Quoting: finaldestNice to see Linux continuing to pick up more users. I did make a prediction that Linux would reach 5% by the end of this year. Hopefully.

I have Just got a steam survey in wine GRRR so I logged out without accepting and loaded native steam and got no survey. I then logged back into wine steam to play a windows game and the survey popped up again.

I believe I triggered a survey as I have just received my roccat sova today.

Actually, I just got my first ever Steam Hardware survey last night. I never use windows (or steam on WINE). I have had a steam account for 4.5 years now.

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I bought Worlds of Magic and have Planar Conquest in my steam library as well. There were a lot of major game crashing bugs in the original release. The release was a Master of Magic clone that not only cloned the original MOM's numerous release bugs, but far exceeded them as well.

I think Planar Conquest was an attempt by the Devs to bring a similar title to phones/tablets (iirc) When it was more stable than Worlds of Magic they stopped trying to fix WoM and ported PQ back to Windows which left linux users without anything stable to play for over a year until today's release.

I was thinking for a while that it would never come to linux due to the length of time we have been waiting with no word from the devs. I have to try it, but I am afraid of potential bugs. The dev team's track record has me worried and Tchey's comments about GUI flaws doesn't make it sound promising.

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Rimworld
Factorio
Dungeon Warfare

I bought Dawn of War 2, Portal 1 & 2, and Ballistic Tanks during the Steam Summer Sale and I have yet to try them out.

I was playing Darkest Dungeons but I get a SEGFAULT error in the game that has not gone away even with a few updates. Not sure If I need to restart the game, but I really don't want to regrind the little progress I have.

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I agree, its just a way for them to avoid the "steam tax." Not to mention once it has people using its library app, it will basically be trying to sell every other app in its library.

While I appreciate the linux support, the thought of every publisher doing this makes me go crazy as I am not interested in having a proprietary software installer/updater for each individual publisher.

Even if it works better than steam, I will avoid it like the plague.

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Quoting: melkemindThe last step would be to get some first releases or timed exclusives, if you prefer. A company like Valve would have to step up and make that happen. If great games start dropping on Linux first and run better on Linux, PC gamers will switch.

This is a nice dream, but it will not happen with any major game release.

The fact is that development is quite expensive. Even a company like valve which has done a lot to support linux will not drop a linux exclusive, timed or not. After spending a lot of money on development, every big company is going to put it for sale where it gets the most return on their investment. With roughly 90% of the desktop market on windows, that will be their initial target.

While on consoles, some of them do get exclusives despite not being the most popular console, this happens because they have a hardware company behind it paying for the exclusive release. There is no company that has a vested interest in linux to the point that bringing exclusive releases to linux would result in a net gain through hardware sales. (or any other positive investment return.) Sadly, the reverse is true, Microsoft has a vested interest in Windows to the point that if their market share started to erode, it would make financial sense to pay for exclusives to stop any market erosion.

Theoretically, I suppose some type of crowd funding effort could be made to pay for a linux exclusive, however, what would be the real point? IMO, this would just be a waste of money, because 6 months later the dev will port it to the other platforms. It would need to be a constant stream of titles to make a difference, and I doubt the linux community would want to keep paying for this effort, especially considering if it actually made a difference, Microsoft would start doing the same to keep its share and their ability and willingness to spend money in support of their platform far exceeds the linux community.

An indie developer might give a few timed exclusives to linux first, especially with the number of developers that actually use linux. However, being indies, they do not have the reach or the marketing power to make a huge difference.

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Quoting: BlackBloodRumNot bad.. bu when you click "source of the data"

You get to this website.. https://www.truestats.com/?source=nmsHome [External Link] - it reminds me why I do so much to block advertising / tracking in my browser!

I generally do not use an ad-blocker, only a script blocker. So the old fairly non-invasive ads can get through (which sadly is very few)

However, unless you change your browser user agent string, people can tell your OS without javascript. Your user agent string is sent with every page request and includes your current browser, OS, and versions.

My UA string is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/56.0.2950.0 Iron Safari/537.36

I use the Iron browser(based off of chrome/chromnium and data isn't sent back to google.) Most of the other browser type strings are there for compatibility reasons. Of course linux is the "(X11; Linux x86_64)".

...and now updating Iron after I realized I had an older version when I pasted the string.

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Sadly, It appears that our growth is at the expense of Apple... not Microsoft.

While I have no love for Apple, a healthy market would be showing a decline for the windows monopoly.

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I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords

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Alas, I just noticed this article now, and they no longer need testers.

At least the good news is that they had overwhelming response.

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Steam also has Civ VI on sale for 33% off through the weekend.

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