I distro hopped a bunch in March. Tried like eight distros, maybe more. I installed steam on all of these to see how it works.
Hah! I contributed to this, was quite happy when I got the steam survey on my Linux rig.
I switched to linux in december 2025, and was part of the steam survey in that month, but unfortunately they did the survey before my switch, so have yet to be part of the statistics.
What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:
OS Total % of Players Monthly Change Windows (Total) 92.33% -4.28% Windows 11 64 bit 66.85% +10.57% Windows 10 64 bit 25.36% -14.89% Linux (Total) 5.33% +3.10% Arch Linux 64 bit 0.34% +0.15% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 0.27% +0.13% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 0.14% +0.06% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.07% +0.02% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% Manjaro Linux 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.
That 3% jump seems almost too big for me to believe. With the seemingly annual increase of Chinese users in February, which is then corrected in March (which we can see this time), I’d probably wait another month or two if more stats get adjusted or if Linux stays at over 5%.
The majority of people will ignore advertisements. Usually less than 10% of people will respond to advertisements and an even small percentage will buy something. Out of 742,000 advertisement impressions, they’d be lucky to get 1,000 sales.
In lifetime customer value it’s billions
Huh, March is the month I switched and I don’t plan to go back.
I’ve had some issues with xwayland crashing but outside of that gaming has been awesome.
And oh also the whole experience is higher performance, faster boots, less bloat, I’m loving it!
I’ve dabbled with Linux over the past 25 years. Last November, I built a high end gaming PC spec’d for Bazzite.
I haven’t touched Windows for gaming in over 4 months.
Yep, my steam rewinds have been 100% Linux for a couple of years now.
I think the only exception in that time was AW2 because it’s an EGL exclusive (and ray tracing/mesh shading support in proton were still a bit lacking in performance).
There are sacrifices. Space Marine 2 doesn’t work despite having a beast of a machine. It seems to be optimized for Windows / Nvidia. I can’t use my racing wheel. It is detected as a device, but I’m unable to configure it due to how Bazzite sandboxes devices and programs from each other.
Eventually these may be resolved. In the meantime, I’m playing Kingdom Come 2 and Arc Raiders along with hopping around a massive backlog playing 5-30 min of games I’ve accumulated over the years, like wandering a massive arcade. Any given evening, I turn on the TV, switch to input 1 and there’s the Steam Deck UI where I left it last. No mysterious reboot showing me a Windows login, no surprise, required Windows update forcing me to wait 15 min before I can start playing.
It’s fucking awesome.
What the f is this? (If you click Linux only.)
IIRC someone one internet once said that was from Flatpak installations.
In the past Flatpak was listed as “Flatpak”. Its possible that something changed and this is actually Flatpak.
It’s issues with data gathering.
I didn’t want to use Windows 11.
Nobody likes using Windows. People merely tolerate it because of the other stuff the like that runs only on Windows.
I’m extremely skeptical about Steam’s statistics. They seem to have wild fluctuations like this on a regular basis. Not to mention the statistics they show about me in their “year in review” are often just very very wrong.
They fluctuate a lot, but I have yet to see a fluctuation that can’t be explained away as “a ton of Chinese players played this month” or “a ton of Chinese players did not return this month”. You can check Gaming On Linux’s Steam Tracker page, and the rise has been fairly steady when you filter for English only. That said, these surveys are often revised a handful of days after initial posting, so check back in a week to see the more accurate data.
What statistics that they show you for year in review are very very wrong?
I haven’t seen any issues with year in review, I’m curious what you’ve seen.
Especially when compared with macOS, an operating system famously known as NOT a gaming operating system.
That’s like saying you made a car that gets better gas mileage than a bicycle.
Like, ok. But how well does it run Photoshop or AfterEffects?
I’d be pretty impressed if you showed me a car with better fuel economy than a bicycle. I don’t know about you lot, but I haven’t had to refuel my bicycle a single time since I bought it.
If I don’t refuel my bicycle I die
Sounds like you need a riksha.
This isn’t a conversation about cars or bicycles or even about fuel economy. it’s not even about transportation.
No, but that was a joke about bicycles.
Yeah, but how far will it go if you try to power it with gasoline?
Don’t know yet but it seems to just be running on fumes.
I’m guessing most people are not buying Macs if they want to play games on it. Macs are excellent work computers but not suitable for anything more intensive than the Sims 4. Which is fine if you only want to play that, but most people buy Macs because they want to do work on them.
I have used Macs for more than twenty years and have also played games on everyone of them. They run just fine.
If you buy a computer for gaming, Macs are not the best choice. However there are more great games that run well than you can ever play.
