It Was Only 4 Years Ago That Many Thought Steam On Linux Was An April Fools' Day Joke

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It Was Only 4 Years Ago That Many Thought Steam On Linux Was An April Fools' Day Joke

While there are around two thousand Linux-native games now available on Steam brought over by many different studios, it was just four years ago that many thought Valve bringing Steam to Linux was a joke or far-fetched rumor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=4-Years-Gaben-Email

[Snaipersky]

I wonder if the percentage is actually higher. I personally installed steam under wine to play a bunch of my library that way. Actually, I have no doubt that Linux gaming would see higher adoption if Valve collaborated with the Wine devs to allow windows only games to run under wine, and games with a Linux port to run either way.

[sarmad]

For the past year I've been gaming exclusively on Linux. There are now already more good native Linux games than I have time for. Great achievement in just 4 years. Let's hope by the end of 2016 we'll be seeing many AAA games having day 1 Linux release.

[carewolf]

Seems it started at 1% and stayed there.

[wikinevick]

And given the sales, nowadays it's the Steam guys that are thinking linux was an April's Fools' joke.

[ruthan]

Valve at least should buy Codewevears, at least, they have enough many to make Linux good platform for gaming..

[anarki2]

Guess what: it still is a joke.

[rabcor]

Yeah it pretty much is a joke, there might be millions of users using steam on linux, sure, but we're only a shadow, a 1-2% of the entire steam userbase...

They made SteamOS, as a push to drive people towards linux, and look where that got us: Nowhere.

It got us nowhere because SteamOS was not marketed properly, and Steam Machines were not marketed properly.

Although... are we still just a 1-2% because these numbers aren't including SteamOS users.... Another one of valves mistakes, and a testament to their inaptitude when it comes to all things code related. (As well as the amount of time it takes them to fix even the simplest yet most damaging of bugs within Steam, and the currently broken state of Steam on linux and slow as fuck state on Windows and Linux)

I have to say, looking back over the past two years it might as well have been a joke.

But despite this, it's good that they successfully opened up the route for people to use Linux as an alternative to Windows as a gaming OS. Even if almost nobody has jumped ship yet... Seriously, I am the only Linux adopter I know that started using linux within the span of the last 5 years or so. It didn't take me long to make the jump either, I saw Windows 8, I shook my head, and I installed gentoo, and it's been tough, it really has to adapt to the different ways in which Linux works, but I did it anyways, because I wasn't going to accept anything else. It was the least of 3 evils (Windows, OS X and Linux) but an evil nontheless.

Time to face the truth. The general population is on average either too stupid to choose Linux over Windows based on it's values, and/or too horrified of the concept of change to do so despite having the capacity to make the choice. So as one of my favorite musicians said: "Inaptitude is reaching critical mass."

It's the only reason I can think of for why Linux isn't in more widespread use today. People just blindly follow along with trends and eat whatever corporations and industries spoonfeed them without doubting or questioning anything about it. And the ones who do doubt, the ones who do question, usually can't even be bothered to do anything about it... (I see this ALL the time)

I can also attest that Linux definitely is a bigger joke here out of the two (just look at the bad printer and peripheral support, and most of the other items listed here that nobody has fixed for the past 20 years!) and also as a recent adopter of Linux, this is kinda what is the most appalling to me. E.g. that the linux community is loaded to the brim with two faced assholes and people actualyl try to sell linux with "The Linux community is awesome!" well I learned extremely fast that this was a flat out lie, I never felt particularly welcomed on any linux related community. Some are better than others though.

[humbug]

LOL. I remember this. I wasn't a Linux user at the time but I remember reading the negative and skeptical comments on phoronix after Gabe Newell email Michael. I thought it was a strange reaction because all he did was ask for some contacts.

[DonQ]

For the past year I've been gaming exclusively on Linux. There are now already more good native Linux games than I have time for. Great achievement in just 4 years. Let's hope by the end of 2016 we'll be seeing many AAA games having day 1 Linux release.

Late last year I finally got rid of my Windows partition because I have enough games. Yeh!