Where?! I filled the hardware survey and as they asked what OS I was on was hoping to see a stat about OSes, but no.
Spoiler: we are talking about 0.32% rise in Linux gamers.
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.
At this point it is just easier to play 90% of my Steam library on Linux. Maybe it’s different for NVIDIA cards, but with AMD Microsoft is constantly trying to automatically installing old drivers and breaking things. No amount of registry edits seems to stop it. Hell, I had to open the command line just to install Windows with a local account only. Meanwhile, Linux is just click and play now.
@DelnitaCrane @mesamunefire The ONLY issues I’ve ever had with gaming on Linux was with x11 WM’s and that’s ONLY because my stupid Rog Strix is dual AMD/Nvidia and it doesn’t play nice with x11. Are there fixes for my issue? no. why? because I’m an idiot that decided to buy a laptop with dual AMD/Nvidia.
On Wayland it works fine.
I think it’s important to point out that the percentages are not necessarily that meaningful. If more people are using steam deck and ditch their windows PCs for it, it’s not an OS choice. It’s a choice to move to consoles. Additionally, steam deck also competes with traditional console brands (PS, Xbox, switch) and might take some market share there as well, so that even if no one ditched their windows PCs, the total number of users using goes up and hence, the percentage.
I haven’t had a steam deck in my hands, but I guess that it doesn’t need the user to understand the underlying system at all. It can be used by the same unskilled people who use android or iPhone. So, one core requirement I think people need to have to install any other os is not met or even trained, which is actual knowledge about computers.
The reports about “increase in market share of Linux user’s” is from my point of view, which is “I think it would be great if people would ditch windows and office” just a market bit. Useful but ultimately little meaningful.
Perhaps the steam deck is a gateway drug for desktop linux?
The gaming industry will never recover when valve gets picked clean by the capitalist vultures that continously circle it.
The PS3 also ran on Linux and allowed users to boot into full desktop Linux. Didn’t exactly lead to the Year of the Desktop Linux, did it?
Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.
It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.
Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.
Not every Linux user needs to ve comfy with terminal
If more people are using steam deck and ditch their windows PCs for it, it’s not an OS choice. It’s a choice to move to consoles.
They might have as well moved to Windows handheld or Nintendo Switch. They specifically chose the only Linux handheld on the market.
[Steam Deck] can be used by the same unskilled people who use android or iPhone. So, one core requirement I think people need to have to install any other os is not met or even trained, which is actual knowledge about computers.
Why is this a core requirement with Linux only? There are millions and millions of Windows users who have never installed an OS. Sounds gatekeeping to me.
They might have as well moved to Windows handheld or Nintendo Switch. They specifically chose the only Linux handheld on the market.
No, they chose a Steam console. A device with the same high convenience and low bar of entry as any other console, but with their (almost) whole Steam library on it.
Why is this a core requirement with Linux only? There are millions and millions of Windows users who have never installed an OS. Sounds gatekeeping to me.
Because conciously choosing and installing Linux is currently the requirement to run Linux on your PC.
If I go to the local electronics store I can pick up a Windows, MacOS or ChromeOS device that has everything pre-installed: OS, drivers, dependencies, all setup for instant usage.
And if I don’t even know what an OS is, I’ll get a Windows PC recommended by the sales people at said electronics store.
That kind of user experience is usually not available for prospective Linux users.
Unless they buy a Steam Deck, which is pretty much the only native Linux PC that’s popular enough that a non-tech person would know it.
(Technically stuff like Tuxedo and Framework exist, but they are pretty unknown.)
Because most pcs bought don’t have Linux preinstalled and usually only have the option of windows?
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.
Glad to have made the jump! not even dual booting
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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%.
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
I’m currently configuring my new linux dev/gaming machine. Thanks for giving me the push I needed, Microsoft!
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!
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.
the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship
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.
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.
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.
