Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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I tried setting up Windows 10 in a virtual machine recently and damn, what a miserable experience that was. “Please wait. We’re getting things ready . . . please wait . . . We’re getting things ready. Hey, you want Cortana? Tough shiat, we’re installing it anyway. Do you need an Office App? Well we’re going to install Live365, whether you like it or not. Also, we really want your email address. You don’t have a choice. Just give us your damn email address. And your phone number, too.”
Installing Linux: 15 minutes later: “You’re done. Enjoy.”
Haiku, 30 seconds later… Your all set
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Just tried gaming on Linux because I forgot my Ally and was stuck on my laptop. Sorry, guys, it still sucks. It’s getting better, though. Perhaps in another 10 years.
Issues were?
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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
check out https://lvra.gitlab.io/ for information on linux VR
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Microsoft Recall and Steam Deck and Proton are why.
It would be so hilarious to see historians refer to the market shift as “The Great Microsoft Recall” as like a literal recall in addition to the name of the feature.
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Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.
But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual
drive?).I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.
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Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.
But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual
drive?).I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.
I’ve had a lot of success using Ventoy for my USB drive writing needs. Every steam game has it’s own folder for it’s virtual windows directory. You want to look in /home/your_name/.steam/steamapps/compatdata The folders are all strings of numbers, each being the ID of the respective steam game. You can find the ID for any steam game just by going in it’s store page and looking at the URL. You don’t usually need to mess with this though, just browse the game files in your /steam/common folder.
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I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that’s a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.
In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.
My experience with Linux with Nvidia drivers was basically - hey execute this “.run” file and you get drivers. Okay that worked but then if the kernel updated, the drivers broke and had to be reinstalled. And if the dist upgraded to a new version then the drivers broke completely. And NVidia gave up providing drivers at all for their older GPUs and I was stuck with Noveau which is better than nothing but useless for gaming.
Conversely, some dists are supported by graphics manufacturers with proper packages but there is always that gap where the driver dependencies and the kernel dependencies are out of sync. Or the graphics driver only works on the last couple of dists and support disappears after that. Or you upgrade the dist and then discover there are no drivers for it yet.
I know it rankles some purists, but really there should be an long term, versioned ABI for graphics drivers on Linux. There is sort-of is one with Gallium3D but it’s still not supported properly by all vendors.
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I’ve had a lot of success using Ventoy for my USB drive writing needs. Every steam game has it’s own folder for it’s virtual windows directory. You want to look in /home/your_name/.steam/steamapps/compatdata The folders are all strings of numbers, each being the ID of the respective steam game. You can find the ID for any steam game just by going in it’s store page and looking at the URL. You don’t usually need to mess with this though, just browse the game files in your /steam/common folder.
Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.
Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don’t have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).
Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives… but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB… sigh.
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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.
Yeah, “linuxism”, that must be it… That or it’s possible that the OS and distributions have evolved while you were not looking.
As in: between today and six months ago, when I moved my personal PC to Linux and encountered various weird shit that just doesn’t happen on Windows?
secure (please don’t try to tell me Windows is more secure, please please please)
Wait, are you one of those weird people who believe that there are no viruses on Linux and no security tools are needed?
Windows servers are under constant attack… Just like Linux devices are at all times.
I am also quite curious about getting a source for that claim that Windows Server is coming back.
I didn’t say “it’s coming back”. WS is still losing market share, but the losses slowed down pretty significantly in recent years. Sorry, I can’t find the source again because Google is shite. Feel free to disregard this point.
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.
Fuck off with this tone, mate.
I mentioned MacOS as an example that Windows is not as buggy as you seem to believe. I guess that went over your head and I should denigrate you now?
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I could drill down into the work that went into DXVK before Proton came about, enabling the Steam Deck, but that’s a boring history lesson. I will concede that newer bleeding edge hardware is far more likely to be plug and play on Windows, but one of the leading reasons I transitioned was Windows removing support for the audio chipset on the motherboard for my Ryzen 1600. Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers, it was maddening.
In my experience (so, totally anecdotal), my hardware is stable longer on Linux than Windows.
Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,
The OS would autoremove them?!
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The thing that confuses me is that Microsoft is no stranger to Linux. They use it in their data centers. It’s plainly obvious if you know what other offerings are doing.
Their entire front end stack for azure virtual machines is OpenStack. Some years back they integrated with OpenStack to allow it to manage hyper-v, but OpenStack can also natively manage KVM hypervisors, as it was originally designed to do, and also VMware.
Hell, I’d be surprised if there isn’t a Microsoft distro of Linux floating around (not available to the public… Not yet at least).
The people who seem to be pushing Microsoft, more than anyone, are game studios. Their garbage Anti cheat rootkits work best on Windows. So use Windows so they can low jack your PC.
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux is a thing, yes. Public and fully open source.
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lol, what is this ‘Xbox Exclusive Game’ you speak of, in 2025?
Microsoft has plenty of console exclusives, so they are on PlayStation and Switch but not Windows for whatever reason. Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled is one I’m confused why they don’t trust their own platform with.
That said, they don’t trust their own Windows on ARM devices either and those should definitely be capable enough to run games that come to Switch.
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This is good. This data will eventually help influence game developers to support Linux. It won’t happen over night, but we this trend continues, it’ll eventually start getting some attention.
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Developers already care about it. Not all of them, not all the way, but many are aiming for steam deck compatibility via proton. It’s not perfect, and some devs are vehemently holding out, but it’s progress!
That doesn’t seem to take a lot of effort. It’s still a windows binary. And it’s unfortunately simpler than figuring out if the user runs X or not.
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https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux is a thing, yes. Public and fully open source.
Well, would you look at that…
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Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,
The OS would autoremove them?!
It’s probably Windows update “fixing” you drivers by updating them to the Windows version because it is newer. I had to turn off Windows driver updates, because it kept updating my already fully working 5.1 Dolby digital driver to a newer one that only has dual channel audio, and it also broke the optional optical out my sound card supports (and has installed).
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Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.
But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual
drive?).I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.
Welcome to gaming on Linux!
how to manage the games installed in Proton (virtual C drive)
They can be found in: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/<game app id>/pfx/drive_c/ For Elden Ring for example the path is: ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1245620/pfx/drive_c/
Biggest blockers are games with invasive and unsupported anti cheat or very new games. Check https://www.protondb.com/ for the latest reports on games.
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Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.
Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don’t have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).
Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives… but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB… sigh.
Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it’s odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you’re trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can’t natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.
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Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it’s odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you’re trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can’t natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.
if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems
What kind of problems? I REALLY don’t want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.
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Every time I rebooted, I’d have to unpack a zip file and reinstall the audio drivers,
The OS would autoremove them?!
Yeah, it was super fun. I tried reformatting, I bought a new drive and put new Windows on it and the same thing happened.
