Linux continues to grow and has reached a new peak of 3.20% in the November 2025 Steam Hardware & Software Survey

I switched to Bazzite based on a recommendation and it's been a fantastic OS for me (gaming and light development/home labbing) and I no longer have any desire to distro hop.

Took a bit to figure out the immutable stuff for some very niche things I needed done, but other than that ezpz

That list is just weird and only shows a few specific distros. If you go to the Linux only results you get way more info. It shows Bazzite as used by 5.53% of respondents, +1.29% from last month.

I think it was more of a fad for a short while, but there are a lot of other much more entrenched and mainstream distros

It's a fad at best. And immutable distros are awful outside of extremely ridged use cases.

It basically is just a worse version of normal fedora or cachy OS.

It tries to both and successfully does neither job as well.

Some of us still duel-boot

Now that you've mentioned... Knocks on wood

Been using Arch for daily driver, web server, large data analytics machine, gaming, music making, programming, visual design and a while lot more for 15 years now. The only time I've had an issue with something in the official repos was when freecad was compiled with a version of a library that wasn't compatible with a very specific thing I wanted to do and I had to recompile it. That's it. 15 years. One issue. Not sure that even this Gaben fellow could improve on that...

Importantly, there was a net increase in Linux users and a net decrease in Windows users.

Still increases in other areas ☺️👍

These are private computers for gaming with Steam installed. This will literally be less than pocket change to them. They likely lose more from pirated Windows and secondhand purchasers of Apple products.

The amount of money tech giants lose will not be affected for a long time. The main achievement for Linux right now would be to get a foothold, to make it known to the public, to normalise its use. The big change will come when organisations start moving to Linux (which you would think would be a priority considering the fact that it is free and more secure).

They make more on cloud servers than as operating systems nowadays.

Till that number starts hitting like 15% because these are just private users. These big companies aren't even going to be able to notice the shift.

Apple probably isn't seeing it as a factor. Anyone switching from MacOS to Linux on Apple hardware has purchased Apple hardware and will likely continue doing so because they're the kind of people who buy Apple products and you can't change that about a person.

Of those Windows users switching to Linux, how many of them have decided to stop using a Windows license they've had for years? Instead of upgrading to 11 for free, they're switching to Linux? Or, how many of them are rocking the Activate Windows watermark? There's probably a pittance or two lost in ad revenue, but Microsoft almost isn't a B2C company anymore.

It's like damn look how good the general Linux desktop got with barely any general consumer adoption for about 30 years. Imagine what it could get around ~10%. 20 years ago Mac's were only around 5%. I love gaming on Linux but my main thought is how this is the trojan horse that brings users and some funding and developer attention to open source applications. Kdenlive needs love. Ardour needs love. Darktable. Get them all the Blender treatment someday

I think it really depends on your definition of what counts as year of Linux. Will Linux usage ever beat Windows or Mac? Of course not. But it can definitely get popular enough that companies have to think really hard about whether they need to support Linux or not. And meanwhile, Linux isn't going to get popular overnight (or in a year, for that matter). So do you consider the year of the Linux to be the end of growth? Middle of growth? Or beginning of growth?

For me, I think year of the Linux desktop already passed in 2021, with the launch of the steam deck (where I'm defining year of Linux to be the point where Linux usage picks up and will hopefully end at a point where companies have to take Linux seriously)

All of the major gaming youtubers have made at least a couple videos featuring Linux over the last couple months, which is definitely a big change from the windows-only (except sometimes servers) content of years past.

Right? It's oozing with sarcasm, like—ArCh LiNuX

lmao

I think it's because they're including steam os which is an Arch derivative.

openSUSE is GOAT.

I'm a CachyOS shill, and I'd recommend Tumbleweed to anyone. It's criminal that folks use stuff like Ubuntu or Manjaro over it.

Now that zypper has been pulled into the modern age with parallel & faster downloading, the only complaint remaining I have for it is the installer itself

Really wanna try a perma switch from Fedora just cuz they include a nice grub theme lmao.

Plus I like that its proper rolling instead of staged releases.

I also had a friend ask how to install Linux or where to buy a computer that has it preinstalled. It's getting out there.

Yeah, indeed. Steam language breakdown is about 40% English, 30% Chinese, 10% Russian, 5% Spanish, 15% other. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly use Windows rather than Linux, so choosing 'English only' basically doubles the Linux percentage.

I'd be interested to know why Linux has such bad update in Chinese-speaking regions. (It's the lingua franca for much of Asia, so not just China, just largely China.) Obviously, inertia plays a part - easier to move to Linux if you know someone else that can help you, which if there's no-one then you might be a bit stuck. Are the fonts crappy? Are the input methods greatly superior in Windows?

That chart shows what I would interpret as really strong Linux growth. Somewhere around 200% growth in the last 4 years, and seems to be significantly accelerating.

Other gang assemble!

Was thinking of trying Cachy cause of Lemmy talking about it, glad you see it higher than what I previously used (Manjaro).

So if I'm running Arch but running flatpak Steam, my Arch statistic will not go noticed?

I find it weird that China hates Linux

I've been gaming on Arch (btw) since 2013 and only had minor issues I could resolve with a bit of googling.

Things have only gotten better over the years. Steam will just work on pretty much any distro as it has its own runtime.

'won't die' ? I mean Gabe is great, but I don't think he's immortal.

I respect that. Tho do remember this is opensource instead of a traditional system.

Any improvement to steamos will improve bazzite and any improvement to bazzite will improve steamos.

I have doubts that Valve will officially support SteamOS on anything but their own hardware (and maybe some partners'), in which case unless you plan on buying a Steam Machine you're going to be stuck for a very, very long time.

EndeavourOS is nice. I've been using it for 10 months.
Only issue I had was that my windows dual boot messed up the booting. Plenty of tutorials about fixing it tho, so wasn't too hard

this is steam as snap package, just like how they count flatpak steam

I was wondering who's gaming on their thermostat.

i'm presuming people are using a just enough os (JEOS) distro to install a gui of their choice and steam and not much else.

I have one machine where I run steam as a headless instance as I just use it for remoteplay to the TV.

My understanding is that Steam has nearly or completely removed the old 32 bit dependencies recently.

I'm part of that 0.15%. I had been dual booting Windows for years and finally made the full switch with win10 EOL

I have been running Bazzite (with KDE) and an Nvidia GPU (RTX 3070) for almost 6 months and I have not had any issues.

Everything worked with no additional tweaks. I was playing Dead Space (2023) almost half an hour after installing the OS, it was amazing. If you have the time, you should give it a try, I highly recommend it.

I'm sorry to hear that! I've been having good experiences with Wayland + NVIDIA on both Ubuntu 25.10 and EndeavourOS (whatever version is the latest). There are minor annoyances, but nothing as dire as what you're describing.

I couldn't get Fedora working well with Nvidia. Bazzite worked for me out of the box. Bazzite is just Fedora with some out of the box configurations, so it must be possible to make Fedora work with Nvidia. I am just not capable of making it work.

I am happy with Bazzite though.

I don't know what I'm doing, I just installed some Arch thing and so far everythings worked - although my hdd is sluggish compared to my old windows install.

Please try memtest86. I had issues that almost looked like this.

Just use Xorg. Wayland is notorious for Nvidia issues.

One in a while there is an issue with CS2 for me too, but it's usually because of fullscreen/windowed mode and the window manager being aggressive. Try turning it off/on with launch parameters.

I guess it kinda depends on the accuracy of the numbers available to the application. If 0.00 is actually zero then a negative zero doesn't make sense. But if the number was -0.001 then yeah -0.00 would make sense, it would be conveying a decrease just not in the decimal places displayed.

But if it is actually zero then they probably should've used a different colour than red because it is confusing.

My guess is it's probably just if x > 0 then "green" else "red" kinda logic happening.

Probably not in the mood of dealing with stuff like having to turn Secure Boot off to get my laptop's Nvidia (Optimus based) card to work in Performance Mode, as the drivers delivered by Mint aren't signed.

Or fighting with Wine and Lutris to get Battle.net to install, as I just want to play the Diablo II remaster. Only to find the Battle.net interface does not render most of the time, even after following advice like turning Hardware Acceleration off. Or having the launcher freeze completely when trying to use Proton, no matter if it is version 8,9,10, Experimental or Hotfix. Or finding out that after spending way too much time on getting Battle.net to work that the game I wanted to play actually crashes immediately to the desktop on start.

Or trying to get Bazzite to install, which it won't because it keeps throwing a useless 'exit code 1' error during install. Which can't be solved by following the online guides, as none seems applicable to my situation (no previous Fedora installation, no Fedora folder on my EFI drive, tried multiple drives, image checksum is OK).

That was my gaming experience of the last week and hardly the first time that I had to jump through hoops getting stuff to work. Getting Skyve to work for Cities Skylines II was also such a fun time.

I'm crazy enough to keep trying and debugging on my laptop. But my gaming PC is definitely not going to get converted to Linux anytime soon, for those cases where I just want to play a game without any problems. And unfortunately my debloated/detelemetried Windows 11 has so far provided a stable and trouble free gaming experience.

A pugnant earthy mix of fear, nostalgia, sloth, and an open acceptance of corporate skullduggery.

Possibly Battlefield, League, Fortnite, or COD. Can't deny those are big population draws, and turn Linux into a no-sell.

Ableton Live

It amounts to several million converts in the past 4 years, at least.

are you asking which linux distros work or which distros steam works on? i'm having trouble squaring either question since any distro with guided installer is trivial to get set up once you know how to get into UEFI/BIOS and steam runs fantastic on linux. did you try steam on linux recently and run into issues? what distro did you try? do you have nvidea hardware?