Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up when filtering for English only. It’s worth noting that for all the official support Macs ever saw in gaming, they never represented anything better than about 5% of the market.
I joined that group today, but it wasn’t necessarily this support thing. I hated Windows update most of the time anyway. Mostly I just needed to buy a new SSD so I could dual boot, which will allow me to transition at my own pace while getting comfortable. I bought a cheap 500gb Saturday.
The other issue is my version of decision paralysis on choosing a distro, which generally is paralysis up until I suddenly just bite the bullet. I went with Nobara since it looked easiest to support my hardware and get into my games quickly.
So far I’ve gotten FFXIV, Warframe, and Enshouded running the way I want, and am slowly downloading my other current games. I have to keep a 200mpbs download limit because I’m working too. I also wiped one of my 2tb drives that mostly had games I was planning to play soon or just started playing to make it exFAT. I’ll probably eventually convert the others but may need to buy another 2tb drive for transfers if needed.
Update: exFAT gave me issues with another game so I ended up just making it a btrfs drive.
Yeah, filesystem is a slow battle of forfeiture. Everyone wants to say “I’ll just use FAT, or NTFS, because both Windows and Linux support them!” And then it inevitably gives them performance issues among other problems.
I still use either for the drives where both of my dual boot OS’s need to access them, but I recognize it’s not a good place for games (I have some old, light ones that I’m not worried about accessing on NTFS, but big ones like Helldivers are out). It may even be a good excuse to learn more detailed partitioning so you can slowly shrink/eliminate what’s still using the two compatibility formats.
Distro choice is a tricky problem. I say that as someone that kinda settled on one; my own experience has not always matched others. But I will admit, it’s nice to stay on an interface not too far from Windows’ taskbar.
I do have an edge there as I’m actually pretty technically inclined (I do tech support for living, and at the risk of sounding like touting my own horn, I’m high up the escalation path for my company). So partitions and stuff are common things I work with, and this isn’t nearly my first brush with Linux. It’s just more getting games and a bunch of small unique software working is somewhat different from working with business servers where you have either stricter policies on what gets installed or vendor backup if necessary.
Still, much of my actual work involves solving issues by looking up errors and symptoms, so figuring out the issues here aren’t that hard for me either. While I do appreciate the GUI making it an easy switch from Windows, I’m no stranger to CLI either and feel quite comfortable using it, and documentation for a lot of what I’ve messed with so far has been pretty easy to find and follow.
As for my plans, I’ll probably eventually limit NTFS to one 1tb drive, or maybe do what you said and repetition it down to maybe 500gb, and hopefully most of what I do will be in Linux. I am the type to force myself to learn by force, so I haven’t actually booted back into Windows except for an issue where I couldn’t delete the NTFS partition from Linux. And I’ll probably hardly boot into Windows going forward either.
It can be a slow transition, but I did the same. I had equal space for Windows and Linux in 2017, predating the Proton years. When I built a machine in 2021, I saw how much I was using each OS, and it ended up being 1.5TB Linux and 500GB Windows. Whenever I build my next PC, I’m quite confident I won’t have any reason to use Windows at all, seeing as I haven’t even booted that partition in about a year. If there is some odd use case, like a firmware update utility for a peripheral that requires Windows or something, I’ll just install Windows briefly on a cheap mini PC I’ve got and then set it back to Bazzite when I’m done.
Haven’t checked the news itself, but been following the hardware surveys from Valve for some years now, and on average, Linux is on a slow but constant growth. Also, been checking US’s official analytics site every now and then for some months now, and there, Linux oscilates between 3 and 6% of users per system.
Hopefully we can surpass 5% by the end of the decade :D
I switched this year, but the laptop I switched with was on repair during the survey so I probably wasn’t counted this time :(
5% at the end of the decade is quite a pessimistic take 😉
Looking at the graph 1% was crossed mid/late 2021, while 2% was crossed mid 2024, so almost 3 years later. Now 3% is crossed a little more than a year later. Next year we would be likely to have crossed 4% and 5% should be no later than 2027, even if it doesn’t speed up much further.
Not at, by. Hopefully sooner.
Do I need to do the yearly survey or do they know I’ve swapped already?
It’s a random statistical sample. They know that approximately 3 people for every 100 are on Linux, but it doesn’t matter which 3.
Can I play pirated games on Linux?
I assume, it is often more easy to get games running without (or removed) drm, as drm may be the one tricky thing that is hard to get working with wine 🤔
Outside of delisted games, I always encourage people not to, but yes.
Why wouldn’t you?
I was always under the assumption that I cannot run Windows games on Linux, and that in order for games to work on Linux they need to be compiled for Linux and not windows.
All the pirated games are windows games. I haven’t seen pirated games for Linux specifically.
So do I understand correctly that I can download pirated games for windows and run them on Linux?
Using a program like wine, yes. Though it’ll depend to what level is successful.
And I assume running wine adds overhead and makes games run slower?
So I can only run pirated games by going through extra hoops and even then the level of success is varying?
See that’s what’s been preventing me from switching to linux for years and years and it seems this hasn’t changed really :(
I support indie devs and buy their games, but most often I can’t afford AAA games or simply don’t want to support greedy devs ruining the gaming industry, so I pirate them.
I mean really it’s like one more step and it’s pretty much just as easy as running a game on Windows I mean I don’t know what to tell you other than dual boot install or grab a laptop install or something else so you can just throw an instance on and give it a try you might be surprised
Malware is a decent reason. You may get the game, but you’ll likely get more along with it.
Now movies on the other hand…
SteamOS Holo 64 bit - 27.18% (-0.47%)
Arch Linux 64 bit - 10.32% (-0.66%)
Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit - 6.65% (+6.65%)
CachyOS 64 bit - 6.01% (+1.32%)
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit - 4.55% (+0.55%)
Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64
bit - 4.29% (+4.29%)
Bazzite 64 bit - 4.24% (+4.24%)
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit - 3.70% (+3.70%)
Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit - 2.56% (-5.65%)
EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit - 2.32% (-0.08%)
Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64
bit - 2.31% (-3.98%)
Fedora Linux 42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)
64 bit - 2.12% (+0.19%)
Manjaro Linux 64 bit - 2.04% (-0.31%)
Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit - 1.93% (-0.04%)
Fedora Linux 42 (Workstation Edition) 64 bit - 1.75% (-0.43%)
Other - 18.04% (-4.28%)
I spent the last two days building a machine from old parts and installing Linux Mint. It’s my first time using Linux and I am really surprised at how lovely it is. I am still learning, but I can easily see it replacing my home gaming PC. I have yet to find something I can’t get to work.
Fortnite.
Anything with anticheat unfortunately.
But I’m happily on Linux for daily and gaming. Welcome to the club
EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye both support Linux/Proton, though not all devs have enabled/updated it.
I think it will continue to rise. People are updating their rigs all the time. Whenever they update their rig they’ll have to ask themselves whether they want to continue with Windows on their new rig, or try with something new.
Most will stay on Windows of course, but some don’t. And those who switch to Linux are likely not returning to Windows (for gaming at least).
I think it will continue to rise. People are updating their rigs all the time. Whenever they update their rig they’ll have to ask themselves whether they want to continue with Windows on their new rig, or try with something new.
The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks, which run on Linux, not from people switching to Linux on their PCs.
If it continues to rise, this is the reason. The general public is less and less into using a desktop at all as time goes on, much less running, and much less changing to, an extremely niche operating system on one.
EDIT: The previous sentence is actually more of the reason, upon further reflection. The total number of people playing on desktops period is falling, and the vast majority of desktops are Windows, so non-Windows OSes will comparatively gain ‘market share’ as that happens, even if their numbers don’t change at all.
Actually, the raw number percentage shows that the increase is due to Mint, Ubuntu, and Bazzite. Maybe people are installing Bazzite on their Deck but likely not the other two.
Hannah Montana Linux support for Steam Deck when?
Not too soon (if you wanna run it in bare metal):
https://www.xda-developers.com/i-tried-hannah-montana-linux-in-2025/
I switched from Windows to Bazzite on my main rig 2 weeks ago. Likely won’t go back to Windows for gaming as I’ve had pretty much no issues with Bazzite.
I did also get a Steam deck recently, so anecdotally, both above answers are right.
Insert “I’m doing my part” meme
I want to say that I’ve been helping people get onto Mint and Bazzite. Going to pat myself on the back for contributing what little I can to grow this awesome community
The vast majority of this increase is from people playing on Steam Decks
I believe this is incorrect. The Steam survey break down GPUs by description and the Deck’s GPU appears in the results as “AMD Vangogh”, which only accounts for 0.39% of respondents. That implies that the vast majority of survey respondents using Linux are actually on PC, not the Deck.
the Deck’s GPU appears in the results as “AMD Vangogh”
I bet it’s EXCELLENT at rendering sunflowers!
Not so good at ears, though.
That’s not true. You can see on Steam Hardware Survey what OS people are running, and SteamOS only makes up 27% of Linux users on Steam, so the vast majority are on regular PCs.
The vast majority of the increase, is what I said. In other words, I’m saying it wouldn’t be nearly at the 3% mark without those users, and with over a quarter of all Linux users coming from the Steam Deck userbase, that is, in fact, true.
Without the Steam Deck there’d be 27% fewer Linux users. So while that would indeed mean Linux wouldn’t yet be 3% of the total Steam userbase, I think you will find that 27% is not the majority.
GamingOnLinux aggregates this data in a nicer way and as you can see there, the total Linux market share has gone from <1% five years ago to the 3% it is now. If that increase was mainly thanks to the Steam Deck, it would have to make up more like 75% of the Linux userbase rather than only 27%.
Instead, as others have pointed out, SteamOS’s share has actually gone down rather than up, which is a natural consequence of the Steam Deck being relatively old now so fewer are being sold.
Certainly interesting to look at the fastest-growing distros: Ubuntu (the well-known, popular option), Bazzite (the gaming-marketed one), Freedesktop (someone else can answer this for me), and CachyOS (the side-gaming one? Not quite a gaming OS but very good at it)
“Freedesktop SDK” means the user is running Steam via Flatpak. They could be on any distro.
The portion of people playing on SteamOS is steadily decreasing, which means new Linux users are on Steam Deck to a lesser extent.
Yeah, for me personally, I’ve got one or two devices that see irregular use that are linux now, but my main rig is still windows and will continue to be so, since I have a number of friends on xbox that I can get more cross play for via gamepass But since I’m currently boycotting microsoft, and don’t know how much longer friends will stick with xbox given their general market decline, and given all the stability issues with win11 lately due to an increase of AI code usage, and all the everything… It might be a matter of time
shoutout to WUBI for making factorio and space age native on linux.
Silksong is also native on Linux
ngl the hk and silksong native ports were pretty crap on my machine (but proton + Windows version worked perfectly)
It’s sad in a way but I kinda feel like proton is going to near wipe out the very few Linux native ports we get. It’s so much easier and more stable than trying to build and package for Linux.
According to statcounter, Linux desktop was over 4% marketshare in April 2025, damn that’s impressive.
We really are getting there.
By some reports it’s over 5%, statcounter may be undercounting Linux.
Everybody keep growing the userbase!! We got this!
Back when I worked at Apple Retail we used to say, “5 down, 95 to go”. I really want SteamOS to be a runaway success
I’m not so sure Valve is the right maintainer for the core desktop. The Deck works well, but mainly what Valve is maintaining is the Game Mode feature and Proton. Everything else is largely better handed off to a bigger group.
Tbf, I think people are hoping for mainstream SteamOS as the “safe supported option”, because they are afraid of an “unintuitive experience” (This is basically a Linus Sebastian demographic problem).
Personally, I think that’s a bad judgement call (as platforms like Bazzite have already proven that an official SteamOS environment isn’t required to have a good time gaming and using your machine), but I guess that means there’ll be even more excitement once that releases.
I can’t say having to fiddle around with Proton versions is exactly intuitive, though it has gotten better since last I tried it a year or so ago.
It is still not quite as smooth as it is on Windows, and I have tech-normie friends who want to do nothing more than download and press play.
Gamers be rising up
What makes the chart “only” on 3% is Chinese users. English Linux user alone has more than 6% percentage of Linux users.
We need Chinese government for their independent tech stack to include Linux further. At the moment, there are already several Chinese distro with big companies porting their basic apps to Linux (like chat app, office app, etc).
If Chinese gov force gaming company to support Linux as well, we will see a huge surge evenmore. There are a huge number of Chinese game that never made out of China, and exclusive to PC only.
Here’s a graphic showing that from this page:
I wish there was a graphic that showed English users with SteamOS separated from non-SteamOS users, because I think if we get 5% of non-SteamOS users, we should start to see devs pay a lot more attention. We’re starting to see devs make SteamOS-specific versions (e.g. THPS 1&2 offline mode), so the next step is getting Linux-specific adjustments for more games.
So uh, what happened between March and September 2021 that caused the current upward trend? Was the Windows 11 announcement that poorly received?
Yes, and 2021 was a perfect storm of a bunch of stuff:
- Windows 11 would break compatibility with older processors
- Steam Deck announced preorders in July - wouldn’t release until 2022, but there was a lot of excitement about Linux gaming
- LTT made a video series (part 1 was Nov. 2021) where Linus used Linux exclusively for a month
So yeah, a lot of people were curious at the time, and while not all of it was directly related to Windows 11, that certainly was a factor.
So 93% of the Linux users use English steam. I wonder how much of that is because Linux users just don’t bother to set system language (I am one of them), or maybe the language was not detected correctly.
Would that be similar to Windows users who don’t set the language? Or do OEMs set that for the region they sell in?
In my non English native experience, they will often set the language.
I wonder if Valve will ever release an official desktop version of SteamOS? I think Linux adoption would really increase fast if there was a gaming focused Linux desktop distribution with the support of an established company. But does Valve want that? A full featured operating system is a lot to maintain and provide support for.
Is that really needed?
I think what could really drive adoption is if computers with Linux pre-installed was more easily accessible. Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install and then it’s done. It doesn’t need to be SteamOS. Just any good distro will do.
Its become abundantly clear to me over the past few years that Linux is in place where, to get significant share it needs to have a major figurehead. Imagine if all ThinkPads suddenly were only available with Lenovo’s own fork. That kind of thing.
Unfortunateoy, that’s kinda the opposite of Linux ethos, and not necessarily likely to make Lenovo much money.
So the best we can really hope for at this point is a company with the brand awareness of Valve pushing SteamOS into the mainstream. People who play games know and generally trust Valve, so people (like my wife) who are on the fence, or who just need their computer to work without needing too much faffing, could likely trust SteamOS in a way they wouldn’t necessarily trust Bazzite or CachyOS.
Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install
Yeah, that’s not at all accessible to the average consumer; they don’t know what a “DE” even is, much less why they should choose any over any other.
Very, very few people want to deal with something other than a ‘just works’ situation.
They don’t need to, just give them 3 screenshots and ask which they want. Show KDE, GNOME, and whatever the distro wants as the third. Maybe include some bullet points below each explaining what they are (pick one from the last two):
- KDE - familiar, extensible
- GNOME - modern, minimalist
- Cinnamon/Budgie/MATE - something in the middle
- XFCE/LXQT - super lightweight for older systems
Maybe select one by default that the OEM likes, but showing the option helps nudge them toward the idea that this is a flexible system.
Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.
I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I’ve seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:
- The image is weirdly large, it’s like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
- Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
- If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there’s no way to adjust this.
- If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
- The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There’s a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
- There isn’t a simple way to tell it “put / on this drive, put /home on that drive.” There’s an automatic installer which will do god knows what…fail, most likely. There’s a “custom” partition dialog which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and then there’s a “custom advanced” one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
- If you’re in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite’s immutableness means that there is no /home, there’s a /var/home symlinked to /home.
And if it doesn’t randomly lock up, you’ve got Bazzite installed!
Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They’ve got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?
You forgot the part where the installer fails just right before the end. Every time.
Had this occuring on both my laptop and someone else’s that I was trying to install Bazzite to, which resulted in installing Fedora on their laptop instead (and back to EndeavourOS on my end), and even Fedora’s new installer errored out too. Thankfully the OS was working though.
I am suspecting your 6th point for that one, which even if it wasn’t I consider it a colossal failure on their part because it is NOT TELEGRAPHED AT ALL. I shouldn’t have to stumble upon random forum posts to learn about it, come on.
I tried to go with Bazzite on my wife’s old PC. Fuck knows what happened, but I could not get it to recognise that I’d downloaded the image with the Nvidia drivers built in.
Ended up giving up and rolling Kubuntu. I know Kubuntu and like it. And it works beautifully. Back in the world of RDR2 now, and loving it.
Bazzite is just a shit option vs using cachy. It’s the same goal and work load target. And bazzite manages to just be worse in every respect.
That’s really too bad. I’ve heard great things about Bazzite, and it’s what I recommend when someone wants SteamOS.
That said, that’s a bit different from what I’m talking about. I’m suggesting OEMs ship a pre-installed Linux desktop, and users are presented an option on setup about which DE to use. So all that would change is enabling one and not the others, but they’d always be present. After install, you could switch between them if desired without messing with the package manager.
I personally use openSUSE (leap on server, tumbleweed on desktop, Aeon Desktop on laptop), and their installer is solid, but I haven’t tried it on a 4k monitor (worked fine on 1440p). Unfortunately, I don’t recommend my distro of choice because it’s not popular enough to have a good newb support network, whereas that’s basically Bazzite’s core demographic.
Stop recommending bazzite, just r commend cachy.
It has a steam deck iso. It’s based on the same thing steamos is built on.
Bazzite is literally the worse option and more likely to lead to problems.
I don’t recommend Arch forks as a rule, unless it has fantastic support from the maintainers (e.g. SteamOS curates updates). It’s going to by break eventually, and it’s going to require manual intervention (probably minimal), and users will get mad. Maybe it’ll be fine for 6 months or a year, but it will break eventually.
That’s much less likely with something built on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or OpenSUSE. Those all have solid testing and upgrade rules, unlike Arch, which is basically “works on my machine.” I used Arch for years until I got tired of the random breakage, and now I’m on Tumbleweed which has far less breakage and stays reasonably close to Arch package versions.
My first recommendation is either Linux Mint (I prefer Debian edition) or Fedora, because those have good new user experiences and aren’t super opinionated like Ubuntu.
EndeavourOS has that kind of menu during the install process. A few screenshots and a brief explanation of each option.
I thought it was nice. It’s something I want to see more with other distros. The DE is what most people will notice about the OS either way.
Some companies sell Linux prebuilts, like System76, but that’s pretty niche for the average person to even know to search for.
Now, if stores like Best Buy had a section for Linux prebuilts, that would reach a lot of people.
The issue with that is, people have no idea what these “choice” even mean. SteamOS is SteamOS, Windows 11 is Windows 11, MacOS is MacOS, but Linux is a big list. If pushing adoption is the key purpose, the manufacturer need to pick one that they believe is reliable and in active development. Just one. All these editions will very likely cause choice paralysis, which lead to people deem it as “too complicated”.
Also Valve will not likely go that path again.
Is Battefield 6 supported? That is the only thing fully getting off Windows
It’s not that it’s not supported by Linux, but that the developers of BF6 choose not to support Linux.
Personally speaking, fuck EA and fuck kernel level anti cheat anyway, good riddance.
Also fuck giving saudi arabia money. Sometimes its unavoidable, but this is a video game. There are other video games, but there is no regime worse than the saudi regime.
“bUt ThEy DoNt OwN tHeM yEt”
The price has been settled on, so any success from here on out absolutely does directly benefit the saudis.
I was not aware of this. I cannot take back what I’ve paid
Technically they only benefit from money after the price was set, which was recently
Yeah kernel level anti cheat sucks. But I like Battlefield. But yeah i’m with ya F Ea
It’s frustrating because kernel level doesn’t actually help. The cheats and cheaters can also do that and do! I soured on competitive multiplayer because it’s become impossible to ignore that every popular PvP game is infested eith cheaters and that anti cheat is the equivalent of the TSA at Airports but even less effective. It’s security theater.
The only real prevention is consoles in games without cross play and that haven’t been cracked/exploited yet. Even then there’s man…AI In The Middle external cheats now that record the display output and can aim bot with controller input splicing hardware. But that’s not as easy to set up so way less cheaters.
Except then you’re gaming on a console which usually aim bots for you anyways because joysticks are inaccurate crap. Labeled “aim assist.” Halo Infinite for example was so egregious you couldn’t compete with controller players because of aim assist vs mouse and keyboard. That’s built into the fucking game!
I have a Windows laptop specifically for gaming, but I end up using my Linux coding laptop for games in the end.
It’s less hassle figuring out how to enable nvidia drivers on xorg in GNU linux so that I csn use Proton emulation than to deal with this weeks clusterfuck of windows update trying to make me turn on ads and spying and trick me into using a microsoft.com account to log in.
I am not joking.
The windows still has some dust on it from when I did some house renovations months ago, because I haven’t been bothered to use it.
Having been gaming on Linux for the past 10 years and facing basically 0 issues, I can also affirmatively I don’t understand the attachment to windows. I get it if you need specifically word or excel. and I guess if you’ve got kids who want to play fortnite.
Why not installed something like cachyos which has all of that figured out for you out of the box? Nvidia drivers, steam install, Proton, etc. I was up and gaming in no time post install.
Well, it’s primarily my coding laptop, so I prioritize the OS that has the best tooling for my needs there. Gaming is just a happy secondary option on the machine. :)
