Quoting: whitewolfguy

Quoting: Teodosio

Quoting: Leopard

It's worth noting that all ways of tracking it come with their own flaws.

Flaw in here is , Chromebook's counts as Linux.

Chromebook is Linux, its problem is that it is not GNU. Still, better than the rest.

Yes, an increase of almost 1% in a month can only indicate some abnormality in the counting of the numbers. Chromebooks should be entering the Linux count, but since they are Linux, that's not entirely wrong, and it's very cool to see Linux passing 3%, maybe this call the market's attention to software and games support on Linux.

So very much this. Maybe once we reach a greater than 10% market share the GNU vs non-GNU toolchain issue should become a bigger deal and a reason to split the numbers (Chromebook isn't the first non-GNU Linux by any stretch after all, just the biggest to date) at which point also dividing them by core distro (Debian, Arch, etc) is maybe a worthwhile thing to do. At this point any growth in the Linux market share is a boon to every interested party.

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Quoting: liamdaweThe new statistics are up. This includes the new GPU graph with data captured from 340 people. Hopefully next month it will give a better picture with more people adding there's in. There was a small bug where the full details dropdown was empty, as there's no data from a previous month. I've now fixed that to show all the data no matter if there's no previous month :)

Even with the small sample size I think this may still confirm something I've long suspected about Valve's data, which is that it counts every installed GPU, even if it isn't enabled, on Linux where Windows will just not report hardware to any software unless that hardware is enabled.
That's an issue I care about largely because if any significant minority of the AAA developers/publishers are relying on Valve's publicly reported data (or a closely related private dataset) to determine whether enough of the Linux community have hardware that can even handle a game as part of their number crunching to determine whether a port is viable, Valve is essentially telling them at least 25% of us (from the June 2017 data [External Link] are using on board Intel GPUs. That in turn suggests that the Linux market is even smaller for their products than the current 2.5% general Linux market share (per netmarketshare.com) would. My own math works that out as a difference (assuming from summer sale peak active users) of ~200,000 potential sales on paper which can easily be enough to swap the value proposition of porting from "at least it's good PR and consumer good will with some profit margin to be had" to "that'll be a negative profit margin, nope".
With the lack of AAA games on Linux compared to Windows being the major thing that's stalled me getting friends to even try a Linux distro, an experience I strongly suspect to not just be a narrow anecdotal one, that makes this another potent vicious cycle our community may be stuck in.

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I look forward to seeing the actual breakdowns on this GPU data in a couple days. I also look forward to seeing the CPU data when/if it shows up. Valve's data is hard to manage in a useful manner, especially compared to the layout used here.

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Quoting: wolfyrionNow I Am a bit confused, Which Language is the best for gaming development?
Which Language will benefit me most?

Learning C++ is a bit hard but is ok atm.
but really I cant imagine myself that I have to learn Java as well... :dizzy:

Stick with learning C++, it's easier to move from C++ to most other common OOP languages (C#, Java, etc) than it is to learn those and move to C++.

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So I finally got around to testing Stardew (why did this week have to be the one I was busy on my days off) and had the Black screen with sounds playing issue mentioned here: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/black-screen-when-game-is-run-sound-working.119703/ [External Link]
The workaround zaphodbb mentioned in the linked thread worked at least (thank god I had Amnesia still installed). I suspect the 32bit SDL lib got copied to the 64bit lib folder or the lib got recompiled and somehow failed without anyone noticing. Hope that isn't still an issue when the game goes out of testing.

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*looks at his two separate MultiMC installs, old practically unused Linux FTB launcher, and the unofficial Python downloader for Curse modpacks* Meh. Modded has been the way to play MC since Beta and they can't make the game not run on Java without killing the existing modding scene and therefore much of the game's existing value. So long as the game is Java based it runs on Linux even if one needs a separate launcher, and the vanilla launcher has been a PitA for years so most people use a separate launcher. Making a new Windows only non-Java launcher is practically a non-issue except on a moral level and Mojang is now a MS owned studio so none of us have any reason to expect morals to enter into it.

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It's good to see some developers still learn these classic lessons. Spending a couple dozen hours up front designing from the start to compile one multi-platform codebase is much easier than refactoring every time you want to add a new platform.

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Really Valve needs to do a full userbase survey at least once a year and their shown stats need to also include logged play time per user per month month by OS and average gross purchase value per user per month by OS at the very least (both stats we know they already track per user).

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1. Hot damn. We finally broke the 2% barrier.

{the following are included because of talk elsewhere in the comments to this article}

2. Insisting on people using "Linux" just for the kernel and "GNU/Linux" for an OS built on the Linux kernel is at best disingenuous when we consider the fact that GNU is not the exclusive free toolchain to be had and there are non-mobile distros in the wild built without GNU which we should absolutely not call "GNU/Linux" but are indeed Linux based.

3. Stallman can... No I won't be rude here... I'll just say it this way, it is not freedom to let someone dictate to you what shape freedom takes. The FSF and R. Stallman have a long history of doing just this and are in some ways nearly as bad as Gates, Jobs and their respective companies.

4. Arguing about this kind of stuff is one of the significant things that drives otherwise interested people away from even trying the output of the FOSS community.

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Quoting: niarbehtTo the best of my knowledge it's x86 only.

That would be correct. I know there was a project at one point to make the game run on ARM (essentially by translating the opcodes from the x86 Linux binary to ARM opcodes and implementing a wrapper application to handle system call translation on the fly), but I haven't heard a word about it in at least five years...

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