam Deck to ditch Windows and install Linux on their desktops because they're already using Linux.Ha, just pick a 'proper' Linux distribution. PopOS was one for me... until I attempted to update some old install on a laptop I sold to some friends for cheap. PopOS ate itself in a spectacular way! Back to Debian for you! On that note; seems every new Debian release there are less and less things I have to tweak post-install for it to work the way I want it to. And at this point it's mostly just installing ublock on Firefox and changing it's default search engine away from Google.
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