Two weeks later: Pop!_OS is still fine

It's been a couple of weeks now since I switched from Windows 7 to Linux. If you're thinking of making the switch yourself, and wondering what that's like, I feel like I've now got enough experience to tell you what you can expect.

Ubuntu dethroned by Manjaro/Arch as top Linux gaming distro

It wasn't too long ago that I'd posted about how Ubuntu seemed well on its way to becoming the top choice distro for basically everything, including gaming. That was before Canonical shat their own bed, though, announcing that they were dropping support for the 32-bit libraries that PC gaming generally, and Steam particularly, depended on. Valve, which had been recommending Ubuntu as the preferred distro for Steam, withdrew that recommendation; and while Canonical apparently walked back their decision on those 32-bit libraries, Valve's recommendation was not restored.

And now, just a few months later, we're starting to get a good look at exactly how much damage Canonical/Ubuntu did to their own cause with PC gamers, thanks to a great post at Boiling Steam, which sums up the trend with this chart:

In case you missed it...

... Windows 10 finally managed to hit 50% market share, according to NetMarketShare.

Some takes on this development were, sadly, predictable, such as Computerworld's, "Windows 10 user share surges as loafers heed impending deadline." Others were more balanced, though, such as Mike Sanders at eTeknix:

It’s been around 4 years now since Windows 10 launched and if one thing has been made abundantly clear, it’s that people have been very slow in adopting the latest operating system platform. In fairness, there has been good reason for this. Firstly, it’s hard to ignore just how hard Microsoft shoved this down our throats. We got the option to update to it for free, but this was part of a huge campaign that saw Windows 7 and 8 users badgered for months to do it.

Since then, following more than a few problematic updates, Windows 10 doesn’t exactly have a glowing reputation with a lot of the PC community. As such, many have stubbornly refused to make the update.

Following the latest figures from Netmarketshare, however, it may have taken 4 years, but Windows 10 finally has a 50% operating system market share!

[...]

Microsoft is likely more than a little embarrassed that it has taken this long for people to adopt Windows 10. Particularly given how hard they pushed it. Like it or not, however, we fully expect that number to really start spiking towards the end of the year with that end-of-support for Windows 7 looming in the not too distant future.

If you haven’t updated to 10 yet, you’re likely going to. So, try and make the best out of a bad situation?

Oh, I plan to, Mike. I'll be switching by the end of the year... but to Linux, not Windows 10. All that remains is to pick the most AMD-gaming-friendly distro; I'm currently leaning towards Pop!_OS, but Manjaro and (naturally) Ubuntu are both in the running.

Windows lost more Steam, too

In case you were still thinking that Windows' 0.83% user market share drop in December was some sort of an error, Steam's Software Survey has corroborated the decline, putting Steam in sync with the overall OS market for a second straight month.

Click to enlarge.

Once again, MacOS (a.k.a. OS X) and Linux were the big gainers, with MacOS 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.10 both showing strong results; the newbie-friendly Linux Mint, a distro that doesn't even register among OS users in the broader marketplace, appears to have gained a significant share among Steam users. Weirdly, only Windows 7's 64-bit version lost Steam users, with Win7's 32-bit version gaining ground alongside all other Windows versions except XP; Win7 64-bit's decline was enough to put Windows in the red overall, though, with a 0.58% overall drop which is only slightly slower than the decline seen in the overall OS market.

In isolation, this sort of behaviour among Steam users could be interpreted as resulting from Valve's Steam Play/Proton initiative, but given that Windows' decline among Steam users is actually less than that seen in the larger OS market, it's difficult to describe this as anything other than just a part of the overall trend, with Windows-dependent PC gamers actually lagging slightly behind everyone else. Whether Steam Play/Proton changes those users' decision-making calculus in the coming months is, of course, anyone's guess. It does seem to be making it somewhat easier for gamers to join the shift away from Windows, though, meaning that Microsoft shouldn't be counting too hard on PC gamers to be a backstop against the overall loss of Windows users.

It just. Won't. Die!

Do you remember the Universal Windows Platform? The new paradigm for Windows software distribution, which Microsoft has been pushing since Windows 8, when it was called Metro, and which Windows users have been resoundingly rejecting ever since?

Metro, and Windows 8 with it, was so unpopular that Microsoft was forced to allow OEMs to install Windows 7 instead on machines whose purchasers were paying for Windows 8 licenses. Valve's Gabe Newell saw Microsoft's attempt to seize control over software distribution as so profoundly anti-competitive, and anti-consumer, that it birthed the Steam Machine initiative, whose SteamOS has since given rise to Steam Play/Proton, which is well on its way to making Windows irrelevant for gaming. And UWP-exclusive titles are virtually non-existent, since they can only be installed via Microsoft's storefront of desolation, while basically the entire PC gaming industry distributes their games through Steam.

That is the legacy of UWP for Microsoft: repeated failures, alienated consumers, and a well-deserved reputation for monopolistic bullshit. Well, apparently Microsoft still see UWP as their key to global domination, because it's baaaack!!!

Not exactly Half Life 3

Lest we forget, Valve Software isn't only working on separating their primary business, the Steam storefront, from Microsoft's Windows OS. They're also devoting significant resources to VR technology, an R&D spent which apparently includes Valve-branded VR hardware, likely iterating on HTC's Vive designs, and supporting software, including a sequel prequel to Half-Life 2.

As reported by UploadVR:

Images of a prototype VR headset with a Valve logo visible on the circuit board leaked on the image sharing website imgur. Our independent sources tell us these are in fact prototypes for an upcoming Valve HMD.

We’ve also heard the field of view will be 135° with “Vive Pro resolution.” It may also come bundled with ‘Knuckles’ controllers as well as a Half-Life based VR game that could be a prequel rather than the much-anticipated Half-Life 3.

Cue the Half-Life 3 jokes in 3... 2... 1...

And now, with that out of our collective systems, let's talk about the potential impact of this.

Coming along nicely

As a PC gamer, with Windows 10 looking like more of a dumpster fire with each passing month, and Linux looking more and more like the OS that I'll end up using in 2020, I've obviously been keeping an eye on the progress of Valve Software's Steam Play/Proton initiative. I'd even tried switching to Linux a few months ago, literally formatting my hard drive and installing Ubuntu... only to discover that Ubuntu came with some frustrating limitations, and that Proton itself wasn't quite ready for prime time.

Proton was very promising, but it was clearly not a polished enough consumer experience yet that the average consumer should be thinking of making the switch. That was back in August, though, and this is November. With three more months to work on their tech, how much progress have Valve made?

There was only one way to know. Armed with my list of shame (i.e. every game on my Steam account that I have yet to play), I looked them up on ProtonDB to find out how they were rated for Steam Play performance. To say that the results surprised me, would be something of an understatement.

Here's how my Steam library breaks down, using the rating definitions from ProtonDB:

Native	Platinum	Gold	Silver	Bronze	Borked	No Rating
42.5%	13.7%	11.8%	13.7%	5.2%	7.2%	5.9%

OS usage share stats for end-September (Yes, there actually is news to report.)

Okay, yes, I know, I said that I was all done following Windows 10's monthly crawl to parity with Windows 7. That declaration is looking to have been premature, however, since this appears to be the month when things actually got interesting again.

First, Windows 10 (WX) vs. Windows 7 (W7). Last month, WX looked to finally be on pace to equal W7 by November, to such an extent that even I was willing to posit that they might actually make it this time. That was then, though, and this is now, and in the now, WX has once again lost ground to its much, much older cousin. As reported by Wayne Williams at Betanews:

Usage share monitoring service StatCounter saw Windows 10 overtake Windows 7 back in February, and its latest figures put the new operating system on 50.07 percent, well ahead of Windows 7 on 37.2 percent.

Rival monitoring service NetMarketShare disagrees however. While Windows 10 gained significant share in August, at Windows 7’s expense, the latest figures, for September, show a reversal of fortune.

According to NetMarketShare, in September, Windows 10 went from 37.80 percent to 37.44 percent, a fall of 0.36 percentage points.

In the same time frame, Windows 7 gained 0.61 percentage points to sit on 40.88 percent, 3.44 percent ahead.

Based on last month’s figures, I predicted that Windows 10 would take the lead by November, or possibly as early as October, but that no longer seems to be the case. It's now more likely to be the start of next year, but we shall see.

In case you're wondering what that looks like, here's the graph from NMS:

W7/WX still leads everyone else by a large margin, but Linux now clearly leads the "everyone else" pack.

I'd previously pegged ±0.5% as the threshold for significance, which these changes just barely exceed. That said, it does mean that the "by November" prediction for WX/W7 parity will likely be missed for a third straight year, which has to be slightly embarrassing for Microsoft.

This development isn't nearly as interesting as the month's OS usage changes among Steam users, though.

Why not Windows 10?

Given that my recent foray into PC Gaming on Linux were... underwhelming, shall we say, some of my readers (yes, all three of you) may well be wondering why I don't just bite the bullet and switch to Windows 10 already. True, the "free upgrade" offer has ended, and Windows 10 will not cost money, but I was honestly always going to want more control over my PC than WX Home offered, which would always have meant a Professional license... in other words, Windows 10 was always going to cost me something up front.

So, why not just switch already?

It's a good question, and one which I've struggled a bit to answer myself this past week. Was I just being stubborn? Or did I still have concrete, valid reasons for sticking with Windows 7, while hoping that Valve and Steam Play would be able to solve the Linux gaming performance problem at some point during the upcoming year?

Today, though, I had a eureka moment, when I found my nebulous reasons for sticking with W7 suddenly crystallized into a single paragraph by Paul Thurrott. He was writing about Microsoft's decision to de-escalate some of WX's advertising bullshit. After downplaying the reversal as "not much of a win," he goes onto describe  Microsoft's approach to Windows consumers thusly:

Everything else that is still wrong about Windows 10 is still in the product and will move forward with version 1809.

In other words, the slippery slope I first warned about way back in 2012, when Microsoft quietly began its first sneaky advertising additions to Windows 10's predecessor, is still very much an issue. And has escalated over time. The ongoing and unnecessary compromises to Windows 10---rampant advertising, attempts at pushing users to Microsoft Edge, pre-bundled crapware, and more---continue unabated. There is no major software platform that is this hostile to its own users. [Emphasis added.]

"That's it!" I thought. "That's the reason!" It's not just WX's ongoing issues, which I could probably live with or work around, it's that Microsoft treats all but their largest Enterprise customers with thinly veiled contempt, most of the time, and has done so for years. Sure, maybe this latest half-hearted walk-back marks the beginning of a trend towards less bullshit in Windows... but I'm not planning to bet money on it.

Seriously, fuck Microsoft at this point. If Valve can get Steam Play working well enough to provide a moderately decent gaming experience on Linux (or, hell, SteamOS), I'll put up with some performance issues, rather than give Microsoft the satisfaction.

Failing faster with Steam Play

About a week ago, I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS Bionic Beaver, expressly to try out the new Proton technology that Valve was adding to Steam Play. In theory, Proton should allow Linux users to install and run almost any Windows game in Linux, seamlessly.

In practice, though... well, let's just say that it's a beta. Quite literally, actually. And, after a week of struggling with Linux as my daily driver OS, and trying to game through Steam Play, I'm retreating back to Windows 7 for the time being.

I'll let Jason Evangelho from Forbes explain why:

While the technical possibility of playing the thousands upon thousands of Windows-only Steam games on Linux is a revolutionary leap forward, it's far from perfect. When it works it's amazing. When it doesn't it's an exercise in frustration.

I've spent the past two weeks downloading dozens of games to test, and many of the ones Valve has whitelisted do indeed perform well without any hiccups. But some, like 2016's DOOM, simply won't launch. The game works for the majority of people who've submitted their experience to the Steam Play Compatibility Reports website, but for many others, it does not.

Valve can't whitelist a game and take Steam Play out of beta (it's now available to everyone using the Steam for Linux client) until every title they've put their seal of approval on works for everyone who launches it -- provided they meet the software and hardware requirements. I think the worst possible outcome is to see reports of gamers who've wiped out their Windows partition and parked themselves gleefully in the Linux camp, only to be frustrated that the experience they expected isn't happening.

Emphasis added, because that last sentence describes me perfectly.

The Steam Play experience

The adventure continues...

Yesterday, I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu, with the intention of gaming on Linux using Steam Play + Proton. Today, having installed a couple of dozen games to use as test cases, I finally booted up Path of Exile for the first time.

PoE is not a Linux game, and Grinding Gear Games does not provide any support for Linux. This means that I have to rely entirely on Valve's new Proton addition to Steam Play to run the game (well, I could try to run it myself independently, using Wine, but since Proton is Wine, it amounts to the same thing). And so, I booted up the game for the first time.... and it crashed the OS.

On Windows, this would mean ten minutes of downtime; on Linux, however, reboots take seconds, and are just no big deal. So, I booted it up again, dove into Steam, and restarted PoE... and it crashed again.

This time, though, only the game crashed; and, afterwards, Steam asked if I'd like to try booting the game in DX9 mode, rather than DX11. And so, figuring third time lucky, I said yes, and re-restarted the game... and it worked!

In fact, the login process was working better that it had been working on Windows, lately. I'm not sure why, but PoE on Windows 7 had been failing to open instances for the first two login attempts, every time the game was started, needing at least three tries to actually start the game. On Linux, once I managed to get the game to load, it started first on the try. Excelsior!

Finally taking the plunge...

I was perusing my past posts, and realized that it was April of 2016 when I first mentioned planning to migrate to Linux. By September of last year, I had bought a 2nd hard drive, with vague plans of dual-booting. Only one thing stood in my way: my gaming habit, and the fact that most of the games I was interested in simply didn't run natively on Linux. Worse, getting to run games on Linux using Wine looked really... complicated.

I had high hopes for SteamOS, which seemed to pair well with the new Vulkan API and a growing trend in cross-platform development to make more Linux-compatible games a possibility. But Valve seemed to be letting the SteamOS initiative wither on the vine, which left me using Windows 7, facing end of service in a year and a half with an extra hard drive still in its packaging, and wondering if Linux was really the OS that a lifelong PC gamer like me needed.

All that changed last week, though, when Valve announced Proton, a Wine implementation that they'd built into the Linux Steam client, adding 1000 certified Linux-compatible games to Steam in a week -- and making all of the other games on the service Linux-installable at the same time.

Suddenly, installing any game on Linux that I wanted to play was a doddle, and the main reason for my procrastination was gone. Here I was, with two weeks' vacation ahead of me, every reason to switch operating systems, and no excuses left

Updated Steam Play makes every game Linux compatible, paving the way for SteamOS 3.0... and that's just for starters...

Valve Software have a history of "running silent" - they'll make little or not noise, saying almost nothing publicly about what they're working on, only to pop up, seemingly out of nowhere, and make all kinds of news. Their critics (and some of their fans) often find this to be a source of frustration; Valve simply don't fit the mold of most other big players in the video game business, mainly because they're not a publicly traded company, and thus don't have to be unceasingly communicating to their investors, and potential investors. Some days, Valve's silent running mode works against them.

Today was not such a day.

From PCGamesN:

Steam Play – Valve’s name for its cross-platform initiative – is getting a major update, with built-in tools allowing you to run Windows games on Linux. [...] In the most practical terms, this means you can now download and install Windows games directly from the Steam client without any further fuss. Valve is currently checking “the entire Steam catalog” and whitelisting games that run without issue, but you can turn off those guidelines and install whatever you want, too.

[...]

In theory, this should eventually allow nearly the entire Steam catalogue to run on Linux, though it’s possible certain types of DRM and anti-cheat measures could keep that compatibility from happening. [...] Valve’s own SteamOS is built on Linux, and as we speculated when hints of this update surface last week, this could be part of a renewed push for the platform. There are rumblings around the internet about SteamOS 3.0 being on the way, even after Valve removed Steam Machines from the Steam store. At the same time, Valve reiterated its support of Linux and Vulkan for PC gaming – and this update marks a major confirmation of that support.

Combined with the Vulkan API and an industry-wide trend towards cross-platform development, the fact that Valve is about to make the entire Steam library compatible with Linux will be game-changing. Valve's Steam Machine initiative failed to launch because there were too few SteamOS-compatible games to convince people to switch operating systems, and too few people using SteamOS and Linux to make Linux game development worthwhile.

But Linux is about to become a viable gaming platform, virtually overnight, which means that game developers don't have to maintain a separate Linux version of their games anymore, and Linux gamers can play the largest single library of PC games on their own machines with no additional work required. This is great news for any gamer who had been dragging their feet about switching to Linux. Valve just made it easy.

And that's not the only news that Valve made this week.