Something I noticed looking at the graphs... Our 2 biggest dips were both in March. Any theories as to why that could be?

China has lots of PC cafes where there are many PCs behind one IP address, and where the local storage on each PC gets regularly nuked by reimaging. Ensuring that each of those PCs gets sampled once and only once each year is a genuinely hard data collection problem.

When Valve gets that data collection wrong Chinese PCs get overcounted. Around six months of that overcounting is why the GOL data starts in September 2018 despite Liam having reported on the data previously, and you can see the obvious spikes on the language graph on the Steam Tracker page where it's happened since. As those Chinese machines strongly lean towards older Windows on older hardware, whenever there's a spike in Chinese machines in the survey data there's a dip in Linux machines.

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The trajectory seems to indicate that the percentage goes up every time new Steam Deck is introduced, and keeps going up with momentum.

You can separate out the signals.

https://i.ibb.co/5gx0PmRR/Combined.png [External Link]

Desktop Linux ticks along at its normal growth rate, but we get an additional few millions of users from the Deck. Then the Deck growth flattens out, but desktop Linux growth picks up from all that "Linux gaming is actually great" coverage from people who hadn't been paying attention before the Deck. Note that Steam itself keeps growing, so a flat proportion still represents growth in users.

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ACE supports the latest version of the Steam Deck system

And if it's like the other games that use it it's likely to only work on Deck LCD but won't work on Deck OLED, as well as not working on the millions of other Linux PCs.

One to avoid, obviously.

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What have you been playing across Steam Deck / SteamOS and other Linux systems lately?

Over the last couple of months I've completed The Raven, Sifu and Lacuna (all on the Deck), Detroit: Become Human (streamed from desktop to the Deck), and Control (on the desktop), and played some Dead Cells, Tchia, Jelly Car Worlds, Tempopo, While True: Learn(), Brütal Legend, and En Garde.

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It can also be directly used by developers for Linux ports too

Notably Valve's games use DXVK for their Vulkan support on Linux.

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I wonder why they can't offer two versions to install.

Because that would give potential adversaries the opportunity to diff the versions to identify circumvention strategies. It's the same reason you get free demos coming with fairly brutal copy-protections.

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After all, if Mastercard lied about not censoring legal purchases, why wouldn't PayPal also lie ?

If PayPal had a problem with Steam they probably wouldn't still be handling those six currencies. Instead it seems like those are the currencies PayPal handles itself and it's whoever they get to cover the other currencies that's got whatever issue they've got.

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METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN no longer crashes at the start of Chapter 1 video.

Those cutscenes have been such a pain. For the longest time they'd only run at minutes per frame. I have no idea what the game devs could have done to make rendering a video so problematic.

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One day I really hope Valve can solve this repeating issue.

The games are looking forensically for any behaviour that's not Windows; Wine is never going to be Windows. There's nothing Valve can do to change that; at best they can persuade developers not to automatically consider not-Windows as evidence of a cheating cheater by itself, and the weight of that persuasion is only going to come from market share.

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Ubuntu Core ??

Steam snap.

SteamOS only being 28% is very interesting. Means that market share is not just being carried by the Steam Deck but instead more people are interested in trying a large variety of distros.

https://i.ibb.co/1tJys5sC/Steam-Deck.png [External Link]

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