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Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux (www.tweaktown.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 189 points 1 year ago (35 children)

This is me. Always Windows for my gaming computer and when I built a new one recently, I went full Linux. No regrets so far.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (32 children)

    Which distro did you go with? I'm looking at switching soon too

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  • [–] 68 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    Bazzite.

    I found it really easy to get started with. Although I’d recommend KDE over Gnome. I tried Gnome for a few hours before changing my mind and it was just a little too different from what I was used to.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    That's honestly the way. Bazzite just works without tinkering. It doesn't eat into your game time with debugging. Plus KDE is very Win10 like, so it's all just familiar and easy.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I'm glad Bazzite is what it is, but I'm hoping some of y'all get interested in other distros in the next few years. There's several great options out there (and I don't want to say … have everyone wind up on Ubuntu flavors and be having the same conversation about corporate overreach in a decade with Canonical as the new Microsoft)

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Eh, I already have a decent amount of skill with running other distros headless. When it's gaming time I prefer a solution that just works 99% of the time.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Bazzite exists because of SteamOS, and SteamOS is Arch-based. If there's a danger of one OS starting to dominate, I'd still think SteamOS is more likely because it has Valve's backing.

    I don't think there's much danger of all other distributions disappearing any time soon, even for gaming applications.

    What I hope is that container-based atomic-type distributions take off. I've been using Linux for decades, and it's such a nice change to have an OS where I don't have to fiddle with drivers or the base OS.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    have everyone wind up on Ubuntu flavors and be having the same conversation about corporate overreach in a decade with Canonical as the new Microsoft)

    Bazzite is Fedora based, not Ubuntu.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yes, I know - but my concern is eventual capture, like Microsoft has done to GitHub or how IBM is 'partially closing' RHEL's source code. My point is that off were all in one basket (Bazzite) it's easier to be taken over and reigned in. Bazzite is fine, but I hope is not the only distro all the influx of Windows users settle on. There's a wealth of great projects - Garuda for example is a great gaming Linux distro.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    if you miss iphone + cydia, gnome + extensions is max dopamine, plus with arcmenu (customizable start menu, many presets) and dash to panel (panel like windows/kde) it's basically like any other de.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The current gnome (3) is very different from previous versions. You might like a modern fork of gnome, like mate. Don't let something that has a gnome connection turn you off right away if all you've seen is gnome 3.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I... don't think Bazzite has a... mate flavor/spin/variant?

    I think its just KDE or GNOME?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    if on cachyos you get like 12+ de options which is nice when initially testing them all out, just demo each for a while

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    Thats neat, I didn't know that!

    Yeah, a benefit of arch based distros is that they are much, much more customizable than other OSs... downside of that though is that there are a whole lot more bugs that can happen, whole lot more crazy custom solutions that may need to be figured out.

    I've not used Cachy, but I have used Arch before... if the Cachy people can figure out a way to keep all that just generally more stable, honestly kudos to them!

    Bazzite basically narrows its official support scope so they can focus on a feature set that 'just works'... I am sure I could figure out how to torture a Bazzite install to work with a non KDE / Gnome DE, but it would be a lot of work.

    Or maybe it could set it up with the built in distrobox/distroshelf tools? Not sure, never futzed with a different DE in a distrobox.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Look at the desktop environment first. KDE is like Windows. GNOME is like MacOS.

    Then look at some videos about how to get your GPU working on a distro you're interested in if you have an Nvidia card. AMD GPU works out of the box.

    I would recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Excellent implementation of KDE, GUI tools to do advanced things, rolling release (i.e. constantly up to date) but also thoroughly tested. Rolls back easily if something gets messed up. This gave me the least problems starting and I stuck with it for over a year. It was great.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I recently switched and have distro hopped a bit, landing on CachyOS which I feel I’ll stick with for a while (though I’m very indecisive and a small part of me wants to change over to Arch). CachyOS is based on Arch but with more ease of use stuff on top, especially for gaming (they have a gaming bundle which is just one command and you’re good to go), plus I’ve heard it’s the fastest or one of the fastest out there. Bazzite is also great (Fedora-based), which I used for a bit, but I started to get into using the command line more and found immutability to be annoying. It does mean it’s harder to fuck up though, but I don’t really care if I break my machine (you probably won’t break your machine regardless, that’s mostly sarcastic). Pop_OS! (Ubuntu-based) is also supposed to be good for gaming but I haven’t tried it. Keep in mind, if you plan on doing more than gaming and decide to use the command line for downloading, most download guides out there assume you’re using something based on Ubuntu or Debian (you’ll see a lot of “sudo apt install _____”), for better or worse. If you scroll down a bit you’ll probably find stuff for Fedora and/or Arch but not always. That doesn’t mean you can’t get the program on those distros, just that you’ll have to either know where to look or download a different way, such as from a digital storefront or manually from the website of the program you’re getting. I’m still a beginner actively trying to get better, but these are all things I would’ve liked to know when I made the switch a little while ago. Another thing to keep in mind is Linux and Nvidia don’t quite get along as well as AMD or Intel. I have an Nvidia card and both CachyOS and Bazzite had no issues, but for whatever reason Mint didn’t like to run steam games, no matter what I did. I made sure to have all the drivers downloaded and looked up a bunch of guides but I never got it running properly. Bazzite just worked straight out of the box, and CachyOS works even better for me after a little tinkering. If you have any questions, I just recently was where you are now so I might have more relevant advice, though I’m certainly no expert. But I’d be happy to help.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    exactly what I ended up on with exactly the same issues with Mint (and Zorin as well). Cachy and Bazzite just worked (bazzite didn't work on live image though), but yeah Mint just didn't work.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Once you know the equivalent commands to search, install, remove, ... packages in your distro, problem solved.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that if someone doesn’t care to learn, it might be more straightforward for them to chose something that uses apt. I’m a beginner and I use pacman no problem, but I’m willing to learn. Lots of folks aren’t.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    honestly i see pacman/yay just as much as I see other stuff when looking at instructions, (paru is pacman/yay in cachyos for that stuff, pacman in cachyos is their own repos)

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Cachyos is great if you want access to everything, debtap for the rare ocassion you need to install a deb, can install snaps and flatpak support easily, but you don't really need to mess with all that, mostly everything is available with aur + flathub (have to do one terminal line since cachyos doesn't have it by default)

    Bazzite does have bazaar by default, which i like as the best flathub appstore, aur version stopped working for me.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    For anyone reading this: immutable does not mean you cannot use the command line, and you cannot tinker. It's just different, and you will need to learn a few new commands, etc.

    Additionally, Bazzite comes with Distrobox where you can literally install any software on any distro (including AUR if you want). There's almost no limits.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I should’ve clarified that in my comment, you’re correct. I wasn’t trying to imply it wasn’t possible, just that a lot of people don’t care to learn new things and just want things to work like they’re used to, and the odd time they need to use the command line, it might be more straightforward if they aren’t using something immutable, for better or worse. Immutable has the upside of being harder to fuck up for newbies though.

    I didn’t know about Distrobox, that’s really cool actually. I’m content with Cachy but if I went back to Bazzite I’d be looking into using that for sure.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Switched to Linux Mint a couple of weeks ago. Been playing games for 30 years on windows. So far so good. Played The Drifter through Heroic without issue. Great game btw.

    Got an 1080ti. I hope I won't run into to many issues.

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    • [–] 153 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship

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  • [–] 60 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Linux is not a perfect rose-colored relationship but it's a mature one.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    It does, like any good relationship, need some work. I have been using Mint as my main driver for the last couple of months, and even being a beginner friendly Linux it still needed some time to learn and google around. Now that it's set up i haven't run into anything for a long while.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago

    I still run Windows on a rarely-used old laptop. Every time I use it, it reminds me how much that's true.

    • Forcing you to reboot to install updates, sometimes interrupting a download or something just because it knows best
    • Ads creeping in all over the place
    • More and more "features" you don't want and never asked for
    • AI being shoved in your face
    • Surveillance everywhere
    • Constantly trying to push you to use "Edge" instead of your chosen browser
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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It is sad to see Windows get torn apart by Microsoft.

    You don't have to like it but most people know how to use it

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    No, they don't, never have, and never will.

    I would be surprised if 'most people' nowadays even knew what the 'Internet icon' does, since it's not a logo of Facebook/Instagram/TikTok...

    Even before phones, people could open a browser and perhaps browse pictures.

    The Office Suite is next level, attained by relatively very few.

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    • [+] 65 points 1 year ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I just had to change my expectations a bit (which might be a lot for some), but the end result is pretty good.
    Always having bad Ping times in multiplayer games, helped out a lot with it.

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    No.

    The internet in my country has high ping all over the place.
    So I never had a good enough experience with Online Multiplayer games for them to keep me on Windows.

    I wasn't playing online games most of the time anyway, before switching to Linux.

    I do play Elite: Dangerous, but that works pretty fine even with bad pings and it works very well on Linux.

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    • [–] 48 points 1 year ago (23 children)

    I switched to Linux so I could spend $200 more on actual hardware for my build.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (22 children)

    Not arguing with your choice (props actually, I respect the switch) but it is possible to get a legit grey market key for w11 Pro for a lot less. I think I got mine for $20-30 in early 2024?

    Edit: I should have noticed I was in the Linux group before I posted that, I thought I was still in the gaming one I guess! Not advocating windows to anyone, it's a terrible OS. But some people might need it for some things so I figured I'd share information that might help someone save a bit of money if they did. (Yes, there are other ways around that.)

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  • [+] 20 points 1 year ago (6 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I don't doubt it, but do you happen to have a source?

    The only plus side I guess is I only use that computer for a bit of gaming and not for anything else, and i did manage to turn of automatic updates before they AI-ified everything. If I had more time and energy in my day I'd dual boot it, maybe some day.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    So you’ve decided unpatched security flaws is better than learning a superior OS? I’m not much for gambling.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    No, I just haven't had the time and energy to do something better. Happens when you're approaching middle age and have health problems.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Just so you're aware, it's super easy. You can even leave your Windows drive(s) the same if you want too if you're up for buying a new drive. Linux can access the data fine —though probably not the other way around, depending on the format of your Linux drive(s). I have a drive that's mostly media from back when I used Windows that just works like any other, but a worse format but that hardly matters.

    If you're a gamer, Garuda, CachyOS, or Bezzite are good and take minutes to set up, and come with everything you need out of the box. Bezzite is immutable, so it's harder to mess up, but it also limits what you can do (which probably doesn't matter for you). If you do need help, which you probably won't because it's easier than installing Windows, you can ask and plenty of people will volunteer.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Thanks! I've actually done it before back in the days when Mint was quite new,and I'm a programmer by trade (although mostly on Mac) so I'm not too worried about it, but I don't have a second drive (and don't really want one given a 2TB NVME drive) so I'd want to do all the backups first, at least for important stuff like my friend and I's Minecraft server. For a computer I barely use it hasn't felt worth it. Most of my computer time (outside of work) is on my Mac laptop.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    And then you have to continously fight it because it switches your default browser to edge or starts showing you ads out of the blue or record your screen every second or whatever the fuck those greedy bastards think of doing next...

    Noooo fucking thanks, I switched to Pop for a year now and I'm not going back ever.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Even with Windows Enterprise, I don't trust Microsoft to not spy on me and fuck with my control over the machine. If it weren't for that, I wouldn't be planning on switching over to Arch SteamOS Desktop when it releases.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've used Enterprise IoT for a while, which is supposed to be the cleanest possible build of Windows (except for the Chinese government special one) and that STILL somehow managed to introduce ads after updates, reset settings, force me to use the GameBar, and so on.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Yup. Just last night, my machine decided to reboot itself without permission. I want to do updates on my timetable - that means backing up my passwords and bookmarks, figuring out what third-party things I want to update like my GPU, and preparations. Being forced to update also makes me feel extremely distrustful of MS, especially since they plan on having AI to take pictures of our activities. I enjoy LOTS of hentai, and feel that it is likely for MS to give the Trump Regime dirt on people.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Just switch. SteamOS is specifically designed for the Deck, and other handhelds. It doesn't do anything special outside of defaulting to a handheld friendly view that you can't get in another distro. I would say it's probably going to be worse than one designed for desktop, if you're putting it on a desktop. Bezzite is pretty much the same as what SteamOS will be (with the option of desktop or handheld mode at install I think). Garuda and CachyOS are great for gaming if you want a distro that isn't immutable. They come with everything you'll need for gaming.

    It's trivial to set up. Just switch. Stop creating an excuse to wait. SteamOS isn't special, unless you are putting it on a handheld potentially.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    SteamOS is special in that it has the direct support and maintenance from Valve, but I agree with the spirit of your response

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Yeah, but it doesn't do anything special. Sure, it's pretty much guaranteed to work for the Deck, but other than that you don't get anything out of it that you can't get elsewhere. There's no special sauce that Valve puts in. The only thing they put in that's special is Proton, except the contributions are open source and freely available everywhere.

    All distros are supported by some group. Valve isn't particularly special in that, except it isn't their specialty like other distro maintainers.

    If you're switching to Linux to avoid a huge corporation then you should do that —and Valve is a pretty damn large corporation. Sure, they're doing good things now, but people would have said the same thing about MS at some point in time. Don't build them up into something else. Use the best option, not just following some brand loyalty for no good reason.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Sure, but Valve specifically have a focus on a gaming experience, so if your focus is gaming, there's a good chance steamOS will provide timely fixes and updates.

    Again, I don't disagree with the general sentiment of your reply, and I wouldn't personally bother waiting for steamOS, but there are valid reasons to want to specifically choose steamOS

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I've never needed to activate windows on any of my computers since I just prefer Linux. But the gray market seems scary to me with the possibility of the key coming from a stolen card victim's wallet.

    Is there any reason a non-dirty key would be available on the market? Does Microsoft do promotions or deals like that?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    A ton of them apparently come from regional pricing, or from keys purchased by businesses. Windows offers volume licensing where you can buy bulk keys at a steep discount, basically. The business might not use all of them, and then they turn around and resell them. That's technically against the terms of the license, but afaik Microsoft has never bothered to enforce that.

    I've also heard people will take the Windows keys off of older OEM towers and resell them. I have no idea how true that is, but it would also be against their terms.

    It's not exactly likely, but Microsoft could probably just deactivate all of those keys at once if they decided to.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Microsoft doesn't give a shit to stop it, because they profit off your data. They give it away for free themselves. They don't care how you get it if you are on their system, and then they do everything they can to trap you. They don't make their profit from key sales.

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    • [–] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    The change is even more dramatic if you consider only those users who use English as their language in Steam. Also, Linux adoption rate has sped up this year. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ collects various data about Steam usage. One of the charts (screenshot below) show Linux market share among Linux/English users and overall Linux market share. I added the red line to demonstrate how I see the growth. There's only few data points this side of the year, so my drawing is most likely wrong, but the growth starts around March. The green line is at 4.8% in January and February and 6.31% in July, so a nice 30% increase within about 6 months among Linux/English users.

    EDIT: The post is now more in line with reality. Couple more data points:

    • Linux market share among all Steam Linux users has gone from 2.06% in January to 2.89% in July. That's a 40% increase within the first seven months only. And as another commenter said, the growth rate might increase towards the end of the year as more people starts abandoning Windows 10.
    • The same numbers for last year are 1.95% in Jan '24 and 2.08% in Jul '24, which is only a 6% increase.
    • But because the data is a bit jumpy, if I use approximate values of 1.75% for Jan '24 and 2.05 for Dec '24, the Linux market share increased by 17% in the entire last year.
    • I'll stop now.
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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Considering how people love to delay things until the last minute, I expect it'll sharply rise in October.

    I know this because I'm one of those people. Linux on several PCs and servers for years, but I've been too lazy to format & rebuild my gaming PC to get it off win10 and onto Linux.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I run Linux in English (because translated Unix looks weird) even though I'm not in or from an English speaking country. Sorry for skewing the stats.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Thou shalt not be forgiveth! /jk

    I might have slightly misunderstood what the information is about, but I also worded things in a wrong way. I edited the post to be more in line with reality, and added some more data points.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Could it be that Steam overcounts the users? I mean if you have a Steam Deck, do you now count as a Linux user, thus diluting the Windows share, even though you’re still (also) using Windows?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It’s based on devices. But, I wouldn’t consider it as diluting the Windows share. A user might have any combination of devices. Maybe they have PS5 as their home gaming device and Deck as their handheld device. They could also have Windows PC and Nintendo Switch. Or maybe they have Mac laptop and Linux desktop. I for one belong to the Linux desktop and Steam Deck camp. Steam Survey only tells how many Windows, Linux and Mac devices Steam users use, but, for example, not how many hours each type of device is used.

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    • [–] 32 points 1 year ago

    People don't have a choice. Microsoft made W11 incompatible with a lot of hardware and Microsoft said, "lol, buy new hardware"

    Giving nary a single fuck about whats best for their users.

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    [–] 32 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I liked the comment going "Steam doesn't have data on PC gamers, only Steam gamers.", hinting at the seven gamers that stubbornly refuse to use Steam and still hunt for CDs, or old archives of shareware. They are people too dammit!

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Came here to 2nd GOG, but there are a few other storefronts with their own game launchers & DRM similar to Steam (Ubisoft, Epic). Humble Bundle provide (sometimes a choice of) GOG/Epic/Steam keys depending on the game, and they also have a collection of DRM-free games you can download directly.

    Still, seven CD-ROM game hunters is probably a good estimate..!

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    • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    I'm really not far off. Once my Tiny11 install breaks, it's on to Bazzite.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Would recommend CachyOS, especially if you have a nvidia card

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Had thought of Fedora with Plasma, have been.using Linux Mint for the last 18 months. any thoughts?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I've been using CachyOS for about a month now with no problems. Very fast and easy distro based on Arch, so it's "bleeding edge." I haven't needed to, but be prepared to tinker if an update goes south. I came from Bazzite and liked that well enough too, but I wanted better access to some softwares.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    I wouldn’t trust a premade iso like that. Get an iso directly from Microsoft and use an unattended autoinstall script to clean things up.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I respect that, but I built my own Tiny11 iso. You can do so as well here: https://github.com/ntdevlabs/tiny11builder

    Folks gotta give me a little benefit of the doubt. I'm not raw-doggin' the modern Windows experience here.

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    • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    author has never used desktop linux and doesn't really grasp what it is 😜

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    For someone out of the loop, could you explain what it is? What is wrong with desktop linux?

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    • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    Fuck windows, and copilot, and recall, and most especially OneDrive, and start menu ads, and unnecessary upgrades and ... And ... I gotta say I'm so much happier on Ubuntu, took me a little googling on some stuff and proton is still finicky sometimes, but man o man is it nice to have an OS which does what I tell it to.

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