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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I love tinkering, but I also love not having to worry about an updating breaking my system. Bazzite is almost boringly stable lol
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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
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.
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.
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
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.
Same. Overall it’s been a great experience, but it’s had a few issues. Nothing making me even consider going back though
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.
the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship
Linux is not a perfect rose-colored relationship but it’s a mature one.
It does, like any good relationship, need some work. I have been using Mint as my main driver for the last couple of months, and even being a beginner friendly Linux it still needed some time to learn and google around. Now that it’s set up i haven’t run into anything for a long while.
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
It is sad to see Windows get torn apart by Microsoft.
You don’t have to like it but most people know how to use it
No, they don’t, never have, and never will.
I would be surprised if ‘most people’ nowadays even knew what the ‘Internet icon’ does, since it’s not a logo of Facebook/Instagram/TikTok…
Even before phones, people could open a browser and perhaps browse pictures.
The Office Suite is next level, attained by relatively very few.
switched to arch 7 or so months ago because of the recall spyware breaking the camels back. havent looked back since, i shouldve switched sooner i actually like using my computer now!
Roughly the same for me. I couldn’t use Windows 11 on my old one and certainly wasn’t going to put it in my new one. Gaming has been a breeze too, much easier than I was led to believe.
Fuck windows, and copilot, and recall, and most especially OneDrive, and start menu ads, and unnecessary upgrades and … And … I gotta say I’m so much happier on Ubuntu, took me a little googling on some stuff and proton is still finicky sometimes, but man o man is it nice to have an OS which does what I tell it to.
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.
We have the same “loop hole” around here.
People started doing protests by sun bathing in front of the rich folks gardens.
That’s crumbs. I want everything withng 500yards of high water line to be public lands.
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.
how would that be worse?
everyone has the possibility to get to vacate on a private piece of seashore but noone gets to hog it and keep it from everyone else.
Commidification of nature is bad, mkay. I’d rather see beaches be labeled as public property, like in Oregon, Hawaii, or even Texas.
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
In the USSR, private plots owned by collective farm families, averaging 0.25 hectares in area, provided 30% of meat, vegetables and milk, 33% of eggs, and 59% of potatoes in 1979.
Bet the land was taken better care of when its a family that owns it compared to some minimum wage workers hired by a mega farm.
Yes, although I was referring to the fact that every experiment in collectivized agriculture in the 20th century boils down to: A minuscule percentage of the plots were left to private initiative and those plots account for the majority of the total output.
No problems? I think some of the citizens that lived through the Soviet era would disagree with you there
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
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
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.
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.
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
Linux market share has been growing at increasing speed. Last year, Steam Linux market share increased less than 20%, while it has already gone up by 40% this year. There is still 5 months left in this year.
Steam OS handhelds are pretty much the entirety of the growth.
The market share of Steam Decks has been declining among Steam Linux users for at least over a year. Steam Deck users were 42% of Steam Linux users in April '24, and this year’s July it’s only 28%.
Well, I for one installed Linux on my old surface book 2 yesterday, and my steam library works great on Linux. Even got better FPS.
So I became a Linux gamer yesterday and am super happy
The July 2025 data shows that Windows’ market share on Steam dropped by 0.44% while Linux’s market share grew by 0.32%.
While okay this is growth, it’s not exactly meteoric. Hopefully the trend picks up steam (cough) as the win10 EOL approaches.
Lots think the gamers will switch over as win10 gets to EOL. I don’t think so. Most gaming machines need to be more modern tomsupport modern games, so they will likely stick with windows and move to win11. I think Linux has a chance to convert many with older PCs, but they won’t be the gamers.
Hell I switched to Linux specifically because I refused to get W11. I do have to agree with you though, the average gamer probably won’t switch to Linux unfortunately.
This is exactly how it’s going for me. I’ve been simply too lazy to move everything, test it all, and probably do it all over a couple times to find the distro I actually like.
They most certainly will not switch (or switch and not decide to go back after a few weeks) with the timing of the release of Battlefield 6, which requires Windows. It’s an EA game, so I’m not touching that, but they’re doing a lot of marketing and it’s working.
I’m personally strongly considering switching when support for Windows 10 ends. I actually started testing the waters by installing Mint on an old netbook today. I game on PC, but the truth of why I’m considering changing is because I’m just sick of the crap with windows. Every new edition is just bigger, slower, filled with more bullshit. I’m just getting tired of disabling all the shit they want to force on me. I’m sure I’m not the only one, but of course this is just my personal experience.
I’m a gamer, and I ditched windows permanently early this year. shrug
I’m a gamer but on console. My PCs are all older so I use Linux on some of them…one still has windows for work software…it’s glitchy enough on Windows so I haven’t even tried wine.
Try it, you might be surprised. I played WoW under Linux like 15 years ago, and for a couple of patches WoW ran much better under Linux than Windows because of a bug in the GPU driver or something. The Wine folks handle buggy Windows software all the time, and might fix bugs that MS won’t bother with.
This is just wrong. All modern hardware will work on an equally modern kernel.
However when it comes to games, some competitive multiplayer games that require kernel level rootkits might not run on Linux if the developers think gaming on Linux is cheating.
I always suggest cross referencing protondb with you game inventory to see if you would have any issues
No, you’re misunderstanding. Linux supports new and old. Windows only supports newish. Gamers are more likely to be on newer hardware and so the end of win10 will still allow them to upgrade to win11. They won’t have obscelecence. Older PC users will have forced obsolescence due to win 11 requirements and the eol of win10.
So, while I expect Linux use to rise with the end of win10, it won’t be mainly gamer PCs. Gamers with a steam deck, already familiar with Linux might be included but that’s a tiny demographic.
I think you underestimate the share of gamers that stick with hardware for quite a few years. I maybe I overestimate them. but I think there are tons of people who have computers not eligible for win11
I agree with this and would also like to add the current economic situation to the list. People have less disposable income to spend on buying a brand-new computer just because Windows says so. Especially outside of North America and Europe, people are much more likely to be running hardware that’s multiple generations behind the latest hardware. I believe Windows 7 still holds the majority of installs currently in use, and end of life for that was 5 years ago.
Well uh… if that is month to month growth…
A year at .32% growth works out to about 4% growth, if that is rate is sustained for a year.
That would be roughly a doubling of linux marketshare in a year.
I dunno .32% in a single month seems pretty significant. Obviously it’s not like Windows is going to go the way of the dodo but it’s looking like Linux may be taking a permanent piece of the pie where it had no staying power before.
I hate to say it, but it’s literally PewDiePie recording a video and showing young gaming fans Linux and calling it “cool”. That’s it. The guy’s got 110M subscribers.
Maybe. But so what? Pewdiepie wouldn’t have made the video if windows didn’t have serious problems, and if Linux wasn’t an incredibly good kernel to build an OS on.
That video highlighted that you don’t have to be technical to use Linux, it’s here, and it’s ready for mass adoption.
It’s about half a million active users. So, yeah, a tiny city’s worth.
Though things often start snowballing this way and Windows 10 end of life is likely see see a jump.
Actually, it is meteoric.
Linux’s market share didn’t grow by 0.32%, it grew by 0.32 percentage points. It actually grew by 12.5% month-over-month. That huge. It went from 2.57% to 2.89%, which is only an increase of 0.32 percentage points. But that’s because the starting value is such a small percentage. But, the number itself grew by about 12.5%:
2.57 * 1.125 = 2.89
If it could keep up this month-by-month growth it would go from 2.57% to over 10% within 1 year. If it could keep it up for 2 years Linux would be nearly half of all Steam users.
On one hand, I don’t think that would happen because the people making the switch now are early adopters and more adventurous users, so at some point it’s going to slow down. On the other hand, I think adoption will speed up at some point once there’s a critical mass of Linux users and Valve and nVidia start putting even more effort into Linux builds.
I think we’ll see a bump in users centred around October, since that is when MS had announced support for Windows 10 ended. They have recently announced that you can (maybe) get into the Extended Security Updates program for a year for free, but that’s perhaps too little too late.
If there’s any company that can make money from users installing Linux instead of Windows, that October deadline is a great time for a publicity blitz.
So 2026 year of the Linux?
Relative, it is. Going front 2% to 2.32% (for example) is pretty good, though I don’t know where these numbers come from because the latest I saw had Linux at about 5%, and growing by something like 50-100% per year (for a year). Sure, the total number compared to Windows looks small, but compared to where it was it’s growing incredibly quickly.
Edit: Someone said that was monthly, in which case yeah, that’s pretty fucking big.
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!
When the internet turns off/gets even more firewalled, the data hoarders will be royalty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m currently configuring my new linux dev/gaming machine. Thanks for giving me the push I needed, Microsoft!
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.
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