Doesn’t really help that the AAA scene has gone straight in the shitter, while the quality games are all coming out of the Indie scene.
What Valve is doing is making it easier for indie Devs to better support Linux. They don’t have the funds for separate Linux builds. But with proton, it’s a pleasure to make it work. So… It’s great that quality games are coming out of Indie studios and they can be played on linux. Fuck the AAA
If the survey hit for me 1 week from now I’d be on Linux, I’m literally setting my system up properly next Saturday
You can dual boot Linux to try it out.
My main gaming rig is my last system not running Linux right now, I’ve been migrating my stuff over on my other systems for a couple months now (I keep getting distracted lol)
But not that I’ve got alts for the software I normally use on my main rig it’s finally time, 2 months ahead of schedule.
That comes with its own risks because Windows has been known to destroy dual boot setups when doing updates. Not always, but it can happen and it’s burnt people.
Dual booting also makes it harder when you decide to get rid of windows fully, because you might yourself accidentally screw your bootloader as part of removing windows.
The option I would personally recommend if you are unsure is to disconnect your windows hard drive, keep it safe, and install Linux on a separate drive. Then you can always drive swap back if you need and you know everything is safe.
You can even put the windows drive back in after installing Linux, and then just use your BIOS boot drive selector to switch where you are booting from. Each drive has it’s own boot record in that case, so there’s less risk of any accidents.
Disconnecting is good advice. What worked for me after windowa scrubbed the EFI boot was installing Linux and assigning its own EFI partition, most distros probe foreign OS so your separate Linux partition gets a chainloader entry to the windows EFI boot. You set BIOS to use Linux boot, Windows gets a handoff if you choose it in the Grub Menu and doesn’t know about the other EFI partition. Kept my dual install save.
Are we going to make a big deal out of every 0.3% shift in steams stats towards Linux?
Wake me up when we’re dealing in whole percentages… That’s when I’ll be excited about it, until then this could just be a sampling bias. A rounding error.
Steam OS handhelds are pretty much the entirety of the growth.
Linux went from 2.59% to 2.89%, that’s a 11.6% increase in the number of Linux users.
If it shifted .3% it would have went from 2.59% to 2.5977%.
The article is confusing ‘percentage points’ with ‘percentage’
Another way of looking at it is that the Steam Linux user population went from ~3,418,000 users to ~3,814,000 users. So there are nearly 400,000 new Linux gamers.
0.3% overall. There might be half a million new Linux gamers on steam, but there’s still hundreds of millions of PC gamers using Windows.
You can arrange the numbers how you want, the fact is that this is still a pretty small shift in the overall PC gamer landscape. I promise you, that’s how any larger developer sees it. Their pool of PC gamers shifted by a fraction of a percent. A good chunk of those that they “lost” as potential customers, probably wouldn’t have bought their games in the first place.
The demographic overlap for large studios of people who are intentionally using Linux for gaming, and people that are interested in their game, doesn’t overlap much, if at all, I bet. Until we get their key demographic switching over in large enough quantities to threaten their profits, the majority of the industry won’t budge from their windows centric views.
Look. I don’t hate Linux. Quite the opposite in fact. I’m rooting for these stats to move in and significant amount. I feel that’s an inevitable shift that will happen and until we do, we’ll keep getting these articles, describing a fraction of a percent move in the overall numbers as if it’s a huge culture shift for how people are playing games.
If you haven’t seen it, maybe you should watch field of dreams, becasuse the main tag line of the movie “if you build it, they will come” definitely applies here. The larger PC gaming community, there is a statistically significant number of indie devs and indie studios that support Linux as a platform, even if it’s just the steam deck they’re building for… Those studios just are not the biggest players in terms of revenue/sales… But they’re the ones building “it”. This is slowly but surely fueling the fires that will eventually burn down Microsoft’s dominance in the gaming space. It’s been a war that’s been waged for literal decades, since before steam was a thing.
There will come a day when we will hit critical mass and the large studios will be forced to either accept that their user base is shrinking because they don’t support Linux. That day is not today. We will need to see much more movement than a few percent difference before that happens. This isn’t even a few percent. This is a fraction of a percent of the total.
So forgive me if I’m not excited by any of this. It’s movement in the right direction, but it’s utterly meaningless to the companies that could actually shift the industry to Linux on a large scale.
I’m not trying to convince you to cheer for this, I’m just correcting a common math mistake.
0.3% overall.
.3 percentage points. 11.6% increase
Those are two different things
I’m currently configuring my new linux dev/gaming machine. Thanks for giving me the push I needed, Microsoft!
Fuck microsoft. Fuck the Idea that everything needs to make a profit. Essential stuff should be publicly owned.
I want to nationalize seashores. It’s unfair rich people privatized entire coastline.
Same with natural resources. WTF are they owned by corpos? Anything mined and drilled should be owned by all citizens
In Oregon, at least, everything below the high water mark is public land.
That’s crumbs. I want everything withng 500yards of high water line to be public lands.
We have the same “loop hole” around here.
People started doing protests by sun bathing in front of the rich folks gardens.
I want to nationalize seashores. It’s unfair rich people privatized entire coastline.
Make them rentable. I want a private piece of seashore for vacation. But nobody should be able to own it for life.
Same with natural resources. WTF are they owned by corpos? Anything mined and drilled should be owned by all citizens
as sad as it is, that failed miserably in the soviet union. The soviets initially had way better computer but because all industry was publicly owned noone competed and noone bought computers which is why they fell behind the US.
There is a sensible middle ground that allows for the pressure-driven innovation of capitalism without its extreme and unfair exploitation. We just have to find it.
Make them rentable. I want a private piece of seashore for vacation. But nobody should be able to own it for life
Bro, that’s even worse.
I disagree. Soviets were busy recovering from WW2 for decades while funding own allies. They were not in the position to splurge on non necessities.
But even with that - they supplied entire population with oil, gas, electric no problems. Utilities barely cost anything even in modern russia
No problems? I think some of the citizens that lived through the Soviet era would disagree with you there
People don’t have a choice. Microsoft made W11 incompatible with a lot of hardware and Microsoft said, “lol, buy new hardware”
Giving nary a single fuck about whats best for their users.
It’s good to see people making a switch to Linux. But the real tell will be in finding out how many of those people actually stick long term.
Dual booting will likely be a part of it, and microsoft will do whatever they need to make sure the bootloader is broken constantly.
And that’s exactly why my Windows install is locked away in VM hell. Fucked with my bootloader twice and I said never again.
I even set up a custom boot option that autoloads the Windows VM in a lightweight Linux environment, so other than the brief Linux boot log, it feels exactly like a native install, 10/10 recommend
That possible for sure. But I don’t see dual booting being as common as it once was. Owning an old spare computer is pretty common these days. Heck, you can even get a dirt cheap mini desktop off of amazon and a referb/used/spare monitor and have a completely fine old time messing around with different distros without a care in the world. And that’s a far easier entry into Linux than dual booting anymore.
Dual booting has always been a pain in the ass. Unless you’re a multiplayer gamer that needs kernel level Anti-Cheat it’s easier to just swap over and suffer the transition.
Funny enough my reason for dual booting has nothing to do with anti-cheat I think, rather it’s because a couple of my more graphically intensive games will randomly cause my entire system to completely freeze while I’m on linux and they don’t on windows. (I also have a couple games that I would need to fiddle with wine to get them to work, but the primary motivation is the system freeze)
Its more about having the option. I’d be more comfortable going to linux if I knew that there would be a way to continue using something in a pinch, even if I just need to figure out how to fix it later.
That’s a valid way too. It’s just that a lot of people aren’t really ready to dive in with both feet from the start. No matter how easy Linux has become or we might think its is. Change is scary and hard. And I think that’s a problem that holds back many people yet today.
VMs. easier and less troublesome.
I liked the comment going “Steam doesn’t have data on PC gamers, only Steam gamers.”, hinting at the seven gamers that stubbornly refuse to use Steam and still hunt for CDs, or old archives of shareware. They are people too dammit!
Came here to 2nd GOG, but there are a few other storefronts with their own game launchers & DRM similar to Steam (Ubisoft, Epic). Humble Bundle provide (sometimes a choice of) GOG/Epic/Steam keys depending on the game, and they also have a collection of DRM-free games you can download directly.
Still, seven CD-ROM game hunters is probably a good estimate…!
I get 99.999% of my games through GOG.
The change is even more dramatic if you consider only those users who use English as their language in Steam. Also, Linux adoption rate has sped up this year. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ collects various data about Steam usage. One of the charts (screenshot below) show Linux market share among Linux/English users and overall Linux market share. I added the red line to demonstrate how I see the growth. There’s only few data points this side of the year, so my drawing is most likely wrong, but the growth starts around March. The green line is at 4.8% in January and February and 6.31% in July, so a nice 30% increase within about 6 months among Linux/English users.
EDIT: The post is now more in line with reality. Couple more data points:
- Linux market share among all Steam Linux users has gone from 2.06% in January to 2.89% in July. That’s a 40% increase within the first seven months only. And as another commenter said, the growth rate might increase towards the end of the year as more people starts abandoning Windows 10.
- The same numbers for last year are 1.95% in Jan '24 and 2.08% in Jul '24, which is only a 6% increase.
- But because the data is a bit jumpy, if I use approximate values of 1.75% for Jan '24 and 2.05 for Dec '24, the Linux market share increased by 17% in the entire last year.
- I’ll stop now.
Considering how people love to delay things until the last minute, I expect it’ll sharply rise in October.
I know this because I’m one of those people. Linux on several PCs and servers for years, but I’ve been too lazy to format & rebuild my gaming PC to get it off win10 and onto Linux.
You’ll switch and then ask yourself why you waited so long.
I run Linux in English (because translated Unix looks weird) even though I’m not in or from an English speaking country. Sorry for skewing the stats.
Thou shalt not be forgiveth! /jk
I might have slightly misunderstood what the information is about, but I also worded things in a wrong way. I edited the post to be more in line with reality, and added some more data points.
Could it be that Steam overcounts the users? I mean if you have a Steam Deck, do you now count as a Linux user, thus diluting the Windows share, even though you’re still (also) using Windows?
It’s based on devices. But, I wouldn’t consider it as diluting the Windows share. A user might have any combination of devices. Maybe they have PS5 as their home gaming device and Deck as their handheld device. They could also have Windows PC and Nintendo Switch. Or maybe they have Mac laptop and Linux desktop. I for one belong to the Linux desktop and Steam Deck camp. Steam Survey only tells how many Windows, Linux and Mac devices Steam users use, but, for example, not how many hours each type of device is used.
It is capitalism man, you vote with your vallet. If you have 2 devices (you spent money twice) you count twice.
I am moving over once win10 support ends and it starts to cause friction for me.
Just my two cents. I personally own a lot of different gaming devices running different platforms. I don’t have an allegiance to one particular platform because::I just think they’re neat::.
I don’t think I’m unique in this case either. In reality it’s always been “use the right tool for the right job” kinda scenarios.
With that being said, open source platforms have broken into the scene in a big way recently. I built a bd790i/radeon7800xt system a little while back and it has become my primary gaming platform. It runs Bazzite and it’s always just ready to go with most (if not all) of my steam games running.
I basically use windows on machines running Nvidia hardware. Even on my workstation where Nvidia has basically decided their chosen platform is WSL2 and chosen not to embrace the larger Linux ecosystem completely (yet).
I do have a test box that constantly runs bazzite-dx where I am testing Nvidia compatibility. It’s getting REALLY GOOD. however I just had a set back where Bambu studio flatpaks do not render 3d objects anymore. Flatpaks integration with Nvidia is a major pain sometimes as it can break with driver updates. I’m really new to this but fltapak needs the driver as well as the base system and then the flatpacked application needs to support it as well? It seems cumbersome. I don’t have this problem with AMD GPUs.
AMD is better than NVidia, just because AMD did not spend years screwing the Linux community out of drivers. I do not need that additional bajillisecond of speed that I do not notice anyways just to use NVidia’s bullshit. Seeing Linus Torvalds flip off NVidia with a very public “fuck you” is one of the most satisfying things I have ever seen. NVidia can eat a dick!
just because AMD did not spend years screwing the Linux community out of drivers.
They did, actually. It’s just that they did that a long time ago. I vividly remember a time when I avoided AMD hardware because, while Nvidia’s drivers were closed source, at least they worked. AMD’s drivers, when they worked at all, gave severely degraded performance compared to what that same hardware was capable of in Windows.
Fortunately, those days seem to be behind us now.
I was probably too poor to afford a computer that long ago, or at least to poor to be choosy about wjat I bought.
Right and I agree. All my recent hardware purchases in the last 3 years have all been AMD.
I have SOME Nvidia hardware right now and I’m sure other people do too. Unfortunately, AMD is lagging behind in some key scenarios that will hopefully be resolved in the near future. AMD knows this and doesn’t compete in the high end currently (outside of Datacenter).
I do like to think that AMDs apus are the future and the death of the discrete GPU is imminent. I have been looking at things like the 395 AI MAX (poorly named CPU) for some testing but right now it doesn’t make sense to hop platforms financially.
Indeed. For many applucations AMD is fine. I think there might be some issues if one wants to do CAD engineering.
the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship
I still run Windows on a rarely-used old laptop. Every time I use it, it reminds me how much that’s true.
- Forcing you to reboot to install updates, sometimes interrupting a download or something just because it knows best
- Ads creeping in all over the place
- More and more “features” you don’t want and never asked for
- AI being shoved in your face
- Surveillance everywhere
- Constantly trying to push you to use “Edge” instead of your chosen browser
Linux is not a perfect rose-colored relationship but it’s a mature one.
Linux only gamer for 3+ years now. It is a good time for the penguins.
I just had to change my expectations a bit (which might be a lot for some), but the end result is pretty good.
Always having bad Ping times in multiplayer games, helped out a lot with it.I assume you mean the ping was better on linux and the bad aspect was on windows?
No.
The internet in my country has high ping all over the place.
So I never had a good enough experience with Online Multiplayer games for them to keep me on Windows.
I wasn’t playing online games most of the time anyway, before switching to Linux.
I do play Elite: Dangerous, but that works pretty fine even with bad pings and it works very well on Linux.
Thanks for the clarification
This is me. Always Windows for my gaming computer and when I built a new one recently, I went full Linux. No regrets so far.
Same. Overall it’s been a great experience, but it’s had a few issues. Nothing making me even consider going back though
Which distro did you go with? I’m looking at switching soon too
Bazzite.
I found it really easy to get started with. Although I’d recommend KDE over Gnome. I tried Gnome for a few hours before changing my mind and it was just a little too different from what I was used to.
I’m used to Debian so I prefer Gnome, but either way, congrats on being more skilled with Bazzite than JayZTwoCents!
Here’s your commemorative psuedo gem!
Work computers had Gnome on Ubuntu, RHEL etc.
I installed my Debian with KDE.
That’s honestly the way. Bazzite just works without tinkering. It doesn’t eat into your game time with debugging. Plus KDE is very Win10 like, so it’s all just familiar and easy.
I’m glad Bazzite is what it is, but I’m hoping some of y’all get interested in other distros in the next few years. There’s several great options out there (and I don’t want to say … have everyone wind up on Ubuntu flavors and be having the same conversation about corporate overreach in a decade with Canonical as the new Microsoft)
Bazzite exists because of SteamOS, and SteamOS is Arch-based. If there’s a danger of one OS starting to dominate, I’d still think SteamOS is more likely because it has Valve’s backing.
I don’t think there’s much danger of all other distributions disappearing any time soon, even for gaming applications.
What I hope is that container-based atomic-type distributions take off. I’ve been using Linux for decades, and it’s such a nice change to have an OS where I don’t have to fiddle with drivers or the base OS.
have everyone wind up on Ubuntu flavors and be having the same conversation about corporate overreach in a decade with Canonical as the new Microsoft)
Bazzite is Fedora based, not Ubuntu.
Yes, I know - but my concern is eventual capture, like Microsoft has done to GitHub or how IBM is ‘partially closing’ RHEL’s source code. My point is that off were all in one basket (Bazzite) it’s easier to be taken over and reigned in. Bazzite is fine, but I hope is not the only distro all the influx of Windows users settle on. There’s a wealth of great projects - Garuda for example is a great gaming Linux distro.
:%s/Ubuntu/Fedora/g
Eh, I already have a decent amount of skill with running other distros headless. When it’s gaming time I prefer a solution that just works 99% of the time.
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Yeah, I love tinkering, but I also love not having to worry about an updating breaking my system. Bazzite is almost boringly stable lol
Bazzite is a community-made distro.
if you miss iphone + cydia, gnome + extensions is max dopamine, plus with arcmenu (customizable start menu, many presets) and dash to panel (panel like windows/kde) it’s basically like any other de.
Gnome is great on laptops, specially touchscreen enabled ones.
Though with extensions you can get it to behave very similar to KDE
The current gnome (3) is very different from previous versions. You might like a modern fork of gnome, like mate. Don’t let something that has a gnome connection turn you off right away if all you’ve seen is gnome 3.
I… don’t think Bazzite has a… mate flavor/spin/variant?
I think its just KDE or GNOME?
if on cachyos you get like 12+ de options which is nice when initially testing them all out, just demo each for a while
Thats neat, I didn’t know that!
Yeah, a benefit of arch based distros is that they are much, much more customizable than other OSs… downside of that though is that there are a whole lot more bugs that can happen, whole lot more crazy custom solutions that may need to be figured out.
I’ve not used Cachy, but I have used Arch before… if the Cachy people can figure out a way to keep all that just generally more stable, honestly kudos to them!
Bazzite basically narrows its official support scope so they can focus on a feature set that ‘just works’… I am sure I could figure out how to torture a Bazzite install to work with a non KDE / Gnome DE, but it would be a lot of work.
Or maybe it could set it up with the built in distrobox/distroshelf tools? Not sure, never futzed with a different DE in a distrobox.
Look at the desktop environment first. KDE is like Windows. GNOME is like MacOS.
Then look at some videos about how to get your GPU working on a distro you’re interested in if you have an Nvidia card. AMD GPU works out of the box.
I would recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Excellent implementation of KDE, GUI tools to do advanced things, rolling release (i.e. constantly up to date) but also thoroughly tested. Rolls back easily if something gets messed up. This gave me the least problems starting and I stuck with it for over a year. It was great.
I recently switched and have distro hopped a bit, landing on CachyOS which I feel I’ll stick with for a while (though I’m very indecisive and a small part of me wants to change over to Arch). CachyOS is based on Arch but with more ease of use stuff on top, especially for gaming (they have a gaming bundle which is just one command and you’re good to go), plus I’ve heard it’s the fastest or one of the fastest out there. Bazzite is also great (Fedora-based), which I used for a bit, but I started to get into using the command line more and found immutability to be annoying. It does mean it’s harder to fuck up though, but I don’t really care if I break my machine (you probably won’t break your machine regardless, that’s mostly sarcastic). Pop_OS! (Ubuntu-based) is also supposed to be good for gaming but I haven’t tried it. Keep in mind, if you plan on doing more than gaming and decide to use the command line for downloading, most download guides out there assume you’re using something based on Ubuntu or Debian (you’ll see a lot of “sudo apt install _____”), for better or worse. If you scroll down a bit you’ll probably find stuff for Fedora and/or Arch but not always. That doesn’t mean you can’t get the program on those distros, just that you’ll have to either know where to look or download a different way, such as from a digital storefront or manually from the website of the program you’re getting. I’m still a beginner actively trying to get better, but these are all things I would’ve liked to know when I made the switch a little while ago. Another thing to keep in mind is Linux and Nvidia don’t quite get along as well as AMD or Intel. I have an Nvidia card and both CachyOS and Bazzite had no issues, but for whatever reason Mint didn’t like to run steam games, no matter what I did. I made sure to have all the drivers downloaded and looked up a bunch of guides but I never got it running properly. Bazzite just worked straight out of the box, and CachyOS works even better for me after a little tinkering. If you have any questions, I just recently was where you are now so I might have more relevant advice, though I’m certainly no expert. But I’d be happy to help.
Once you know the equivalent commands to search, install, remove, … packages in your distro, problem solved.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that if someone doesn’t care to learn, it might be more straightforward for them to chose something that uses apt. I’m a beginner and I use pacman no problem, but I’m willing to learn. Lots of folks aren’t.
For anyone reading this: immutable does not mean you cannot use the command line, and you cannot tinker. It’s just different, and you will need to learn a few new commands, etc.
Additionally, Bazzite comes with Distrobox where you can literally install any software on any distro (including AUR if you want). There’s almost no limits.
I should’ve clarified that in my comment, you’re correct. I wasn’t trying to imply it wasn’t possible, just that a lot of people don’t care to learn new things and just want things to work like they’re used to, and the odd time they need to use the command line, it might be more straightforward if they aren’t using something immutable, for better or worse. Immutable has the upside of being harder to fuck up for newbies though.
I didn’t know about Distrobox, that’s really cool actually. I’m content with Cachy but if I went back to Bazzite I’d be looking into using that for sure.
honestly i see pacman/yay just as much as I see other stuff when looking at instructions, (paru is pacman/yay in cachyos for that stuff, pacman in cachyos is their own repos)
Cachyos is great if you want access to everything, debtap for the rare ocassion you need to install a deb, can install snaps and flatpak support easily, but you don’t really need to mess with all that, mostly everything is available with aur + flathub (have to do one terminal line since cachyos doesn’t have it by default)
Bazzite does have bazaar by default, which i like as the best flathub appstore, aur version stopped working for me.
You can access the AUR in Bazzite very simply by creating an Arch distrobox and installing yay
oh and gearlever to update appimages and make desktop files so it shows up in menus, i only use this for shutter encoder right now
exactly what I ended up on with exactly the same issues with Mint (and Zorin as well). Cachy and Bazzite just worked (bazzite didn’t work on live image though), but yeah Mint just didn’t work.
I started work Bazzite but didn’t want to be immutable. Then I switched to Garuda. Both have been super easy.
FWIW I also switched last year and chose Linux Mint. It was smooth and easy.
I just wanted to drop in and say I use Arch btw… lol, there multiple things to suit your use cases, Linux has a few gaming flavors.
Switched to Linux Mint a couple of weeks ago. Been playing games for 30 years on windows. So far so good. Played The Drifter through Heroic without issue. Great game btw.
Got an 1080ti. I hope I won’t run into to many issues.
Does that exclude steam deck users?
It’s all Linux users, Deck included. But Steam Deck’s market share among Linux users has declined from 42% in April '24 to 28% in July '25, and it looks like it has declined slightly faster this year.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
“SteamOS Holo” is the name of the Linux distro used in Steam Deck.
Good question. It’s an actual survey (not analytics data) which asks specifically about PCs, not handhelds. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Survey data isn’t always the best data. Linux users might be more likely to take the survey in the first place, for example, while Windows users might not care to.
