It very likely has something to do with the Win10 effect and usually people try Linux for some time and then start rebooting to Windows again. Netmarkshareshare numbers are also noisy.

However, despite the need to be cautious, what we are seeing here is enough reason to get excited: The growth is strong and well below noise level. There is a trend visible. And... some other websites wuth statistics also show strong Linux numbers. Something *is* happening.

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Next month will be interresting. Why? Because we believe that the Steam survey is more likely to pop up on new installations. With Microsoft excersizing strong pressure over the last months on people to upgrade, it is likely the survey has been biased towards Windows 10 during the last months. The fact that Steam reports a much stronger market share for Windows 10 than web based OS statistics websites could also be an indication for this.

Because the free Win10 upgrade is no longer available, August should be a lot less biased towards Win10, and other operating systems might show a growth because of that.

What is again interresting this month is the Netmarketshare report, which puts Linux at 2.33% this month:

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=187&qpnp=24&qptimeframe=M [External Link]

Netmarketshare is showing a strong growth for Linux during the past months. While the Linux their Linux share always a variance of up to 0.3%, we are now seeing growth well beyond that, and the fact that it is sustained for months now makes it unlikely to be noise.

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In this case the use of "PC" can be seen as correct: If Microsoft succeeds to close the software part of PC's, why keep the hardware open so people can escape to Linux? Microsoft ARM based hardware is already closed.

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OK. So now, considering Unreal Engine and Unity Engine have a translation layer from HLSL to GLSL shaders, does this mean they are not true native OpenGL engines?

I would call Unreal 4 and Unity engines that are "mostly native": Most of the engine code is able to call OpenGL directly, but for shaders they do translation, therefore developers using it are unable to use all possibilities of GLSL shaders optimally.

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(double post, please ignore)

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Quoting: ShmerlIt wasn't wrong way back in the past. Today it's wrong, because developers are aware that switch to Wayland is in progress and they shouldn't stand in the way of it on purpose. So, absolutely not goes to "games should depend on X".

I agree with that, but this is very similar to "all websites should be available under ipv6", which I believe should absolutely be the case anno 2016. But just like there are an awfull lot of websites that are ipv4 only (because the webmaster benefits of ipv6 are too small), you should expect that not every developer feels an urgent need to support Wayland. If a direct call to X is a solution for a quick need, the short term self-interrest will quickly win from the long term community interrest.

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Absolutely not. Obviously, using abstraction layers like SDL, allows you to support both X11 and Wayland, so X is no longer a dependency. But in the tradional Linux desktop, which was always X11 based, it wasn't wrong in any way to use X directly. Many games are doing this and it is a simple fact that lots of games depend on X directly. Even SDL games sometimes see a need to contact X directly, if the abstraction layer is not sufficient. Also don't just think about the actual game engine. Games often use traditional GUIs for launchers, installers and configuration programs.

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Quoting: Comandante oardoI was asking how many true native OpenGL engines are there, besides IDtech?

Depends on how you define "native". If the definition is "does not support DirectX", then are only a few. But almost all major engines have an OpenGL renderer and don't need translation layers. Unity, Unreal4, Serious Engine, Source2 engine, you name it... all can do OpenGL. For some of these engines OpenGL is less efficiënt, because the OpenGL renderer needs to do an unncessary amount of state changes. But does that mean that they are not native? A matter of taste, but as far as I am concerned any engine that calls the OpenGL engine without translation layer can be considered native.

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Quoting: LukeNukemThat kind of thinking is why we've got so many windows only games.

On the contrary. Game developers dislike shooting for moving target. It's one additional situation they need to test.

I completely understand the motivations why Wayland is being developed from a developer point of view, but it's really hard to make a business case for Wayland for end-users at the moment, and especially for gaming.

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X11 is far from perfect, but from an end-user point of view there are few reasons to move to Wayland at the moment, because Xwayland is almost always used, so you end up with a more bloated way of running X11 applications.

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