Steam For Linux: A Respectable Showing

An anonymous reader writes "Valve has just released its February, 2013 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, and the results are absolutely mind blowing. Linux is now standing strong as a legitimate gaming platform. It now represents 2.02% of all active Steam users." That's in keeping with what new submitter lars_doucet found. Lars writes: "I'm an independent game developer lucky enough to be on Steam. Recently, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale. The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including our cross-platform game Defender's Quest. .... Bottom line: during the sale we saw nearly 3 times as many Linux sales of the game as Mac (Windows still dominated overall)."

Comments

Re:Direct link to results

[Maxx169]

32 bit windows 8. X64 Windows 8 has 9% share...

Re:A respectable showing.

[Gregg M]

2% - the same market share as Windows Phone 7/8

Yes 2% share in a few weeks VS a gigantic company that has thrown billions into advertising.

Re: Too bad they're selling broken games

[vux984]

You buy the indie bundle... humble bundles for example and you are entitled to a DRM free copy. Awesome.

You use the steam key anyway because its as easy as using any other linux package manager. You select what you want, you click play and a few minutes later your playing. You switch to your laptop up stairs, launch steam, click what you want ... and start playing.

The DRM free direct downloads are great in the event steam fails or is down or something. But honestly, for all that I dislike about steam, it is easy to use. I use GoG a lot too, but find myself wishing that I could download and install those games via steam as well. Its just nice not to have all the clutter of manual downloads, manual patches, expansion packs, etc.

Re:2.02% so quickly?

[Lonewolf666]

I think Valve (the owner of Steam) are going for Linux because they are afraid Microsoft will eventually turn Windows into a "walled garden" like Apple's iOS, introduce their own application store and force out competitors like Steam.

Gabe Newell said:

We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It is a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.

quoted from http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/07/26/gabe-newell-windows-8-is-a-catastrophe

I have used it since the beta

[xarragon]

I have actually used it since the beta invite popped into my inbox. For those of you who havn't tried it here is a short summary:

I run Arch Linux, which is not supported. Valve only supports Ubuntu and provides the software as a .deb file which contains the "bootstrapper", basically a "netinstall" version if you were to make a comparision to the average Linux distro. The bootstrapper is easily taken apart via a script in the custom installer program that some of the Arch Linux folks whipped up and ends up installed system-wide by default.

This caused some problems for people like me, who are too paranoid to install untrusted software system-wide or even in my own home directory. I gave it a separate user account and denied the installer root access (which it asked for every time it tried to auto-update). It cried and bugged out, but you could run TF2 from day one. As they continued to improve the software they actually listened to the complaints at github (where they keep their Linux issue tracker) and made the software runnable as a regular user. It now resides completely inside my 'steam' users directory and the bootstrapper is long gone from the system-wide install.

If you are like me, and only run ALSA, hating PulseAudio's tentacle guts, you can actually run Steam anyway. They are using SDL as the backend, so when launching Steam you just export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa before running it, and you'll get sound! Even in-game voice is operational, but you still can't permanently disable it to get rid of all the jackasses screaming into the microphones.

Steam itself still uses the look from it's Windows roots, the ugly custom-skinned UI. And it can't be resized on my machine, which runs PekWM. It is also slow as molasses to start, and so is TF2. That might be in part to me using ONLY a 3G modem for my gaming though. The store also works like a charm.

An interesting feature is that you can actually switch between the OpenGL game window and the rest of your desktops seamlessly, with no apparent bugs or performance loss. Faster and more painless than on Windows. This wasn't always the case though, as early versions would switch to your desktop as soon as you got an archievement and completely screw up your mouse input once you switched back. This has been long since fixed though.

The only recent bug I came across was an apparent lack of support for multi-user environments, where I once started the bootstrapper as my regular user by mistake and let it install, thinking it was an regular update. Once it was up I figured what was wrong, uninstalling it and starting up as the 'steam' user, whereas it sefaulted hard. It took several hours and a lot of support ticket reading to figure out that leftover temporary file descriptors left from the first session screwed up the second one. Kinda stupid bug for a modern software, but that's what beta testing is for I suppose.

For me, Valve has really made my Linux experience a lot better. Hat's off to them. Now I just need to find some TF2 servers with players that are as beligerent and offensive as me!