This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out the ebbs and flows of Chinese players on largely-identical hardware and operating systems) is more than 6%, up from under 2% just 5 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with Windows in general, and especially 11, and Windows 10 is about to force the issue in just a few months as it loses official support. I have a friend whose computer is still in decent shape for gaming but with TPM settings that don’t meet the minimum spec for Windows 11; at some point, he’ll lose compatibility and have to throw out an otherwise perfectly functional machine, so it’s good that some other OS is shaping up to be a good enough option for many people.
This has been an upward trend since slightly before the release of the Steam Deck, as you can see on the graphs, and I’ve come across YouTube videos from both James Lee Animations and PewDiePie about how they got to be so sick of Windows (and Adobe) they both switched to Linux with middle fingers raised at their old workflows. Folks like them making videos like that can have real effects on the market. Linux has been my daily driver for gaming for about 8 years now, and it’s matured so much in that time that I’ve hardly booted to my Windows partition for any reason. It’s not perfect, but if I’m choosing between the quirks that Linux has by accident and the deficiencies that are in Windows on purpose, I’ll take LInux every time, and it seems like more people are coming to that same conclusion.
No doubt the biggest remaining frontier is live service gaming with kernel level anti-cheat, but if Linux becomes a larger user base, as it’s doing right now, the developers making those games will have to solve that problem to reach that addressable market, and everybody wins.
If anticheats would work properly on Linux I would probably ditch Windows forever. Alas.
EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye work on Linux thanks to Valve’s efforts. Unfortunately many devs explicitly deny Linux or only allow the Steam Deck.
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
To be clear:
The anticheat software CAN work on Linux about as well as it does on Windows. Most of the more invasive syscalls don’t exist but said tools are also backing away from those on the Windows side as diminishing returns and fear of pulling a Crowdstrike. Alternative calls are used and most of the major anti-cheat solutions actually already do that and already support Wine/Proton in ways that most game devs never will.
The issue is that the devs (so their publishers) actively disable support for that. They have EAC et al check if it is running in Proton and quit if it is. There are reasons for that (much smaller testing surface) but it is also hard to believe that companies like EA actively updating all their old Battlefields to block Proton isn’t intentional and political.
Err, and then you have stuff like DBZ Xenoverse 2 which just will never have their EAC updated because it is more effort than adding a few new skins to go with the latest movie.
There are also rumors that Microsoft will remove third-party apps like antivirus apps and anticheats from Windows kernel. If that happens, it will pretty much solve the anticheat problem for Linux as well.
Yes. That is the aforementioned “pulling a Crowdstrike”
But, as I said, stuff like EA actively going through basically every Battiefield since 3 and actively disabling Proton “support” indicates a political aspect to things. And there will still be the same testing surface issues that make live games hesitant to support “Valve and some company say this is fine” for games that make more money than many small nations.
Just avoid the games that use them. Games and the software they install should NEVER EVER run kernel-level. Also the games that use those ac’s are bad anyways.
If you must play those games, passthrough your GPU and hide the fact that the VM is a VM.
Careful with that, I’ve heard of folks getting banned because it can still look fishy.
Idc if it looks fishy because i’m discouraging this anyways.
Agreed. I have no desire to give EA root access to my system, full access to everything I do on it … just to play a game.
I’m amazed Microsoft even allows such on their platform, given how large of a vulnerability it creates; as CrowdStrike demonstrated.
Well…microsoft was allowing kernel-level apps (in general). Now they’re shooing every app from the kernel.
Good: ACs won’t run as root anymore :D
Bad: It includes AVs (anti-viruses) D:
Of course, it’s rolling out slowly.
There’s definitely some selection bias for me that made it easy to not even be interested in buying the types of games that won’t work on Linux, and that made my switch easier. I hope the solution that we eventually arrive at isn’t, “Here’s a custom kernel compatible with our anti-cheat,” but instead, “Here’s a way to play our game without kernel level anti-cheat.”
The only way to do that is to use Linux anyway, ditch Windows, and give them the middle finger until they make their game available. No amount of asking politely or screaming obnoxiously will make them care if people just continue using Windows because they feel like they “have to” play this game and keep paying them money, because all they care about is money. Only when they can clearly see their position is losing them money (3% is probably not clear enough for many of them but time will tell) are they going to change their behavior. There’s nothing else that motivates them more than seeing money slipping through their fingers.
Depending on white knights like Valve and CDPR to ride to our rescue is good but they can’t do this on their own either, and in fact they’ve already done very close to as much as they reasonably can. They need our help, we consumers are the ones who are statistically not doing our part. We need to recognize that we have the bulk of the agency here and we need to start to use it.
We have to choose what matters more to us, the future of playing video games on our own terms or letting the developer dictate how much we need to spend and what rights we need to give up to able to play a popular video game right now. We’re not talking about something we need to live. This is a choice we can make. Will enough people choose the future instead of immediate gratification? I don’t know, available evidence doesn’t paint a particularly reassuring picture, but I never am willing to give up on hope.
I wonder what the percent market share is that desktop Linux needs in order to be enough for devs to implement a Linux-friendly anti-cheat
A little dramatic, but yes, I’m already not playing those games.
Is “Stop Killing Games” also dramatic? Maybe we need to be dramatic to accomplish actual change. Thanks for the backhanded compliment though, I guess.