Linux user share hits a multi-year high on Steam for May 2025

I joined the Linux team like six months ago. Fuck windows ai garbage and spyware
- I’ve been considering doing the same recently for the reasons you listed but I’m fairly technologically stunted. How did the process go for you? How smooth was the transition? I’m fed up with windows and need a change but I’m not tech savvy at all.
  
  I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and the installation process was exceptionally easy and the desktop environment is very straightforward.
  You might want to try to install Linux on like an old laptop or something first just to get the hang of it. I installed it on my main desktop first and it went well, but now all my computers run it.
  I even recently purchased a new Linux tablet that I can’t wait to get.
  
  I installed bazzite recently and installation, setups, updating etc is easier than windows. Everything is easier. It's not perfect but yeah, I am never looking back to windows even if I keep it installed as a dual boot... For now.

- And steam deck
- To your first point, it's not even so much the tariffs; it's the threat to our Canadian sovereignty. A lot of Americans see it as a joke, but a president shouldn't be talking about their allies like that. We don't really expect better from that waste of skin, but the lack of a response from the average American about this specifically is a slap in the face from our closest allies.
  
  As a liberal in most ways (except on guns), and as a pro 2nd Amendment LGBT American, I'm sorry.
  Many of us have "evil fatigue" and "ignorance fatigue" and are just exhausted from how many people in our country are total shitheads.
  The list of people for me to apologize to: -dead people in Gaza -alive people in Gaza -all Latinos -all transgender people -Canada -all scientists -intellectuals at Harvard -Ukrainians -Women who were killed due to abortion policies -Anyone in a country killed due to a sudden lack of aid without much warning to even prepare
  As a mostly liberal American, I just don't know where to begin. I also think bad environmental policies are going to destroy the planet, and when I look at conservative middle America and how intolerant and racist their values are, I am sort of like "well, maybe total planetary extinction isn't that bad"
  I just don't know if I could change it at this point, if there's anything I could do.
  The constant horror of the policies being enacted in this country is so terrible, that it's hard to really continue to say "sorry, we don't all believe this!" Some people protest, some don't, but really many liberals are also just treading water psychologically. It's quite possible that the fatigue being felt is being intentionally induced.
  There may be a way to get past the fatigue, but it's being combined with financial stress, and for me, apologizing to Canada, standing up for Canada, is just not on the top of the list.
  I really do not see what is happening as a conservative revolution. I see this as the self-centered wealthy class realizing they can exploit white trash and technology to destroy the middle class and create a permanent underclass and them. I do not think JD Vance Trump Thiel etc are actually religious, I think it is this final push towards neofeudalism.
  It feels like it will unfortunately lead to either communism/socialism or neofeudalism, that there isn't a middle groud.
  The neo-feudalists have made a bet: the white trash class is so numerous and so hateful towards transgenders and Latinos and "the other," that they can simultaneously eliminate many jobs using tech, reduce social services for poverty, and create a new Chinese-style of quasi-authoritarianism in America based on technology ans biometric information... And they can do this as long as they distract the white trash class with tricks and diversions: oh! Look! Mexican criminals! Look over here! Oh no! Transgenders in bathrooms! Look over there!
  And so far, the magicians seem to be right. The yokel white trash of middle America, well over 60 percent of the country, is too stupid to realize they are being tricked by a magician.
  So, many middle class people, and lower middle class people, especially technological enthusiasts, see what is happening. But what now? I'm exhausted. I do not know how to reason with idiots. I am just trying to brace myself for impact.

Damn, that is a solid upward trend.

I'm a part of that percentage!

I am one of them now.

Bazzite did it for me, never looked back.
- Zoring boi!

Fedora did not break the top 10. Is it not good for gaming? Genuinely curious as I was thinking of hopping to Fedora.
- Most of it is probably steamos devices, which is an arch derivative
- It's as good as any other distro
  
  I'd argue that for Nvidia and their drivers management there are better choices, such as Manjaro.
  Although on desktop I didn't have any problems, laptop with AMD iGPU and Nvidia dGpu, prime etc. It's really a PITA on Fedora.
  AMD 9070 on Wayland and Plasma isn't perfect neither.
- im using fedora and its nice, but i installed bazzite on a mates laptop recently, and when it comes to nvidia, and especially hybrid graphics (laptops with nvidia gpus), it’s so much easier to use bazzite with their preconfigured nvidia stuff than anything else. so, bazzite is really nice to use and based on fedora, but for my main machine i’ll probably stick to fedora for now.
- I’m on Fedora and it’s great. I think I had a GNOME-related performance issue the other day, so I’m trying Plasma KDE
- People are still choosing Ubuntu too much which feels annoying to me considering how much better the alternatives are, including mint which is second highest.
  I guess more likely Fedora being an RPM distro with its own set of system standards keeps people from switching.
  I would think Bazzite and Nobara would have boosted the usage, but I guess not as much as I think.
- Fedora is fine for gaming. The biggest issue I had with it was that if i had an issue with it, I had to do a web search for fedora + issue and I got a lot of unrelated hits for hats.
  That said, gloriouseggroll made their own Fedora based gaming distro called Nobara. However I don't know if they would have based their distro off of fedora if they didn't work for Redhat.
  Personally, I prefer rolling releases which is why I no longer use Fedora.
- I'm on Fedora and I always use the flatpak version of steam, which is listed as 4th. If you redistributed the flatpaks to the actual distro, I wouldn't be surprised if Fedora was in the top 10. Probably above CachyOS. Fedora encompasses all the immutable child distros like Silverblue, Kiniote, and Bazzite.
- I game on fedora (nobara) fulltime and its enjoyable and works great
- It's simply reflective of how Steam publishes those numbers on its own platform. For some reason, Fedora isn't explicitly accounted for while it's very likely to possess a huge chunk of the "Other" category.
  To illustrate this point, we'll look at Boiling Steam's latest report. It uses ProtonDB's data to give us (possible) insight on what's found within "Other" (that accounts for 23.27%). Before I delve further, it has to be said that ProtonDB's data contrasts Steam's in significant ways. It's not a huge departure, but one definitely notices a slight discrepancy between the numbers.
  FWIW, as per Boiling Steam's report, we find the following numbers for Fedora (and related derivatives):
  Fedora - 8.7%
  Nobara - 5.2%
  Bazzite - 4.5%
  Which (together) amounts to 18.4%.
  If we would scale this down, as Boiling Steam's report doesn't include SteamOS Holo^[I'll assume its share is 30.95% based on Steam's own numbers.], we'd get:
  Fedora - 6%
  Nobara - 3.6%
  Bazzite - 3.1%
  Totaling to 12.7% this time. And thus, it('s at least likely to) constitute the majority of the "Other" category.

THERE ARE DOZENS OF US

Ay, moved over to Arch 3 months ago! It's been fantastic and nearly every game has worked out of the box, protondb solved most other issues.
- Three months of using Arch and you've not included your 'btw' when claiming to use it? Most suspicious.
  But yeah, agree completely. I made a new-years resolution about five years ago to try 'Linux only gaming for a month' rather than dual booting; worked so well that I wiped Windows a few months later and have never missed it for a minute. That was for Mint, which is great but hard to keep cutting-edge. Decided to try Arch instead, and after a couple of false starts (hadn't read the install guide carefully enough to have networking after restart, that kind of thing) it's been absolutely superb - rock solid, got everything I want at the very latest versions for work and games, best documentation of any distro.

I switched to Linux mint a year ago and play most of my games on it. However, i still need a windows installation for those games that refuse to work on Steam (I play Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 coop and I can’t get expedition 33 to run on Linux. But besides that, i spend most of my time on mint (mainly Monster Train 2 and Mechabellum)
- i still need a windows installation for those games that refuse to work on Steam (I play Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 coop and I can’t get expedition 33 to run on Linux
  All three of those have a gold or higher rating on Linux, meaning they run fine on linux with little to no effort. Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, Expedition 33. If you are having specific issues, check out the linked pages where people share their fixes.
  
  Thank you, i‘ll give it another try
- I had to change Proton version and use Gamescope to run Expedition 33, and it runs quite well.

2 months in. Linux Mint. I am doing my part!

It was really cool of Microsoft to decide 202X is the year of Linux on the desktop.

I do wonder if there's any selection bias in the hardware survey steam does. I'm sure they sample randomly, but I think a user on Linux might be much more eager to participate in the survey than a Windows user, simply because Linux users tend to have a desire to be more vocal about their OS use than Windows users.
- Linux users are also more likely to be private people and not willing to share info about their system. Both of those two effects are probably pretty small and cancel eachother for this survey.
- It's not a manually filled out survey. It's just a box that pops up on Steam, you click OK to share info, and that's it. I think there's very little bias involved in it.
  
  There's the bias between users willing to share that data and those not willing. All sorts of correlations could be hiding there.
  I can't find out what the rate of refusals are, but I'd guess them to be rather low, maybe 10% at most. The survey is incredibly easy to perform and very transparent about colleted data.
  The important thing to realise is that the survey is very consistent, so while the baseline may have some bias, the trends are very representative.

I just built a new machine, for a time I'll try some Steam on Linux. For the latest version of Ubuntu and an Intel 570. No idea what I'm doing, lol. (Normally just use Linux server).
- Just don't install Steam with snap. Many have had issues in the past with it. Either flatpak or grabbing the deb file from Steam
  
  Yeah I agree, snap sucks big time. It's so sad that Ubuntu decided to go all in on that shit
  
  Ok, so re-install Steam! 😆 Pretty sure what I got was Snap. I was presented an App installer thing that kinda reminded me of the Microsoft Store (except, way less laggy). I think I remember seeing the word Snap.
  Is there a way to verify that I have the right drivers for the video card? When it comes to GUI, I have a very Windows mindset, where I need to install the proper drivers, else I get the basic "well it works" drivers which aren't good for gaming.

I switched over about 2 months ago after I couldn't get an older game to play after a windows update and kinda just rage quit Windows. It was building for a while, but in the end it was just a little thing that brought it tumbling down. Game worked perfectly fine with proton without any problems or tinkering. I've only had trouble getting a couple games working, and neither are big deal breakers.

I installed Bazzite earlier this year and it's working great for me!
My dad installed Steam OS on one of his secondary PC's not too long ago.

But how does one participate in these statistics? Via the Help menu -> System report -> Submit?
- No. It's randomly sampled supposedly.
  
  Thanks. I was hoping there was some way to voluntarily help those stats along. It's a known phenomenon in the linux community how much we hate leaving a crumb trail of any kind, but it would be nice to send a signal to game developers to start taking us seriously, and that might just be through steam stats after all.
- You'll get a popup on Steam telling you about the sutvey and asking you to share info. You click yes or no, and that's it. I've gotten them a few times.
  There are no questions to answer, it just takes freely available system info.

it's easier to get games working on Linux then it is to get them working on Mac thanks to the new and amazing Apple Silicon