Flawed Steam hardware survey and suggested solution

[steve7233]

The Steam Hardware survey has a rather serious flaw in that it erroneously thinks a lot of Linux users are on Windows when they are really on Linux. The problem as I see it is this. Most Linux gamers are still running Steam via wine which means they are running the Windows Steam client. Wine reports to the Steam Hardware survey that is version x of Windows. This causes the hardware survey report to be in large error. This is done so that games will run but it results in a failed hardware survey. I hope you can work with valve/Steam to resolve this issue. Maybe wine could generate a Steam Hardware survey flag that sends the Linux id and still report the wine prefix type to the game. Then maybe the none Linux users on the Steam Forums will stop claiming Linux users are only 1% when we know it's much higher. Thee Game companies will also know there is a bigger Linux gaming community than they thought and maybe we will see more native Linux ports.

[madewokherd]

Detecting Wine is easy, and Valve is fully capable of doing so. We don't try to prevent people from doing this.

Last I tried, Proton provided a better experience than running Steam in Wine, so I expect running Steam in Wine on Linux is less common now.

Then maybe the none Linux users on the Steam Forums will stop claiming Linux users are only 1% when we know it's much higher.

What's your source for this?