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.
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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).
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
Actually I wish that was true but the reality is still that unfortunately a lot of online multiplayer games do in fact not work without issues on Linux
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%)
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.
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 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.
So 93% of the Linux users use English steam.
No, 82% of the Linux users use English as UI Language. Less than 3% use Chinese.
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.
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.
Mostly on steam deck it means not that much on PC
THPS offline mode is the same version as elsewhere, but it magically allows itself to operate offline when it thinks it’s running on a Steam Deck, which you can do with a launch parameter. Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has a native Linux version that is only officially supported for Steam Deck, and that might be closer to what you’re referring to.
which you can do with a launch parameter
My point is they built functionality specifically for a Linux-based system. In THPS, that meant offline mode, but for other games it could be anti-cheat, where to store game saves, or default settings (I think Cyberpunk some?).
My point is that Linux is getting on the radar of game devs, and that’ll increase a lot at some level of adoption. I think that level is 5% on desktop Linux.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a unicorn in a lot of ways, so that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, but it’s related. I’m not going to expect BG3-level of support from devs, THPS 1&2 would be so much more than we’re currently getting.
It’s possible, but it’s also possible that they already had that offline segregation built into the code to support the Switch version, and that it was trivial to enable.
On a separate note, the BG3 native Linux version is so strange. Larian is threating the SteamDeck like a console. As if it is a bundled OS+HW system with only one available game store and only one useable OS. So they are only releasing it in steam, not on any other store. As if that means it can only be installed on SteamDeck and not on other Linux systems on different Hardware. They forget that anyone can install other Linux distributions or even windows in SteamDecks or use other game stores.
This decision is so strange, because it disadvantages people that bought the game for PC elsewhere and own a SteamDeck.
Like will they make performance patches to their games gated behind which which store the game was bought from?
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.
A brand name that people trust is a huge deal in marketing
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.
Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.
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.
Ooh, Lenovo is a much bigger deal.
I was really surprised at the price difference. Win11 Home adds $140 to the laptop cost? I would’ve expected $100, but damn.
And Win11 Pro is $200 over Linux lol
Strong agree.
Everyone agrees chromeos is not THE best OS but you won’t see a single person dualboot windows on their personal chromebook.
How google fucked up gentoo is another topic.
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.
Bazzite already fills this niche. It just doesn’t have the Steam name on it.
I can attest that SteamOS does work on my rigs that are AMD gpu/cpu. It actually works great. I haven’t had one single issue. But I don’t do multiplayer games either.
I’d guess Valve wants whatever makes more games work on Linux so that their Steam Deck works better and is more compatible.
And that means the most important thing is Linux desktop adoption by game developers so they make more native games. So somewhat ironically, I don’t think SteamOS would be as high a priority as other distributions, since it focuses on players instead of developers.
Ironically, some games run better on the Steam Deck through Proton rather than the native Linux version.
A lot of games received their ports during the Steam Machine era, used outdated technologies like DirectX to OpenGL translation, and never got updated, so it’s not surprising unfortunately.
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.
Yeah, even more casual games like Balatro are proof of that, despite how easily you can port a game of that nature otherwise, people will choose to use proton because it’s still able to sync with their progress and symlinking is too inconvenient to consider unless you’re running like 2gb ram or something.
And, I totally get that! It’s like yeah, I know how to setup a symlink to probably make that work, but you know what’s a lot easier than that… Just not doing that and just having it work.
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.
It’s mostly convenience. They know it works, so they keep using it.
Luckily Microsoft is making it inconvenient to continue using Windows.
I just banned Fortnite in my house because I don’t like the MTX nonsense. My kids either play on Linux or our Switch.
Minecraft Java edition with mods is so good. Get them accounts and use an open-source launcher like PrismLauncher, you’ll be having a good time :)
Yup, that’s what we do. I just installed a How to Train Your Dragon mod, and they love it. I have a server hosted on my computer, so my kids can play together.
Hell yeah, good on ya. Also nice Weezer username reference.
Weezer? It’s a Three Dog Night reference. :)
Because sometimes Proton doesn’t work? Like, it’s good enough for most games, but there are always edge cases and games that randomly break one day.
As of now, you have to make an effort to find a game that won’t work through Proton, aside from games with malware (anti-cheat).
A lot of games have anti-cheat…
And not all anti-cheat is malware. I was referring to the kernel level anti-cheats.
My daily drivers: Outlast Trials, Dead by Daylight, Wild Assault, Helldivers 2, Warhammer Space Marine 2.
All of those work fine on Linux. It just seems to be the most toxic, gamerfuel-heavy games that go full kernel anticheat.
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. :)
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
Plenty of anti-cheats work on Linux, and the ones that don’t are probably borderline malware anyways, so it’s really a win-win
All anticheats are not made equal, and some are functional under Linux.
EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye both support Linux/Proton, though not all devs have enabled/updated it.
I play Fortnite with my kids, but the only way is using that Xbox streaming service in the browser.
MORE!! MORE!!!
I’m doing my part!
I’m one of them. Huzzah.
I’m kinda in the same boat. I have an old gaming laptop that just barley didn’t make the win11 arbitrary cut. Not because it was below spec, it was way above. Just because it was too “old”. I installed Bazzite. But I do have a top tier premium gaming PC I built recently that’s still on Win11 with Dualboot with Bazzite.
Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command lines. The average user will give up there really quickly.
Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.
No longer do we live in the days of visiting a vendors website to download their executables. They are conveniently packaged for us in the App Store (package manager).
Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.
Its one of the quirks of a lot of the atomic distros. Because they are specifically built around the idea of having a specific set of packages at a specific range of versions for every rev of the distro itself… adding more packages is kind of a clusterfuck.
For flatpaks (and I think appimages too?), it is seamless. For anything else you are googling the commands to add packages as “layers” and so forth
And, to be fair to Bazzite (which I use for my HTPC and love it on there), I have had zero issues with actual gaming. Steam out of the box and Heroic is one flatpak away. But holy shit was adding
iperf3to test some network infrastructure tweaks a Thing.Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora rather than use one of the atomic distros. Atomic distros make a lot of sense for deployed machines but for anything someone is going to use as “their” computer? Just learn to not type
sudobefore every command you run… and maybe get a jetkvm so your tech savvy friend can fix your computer after an nvidia driver update.Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora
Probably sound advice if they are in (presumably) the 0.01% of users (like you) that need other utilities that are hard to get.
If they aren’t, then Bazzite, etc would be perfect for them (as you said, zero issues with gaming/more common uses).
Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command line
Strong disagree on “most”
For the vast majority of users? Everything they need is in Steam and MAYBE Heroic, which is the same as on Windows.
In terms of non-gaming? I… have very strong Thoughts on atomic distros and the hoops Bazzite et al make you jump through with regard to layering and the like, but they are in Discover and the like. So “app store” experience.
I personally don’t think Bazzite is a good desktop OS (but I love it for my HTPC). But any of the user friendly distros (e.g. Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu) should be almost zero command line usage unless you have a reason to use it.
the hoops… [they]… make you jump through with regard to layering
I played around with a few atomic distros and it seems like rather than layering, running things in containers is the preferred solution.
It won’t be the solution for everything that layering could “fix”, depending on your situation, but it is something that I wasn’t initially aware of when I started playing with Bazzite, Fedora Atomic, and now Aurora.
Basically, if you could just run whatever you need to run in a container, that might be another solution.
Bazzite is a vehicle for Steam. If your basis for using it isn’t ‘gaming through Steam’, you’re already intentionally venturing into un-average lands.
Not directly relevant but I just discovered CachyOS for my AYN Loki and it’s pretty fuckin awesome. I hope we retain some non-immutable options for those of us who want to heavily customize our experiences with these devices. It was hard to find something I could just run syncthing and some standalone emulators on. I don’t want valve and libretro in complete control of what I do and do not do on my handheld linux or not - and it could very easily go that way with the popularity of immutable distros. Maybe I’m just paranoid. I dont know.
Immutable distros will become a massive fucking headache. Just watch
Out of curiosity why?
It seems like the perfect thing for BFUs…
Its just replacing closed systems with more closed systems.
They already are. So many user complaints on popular packages have nothing to do with a bug on the package, but are caused by the moronic permissions systems used by Flatpaks and similar.
I think so too… not going in that direction myself.
I’m watching closely.
I just installed cachyOS last week, and quite like it. Im experienced with Debian and rpm based OSes but haven’t used Arch before, but so far this OS has made it pretty straight forward.
Yes its quite nice!
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.
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.
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.
I have 4 computers, only gaming one is still running Windows, other 3 were moved to Linux few years ago when Microsoft started with forced online accounts bs because I couldn’t be bothered dealing with stupid bypasses. Two are running Ubuntu, one is running Fedora. Those are never going back to Windows.
Sweet. Hopefully one day your use case will be resolved so the last one can move as well.
