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GOL Survey Results: March

By - | Views: 11,216
The results for the March survey are now available for you to take a look at and compare with results from previous months.

You can find the new survey for April here, so please fill that out if you haven’t already.

As usual, thanks for all the feedback and suggestions! At the moment, our resident graph maker Fedso is rather busy, but he's working on locking colours to answers and there may be something which tries to estimate a total trend in game sales coming soon! So look out for those in the coming months.

Please click on the images to enlarge. Once enlarged, you can also cycle through them using the arrows.

Respondents
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Many thanks to the 1026 people who took the time to complete the survey! That’s exactly 100 more than the February survey and near the 1000 mark which I would like to keep close to. It also seems that separating out the new survey and results articles has done the trick, so thanks to those who suggested that!.

Question 1 - Do you currently use Linux as your primary PC gaming platform?
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Question 2 - Did you use Wine to play games last month?
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This is one question where we may be seeing a very gradual trend towards less Wine users, with around 8% or so less people using it than when we started the survey. This is probably to be expected given the vast quantities of native games available to us now and how cumbersome Wine can be sometimes to play certain games. Only time will tell if this trend will continue or if there will be a cut off point.

Question 3 - Did you use a Windows partition for gaming last month?
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I put out an article about this very topic last month, questioning why the number of dual booters has not decreased since the survey started. Again, there hasn't been a significant change but I'm keeping a close eye on these results as the months roll by and hoping for some kind of "breakthrough". I should thank all those who left comments and opinions on the subject of dual booting, and if you haven't checked them out then you probably should, the comments are far more interesting than the article itself :).

Question 4 - What distribution do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
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Question 5 - What Desktop Environment do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
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Question 6 - Did you change your primary Linux gaming distribution last month?
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Question 7 - What graphics card do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
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Question 8 - Which drivers do you use for that graphics card?
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AMD
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Intel
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It should be noted that all Intel drivers (to my knowledge) are open source. However, due to the nature of the survey, respondents can still answer incorrectly and this anomaly is probably due to people simply not knowing that their drivers are open source.

Nvidia
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In case you missed it, Samsai has been running a little experiment with open source Nvidia drivers for the last month, which you can check out here. This yielded some highly interesting results and it's well worth checking out if you haven't already, especially considering around 1.5% of respondents use the drivers so they may well be unfamiliar to many.

I find these sets of results to be among the most interesting, especially the difference between the number of AMD and Nvidia owners using open source drivers.

Question 9 - What CPU do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
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Question 10 - Did you exclusively buy Linux-supported games last month?
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Question 11 - How many Linux games did you buy last month?
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Question 12 - Which of these retailers did you use to buy your Linux games last month?
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The steady decline in Humble sales seems to have levelled out, however after a recent bundle with plenty of Linux games, we may well see an increase next month.

I also added Games Republic to the list of retailers and it's nice to see a few people buying from there. Remember that doing so helps GOL financially, so may be worth checking out the GOL store page if they're selling the game you want before buying it somewhere else.

Unique Question 1 - Have you pre-ordered a Linux game in the last 12 months?
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It certainly seems to be the case that people don't like pre-ordering, presumably for a number of reasons. Only a third of people pre-ordered a game in the last 12 months, and considering the quantity of awesome titles which have come out, it seems (to me) like quite a low number. However, this may not be unique to Linux gamers, even though we might be a bit more cynical about the quality of ports or tend to be people to stick to certain principles, so it may well be the case that these numbers would be different if this was a Windows-only survey.

Unique Question 2 - Will you be getting a Steam Machine any time after release?
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This is the second time I have asked this question and have included it again in the new survey to get some "before and after" GDC figures. The original results way back in September were:

Yes - 11.49% (77)
No - 29.25% (196)
Still undecided - 30.60% (205)
I already built my own (or planning to build my own) - 28.66% (192)

Based on this, it seems that people's views on Steam Machines hadn't changed significantly in these months and the minor 1-2% differences are certainly within the margin or error. We'll compare again next month to see if all those crazy GDC announcements shook things up at all. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
After many years of floating through space on the back of a missile, following a successful career in beating people up for not playing Sega Saturn, the missile returned to earth. Upon returning, I discovered to my dismay that the once great console had been discontinued and Sega had abandoned the fight to dominate the world through 32-bit graphical capabilities.

After spending some years breaking breeze blocks with my head for money and being mocked by strangers, I have found a new purpose: to beat up people for not playing on Linux.
See more from me
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17 comments
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Liam Dawe Apr 4, 2015
[quote=neffo]
Quoting: Segata Sanshiro
Quoting: liamdaweNo, there are no proprietary drivers for Intel (I usually make a joke about that). The survey allows people to answer "incorrectly" for that one since I don't know how to prevent it. I assume that it's basically just Intel users who assume that their drivers are proprietary because they've never looked into it. Just shows that not all Linux users are super clued-up about that stuff, I kinda like it, breaking stereotypes or whatever :).

Hmm, use the term closed source then and don't be ambiguous.

Downloading the official packaged drivers from Intel here would fit some descriptions of proprietary.

Downloading there still gives you open source drivers, so I don't see the issue.
Liam Dawe Apr 4, 2015
Also, I'm surprised MATE is as low as it is, it's great!
Xpander Apr 4, 2015
Quoting: liamdaweAlso, I'm surprised MATE is as low as it is, it's great!

its probably because no famous distro comes with it by default.. except linux mint, but theres cinnamon more advertised on the linux mint community i think
there is also ubuntu mate edition, but that havent been so popular yet i think..

also some people seem to prefer bells and whistles over the usability...

thats my opinion though :D

i love MATE
MayeulC Apr 4, 2015
I personally like plasma 5. It's usable already, not much overhead to worry about on a gaming PC, and I also like the direction it is going.

About the Intel drivers issue, I think you should add a reminder that open source drivers are almost always the default ones. But it also gives us a hint about the percentage (12%) of wrong answers we may get.

I am looking forward to next month's survey, with a different sample from this one. This could yield to some interesting results.
Thank you for conducting this survey :)

P.S : Liam, could you give us some statistics on the crowd browsing gamingonlinux.com (statistics from, ie Google Analytics, with OS, Web browser, country, etc. This could be interesting as well. As for the country/continent, this could be an interesting question. We could then plot OSS/Proprietary drivers, and other specs, against the location).
tuubi Apr 4, 2015
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Quoting: liamdaweAlso, I'm surprised MATE is as low as it is, it's great!
Part of it might be the overlapping "target market" with more established traditional DEs like Xfce. Well, more established only if you forget that MATE is basically GNOME2, but my point still stands.
Aryvandaar Apr 8, 2015
I honestly don't know why I keep a Windows 7 system around. I never boot into it any more, and it has been quite some time since I did. Most of my favourite games are in Linux, and those who are not runs very well in Wine.
dRaiser Apr 10, 2015
I'm still not sure how to count my gaming VM. I count my PC as Linux-based in 1st question, but later as Windows partition since it's not helping for getting more Linux ports.
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