Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark
Linux gamers on Steam finally cross over the 3% mark
www.gamingonlinux.com /2025/11/linux-gamers-on-steam-finally-cross-over-the-3-mark/
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My computer has been torn down for a while due to a move and renovations, but as soon as I set it up again, the first order of business is to migrate it to mint.
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It's scary and disorienting, but imo it's worth it.
I can now say anecdotally I have more friends that have tried Linux and are happier on it, than I have friends who went back to Windows.
Most of the people who went back went back for edge cases, weird hardware or that "one game" that has kernel level anticheat and doesn't run on Proton.
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Quick question: I'm assuming a Linux install requires a complete reformat of the drive, aka having to reinstall / redownload my games, right? Also the cloud saves that I have stored on Steam, would those be transferrable / usable if I install on Linux? Or am I going to have to start out at point zero on those games?
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I'm starting to recommend Zorin OS now. They did a really good job with Gnome to customize it into a workable desktop.
In fact, I'm even considering switching from Kubuntu because of how nice and polished it looks.
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Congrats, nerds.
(I guess I have to include myself in that)
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Loooooooooooool
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It was me guys! I got the poll last week and I am pretty sure my Linux Mint 22.2 pushed it over 3% !!!
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Username checks out!
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Congrats dood
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I would say the next biggest hurdle that Linux gaming has to overcome besides market saturation is the compatibility with Triple-A multiplayer games and getting major developers on board. Franchises like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Rainbow Six Siege make up a large percentage of the hard-core video game player base and are incompatible with Linux due to their Windows level cornel anti-cheat or similar issues.
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Yup. Some are doing well (like Microsoft with Halo, surprisingly...), others are actively denying doing anti-cheat on Linux. Here's the website to track them:
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We only just got AAAA gaming, and you're taking about 9A gaming already?
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There, I fixed it. But we all know that such terminology is nothing but a marketing gimic. And any such AAAA games has been over budget and underwhelming.
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I switched over to Nobara Project 4 months ago and am not looking back! Have tried CachyOS, Bazzite, Mint, PopOS and liked Nobara the best
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Could you swiftly describe what makes you prefer nobara over the others?
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It comes with eveything for gaming and multimedia work pre-install, the 2 thing I use my pc for. Codecs, steam and proton, Da Vinci resolve, etc. Flagship version uses KDE. There's a nice little app manager. Really easy installation process. It's a fedora spin-off so it follows the same release cycle, usually updated within a few days. Updates use to be a bit complicated, breaking drivers, etc. but it's much more stable these days. There's not a huge community, basically discord and reddit, but people do try to help. Usually you can follow the instruction for fedora for any tricky installation. Great distro overall.
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I have a lot of drives and nobara comes with a auto mount manager that proved to be very useful. The update manager works great, it by default makes backups with updates to fedora.
It seems they have made the OS extremely user friendly with the ability to still customize.
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only 3% how is that possible with steam deck or whatever
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It dropped after the China market opened up. We are climbing back up again.
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Is there GTX 1080Ti support?
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Yes. You have access to both the official, proprietary Nvidia drivers (difficult for the community to improve or configure but best for gaming), and the open source "Nouveau" drivers (which I would consider more "Works for Tails and for a full FOSS ecosystem", but horrible for games).
No need to visit Nvidia's website either - you should have 3rd party driver installers built into your distro (and can upgrade/downgrade as needed).
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I was playing on one for awhile before I upgraded. It works but the drivers updates are hit and miss sometimes and I think they ended support(or was planning on it) for the card with the proprietary drivers. You should still be able to run off opensource drivers.
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Nvidia 9, 10-series support is quite poor. Your experience at best will still be worse than AMD, Intel, or more modern Nvidia cards running the nvidia-open kernel modules with the latest Nvidia drivers.
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I want to game on Linux too but can't because nvidia removed gpu target temp feature on Linux for my potato gpu.
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how is nouveau running for your gpu atm?
are you in the 9/10 series limbo?
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I have a mx250 laptop, and nvidia removed the ability to set the desired temp and it runs on overclocked freq on Linux so as soon as I launch any games, my gpu reaches to 94°C and I can set desired temp only on windows.
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Are we thanking the Steam Deck or are we thanking Microsoft for ending Windows 10?
Either way, congratulations to those of you who never stopped believing.
There's a graph on the linked page, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it. According to the overall trend "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" seems to be decreasing but "Arch-based" (which is also what SteamOS is) seems to be the one that is going up the most. Fedora has only recently started being tracked, but they probably came under "Other" before.
Could be a mix of Catchy and other Arch-derivatives, since they are known for good gaming performance (at least before Bazzite hit the mainstream). I would also imagine Valve wants to keep HoloISO separate so developers don't only target Steam Deck hardware and prevent other distro support (the infamous steamdeck=1 requirement).
The numbers are a bit misleading here: the overall share of Linux devices has increased massively. The gain of 0.41% points is a relative 15.5% increase from 2.64% share before. Even though SteamOS has a smaller share of this larger Linux share, the overall share (of all devices) of SteamOS increased from 0.290% to 0.315%.