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.
You might have had the same issues with SM2 I did; periods of smoothness followed by severe stuttering. In the past few weeks, they put out a patch that fixed things for me. That said, I’m on Nvidia.
I reinstalled after this thread. I no longer have performance issues! I’m on AMD. Hell yes.
Are you a Fanatec user? If so, that’s a bummer that Bazzite is causing issues. I’ve been on Nobara for a couple years and have had no issues with my CSL DD.
It’s a Logitech G29. I’ve read that other distros do not have this issue, that it’s something to do with Bazzite being an immutable operating system. Does Nobara have a gaming mode? I like Bazzite because it feels like Steam Deck.
what type of hardware did you pick for Linux vs Windows? I know for GPU AMD works better, but anything else?
- AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- XFX Speedster MERC310 AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX 24GB GDDR6
- Corsair Vengeance DDR5 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 6000MHz CL30
- Gigabyte X870E AORUS Elite WIFI7 AMD AM5 LGA 1718 Motherboard
- 4 TB Samsung NVME
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.
Valve is going to be a significant contributor to the death of Windows. Legit one man’s integrity is going to bring an end to a literal monopoly as adjudicated in the late 90’s. Hail gaben.
The fact that he worked on the early versions of Windows makes it even better.
May he live forever.
Not just windows but also Google. Can’t wait to destroy them by installing SteamOS everywhere.
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.
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!
Been on Linux for gaming for almost a year now and completely windows free since November last year. It’s glorious.
I use Arch, btw.
Almost exactly the same here. I technically still have my old windows install as a VM, but it’s broken and has been for months because I’m too lazy to update one little script that would take 5 seconds, because who cares, I ain’t using it.
I don’t use Arch, btw. But I use EndeavourOS!
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.
I haven’t seen any issues with year in review, I’m curious what you’ve seen.
The survey is always offered only to a random subset of Steam users. The results only ever represent the fractions of users who took the survey, and are not representative of the entire Steam ecosystem as a whole. Unfortunately, this means that the increase/decrease in Linux usage is probably within the margin of error and is not a reliable statistic.
Year of the linux desktop
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.
If your reason to keep windows is “but I luv Fortnite and LoL and CoD” then you should be banished to an Amish community.
Fuck those entire playerbases. I hope they all get mandatory $70/wk battle passes.
To be fair some great mutliplayer games unfortunately have battle passes. That’s not on the playerbase… I could swap to Linux, but then I couldn’t play PUBG as their antivirus doesn’t work in Linux. That’s not a compromise I’m willing to take, unfortunately.
I want sitting in the concept entirely, I just hate those games so much that I want those players pushed out so they die off.
No game should make your OS choice for you. I’m an ideal world it wouldn’t matter, but getting off windows is way, waaaaaay more important than playing a specific game. (Or it should be, if you have any idea how bad m$ really is.)
Someone please lead a Great Linux Crusade across the wall.
Anyone from that side of the world? I wonder why their Windows usage is so high.
Probably because of League of Legends. Half of the playerbase is in China.
Chinese government uses Linux though. They have their own homegrown distro called NeoKylin.
Gaming centers that buy the same hardware in bulk, is what I understand. So naturally, they’re going to buy them with Windows pre-installed.
There’s a few key games that some people can’t easily give up.
I also think if anyone has any interest in streaming, there’s often software built for specific desk tools they have (like stream decks) that can be hard to find reliable linux drivers for. I did see OBS is native, but that may be only part of it. Plus, many people are just starved for time, and don’t want to take a day to process a backup/reformat/reinstall that they may have to go back on.
There is open source software to run a stream deck, OBS is native (as you mentioned), and my Scarlett audio interface Just Works™. I’m not some big streamer or anything, but I dabble and nothing I could do on Windows is missing in Linux. Even my wacom tablet just works by plugging it in.
When I made the switch, I spent the money on a new ssd and literally pulled the windows one out and had it stashed away something like an “in case of emergency, break glass” type of thing. I realized recently I hadn’t touched that in 4 years and decided to format it and install Cachy to try that out on my laptop; everyone just won’t shup up about how good it is so I figured I should give it a chance.
I’m doing my part!
But seriously I would encourage everyone to try a dual boot with Linux even if you don’t end up switching. Just to get the numbers higher. Developers see these numbers and if it gets high enough they are going to take it seriously. Can’t wait to see what happens with the steam machine numbers.
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.
