Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
It’s been over a year since our last Steam Hardware Survey and with all of the changes that have taken place in the world of Steam for Linux, I figured now would be a good time to review our place in the overall gaming world. The last time we had a review of the Steam Hardware Survey here at Full Circle Magazine was back in 2017, so we’re definitely due for a refresher. To review our last Steam Hardware Survey issue please refer to FCM#120 from April 2017. I was curious as to whether there would be a noticeable change in the number of Linux users since last time we conducted a Steam Hardware Survey two years ago, especially considering the SteamPlay Proton update from August 2018. For those who don’t know about SteamPlay, it’s basically Steam providing an emulator which is similar to Wine or Play-On-Linux. An emulator is basically a tool that takes a Windows software and tricks it into believing that it’s running on a Windows PC even though it may indeed be a Linux computer. By far, the most popular Windows to Linux emulator is Wine (Wine is a sort of acronym which stands for: Wine Is Not an Emulator). In the case of SteamPlay, the emulator is basically run by what Valve (the company behind Steam) is calling Proton. To find out more about Proton and SteamPlay refer to FCM#137 from 2018.
Recently, as I was about to play a game for the first time in a few months, I was pleasantly surprised to be welcomed by the Steam message that asks me whether I’m interested in running the Hardware Survey. Of course, I accepted and took screenshots of the whole process for your viewing pleasure. I strongly advise all of you Linux gamers to run the Survey as it’s a great way to measure how vibrant Linux gaming is when it’s compared to Windows or Mac OS X.
After you accept to run the Survey, there’s not much that you need to do except for going through a couple of more windows and clicking on Next until you get to the last screen that says you’re done. So, in other words, the survey is not something that you are actively involved in but it’s a rather automatic process which gathers information from your computer and sends the results to Valve. A (sort-of) bug that I encountered immediately after my Survey ended was that when I clicked on the View Results web link, I was taken to the Steam Store page but not the page which actually has the Survey results. So, I had to take the extra step of searching for that page – which can be found here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
Looking at the results, and comparing them to our 2017 results, we can see that the percentage of Linux users has increased slightly from 0.77% in 2017 to 0.81% in May 2019 (and yes, you read that correctly, it’s almost 1% but not yet). Although the percentage indicates a slight increase in Linux users, it has been reported by other people that the actual number of users has gone up a lot because the overall number of gamers (including Linux gamers) has also gone up substantially.
In about a year, I’m hoping to once again be randomly selected to partake in the Steam Hardware Survey. By then, a couple of things should have taken place. First, at this time next year, I should either already be using Ubuntu 20.04 or at worst I’ll be planning on updating by June 2020 at the latest. Second, and much more important, by this time next year the number of Linux gamers on Steam could potentially be over the 1% mark. The reason for this is that, in the upcoming months, it is rumored that the next wave of Chromebooks released will be able to run almost all Linux apps (which I would assume would also include Steam). With Chromebooks being more popular than any other Linux laptop, it would not be the least bit surprising if finally the number of Linux gamers playing video-games on Steam finally surpasses the 1% mark. For now, let us rejoice knowing that we’ve at least added another 0.05% of total users.
Below are the most relevant results gathered from my hardware after the survey was run:
Computer Information:
Manufacturer: Unknown Model: Unknown Form Factor: Desktop No Touch Input Detected
Processor Information:
CPU Vendor: AuthenticAMD CPU Brand: AMD FX(tm)-6100 Six-Core Processor CPU Family: 0x15 CPU Model: 0x1 CPU Stepping: 0x2 CPU Type: 0x0 Speed: 3300 Mhz 6 logical processors 6 physical processors HyperThreading: Unsupported
Operating System Version:
Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (64 bit) Kernel Name: Linux Kernel Version: 4.15.0-48-generic X Server Vendor: The X.Org Foundation X Server Release: 11906000 X Window Manager: GNOME Shell Steam Runtime Version: jenkins-steam-runtime-beta-release_0.20190320.2
Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA Corporation GeForce GTX 960/PCIe/SSE2
Driver Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 396.54
OpenGL Version: 4.6
Desktop Color Depth: 24 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
VendorID: 0x10de
DeviceID: 0x1401
Revision Not Detected
Number of Monitors: 1
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Primary Display Size: 23.54" x 13.23" (26.97" diag)
59.8cm x 33.6cm (68.5cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 2048 MB
Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x 16x
Sound card:
Audio device: Realtek ALC892
Memory:
RAM: 15,986 MB
Miscellaneous:
UI Language: English LANG: en_US.UTF-8 Total Hard Disk Space Available: 351,159 MB Largest Free Hard Disk Block: 64,551 MB VR Headset: None detected
Recent Failure Reports: