Quoting: Purple Library GuyWell, maybe. Seems a bit thin. Why would the growing percentage of Linux users not be moving to Steam at the same rate as the not-growing not-Linux users? There's something screwy going on.

The whole point of my last post was to show you why the actual number of linux gamers might double yet look like the same 1%, while the actual number of linux pc users might grow slower yet have this growth clearly visible in their percentage of pc users.

The issue here is that the number we have is this:
Linux Steam Gamers / Total Steam Gamers

You are hoping that to behave like this:
Linux Steam Gamers / Entire world pop

But it doesn't, because "Total Steam Gamers" is also growing, steam hasn't reached the whole world yet

Even if linux steam pc gamers drops from 1,1% to 1% it might represent more linux steam pc gamers now than before, if the total amount of steam gamers grows faster.

1,1 million linux steam pc gamers / 100 million total steam pc users = 1,1%
>>
1,2 million linux / 120 million total = 1%

that means a 9,09% growth of linux Steam users in this hipothetical period, but hidden under a faster expansion of total steam users in the world, of 20%

that's not screwy, that's exactly what's expected with steam making headways into china: huge growth, almost all of those new users currently running windows

the fact that the proportion of linux steam pc users is growing, despite the well known fast increase in total steam users, is awesome!

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Quoting: pilkThis is really nice to hear. While I was distrohopping last year, the only thing that got me off Mint was its lack of PipeWire. I had some audio issues running Mint and had to hop off.

Pipewire's drop-in replacements for PulseAudio and etc could already be deployed in Linux Mint by savvy users with enough free time on their hands, but yeah, this does make things waaaaay easier! :heart:

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'm actually finding the Steam stats pretty weird when contrasted with the stats from this GoL article from a couple of months ago. Like, why the hell is non-Deck Linux pretty static on Steam at around 1%, when apparently desktop Linux in the wider world is rising fast and closing on 4%?
We need better information.

I didn't run the numbers, but i bet it makes sense...

The total amount of PC users isn't growing fast like the total amount of steam users... instead this is either stagnant (everyone already uses a windows PC) or decreasing (people abandoning PCs for smartphones and tablets)

meanwhile some are moving to linux, so in this math expression...

Linux PC users / Total PC users*
*= Windows + Linux + Mac

...the "linux" part is growing while the "total" part is not... that becomes visible % increase
30/1000=3%
40/1000=4%

wereas for...

Linux Steam Gamers / Total* Steam Gamers
*= windows + linux + mac

...the total steam gamers number is growing very fast (not everyone in the world uses steam yet), so a fast-growing steam linux number may look rather stagnant

1/100=1%
2/200=1% (same percentage but double as many people... actually it's a proportionally faster speed of growth over time than the growth of the total number of linux pc users)

we'll always want/need more data to be sure, but this is the general idea why those two percentage growth trends might not be coinciding right now

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Quoting: nwildnerThere is no advantage that is immediately "tangible" by the user except it will make things better in the future.

Wayland fixes a security nightmare that's intrinsic to X11 protocol design.

This has very tangible and immediate effects...

On one hand, it becomes incredibly harder for one app to spy on keyboard strokes, mouse movement and data being displayed on screen by other apps (eg: keyloggers, bank account invasion by password syphoning, malicious overlays, etc)... this is important ASAP for everyone

On the other hand it makes things harder for honest apps that actually need to monitor keystrokes, mouse movement, data displayed on the screen by another app, etc (eg: Screen Recording, youtube streaming, screen sharing during video conference calls, screen reader for accessibility, etc) so those apps broke until Wayland, DEs/WMs and the apps could come up with something they could reasonably agree with that allows legitimate uses without moving backwards in this security improvement

Those details took several years to be ironed out... heck,some wayland devs took years just to acknowledge the legitimacy of some uses, let alone to accept thatwayland itself should help answer those problems... so yeah... 15 years passed.

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Quoting: pbCan't blame them for trying.

especially if it works, and imho it looks like it will work

they're creating a brand that offers quantity, variety and quality from a pooled effort which isn't as easy to be bought and closed as they are each on their own (but the brand won't risk damaging their editorial independence, like a company that buys indies to support indies would)

and they're doing so in a world saturated with AAA games that consistently disappoint gamers with anti-consumer trends, unpayable pricepoints, broken launchers, half-terabyte installs, etc

plus the camera might love them and their show, so they'll finally get some upper-tier free ads like AAA's always get

and last but not least, the contrast created by lining up indies side-by-side will most likely put to shame the beaten game formulas several AAA publishers rely on to push their products out year-on-year (Square cof... cof... Enix... COF!)

allowing myself to dream out loud: now we just need them to throw in some linux/deck native support pledge and ideally put fitlijibibo and the rest of the motley crew in the same repo cranking out some FOSS crossplatform & cross-vendor game APIs (SDL3 is coming along) that can help them push the same game builds to steam, gog and etc (think steam controller API features like dinamic in-game controller button faces, a steam networking api alternative, etc)

That would immensely help removing excuses some devs use to not support linux native builds, while likely making life easier for themselves, if they can afford it (which is not guaranteed... those are really small studios)

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Quoting: skinnyrafSo desktop Linux usage growth pretty much stopped around the release of the Steam Deck? We're still around 1.0-1.1%. All the growth can be attributed to new Steam Deck users.

in % you're possibly right...

...but keep in mind that the total number of steam users is also growing fast, so seeing the same 1% as before already means a lot of new linux steam gamers in an actual headcount (which Valve has sealed lips about but we can do some math and educatedly guess at it)

...and keep in mind those steamdeck users might end up using Steam Deck's desktop mode for more than gaming and/or they might replace windows for linux on another machine but use steam more on the deck so get the survey only on the deck, etc

ps: i feel for apple gamers... their feudal lord seems to hate pc gaming with a vengeance
eg: deprecating opengl, not supporting vulkan, banning apps from the apple store if they don't adhere to ever-changing criteria, etc... as much as the new development criteria may make sense, games aren't normal utility apps... only some games receive ongoing attention from their devs for years after being released

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Quoting: ZeloxDamage is already done, and it’s a bit too late.
There can still be harmful apps in the snap store, but I feel that this is there last chance. If any harmful app appears again in the store even with manual reviews, it’s over.

sixth timeyear is a charm?

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tl;dr: if you don't notice anything out of the ordinary, it's already working for you

disclaimer: i'm not a linux audio stack expert, i'm just pulling from memory what i read in older phoronix news and some pipewire.org/ articles (oppa chat-gpt style :grin:)

pipewire is a game-changer for linux audio stack for several reasons

a big one is that it is a single software that replaces several older software with drop-in replacements (ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK)

the replacements are written from the ground up in cleaner code, with all that was learned from decades of experience in the older projects... so generally less bugs

they are drop-in replacements, which means software that called Pulse Audio functions will call pipewire's PulseAudio replacement bit the same way and Pipewire will gladly handle it in a compatible manner, so generally no problems getting ancient software to run over the new code

but at its core the way pipewire works is quite different, so it allows things that were previously impossible, like low latency audio via PulseAudio... iirc this was a major reason to choose JACK instead of PulseAudio for some usecases

plus PulseAudio and Jack worked atop ALSA and each had their own opinions on how to decide what to do when things change

eg: you hit the play button on your mp3 playlist in a local app, then someone calls you via google meet on the web browser, then you plug in the usb headphones... which audio source should be rerouted to which audio outputs? should any filters be applied? what sampling rate should be used if the sources are different but you want to mix them to the same output? etc, etc, etc

pipewire not only rewrote all this logic in a unified way replacing hacks over hacks... so less audio selection quirks (which are KILLING me on win11 + Teams right now!)...
...but also it did so in a way that makes it easy for each linux distro or even you as a single user to write your own customized logic to replace or add these to the default ones

who hasn't had issues with audio selection, frequency or latency over bluetooth, right?! that gets better taken care of too!

anyway that's the theory... given how fast linux distros picked up on it (a lot of them before it hit stable version 1.0) and how many people went out of their way to install it manually before it became the default in the more cautious distros, i'd say it's delivered on its promises way more than it caused new issues (always a risk when rewriting from scratch)

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can any of the xbox players around here exolain the appeal of the left analogue being so far up, arguably less comfortable to use than the d-pad?

as a playstation player i always use the left analogue stick to move the player character around and i don't really see how the xbox layout can be better for anyone

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development-adoption cycles for SDL can't be very fast... it must offer a truly stable API once each version is released and the older versions must keep working after a new one is released (directly or via a drop-in replacement shim from the old version to the new, as was done for SDL 1.2 over SDL 2)

this is because games are mostly proprietary static apps released once and never touched again afterwards (not by their devs, nor anyone else), unlike common foss linux apps that are constantly adapted to newer libs and their modified APIs

if they release new versions of SDL every year they'll quickly build up a huge inertial mass of legacy APIs/libs to support forever and that will eat away from new efforts

they could delay SDL3... but that only helps if Wayland devs clearly signal they'll solve their end of the issue soon with high priority... which seems a bit unlikely, though Valve does have plenty of people working for them on both things, iirc

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