Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
-
This post did not contain any content.
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.
-
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.
-
Lemmy Linux copium is one of the strongest in the world.
How else are we going to achieve nuclear fission?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
We’ve achieved fusion too. We just can’t extract more energy than we put into it yet.
-
This post did not contain any content.
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’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…
-
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.
-
Haha, yup! Brain bork moment.
-
Exactly. Maybe I could have given more context but I wrote that comment right before my flight took off.
-
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.
Yeah, “linuxism”, that must be it… That or it’s possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.
Linux dominates on servers because of that yes. Also because of its licensing costs, being open source, stable, secure (please don’t try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please), better performance and lesser response time. Because a Debian stable will never break with simple security updates. I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.
Finally, do tell me where I mentioned MacOS. Unless you think that MacOS and Linux are the same? That wouldn’t surprise me considering your apparent knowledge (or lack of) about Linux. FYI MacOS is based on a BSD kernel.
-
Steam has over 132 million monthly active users
That month on month Linux expansion is ~422,000 computers. That is a shitload of people switching in just a single month.
OSes are sticky as hell. People don’t like switching. As Linux attracts these people away from Microsoft, MS is not going to get them back. And importantly, the adoption rate is high enough that many 3rd party companies are taking notice and releasing for both.
People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers. They probably ALSO have a Windows machine
-
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.
Sure, but even using that absurd growth rate continuously it would still take an ADDITIONAL 18 months from what you originally said to hit 50%
-
Arch is above my skill level at the moment. If CachyOS is an Arch distro, it could be related to Arch configuration issues.
-
Well, screen is running at 4k, so i think its normal.
Ah, yeah that changes things a bit.
-
How is your idle VRAM (video RAM) holding? For some reason i have 1GB usage in Mint with Cinnamon without anything running, while on windows i have 400MB (although i have optimised them a lot).
Why do you care?
If I had to guess, VRAM is probably holding stuff as a cache.
VRAM doesn’t use a lot of power and as long as you aren’t seeing out of memory issues, it doesn’t really matter.
-
People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers. They probably ALSO have a Windows machine
People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers.
The Steam Deck shows up as Arch Linux in the steam numbers; Arch is only 10.7% of the Linux user-base on Steam. And this is on top of the fact desktop Arch Linux is a thing as well sharing space in that line-item.
The Steam Deck (and Microsoft tomfoolery) certainly was the catalyst for the current wave of adoption, but it is barely a notable percentage of Linux installs on Steam.