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I know they mention Steam Deck but I expect it’s heavily skewing the results. I wonder what percent of linux gamers are accounted for by the Steam Deck. I expec
by teg4n_ 3y ago
I know they mention Steam Deck but I expect it’s heavily skewing the results. I wonder what percent of linux gamers are accounted for by the Steam Deck. I expect it’s rather large.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoThat was my first thought, too: "Steam Deck uses AMD; that probably could singlehandedly drive it"
- atq2119 3y agoFrom the same Phoronix title page today, Steam Deck accounts for 40% of Linux Steam users. This means the other 60% are split roughly evenly between AMD and Intel.
- Hamuko 3y agoWhat do you mean "skewing the results"?
- LeoPanthera 3y agoThey mean that most people don't think of Steam Deck users as "Linux Gamers". SteamOS is essentially an appliance OS. It's what comes with the Steam Deck. People don't choose it, it's the default.
- itsboring 3y agoThis feels like a double standard to me. If you exclude Steam Deck users because it comes with Linux by default, then you should also exclude all the people who bought laptops that come with Windows by default, no? They’re not Windows gamers, they’re just using what came with their computer.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoThat would be true if Windows could be described as an appliance OS designed only to play games, but it's not. SteamOS is.
- itsboring 3y agoI disagree. I don’t believe that distinction is relevant. My reasoning is that the large number of SteamOS users allows Valve to justify spending time and resources improving things like Mesa and amdgpu (edit: and of course Proton, which is huge), which benefits many Linux gamers that do not own Steam Deck. I use the SteamOS compositor (gamescope) on my desktop PC because it’s great—-and it probably wouldn’t exist without SteamOS. The only reason I care about the number of Linux users is because more users means more development resources. Using that criteria, Steam Deck users very much “count”.
- Hamuko 3y agoSteamOS is just Arch. You can use it for anything you could use Arch for. The fact that people elect to mainly use it for gaming doesn't really mean that's all it's designed for. I also have a gaming PC that runs Windows 11 and I never use it for anything other than gaming. Doesn't mean it couldn't be used for other things.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago> SteamOS is just Arch. That's technically true, but oversimplified enough to be misleading. SteamOS boots from a read-only OS partition from which you can change nothing. You can only write to your "home folder", and you can only add new software using Flatpak, or Steam itself.
- horsawlarway 3y agoThat's my take away too. I tend to still buy intel for new desktop builds - I'm not really bottle necked on the cpu for most of my computing needs, so I prefer the built in gpu for ease of maintenance and the better power efficiency (particularly idling, where intel still tends to do better). But my Deck means I'm showing up as AMD for most of my steam usage over the last few months. --- To avoid just being anecdata - I went and looked up some numbers (on google, they might still be wrong). As best I can tell, Steam claims about 1.9 million monthly active users on linux (may - 2023). Steam also claims that sales of the deck surpassed 3 million total units in 2023. So 50% of steam decks can end up buried in drawers somewhere and the steam deck would still be 70% of the active linux userbase.