Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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Microsoft is already responding to the potential shift. The upcoming ROG Xbox Ally X handheld from Microsoft and ASUS will reportedly ship with a gaming-optimized version of Windows 11 with a dedicated Xbox UI and interface that aims to streamline the experience while boosting in-game performance and overall handheld efficiency.
Given how much Microsoft wants to shove AI tools every where in Windows, I don’t think this optimisation will make much of a difference.
Given how much Microsoft wants to enshitify its services. Windows 11 is proven to be no exception. They have no reason to stop at the Xbox brand. Even Microsoft games like their new flight sim has not escaped enshitification race to the bottom.
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… what rate are you talking about?
I am going to assume the other person’s numbers were right but it honestly doesn’t matter
422k people per month? That is 0.3% per month.
2.89 + (0.3*34) = 13.09. 13% after almost 3 years. Which… that honestly still seems high but I could almost see it if SteamOS gets enough coverage by the various influencers and runs on every handheld form factor gaming PC that isn’t MS or Sony branded. And if the next attempt at Steam Machines actually gains traction and they take over a chunk of the console space ahead of the PS6.Or are you talking about compound interest? Which… I think even Activision and EA would call you crazy for assuming. Also I am not sure if the math actually holds for that either but I can never remember the simple math to represent that.
Also it is completely unrelated but I’ll just add: I personally don’t consider SteamOS gaining a significant market share to be “linux” any more than I do Android or consider Mac to be “BSD”. Yes, they have common ancestry (and varying levels of shared kernel and libraries) but it rapidly starts creating walled garden issues as developers prioritize one distro over the other to an obscene degree. And… I think we can all agree after the past few weeks that GabeN can indeed do wrong when it is in his/Valve’s financial interest to do so.
It’s Linux because for devs it’s a Linux platform.
And yeah 11% growth month to month compounds quickly. It won’t hold forever but all things like that are sigmoidal Wich does start as an exponential growth.
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Lemmy Linux copium is one of the strongest in the world.
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I highly recommend Nobara.
idk why you’re downvoted hella ppl use proton ge and hes the one making nobara
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Have you tried a different distro base such as Fedora or SUSE compared to Debians based? I have a laptop that will not install Debian based distros due to hardware error or bug, or if it does install they fail to boot with hardware errors messages. Fedora and SUSE work though, and ironically nixOS.
I tried mint and endeavour (also arch tho so I guess its the same) Mint had the same freezing issue. Thought it was my hardware because I had reinstalled my os when problems began, eventually tried the lts kernel and it became stable like it was originally. They recentlly updated it tho, so I have to prevent updates (idk how so I just rollback from the cache after every pacman -Syu)
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I had that issue last time I switched to Linux. Thankfully eventually it went away. It should help to distro hop to a more bleeding edge distro. Fedora specifically gets system updates every night through Discover.
I’m on cachyos, thought arch was the most bleeding edge
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If all you do is game, outside of a few key games (Destiny 2, uhh,couple others) the experience on Linux is better for many folks.
For flat games this is true, there is still work to be done for the VR side of things, even that has advanced by leaps and bounds in just the last 2 or 3 years
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It’s not so much about users switching, it’s more about the ones that will stick with it. And that we can’t know for a few years yet.
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All major distros are fine, but there are some niche that specialise in making it easy for people to play games. I use Garuda Linux for that reason. It has it’s own app that helps handling OS maintenance, you can install things like Heroic Launcher, Steam, and Proton with a couple of clicks, you have a nice app that checks for updates, etc., etc.
It’s still Linux, which means random shit breaks for no reason, but for gaming and not having to worry about keeping the OS alive it’s great.
Linux in no way means that “random shit breaks for no reason”, if anything that’s Windows. Some distributions may be easier to break if you don’t know what you are doing but that is not an OS problem.
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Lemmy Linux copium is one of the strongest in the world.
How else are we going to achieve nuclear fission?
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A lot of people will say Bazzite and they’re probably right, but I installed PopOS last year and I have had zero problems with any configuration or gaming. Also on an Nvidia GPU / AMD CPU.
I did the same with AMD+ NVidia gpu combo but it is not without problems. Do you play through Steam/proton db or are you using something else like Lutris?
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Linux in no way means that “random shit breaks for no reason”, if anything that’s Windows. Some distributions may be easier to break if you don’t know what you are doing but that is not an OS problem.
Linux in no way means that “random shit breaks for no reason” (…) Some distributions may be easier to break if you don’t know what you are doing but that is not an OS problem.
Things that randomly broke for no reason:
- BT-connected mouse suddenly refused to connect.
- App Menu (“File”, “View”, etc.) randomly disappeared from all apps and wouldn’t re-appear.
- AppImage application suddenly started throwing a “binary found, misconfigured” error.
- Sleep would kill the OS. Only a hard reboot fixed the issue (this was on two brand new distros on my PC).
- Every couple of times Sleep would kill the WiFi on my laptop after the OS was woken up.
Things that broke after I installed a dGPU:
- Heroic Launcher “lost” Proton and couldn’t launch any games.
- Steam would open a black window with no content visible.
- Every three or four reboots after installing the dGPU, the FPS while on the desktop would be around 10, the OS effectively unusable.
Things that broke after a system update:
- Application Launcher turned fully transparent making it almost impossible to read the names.
This was all in a span of around 3 months.
If it was “if anything that’s Windows”, then I would be doing nothing but fixing user issues with my ~300 Windows devices. That’s not the case.
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How else are we going to achieve nuclear fission?
Don’t you mean fusion? Fission is separate and we’ve already achieved it a long time ago.
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Linux in no way means that “random shit breaks for no reason” (…) Some distributions may be easier to break if you don’t know what you are doing but that is not an OS problem.
Things that randomly broke for no reason:
- BT-connected mouse suddenly refused to connect.
- App Menu (“File”, “View”, etc.) randomly disappeared from all apps and wouldn’t re-appear.
- AppImage application suddenly started throwing a “binary found, misconfigured” error.
- Sleep would kill the OS. Only a hard reboot fixed the issue (this was on two brand new distros on my PC).
- Every couple of times Sleep would kill the WiFi on my laptop after the OS was woken up.
Things that broke after I installed a dGPU:
- Heroic Launcher “lost” Proton and couldn’t launch any games.
- Steam would open a black window with no content visible.
- Every three or four reboots after installing the dGPU, the FPS while on the desktop would be around 10, the OS effectively unusable.
Things that broke after a system update:
- Application Launcher turned fully transparent making it almost impossible to read the names.
This was all in a span of around 3 months.
If it was “if anything that’s Windows”, then I would be doing nothing but fixing user issues with my ~300 Windows devices. That’s not the case.
Funny, that’s not the experience of the majority of people in this thread. Several flavors of Linux that have been listed are rock solid and require little to no user action to work and launch games. You can list all of the problems you want, that’s just 1 person’s experience. It could be because of the distribution you chose, because of your skills, anything. But it’s not statically relevant.
Also, please, Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly. Don’t you think there would be a tiny bit more Windows dominance on the servers side if the opposite were true?
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We’ve achieved fusion too. We just can’t extract more energy than we put into it yet.
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I’ve been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It’s a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.
My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.
Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don’t shove AI down your throat, and don’t steal your data for profit. The time has come.
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I’ve been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It’s a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.
My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.
Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don’t shove AI down your throat, and don’t steal your data for profit. The time has come.
I can’t wait for nvidia to fix the last few graphical glitches in steam big picture and game scope.
I have windows 11 and bazzite as dual boot. I haven’t moved over full time yet though. Mainly due to VR support and sailing…
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Funny, that’s not the experience of the majority of people in this thread. Several flavors of Linux that have been listed are rock solid and require little to no user action to work and launch games. You can list all of the problems you want, that’s just 1 person’s experience. It could be because of the distribution you chose, because of your skills, anything. But it’s not statically relevant.
Also, please, Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly. Don’t you think there would be a tiny bit more Windows dominance on the servers side if the opposite were true?
that’s not the experience of the majority of people in this thread
I’m willing to bet the majority of people in this thread already forgot about the “linuxism” they had to deal with when they were starting, and are experienced enough to handle any new ones as they come along.
Don’t you think there would be a tiny bit more Windows dominance on the servers side if the opposite were true?
Linux dominates the server realm for a completely different reason - Linux-based servers supported hot-updates much sooner than Windows Server did, and in systems where uptime was critical, people chose Linux. That also meant that the vast majority of “server admins” had Linux experience which also contributed.
This is slowly changing now - if you look at market stats, you can see that Windows Server is (painfully slowly, granted) regaining some momentum.
EDIT: also, fun fact - I used to work at a company that had around 300 MacBooks and 2500 Windows devices. Back then I was working as a Service Desk agent. The distribution of incidents for Windows and MacOS we were getting was VERY close to 50-50… So, it seems to me that “Windows is known, has been known, and probably will be known for having shit break randomly” mostly among people who don’t use Windows.
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Haha, yup! Brain bork moment.
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Exactly. Maybe I could have given more context but I wrote that comment right before my flight took off.
![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg "Lvxferre [he/him]"){kind=avatar}
