It's also interesting to see that SteamOS and the Steam Deck GPU percentages match in the Linux data, making Windows on Steam Deck a tiny minority.

We can compare them directly now that the Deck GPU shows up in the global stats. The Decks represent 0.37% of the machines sampled for the survey (from the GPU list), and SteamOS is the OS for 0.371% of the machines sampled (it's weird that Valve don't list SteamOS directly on the front page). The number of people sampled running Windows on the Deck must be narrowly edged out (to the tune of 0.001%) by people running SteamOS on something that isn't the Deck, with both being essentially nil because of the number of people running SteamOS on something other than the Deck not being big enough to show up in the Linux stats, as you point out in the article.

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I'm not going to argue for a different distro - the reasons for recommending Ubuntu (sensible release cadence, well-supported, lots of users so lots of available information) are exactly right - but I will suggest a different flavour of Ubuntu [External Link] since the Ubuntu website does a terrible job of letting people know that that's a thing that exists. The KDE flavour (Kubuntu [External Link] is going to seem more familiar to a new user coming from Windows than vanilla Ubuntu's Gnome. It's all the same software and updates, but using the KDE Plasma desktop environment (like the Deck does) rather than the Gnome desktop environment.

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Release early, release often.

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I wonder if (although I'm pretty sure the answer is no) the game will go through the Deck verification process again so that it's the Linux version that gets deployed on the Steam Deck. Still, the developers can ask for that to happen.

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Quoting: user1What's interesting from those screenshots is that even though the kernel is still 5.13, AMDGPU version is "DRM 3.45" which is from one of the latest kernels. But yeah, I wonder what prevents Valve from updating the whole kernel.

I suspect that they've got a big directory of patches, and they're finding it less painful in the short term to just add another entry in that directory rather than rebase all of them on a new kernel. They can ask Google about how that works out in the long term, of course.

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Quoting: EikeAh, so I just change it like for a game? Thanks, will find my way around! What a bad default, though...

Yep, really bad decision. In the game interface, in games, and in "lizard mode" of just the controller's firmware when Steam isn't running, clicks are on triggers. Having Steam running makes it rubbish, unless you manually change it to be sensible and consistent with everything else. Hopefully they'll come to their senses at some point. But at least they do provide the option to set it up yourself.

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Quoting: EikeHow do you press the mouse button on desktop mode with SD's own controls? I only know pressing the touchpad, which always makes the cursor move, especially with double clicks..

I changed mine so that clicks are on the triggers, and the left trackpad is scroll wheel. Controller setup in Steam in desktop mode is how you change it to whatever you want.

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Quoting: t3gI guess this screws over Ubuntu 22.04 users unless they upgrade to 22.10, wait for a backport, or move to Pop_OS which has 22.2 and 6.0.6 of the Linux kernel right now.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa [External Link] (actually, the standard repositories carry 520.56.06 without needing the PPA)

https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa [External Link]

Mesa (and the kernel) will also get standard upgrades on LTS releases following the Hardware Enablement cadence.

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NVIDIA said in the announcement their plan is to also bundle Flow (combustible fluid, fire and smoke simulation) and Blast (a destruction library) which don't depend on PhysX, but they've decided to include that too under the same open source license.

That's nice to see. One of the disappointments of Q2RTX was that when they announced it they showed fluid particle effects for the explosions, but when it got released those had been replaced by sprites because they didn't want to open source those parts. It's good to see developers moving to more open stuff.

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Quoting: g000hOr, is each Device being counted, so I'd count as 6 Linux Steam users according to my machines listed above.

It's a hardware survey, not a user survey. That's six Linux entries. And somewhere out there, there's Wing000h with six Windows entries for their gaming stable. Just part of the statistical noise.

The back-of-the-envelope "active users" guesstimate does assume that users and machines are equivalent, but it's a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate, so what else are you going to do?

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