Linux user share hits a multi-year high on Steam for May 2025
-
Bazzite did it for me, never looked back.
Zoring boi!
-
This post did not contain any content.
I am one of them now.
-
Fedora did not break the top 10. Is it not good for gaming? Genuinely curious as I was thinking of hopping to Fedora.
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 don’t get the hateboner the linux community has against Manjaro, it’s the only distro that booted correctly in live image mode with full nvidia support on my PC, so seems like they at least take Nvidia pretty seriously.
manjaro really does some things right. it’s the best grub boot menu i’ve ever seen, with perfect dual/triple booting detection and such, but it kept breaking all the time and was a pain to fix. switched to fedora and never looked back. i got debian on machines where i don’t want to fiddle with the is often. then fedora on what i use a lot and need to be flexible. bazzite on machines where its supposed to just work and manage the nvidia optimus pain, which it does really well. also i’d opt for mint for people starting out, or not as tech savvy people. different distros for different use cases, but manjaro has proven to be too much work (on my workstation and those of multiple friends). (also i’m looking into nixos)
-
This post did not contain any content.
This is most likely a combination of:
-
Trump’s tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes
-
Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11
-
Steam supporting Linux increasingly well
-
-
This is most likely a combination of:
-
Trump’s tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes
-
Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11
-
Steam supporting Linux increasingly well
And steam deck
-
-
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.
-
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 had to change Proton version and use Gamescope to run Expedition 33, and it runs quite well.
-
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.
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.
-
But how does one participate in these statistics? Via the Help menu -> System report -> Submit?
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.
-
And steam deck
Well that comes under point #3 but yeah
-
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.
-
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.
-
This post did not contain any content.
2 months in. Linux Mint. I am doing my part!
-
This post did not contain any content.
THERE ARE DOZENS OF US
-
Fedora did not break the top 10. Is it not good for gaming? Genuinely curious as I was thinking of hopping to 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.
-
This is most likely a combination of:
-
Trump’s tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes
-
Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11
-
Steam supporting Linux increasingly well
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.
-
-
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.
I think most of us have experience of the concept of something being said ironically, as a joke, at first but then being increasingly serious. It’s like magic really does exist and if you say words often enough they start affecting reality, like a spell. Freedom of speech is a right but it’s also a profound responsibility.
-
This post did not contain any content.
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.
-
I don’t get the hateboner the linux community has against Manjaro, it’s the only distro that booted correctly in live image mode with full nvidia support on my PC, so seems like they at least take Nvidia pretty seriously.
There always seems to be some sort of controversy going on about the devs’ behavior from an ethical perspective.