Amusing that you call it sarcasm. Linux gaming has flatlined at 1% or so for years without any noticeable changes.
I just checked the last steam hardware survey, linux is at 0.60%.
The linux steam hardware has pretty much been a flop. Ubuntu is ditching unity.
I sit in front of linux desktops at home and work. I do occasionally game some under linux. I have a linux phone (which has a linux kernel). But I fully realize it's a niche and feel lucky when any game comes to linux. I don't really see any reason for any real optimism.
It's much more a sign of their failed mobile strategy, which hinged on UI convergence between the desktop and mobile versions of Ubuntu. With all that gone, pooling their efforts with the rest of the Gnome-using world only makes sense (much of the Unity desktop also consisted of appropriated Gnome components).
I think your conclusion falls under the term non sequitur. It does not show anything about Canonical's financial incentives or their strategy, your statement is basically stating an assumption what the reason is.
Further I would argue it is irrelevant to the initial argument.
What has Canonical to do with it? Neither "Linux", "Linux Desktop", "Linux Gaming" or "AMD graphics under Linux" are in any way tied solely to Canonical or what Canonical does. Again, am I missing something?
> It does not show anything about Canonical's financial incentives or their strategy, your statement is basically stating an assumption what the reason is.
Fair point.
> What has Canonical to do with it? Neither "Linux", "Linux Desktop", "Linux Gaming" or "AMD graphics under Linux" are in any way tied solely to Canonical or what Canonical does. Again, am I missing something?
Ubuntu is the only official supported distribution by Steam and GOG (they also support Linux Mint, but it's based on Ubuntu).
RedHat and Valve do way more for Linux gaming than Canonical. So I agree with the above, Canonical's decisions aren't affecting Linux gaming that much.
Because Valve assume majority of users are using Ubuntu or derivatives. Which doesn't contradict what I said above. RedHat developers contribute a lot to Mesa. Canonical isn't exactly known to do that.
Something yes, but not improving it directly. Besides, Ubuntu proper isn't even the most used distro probably. Mint is likely more used.
My point is, those who work on Mesa (OpenGL / Vulkan) and Linux graphics stack have way more direct impact of Linux gaming (they are fixing bugs that affect games, improve performance, add new functionality and so on).
That actually says (if you follow the links to try to find the actual claims): The Linux Market share on Steam is about 1%, Mac is about 4%. They are relatively stable around that. But obviously more people join Steam every day.[1]
So... about 1%, using Steam to estimate (not steam hardware though).
There is no evidence presented anywhere which disproves that. Your claim was that it showed evidence of growth, but if you read it then it turns out it is using the steam survey, and shows no growth in percentage terms at all.
The article above showed evidence of growth, read it again.
And there is actual sales data that comes from developers. It's very different from those survey numbers.
Also, since there is no info on methodology of that survey, you can't know even what it means. I've heard from many Linux users, that they never got one while using Steam on Linux, while they got it while using it on Windows for example. It even never comes up in Valve's own SteamOS, so it's clearly not something Valve put a lot of thought in.
So, I'll stand by what I said. Data from that survey is useless as is and should not be applied for any market evaluation.
The OP's comment "The several dozen people playing AAA games on linux must be thrilled." seems pretty realistic.
Increased number of games is simply because it is close to zero-effort for most game engines to press the button and deploy to Linux Steam. That doesn't mean anyone is actually playing them.
I had a quick look at the GOL site and I didn't see anything obvious claiming growth. Ironically (given the topic of this HN story) I did see this:
Get ready to become a neural detective as 'Observer' is now on Linux, AMD not supported.... I spoke with Aspyr Media, who confirmed to me the team has "currently no plans to support AMD at this time for Observer".[1]
Yet, clearly gaming on Linux will take off any day now... (And this is from someone who runs a Linux desktop computer)
> Increased number of games is simply because it is close to zero-effort for most game engines to press the button and deploy to Linux Steam.
It's far from zero effort. Besides, engines are making Linux support easier, is also driven by demand. But hey, legacy execs would rather talk about how Linux gamers don't buy games, instead of actually making games for Linux.
I just checked the last steam hardware survey, linux is at 0.60%.
The linux steam hardware has pretty much been a flop. Ubuntu is ditching unity.
I sit in front of linux desktops at home and work. I do occasionally game some under linux. I have a linux phone (which has a linux kernel). But I fully realize it's a niche and feel lucky when any game comes to linux. I don't really see any reason for any real optimism.