Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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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.
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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.
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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
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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%
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Arch is above my skill level at the moment. If CachyOS is an Arch distro, it could be related to Arch configuration issues.
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Well, screen is running at 4k, so i think its normal.
Ah, yeah that changes things a bit.
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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.
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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.
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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.
I’m gaming with an NVIDIA GPU, so my VRAM is kind of limited. I’m at my limits in games because the company cheaped out on VRAM in their GPUs after the 10 series.
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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.
Good on your son! Glad he sees the light. Windows is shittier and shittier all the time. I migrated away from it years ago. It’s absolute poison now.
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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
Are there really people playing VR stuff regularly? I only know 2 people in my circles that bought equipment for it, and both of them got sick of it after a couple weeks.
I don’t know, what I’ve tried was fun for about 10 minutes, but that’s about all I could take before the headache starts.
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I’ve been running Linux on my desktop for more than 30 years, so I’ve switched for a while. And while I’d certainly like to see it become more commonplace, I’m not sure a few decimal points are really going to change anything. It’s nice that it’s making progress, of course, but all in all, it’s rather insignificant.
While it’s under 10, or more likely 15%, nobody will care about it. -
Are there really people playing VR stuff regularly? I only know 2 people in my circles that bought equipment for it, and both of them got sick of it after a couple weeks.
I don’t know, what I’ve tried was fun for about 10 minutes, but that’s about all I could take before the headache starts.
I have put over 9k hours of play time since i got my vive in 2018. usually play for about 2h at a stretch 7 times a week. VR has destroyed my ability to play flat games, I just can’t put more than a half hour into them these days. Usually load a game, look at the main menu, may start the game then in a few mins, turn it off.
I play mil sim, zombie shooter, vr mods of flat games I have enjoyed in the past like raft and The Forest.
When I first started there was a time i couldn’t play long but after a month 2h was no issue except for tiredness.
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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’m too old to tinker anymore. Bazzite has been a blessing. Rock solid.
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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?
I use steam, I do check protonDB but I’ve never had to tinker with much.
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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.
Linux really is in a good place I’ve been on it for some months now. It feels like win 7, it doesn’t get in your way, it does what you want it to do when you want it to. And if you fuck something up its because you fucked it up… go fix it…
