Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-Tops-5p

by hkmaxpro • 4 months ago

784 368 4 months ago

mikenew• 4 months ago

Even if this is largely due to a change in how PCs in China are being counted, it's still amazing to watch Linux usage continue to climb like this.

It's really the only opposing force to Microsoft's enshittification of Windows.

WaterRun• 4 months ago

Linux’s ecosystem has also improved significantly over the past two years, especially in China. Due to the influence of “Xinchuang” (that is, domestically produced Linux rebranded under another shell), many Chinese desktop applications have been reworked in the past couple of years, switching from Windows-specific tech stacks to cross-platform ones—mostly Electron, basically browser wrappers—and now support the Linux platform. The commonly used software is basically all there.

In addition, the development of LLMs has greatly lowered the barrier to using the Linux command line. Problems that used to take a full day to solve can now be handled easily by anyone who can write a prompt—just ask, copy, and paste. This has even made Windows’ command line unfriendly by comparison, despite its own major improvements in recent years, turning it into a significant drawback.

sonzohan2• 4 months ago

When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles)

When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.

Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.

My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)

malbs8• 4 months ago

On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.

On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.

after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out

darkteflon4• 4 months ago

Sadly, the original Assetto Corsa is also borked on Linux (AC Evo and AC Rally, on the other hand, run great).

rounce6• 4 months ago

Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.

0: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/Using_Simucube_wheel_base_in...

1: https://simracingonlinux.com

rshackleford12• 4 months ago

You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.

You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.

cogman103• 4 months ago

Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.

Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.

DiabloD32• 4 months ago

I will warn you, Ubuntu is basically dead now.

Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.

sonzohan2• 4 months ago

Is your name a reference to the Blizzard game? If so, I worked on that :)

You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.

Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging

yjftsjthsd-h3• 4 months ago

Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base

When was that? I don't disagree that it appears to be the case (especially with replacing coreutils/sudo/etc and the... varied approach to .deb vs snaps) but I'm not aware of them saying it explicitly in those terms?

vkazanov3• 4 months ago

As somebody who has been around linux almost for as long as it exists, i must say that is a very strong statement.

In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.

theevilsharpie• 4 months ago

Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Citation very much needed for this claim.

flohofwoe2• 4 months ago

If that means that package versions for commonly used tools are less than a decade old in the future that's probably a good thing though ;)

traderj0e12• 4 months ago

Sorry but this comment is part of the reason anyone should rightfully be scared to switch to Linux. Not only do you have to pick one of 999 distros, but every choice is wrong according to someone. Which one do you recommend, and is it the kind that will throw random issues or be called evil?

traderj0e12• 4 months ago

They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?

komali22• 4 months ago

If you have any unusual set-up going on personally I'd recommend a rolling release distro like manjaro (arch) or fedora, so you get latest drivers and whatnot fast. Modern releases of these distros come bundled with the same desktop environment options as Ubuntu and good, easy to use package install and update GUIs. IMO it's more noob friendly than Ubuntu because your stuff is more likely to work without weird workarounds.

Zardoz843• 4 months ago

I strongly suggest any other distro that is Ubuntu. Canonical is a Microsoft wannabe

deltoidmaximus2• 4 months ago

Fighting off snaps would be reason enough to abandon them but Canonical has control of the snap store in a way that is antithesis to open source as they're trying to run a walled garden play. This is the exact type of crap that lit a fire under my ass to get off Windows in the first place.

cryptoegorophy• 4 months ago

I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?

bigyabai• 4 months ago

It's hit-or-miss, with recent live service and esport titles being the iffiest. The older multiplayer titles, casual shooters and natively ported games are more consistently supported and form a sizable library of working online games.

mcv2• 4 months ago

Anti-cheat systems that rely on rootkit-style undermining of your OS will indeed not work on Linux.

toofy• 4 months ago

i thought it would bother me, but honestly, tehre are just too many good games that dont require eac.

i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.

[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.

Zhyl5• 4 months ago

There's a good tracker here:

https://areweanticheatyet.com

mancerayder3• 4 months ago

That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.

Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.

Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.

But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?

And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.

jms7032• 4 months ago

I had the same experience! Not looking back at all.

noisy_boy• 4 months ago

I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.

thrdbndndn• 4 months ago

I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions.

The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?

And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.

At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.

amarant2• 4 months ago

I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!

malbs8• 4 months ago

to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux

the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.

next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.

pjmlp4• 4 months ago

It has been achieved with WSL on Windows, and Virtualisation Framework on macOS.

Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.

BigJono• 4 months ago

Well, if it's any indication, my sister, who is very much not a tech person, randomly asked me to help her install Linux Mint a month ago, and has been using it successfully since without needing to ask for help once (at least not from me, I suspect ChatGPT is getting a workout).

That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.

taskforcegemini• 4 months ago

a lot of people don't even have a computer and do everything on their phone. Given androids market share, one could argue Linux is already present on most desk tops and therefore has already won.

faangguyindia• 4 months ago

This time it's different.

Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch.

everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches

I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns.

Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast.

using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.

unixhero• 4 months ago

I have tried Arch btw

HDBaseT3• 4 months ago

The key word in the article is "again"

'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.'

This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.

This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."

BoredPositron3• 4 months ago

It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.

keyringlight• 4 months ago

The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.

HerbManic• 4 months ago

Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months.

Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.

jstummbillig• 4 months ago

Even if it wasn't for corrections Loads of people

This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.

ErroneousBosh2• 4 months ago

Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later?

Everyone who bought a gaming PC last year, only to be told it has to be scrapped now because Windows 11 doesn't like the colour of the power cable.

ThatPlayer5• 4 months ago

The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday.

It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%

hkmaxpro• 4 months ago

How does a Jan/Feb holiday affect this year’s March number (that was reported in early April)?

I’m not talking about the Feb number that is reported in March.

krs_• 4 months ago

Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Zhyl5• 4 months ago

Yes, this is the key. You can account for anomalies such as Lunar New year, do rolling averages and other statistical modelling to show trends.

Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.

zokier• 4 months ago

Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.

helterskelter2• 4 months ago

This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.

Tade0• 4 months ago

I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.

bilekas• 4 months ago

Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased.

Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever.

The future is bright.

WhyNotHugo• 4 months ago

any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt

Agreed.

January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.

everdrive• 4 months ago

Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.

nimbius• 4 months ago

unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.

- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.

- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.

- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.

october8140• 4 months ago

It’s great. Moving on from Windows has been like leaving an abusive relationship.

cafebabbe• 4 months ago

They are even playing the "come back, i've changed" card recently :D

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

"Recently"? Did people forget the whole "Microsoft <3 Open Source" flop already? Feels like it was just some years ago.

bb88• 4 months ago

2026 is the year of Steam Linux.

simmanian2• 4 months ago

A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I have an nvidia gpu as well, which apparently does not work very well on Linux. For me, on Nobara, it's been working flawlessly.

The most annoying thing I encountered was the Switch controller support being rather poor. Every button press was somehow interpreted as two different buttons at the same time and I had to figure out which commands to run on Terminal to stop it from happening. Even then, the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects. I don't really think this is a Linux issue per se, but I recommend people buy a couple of 8bitdo controllers on Amazon which come with USB dongles if they want to go this route.

I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard, but I think there are enough games out there with controller support that this is not going to be an issue.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection

tmtvl• 4 months ago

I have an 8bitdo Pro 2 and it's... kinda okay? 90% of the time it works great, but if I don't have an application running which looks for a controller then the controller gets disconnected and reconnected every 10 seconds or so.

manbash• 4 months ago

Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.

darkteflon4• 4 months ago

Me too. My weapon of choice is the Dualsense. Lots of great things about it in addition to gyro controls: as of late last year you can pair 4 devices with it. I have one Dualsense and roam between PS5, Bazzite desktop and Steam Deck seamlessly.

deafpolygon3• 4 months ago

How do you use the gyro sensors to play? I looked into it before but couldn’t wrap my mind around how we’re supposed to do that.

GCUMstlyHarmls• 4 months ago

8Bitdo does have a gyro controller, I have the Ultimate 2. It does have some requirement to configure the gyro though, you have to boot it in `dinput` mode by holding down a button.

I have included a link from my notes, I have not actually tested it much beyond seeing that the gyro does work in steams "configure controller" thing, never got around to correctly mapping any game.

https://pastebin.com/YP4CD6BX

pkulak• 4 months ago

The Steam Controller will be such a blessing when it comes out.

seaal• 4 months ago

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

lloeki• 4 months ago

Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.

I still ran in a few snags:

- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.

- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.

Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.

malbs8• 4 months ago

dude, the whole Linus sticking his finger up at nvidia meme? Its still real in 2026. The opensource ABI whatever the fuck they call it is trash. I'm absolutely ready to purchase an AMD card next GPU I buy. I don't want to give nvidia anymore money, I'm done. It'll be AMD GPUs from now on no matter the performance diff, purely because they've got a better attitude to supporting non MS deployments.

There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.

If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!

noname120• 4 months ago

Is it thanks to ML needs or is it unrelated?

matja3• 4 months ago

The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.

Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?

Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.

I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?

[1] 6800 Ultra, 7800 GTX , 7900 GTX, 8800 GTX, GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 680, GTX 760 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 4080... probably missed some.

simonask• 4 months ago

I've also never had any trouble with NVIDIA on the desktop. I think most issues people have are on laptops, which have odd hybrid/dual GPU setups, and which exercise suspend/hibernate much more aggressively.

heavyset_go4• 4 months ago

If you have sufficiently old Nvidia GPUs, eventually drivers and supporting software stops shipping with distros. I have a bunch of older laptops that support in Ubuntu existed for like 10 years ago, but drivers stopped being updated and Ubuntu dropped them from their repos.

threetonesun• 4 months ago

We've had open source AMD drivers for... 20ish years now? Meanwhile Nvidia begrudgingly added drivers support in the last year or two. So maybe some recency bias.

cogman103• 4 months ago

nvidia x11 support has been pretty good for quite some time. It's nvidia wayland support that has been less than stellar. That has gotten better in the last year to year and a half now.

Now, I think it's no big issue so long as you are using a distro that supports up to date drivers. That should be about everyone now as I think even debian stable currently has decent drivers.

newsoftheday• 4 months ago

Same, no issues with any nVidia card going back two decades, several PC's and laptops, Linux and Windows.

hamdingers2• 4 months ago

It has more to do with how you're using the cards. I don't see you mention gaming at all, that's where the biggest performance penalty and lack of support is apparent.

foresto6• 4 months ago

The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.

It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.

I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.

Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.

DanielHB• 4 months ago

I just migrated to linux (Bazzite) in March, I have a RTX 3080. The only issue I ran into was that video stream compression is not supported on linux so I can't run 1440p 165hz with HDR on because my monitor doesn't support HDMI 2.1. Either I need to turn off HDR or lower refresh rate to 120hz.

Jach• 4 months ago

the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects

Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?

MisterTea• 4 months ago

on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console.

This is the way.

I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.

I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.

edit: > I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard

When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.

fwip• 4 months ago

If you haven't tried it, the Steam controller does a pretty good job of playing mouse&keyboard games. The original is probably hard to find now, but allegedly they'll release a new one later this year.

seabrookmx• 4 months ago

You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.

tasuki2• 4 months ago

I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid.

Explain please?

simmanian2• 4 months ago

I read online that playing games on a shared screen is better because it establishes gaming as a group/social activity.

functional_dev• 4 months ago

what surprised me is how Proton works under the hood... no emulation at all!

wine translates win API -> Linux. Then DXVK converts DirectX calls into Vulkan in real time, and VKD3D-Proton for DX 12. so it always native Vulkan.. no wonder performance is even better than in windows!

this laid it out it for me visually - https://vectree.io/c/how-proton-runs-windows-games-on-linux-...

tomnipotent• 4 months ago

no wonder performance is even better than in windows!

Every "benchmark" I've seen from someone claiming a game performs better on Linux via Proton than on Windows was written by someone that doesn't know anything about running benchmarks or how statistics work.

geetee• 4 months ago

I was waiting for the steam machine and grew impatient. I instead built a PC to go behind our family room TV. I gave bazzite a chance before committing to a copy of Windows. I'm glad I did. It runs perfectly. Zero hassle, no chasing down drivers. The only thing to be aware of is that a handful of games are not compatible, generally due to their anti-cheat software (e.g. marathon won't run, but arc raiders does.)

tapoxi2• 4 months ago

Bazzite is incredible, I've been running it on my gaming PC for about two years now. Games just work these days, and the updates are silent so I never need to think about them.

Gigachad2• 4 months ago

After installation, I haven't even used a mouse and keyboard with Bazzite. Everything is controller accessible. It just feels like a console like "just works" experience.

legitster• 4 months ago

The top distro is Arch - implying that the Steam Deck userbase is moving the needle.

Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.

It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.

traderj0e12• 4 months ago

Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.

tokai• 4 months ago

Linus has been using Fedora for over a decade.

kombine• 4 months ago

It's not just the single distro, but single Desktop Environment upon which app and ecosystem developers will standardise. I'm glad that the latest generation of gaming distros are converging on Plasma.

Karliss• 4 months ago

Steam Deck is currently ~25% of those 5% Linux users. Good chunk but not a majority. You can estimate it in two different ways which produce similar results: filtering to Linux only looking at OS list "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" is 24.48% and in the GPU list "AMD Custom GPU 0405"+"RADV VANGOGH" add up to 23.72%.

PurpleRamen3• 4 months ago

The top distro is SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but does not appear as such in the stats. The Arch appearing in the stats has to be CachyOS and other gaming-distros, as also real Arch-users.

But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.

pavon2• 4 months ago

No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.

forrestthewoods6• 4 months ago

SteamDeck should be excluded from “Linux use” imho. Especially when it comes to click bait headlines.

Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s. Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!

tapoxi2• 4 months ago

SteamOS is just an immutable Arch, and all Steam Linux games use the Steam Linux container runtime or Proton.

Bazzite and a few others provide a similar console-style experience.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 4 months ago

Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s.

It's really not; SteamOS is just another GNU/Linux, and pretty close to vanilla Arch Linux for that matter.

Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!

Proton works fine on other distros.

forrestthewoods6• 4 months ago

SteamOS is just another GNU/Linux

if you are a gamedev considering support for SteamOS and considering support for generic Linux desktop they really really really REALLY are not the same. At all.

tribaal• 4 months ago

SteamOS is really a desktop linux. You can switch to "desktop mode" to see the "normal desktop" and you get a KDE where you can run whatever you want.

It's "just" immutable Arch that defaults to Steam's console mode interface.

vkazanov3• 4 months ago

Try it. Switch to desktop mode. Behold! A desktop linux!

SteamOS is so very much linux that even WebOS and Androids pale in comparisom.

conceptme• 4 months ago

you can just navigate to the full linux desktop on the steamdeck?

Zardoz843• 4 months ago

yes

akimbostrawman5• 4 months ago

completely different beast from desktop Linux

Absolutely not. If you ever actually used it you would know that the only difference is a custom big picture mode like interface. Anything else is literally the same code.

forrestthewoods6• 4 months ago

Have a SteamDeck. Have shipped games for Linux.

poulpy123• 4 months ago

SteamOS is just steam big picture mode by default on an arch linux. You can switch to a regular KDE in one click

2pEXgD0fZ5cF• 4 months ago

What you say is not even remotely true. SteamOS is basically just Arch with steam preinstalled.

rigrassm• 4 months ago

I was keeping a Windows install around solely to play Fortnite with my kids but they've finally found other games.

Rocket League performance on Linux used to be the other big reason but about 4 months ago I fired it up and found it ran smoother (the random stutters I have suffered through on Windows are not there on Linux).

Now that those two are no longer relevant I can finally reclaim that wasted SSD storage.

thinkloop• 4 months ago

AI fixes Linux on the desktop. Whatever obscure issues you’re facing, you’re a quick prompt away from the solution.

HDBaseT3• 4 months ago

Whilst I tend to agree, I also don't recommend just pasting every command from ChatGPT into your machine without having some understanding/validating process.

ozgrakkurt• 4 months ago

Best flow is

Llm -> manual research -> apply

But no one has the time to validate everything llm writes via manually researching it unfortunately /s

traderj0e12• 4 months ago

Was not the case when I wanted to use a GameCube controller via Wii U adaptor without a lot of extra lag. Yeah that's a niche, but it works fine in Windows and even Mac.

ThatPlayer5• 4 months ago

I believe most of those work with controller drivers in the application (Dolphin Emulator or Steam/SDL) rather than the OS level. That's why the Windows solution requires Zadig to replace the HID driver.

On Linux instead of replacing the driver, you have to add an udev rule that allows applications to communicate with the USB device directly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/blob/master/6... And you can see in this list, it's not the only controller with that requirement.

SteamOS includes this by default.

Underphil• 4 months ago

Assuming you actually take the time to retroactively understand what you just did and don't become a slop-ministrator.

akimbostrawman5• 4 months ago

In my experience AI is unreliable more often than not. It is conflating topics, uses outdated information or straight out hallucinates. It can be good if you already know enough to call it out on its bullshit.

coreyburnsdev• 4 months ago

Completely false. The models are nothing like they were a few months ago. Try codex 5.4

nijave8• 4 months ago

The paid plans which enable "thinking" and internet research are far better than the free tiers and open weight models

e.x. ChatGPT-5.4 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.6

heavyset_go4• 4 months ago

LLMs regularly give wrong advice for debugging and fixing Linux stacks, especially desktop stacks.

nijave8• 4 months ago

Which LLMs? I've had good success with Claude Opus >=4.5

Older/smaller models were far worse

pjmlp4• 4 months ago

It will reach 10% in 2050 thereabouts, given current velocity, assuming current computing models are still relevant by then.

vkazanov3• 4 months ago

Well, in the overall kernel space there is nothing but Linux-based kernels right now.

pjmlp4• 4 months ago

You should broaden your hardware horizons.

Straight out of Linux Foundation, https://www.zephyrproject.org/

There are no Linux kernels on Sony PlayStation nor Nintendo's Switch, or even Microsoft's XBox.

Windows with its 80% market share has no Linux kernel.

Zero Linux kernel running on the ca 15% Apple desktops.

Zero Linux kernels running on iOS and iPadOS.

No Linux kernels on Arduino or ESP32, althought they certainly can run ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS.

And then there are INTEGRITY, vxWorks, QNX, NutXX, FreeBSD, OpenBDS, DragonFly, IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath MCP, OS 2200, ThreadX, SphereOS, Fuchsia,.... and plenty more I won't bother to list, none of them with Linux kernel.

kleiba• 4 months ago

That's possibly the first time that "skyrocketed" and "5%" have been used together in one sentence.

dannersy• 4 months ago

Of total users 5% is a substantial number of consumers and some would argue a non-trivial amount of market share to ignore when making a product.

This also goes without saying that the more adoption we see, the better these alternatives will get as we see consumers and businesses view Linux as worth the investment.

drnick18• 4 months ago

Exactly, 5% isn't much, but it's enough to compel developers to make sure their game runs well through Proton, which is all is necessary these days. Ports aren't really worth it, especially if they aren't going to be as well maintained in the long (cough, Valve, cough).

sph• 4 months ago

The first 5% is the hardest. It won’t take 35 years to reach 10%.

samrus• 4 months ago

"You know whats alot harder? The first 50%" - windows

nickserv2• 4 months ago

5 per cent is a significant number. In many elections for example, this is the minimum to have representatives and/or receive state funding.

Zhyl5• 4 months ago

Ah yes, forgot this was HN.

"OS disruptor 5Xs in 3 years thanks to innovative new multi-platform solution, securing unprecedented market share."

ekianjo2• 4 months ago

This means nothing. There is so much up and down based on the active Chinese user base. PHoronox making headlines out of thin air again

mikkupikku8• 4 months ago

M$ shareholders ITT are sweating bullets! Gaming has always been Microsoft's redoubt; without it they will lose the retail market entirely and be left with only the B2B market coasting on the soon forgotten legacy of what Windows once was, and eventually that will dry up too as Windows fails to capture the attention of a new generation of engineers and administrators.

Neikius4• 4 months ago

Microsoft pretty much abandoned desktop as is. They are just squeezing out what is left. Their main cash now is azure and office365. And they expect it to be AI next. Kinda obvious by the where the effort goes.

ekianjo2• 4 months ago

They will never lose the retail market because they enforce severe rules towards OEMs.

scubadude• 4 months ago

Long time Linux user, but I got lazy into the Windows ecosystem for too many years. My son convinced me to move over and I haven't looked back. I haven't found a game that hasn't run, the worst I have to do is change Proton version. Ubuntu was good, but Nobara is amazing (ndivia 5000 series drivers out of the box).

conception• 4 months ago

Just another post saying stuck kde with the new plasma on it for my kids first computer and was blown away by the polish. Switching over my workstation this month for sure. Highly recommended

LennyHenrysNuts• 4 months ago

Gaming is more than viable on a Linux PC these days.

I'm using CachyOS with a PS2 controller or mouse and keyboard. I had to do virtually zero tinkering.

ramon156• 4 months ago

Let me know how rainvow 6 runs for you :)

I wish you were right, though

jabwd• 4 months ago

yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.

And those games are easily ignored, as they should be.

komali22• 4 months ago

We're entering a world where developers are going to need to start implementing anti cheat that works on Linux. It's clearly possible, and as we break past 5% it's no longer economically viable to ignore Linux. Especially once the GabeCube comes out...

wafflemaker• 4 months ago

When playing eve online on Linux (via Proton), the moment any other window gets focus, or the mouse slights off the game screen onto the second monitor on the side, game minimizes.

I have a feeling it's just wine things. Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?

I remember that 13 years ago I did everything on Linux and only switched to Windows to play eve online. Now the game works beautifully (graphics and all) on Linux with just one slight modification in the "run command" in Steam.

This is nothing, as anybody who tried to play games on Linux using wine can attest. It used to be a hell of modifications, dependency hunting and obscure hacks to get any windows game to work.

Proton and Vulcan are Awesome.

flohofwoe2• 4 months ago

Vulcan is the home planet of Spock, the 3D API is Vulkan ;) (sorry for nitpicking)

the8472• 4 months ago

Try running it in gamescope. Or the "always capture mouse in fullscreen windows" setting in winecfg.

roomey• 4 months ago

Check your mouse focus settings in your desktop environment (gnome/KDE/whatever).

There may be an option called mouse stealing prevention or something, but if you have a look you should hopefully see it. On xfce it's in its own tab in the mouse menu

Zardoz843• 4 months ago

There is a weird bug in Helldivers 2 when you use the maximized window without borders and you have a multi monitor setup. Sometimes, the character stops of rotating with the mouse look... like if the mouse cursor found a limit. Another, it's with the full screen mode. When I switch windows with AltTab, sometimes the game restores with the wrong display proportions.

As far I know, this bugs happens on Windows too.

MayeulC• 4 months ago

Not sure why that happens, but you may want to try "borderless window" instead of fullscreen in the game options. If that does not work, you could try running the game in gamescope, or enabling the wine virtual desktop with winecfg (point it at your game-specific wine prefix, you can also run it from protontricks). These are just a few ideas, but it does sound like a mechanism that is part if the game, not wine. Just like some games crash when you alt-tab in windows; gamescope tends to fix that.

nijave8• 4 months ago

Maybe also try different Proton versions

Src https://www.protondb.com/app/8500

coldpie2• 4 months ago

Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?

I spent a lot of time squashing bugs like this.

Windows has one window manager. Linux has dozens. Windows apps are written to make assumptions about how the Windows window manager works. Things like windowing event message sequences, side-effects on values returned by other APIs, the exact sequence of fullscreen status side-effects such as window size and mouse cursor capture and window chrome presence. That's valid because those always work the same way on Windows. But Linux window managers all do all of those things differently, and trying to get all dozens of window managers to behave exactly the same way as Windows's does is near impossible.

Another possibility is it's just how the game works, even on Windows. It was pretty common to get windowing bugs reported, test them on Windows, and see the exact same behavior as we had on Linux.

Neikius4• 4 months ago

Your desktop is set to focus where mouse cursor is not where you click. Usually can be changed. Also in conjunction with that the game is set to freeze when it loses focus. So maybe you can change that in game.

christkv• 4 months ago

I've been happy with my Bazzite setup for play and work. Took a little time to get used to fedora atomic and the changes in installing and running stuff but used to it now.

BoredPositron3• 4 months ago

Phoronix lost the plot in the last year with their click bait garbage headlines and articles. February/March user data is always skewed because of the Chinese holidays. They know it, we know it, they even write about it in the article but still a dumbass hype bait headline and article. Just fucking stop it, the quality of your reviews took a dive as well. Go ahead and produce more garbage and you have lost all value as a news site by the end of the year.

throwaway45460• 4 months ago

“I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down.” —Linus Torvalds

TurdF3rguson3• 4 months ago

Skyrocketed above 5% is an expression I would discourage anyone from using because it's a broken metaphor. Unless the trajectory of that rocket was a few degrees from horizontal.

How about grasshopper-ed above 5%?

KeplerBoy• 4 months ago

Let's revisit that topic if the FED raises interest to 5%.

PurpleRamen3• 4 months ago

The number doubled in the last year. April 2025 it was around 2.3%, and has been jumping around 2-3% for several years. Skyrocking seems justified when looking at a greater picture.

Though, it's a longer process, not something that suddenly happened immediately. The combination of Steamdeck, proton, good gaming-distributions and Windows 10 phasing out, while Windows 11 sucks and becoming an AI+Ads-infested mess, seems to have pushed this trend. So let's see how high this sky will be.

Edit: Found a good visualization: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

TurdF3rguson3• 4 months ago

Right but clearly 5% is still much closer to the ground than it is to the sky. Not that ground-rocketed makes any more sense because it doesn't.

Zhyl5• 4 months ago

It's been an exponential curve since 2022.

https://gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker

esskay• 4 months ago

Massive props needs to be given to the Proton and Wine teams and Valve and Codeweavers commercial efforts to help fund work on this.

Fokamul• 4 months ago

Only blocker for Linux gaming are intrusive Anti-cheats.

They can be bypassed on Windows, but with too much work (custom hypervisor etc.)

To bypass them on Linux, a lot more easier.

Neikius4• 4 months ago

Not true. No way to even play those games in Linux....

acd• 4 months ago

Go Linux. Gamers will have a better experiance in Linux. Predict that Windows will become an legacy emulation layer.

ph4rsikal• 4 months ago

I am part of the 5%. But not on Steamdeck. Proton has made gaming on Ubuntu feasible, and I usually don't have issues with compatibility.

zelphirkalt4• 4 months ago

I wish things were working so seamlessly for me, as people describe in the comments. There seems to be something wrong with Steam and how it works, so that in my machine (and CPU and GPU from 2019, with official Linux drivers from standard repos, running Debian KDE) it almost never manages to start a Windows game. I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game. This has been going on for years and I have tried various things, Including HWE kernel, OS reinstall from Linux Mint to Debian, installing the steam client via various means, and whatnot.

I have a suspicion, that somehow Steam has issues when Guix is installed, which I am always using, but then the question is, why Steam is incapable of just shipping with whatever it needs and using the things it shipped with properly, instead of getting confused by Guix, which only puts things in the GNU store, and not in a place that Steam should ever look at. But like I said, it is only a hunch or suspicion, and I need Guix more than Steam on Linux.

Then there are games that just work, like Stardew Valley. And maybe Terraria. I suspect, that it is somehow also about what engine the games use and what those engines rely on. But these games are very few, and most bigger mainstream games like AoE2 simple won't start, like I described.

So for me it still seems, that it is not actually working that reliably on just any GNU/Linux system, and that there are still blind spots, that Valve or whoever is clearly not seeing or considering in their whole Proton development or how Proton is used by Steam. Probably some isolation thing that they are completely missing for several years now.

BatteryMountain2• 4 months ago

Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves all problems for me and stopped me from distro-hopping: media consumption, software dev tooling, system admin tooling, gaming - all just works. My current install is about a year old without breaking itself (still on Fedora 42). I gave gnome a couple of tries, but the plugin system is a crapshoot as they broken an install for me once after an update. Come to think of it, I haven't manage to break KDE yet.

Then in steam itself, you can swap different versions of proton. I like to set the base version to one of the newer versions, but if a game doesn't work, I check on protondb which versions work so I override it per game. You can also give lutris a try as it has a few extra advanced levers that you can to get things working.

scbrg2• 4 months ago

Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.

Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.

braiamp2• 4 months ago

don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind

I use Debian stable on my laptop and testing on desktop. It is fine. Only the newest games that need a specific 0 day patch may suffer a bit but that's only for 1-2 weeks even on testing. You want a stable system first, then to unlock the full performance out of everything, and most bleeding edge fail in the former and are a coin toss on the later.

zelphirkalt4• 4 months ago

Since I used Linux Mint before and since this issue has been going on for years, I don't think lagging behind a few months is the reason for it. 1 or 2 years ago people also already proclaimed that now most games just work for them out of the box. Not so for me and my system. There is something that Steam overlooks and does not isolate from, is my guess.

heavyset_go4• 4 months ago

This is correct, if you want a good desktop Linux experience, you want to use a rolling release distribution.

Debian will ship with old pieces of software that are updated and fixed on a daily basis upstream. Some of those changes and bug fixes really are showstoppers and you'll be stuck with them for months/years. Same thing with older kernels.

Debian is great for servers, but if you're doing graphics, sound or multimedia heavy tasks, you want the latest Wayland, Pipewire and driver support at the bare minimum.

nijave8• 4 months ago

Agree. I've had generally good experience with Fedora and Steam + tips from ProtonDB

Only have had 1 snafu with Steam i386 dependencies causing issues with x86_64 packages. I think there's a Flatpak of Steam available that should help isolate that but iirc there was some caveat

foresto6• 4 months ago

Debian Stable gamer here.

Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.

Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports. It's not what I would call a beginner distro for any purpose, but gaming on it is perfectly viable.

I'm having a good time in games, still getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.

mchinen• 4 months ago

This is similar to my experience. I find many people on the forums that can't resolve the crashes in Red Dead Redemption 2, so I suspect a lot of it depends on the specific games you've picked.

It is clearly getting better globally, so I expect in 3 years or so things will be ready for me to try again.

zelphirkalt4• 4 months ago

Maybe I didn't emphasize sufficiently just how many games don't work for me on GNU/Linux. Out of 100 games, I estimate that I get 3-5 games that work, while many people in my circles are proclaiming how great the support now is, that so many games just run fine.

I actually have more luck getting games to run when I myself make WINE prefixes using WINE and try running games that way, than running any games on Steam. Only very few games work with Steam on Linux for me. This is also part of the reason, why I think something Steam does with Proton prefixes might be the reason it is broken.

I also tried things like not putting games in my Steam library on an NTFS drive that is shared with Windows, and instead put them on my GNU/Linux partition in a new Steam library. Didn't help. Tried various Proton versions, including experimental ones. Didn't help. Simply nothing seems to make a difference.

margorczynski3• 4 months ago

Unfortunately a lot depends on the game and software you're trying to use. There are cases where (especially older) stuff on Windows doesn't work but on Steam it works fine.

Also the hope is that when the Linux share of the market grows and more multi-platform engines like Unreal are used then we'll get native versions instead of using Wine/Proton.

On top of that Windows is now basically unusable in many ways so for me at least there is no alternative (MacOS is really bad compared to a well configured Linux desktop, could never get past it treating me as an idiot).

rshackleford12• 4 months ago

I have been running Guix System as my daily driver for 7 years now and I have not had any trouble using Steam as packaged by nonguix with my cursed nvidia GPU. My computer is from 2008 with a CPU/GPU upgrade in 2018.

There have only been a handful of games that I haven't been able to play, like Hitman Absolution. But other AAA games like RD2 and Witcher1-3 run without issue. Even Starcraft2, run through proton, works well.

Neikius4• 4 months ago

I had great success in such cases by just overriding the compatibility tool used, most often to just some version of proton. Default sometimes just does not work.

foresto6• 4 months ago

I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game.

You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...

drnick18• 4 months ago

Are your games installed on a standard Linux partition, e.g. ext4? Proton struggles to launch games from NTFS volumes and can silently fail.

zelphirkalt4• 4 months ago

I have tried both, installing on btrfs and installing on NTFS (shared with a Windows installation). I think I will get a dedicated gaming machine at some point, which hopefully will not have the same issue.

HeckFeck• 4 months ago

I got my Steam Deck that month, so pleased to be a part of it. The Deck fills a gap that has been empty in my soul since the PSP was discontinued, and feels like a genuine step forward that makes technology fun again.

It's fully open! It has a KDE desktop that I can access any time! I can shove in any size of SSD I like!

And I'm playing Halo 3... on Linux... on hardware made by Steam. If you spoke that sentence to me in 2009, I'd suggest you ought to be sectioned.

Levitating• 4 months ago

Yep it's crazy. The SteamDeck alone gives me the hope that we will see mainstream use of (desktop) linux within my lifetime.

People need to get their hands on real, working, consumer-friendly devices running Linux out-of-the-box.

leftpad77• 4 months ago

Agreed. Roll on steam machine as well! I prefer handheld, but the more linux-based gaming we can get out there, the better

crest• 4 months ago

Are the numbers by hours played instead of by installed clients? How are users with multiple devices counted?

mikkupikku8• 4 months ago

Pewdiepie becoming an arch-pilled rice-maxxer who advocates Linux for freedom and gaming has surely had some effect. He's such a good sport he even swore off Photoshop and tries to learn to like Gimp.

jijijijij5• 4 months ago

Things I hadn't had on my bingo cards, in this or any universe: Me really looking forward to a new PewDiePie video! Guy has become a wholesome tech entertainment retreat for me. It's like Martijn Doolaard, but Linux instead of Alps... I can't stress enough how wholesome and pleasant the content has become. Or maybe it's been always like that, and I was just an ignorant snob...

Granted, I have SponsorBlock installed, so the occasional predatory supplement stuff gets cut, but he also kinda made clear he's rich enough and not in it for the money anymore - and I tend to believe him. PewDiePie won life, chose sanity and took the anti-corruption path. Bless him and his family, and God please, let it be real!

alex_duf• 4 months ago

Or maybe Microsoft continuously degrading their user's experiences has finally reached a breaking point, to the point where Pewdipie AND Linus Tech Tips are talking more seriously about linux.

So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.

mikkupikku8• 4 months ago

Certainly Microsoft is responsible for most of it. I'm just saying Felix still has a lot of influence and has been pulling in the same direction to his millions of fans.

ehnto2• 4 months ago

If I am reading the room right, I think Wine/Proton/Steam making gaming almost effortless on linux has been the big swing. It was not like this 5 years ago.

I have been a linux user for work for a decade, but still ran Windows for a gaming PC. But with Win11 dropping the ball so hard, and the general hype around Proton and where linux gaming was it, it was not hard to make the decision to switch.

I haven't regretted it a single bit.

ehnto2• 4 months ago

I haven't used GIMP in a while but I had great experience with Krita, even with my display tablet it all "just worked".

archi42• 4 months ago

krita looks great! I'm not a hugely creative person, so last time I spent time to learn a graphics tool that was gimp in the early 2010s. But I used krita last week to test my convertibles's pen (Dell PN7552W, on Linux of course). Pleasant experience overall, and utterly amazing how far krita came in the last decade.

mikkupikku8• 4 months ago

Yes, Krita is definitely my preference, and aseprite for pixel art work (not open source, but source available and free of cost if you choose to build it yourself.)

pessimizer2• 4 months ago

GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, just like Photoshop is.

Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.

The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]

If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.

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[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.

[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.

[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.

pgwalsh• 4 months ago

If you're coming from photoshop then PhotoGIMP is a good patch for gimp. I never understood why GIMP just didn't take this approach to begin with or at least make it a built in option.

mancerayder3• 4 months ago

Is there an English translation for those not in the latest influencer language trends?

Synaesthesia• 4 months ago

Ricing = making your linux desktop look pretty. arch = a 'techy' flavour of linux.

gchamonlive3• 4 months ago

I am a long time windows pc gamer, but lately I was having to re-pair my DS4 controller every week or so. But the windows Bluetooth device manager will just refuse to remove that device. So I was periodically having to open the old school device manager, click show hidden and remove the controller there. By the fifth time I got fed up, replaced windows with Bazzite and am happy now. Good riddance.

nijave8• 4 months ago

YMMV, I've not had good luck with Bluetooth on any OS

gchamonlive3• 4 months ago

It's absolutely fine on Linux for all the devices I have so I'm happy with it. I daily drive arch (https://github.com/gchamon/archie), bazzite which is fedora, and the notebook my current employer provides which comes with Ubuntu pre-installed.

embedding-shape2• 4 months ago

Fun how those things go, I've only ever had troubles with Bluetooth on Apple hardware (both phones and laptops), meanwhile I never had problems with Bluetooth on either Windows or Linux, both desktops and laptops, with controllers, headphones and keyboards. YMMV indeed :)

Pwntastic• 4 months ago

i run endeavour (arch) and have a handful of things using bluetooth without any issues. i even have my airpods paired and use them constantly with no problems

foresto6• 4 months ago

Your computer's bluetooth module could be the source of the trouble. Some people have found that using a different dongle fixed their wireless controller problems.

shevy-java• 4 months ago

Considering how awful Microslop's Win11 is, Linux could really gain some traction if it were to begin to consider the desktop environment as a useful target. Server is already dominated, top 500 supercomputers running linux (since 2017; https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1/) - yet the desktop area is one where I don't feel there is really a lot of real improvement. I know, I know, GNOME and KDE keep on promoting how above they are beyond epic perfection already, but this is just buzzword-PR-chaining. GTK is a mostly-GNOME-only toolkit now and qt has its own objectives. Things that should be super-simple and work on Linux, do not work that well for Average Joe for the most part. One can fix most things with some research, but not everyone knows how to do so, or will fatigue after a while. Now most gamers are usually young and tend to be more tech-savvy, so they can solve things more easily, but even then one has to wonder why so much time has to be invested to make things work well. Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority? Smartphones are a special place as the environment is mostly controlled by one private vendor or an open ecosystem (which then is usually much smaller, and still does not yield real improvements for the desktop system, for the most part, give or take; GNOME3 kind of looks and feels like a smartphone-UI).

lunar_rover• 4 months ago

Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority?

No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.

Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.

scheeseman4864• 4 months ago

Valve are the primary financiers of Techpaladin, a team of over a dozen developers that work specifically on KDE Plasma and Qt.

ameen• 4 months ago

I wonder if part of this is usage by newer Android based emulators [1] used for emulating x86-based PC games on powerful snapdragon based devices (Retroid Pocket 6, AYN Odin 2 line, AYN Thor, AYANEO Pocket S2, etc).

[1] GameNative, GameHub (and GameHub lite)

gchamonlive3• 4 months ago

I'd be surprised if the intersection of users that have such devices, use it to emulate x86 games and use steam on it is big enough to make such an impact.

bradley13• 4 months ago

I've played exclusively on Linux for a couple of years now. Sometimes, very rarely, you have to select a specific Proton version for a game. Otherwise, it just works.

nickserv2• 4 months ago

My last Windows install was XP, but I stopped using Steam a couple years back. I prefer to own what I buy, so now only purchase on GOG.

However I'm very thankful for the work Valve has done, as this has made Wine much much better.

I can now just download a game from GOG, set it up with a winetricks one-liner, and expect it to work. Even the latest games that just came out.

Although to be fair I usually wait a couple months to get a good discount. But, before, you had to wait years for support, if any at all.

I'm also seeing some studios releasing support for Vulkan either day one or in updates, which is great.

sandworm1012• 4 months ago

Question: What percentage of windows gamers are actually Linux gamers who are using wine/proton or some anti-cheat workaround/VM that causes them to be reported as using windows when they are in fact running linux?

Using proton, I regularly see crash reports where games want to report that I was running some version of windows, which is a result of how proton implements wine. I never send such reports as they are of little use to developers.

ranger2072• 4 months ago

This is from the Steam hardware survey. Steam doesn't run under Wine generally so this problem shouldn't come up

sandworm1012• 4 months ago

Proton is a modified version of Wine. If the underlying game is sending a bug/crash report, it may "see" itself as running under windows as that is what wine presents.

https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton

"Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this."

PaulHoule• 4 months ago

I am impressed with the Steam Deck. Playing The Hundred Line on the deck brings back the glory days of the Playstation Vita. And it's the one device I have (including iPhone, iPad and Mac) for which AirPods are 100% a "just works" experience.

mzmzmzm• 4 months ago

Personally, after using Windows at home since I was in kindergarten (3.1), having an employer-provided Macbook the last 15 years, and every few years dipping a toe into Linux for various projects, I can say they finally did it. I panic built a new PC for gaming, video editing, and messing with LLMs just at the start of the RAM crisis and thought what the heck, why not CachyOS. I might not be the average user, but it has been so much more convenient, snappy, and fun to troubleshoot than any other time I can remember. KDE just works and has sane defaults. The Arch repository has almost everything you can imagine, and usually the Cachy maintained "safe" repos do too. I downloaded Steam and immediately jumped into my saves from BG3, Cyberpunk, Claire Obscur, and more, like nothing happened. QGIS, Affinity apps (bye Adeobe), LM Studio can take advantage of my GPU. DaVinci Resolve is wonky, but Kdenlive is fine as a stopgap. I want to evangelize now as much as possible since it's all so starkly different from even 5 years ago, largely but not wholly thanks to Steam's Proton work. Microsoft really doesn't care about Win users (fine, it doesn't make them any money), and now is our chance.

tjpnz• 4 months ago

GFN is releasing in India this month. Would be interesting to see to what extent that's reflected later on.

octagons2• 4 months ago

I’ve had a good experience running Arch Linux on my “gaming” PC in the living room. It helps that I’m very comfortable with Linux internals, but I’d say I have no issues or issues that can be fixed with 2-3 clicks about 95% of the time.

My setup is basically Arch Linux, ProtonUp-Qt (to easily install specific versions of Proton, the compatibility layer), Steam, and the proprietary Nvidia drivers/Vulkan. I generally have no issues with Easy Anti-Cheat games like Arc Raiders, but obviously anything that requires secure boot attestation like Arena Breakout Infinite won’t play. I’ve not bothered to try setting up full secure boot as the games that require it aren’t typically in my wheelhouse.

I hope Linux adoption continues for my own, very self-serving, interests. I get the sense that those who primarily use their computer for gaming are the frogs slowly being boiled by Microsoft who continues to back their these customers into uncomfortable, unnecessary corners.

drnick18• 4 months ago

I generally have no issues with Easy Anti-Cheat games like Arc Raiders, but obviously anything that requires secure boot attestation like Arena Breakout Infinite won’t play. I’ve not bothered to try setting up full secure boot as the games that require it aren’t typically in my wheelhouse.

I don't think secure boot will help. I use Arch, and have secure boot set up, but don't see how it would help with kernel-level anticheat. The issue is that anyone can sign their own kernels, so while secure boot is valuable from a security point of view, it does not really certify anything from the point of view of a third party.

thom• 4 months ago

I've been very impressed with Bazzite on my ASUS dual screen laptop. Honestly feel like hardware support is better (especially in the absence of crappy ASUS software) and nothing on Steam runs noticeably worse. Hard to imagine going back to Windows at this point.

jms7032• 4 months ago

I moved from Windows to Linux after the lastest round of MS crap on my system. Not looking back.

pavon2• 4 months ago

Man the distro breakdown is an even bigger mess than normal:

Feb 2026:

  31.58% Other
  23.83% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
   9.07% ArchLinux 64 bit
   8.59% CachyOS 64 bit
   6.62% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
   5.79% Bazzite 64 bit
   5.26% Freedesktop SDK 25.08
   3.82% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
   2.83% Ubuntu 24.04.03 LTS 64 bit
   2.59% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit

March 2026:

  25.64% Other
  24.48% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
  17.60% 0 64 bit
   8.78% Arch Linux 64 bit
   8.01% 64 bit
   6.90% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
   3.58% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
   1.90% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
   1.67% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit
   1.45% Manjoro Linux 64 bit

I'm guessing that "0 64 bit" and "64 bit" are CachyOS and Bazzite, as I would be surprised to see either of those fall off the list given their current popularity. It is also interesting to see the flatpack installs (Freedesktop SDK) fall off the list.

I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.

drnick18• 4 months ago

I wonder who the "other" are? Gentoo users hiding in plain sight?

subjectsigma• 4 months ago

I’m on Bazzite and I’m strongly considering switching back to Windows 11. Proton performance is just not as good as native. Games like Valve’s own Deadlock just run terribly on Proton and completely fine on Windows, using the same hardware. It’s a miracle that Proton works at all, but why compromise when I already have a Win11 license key?

pojzon• 4 months ago

Valve doesnt have to do anything to win. Competition is shooting themselve into the foot constantly.

Its only a matter of time before majority of playerbase switches to linux ecosystem.

Work on proton and steamos are just the beginning.

ahhhhnoooo• 4 months ago

I moved to Bazzite in October. Absolutely zero regrets.

j-kent• 4 months ago

living room gaming PC Mobo died and was looking at $400 min to rebuild. I jumped on the BC-250 craze, which is a very capable bitcoin miner based on the PS5. installed Bazzite and it's been great.

Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

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