I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions.
The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?
And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.
At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.
The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday.
Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance
This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.
This is the reality - most people won't spoof until they figure out it's the way to make a specific site work; and then they'll likely spoof for everything.
I'd also like to add that we forget that we're doing it, or at least I do. Once you set something up like that, there's never any reason to get rid of it; nobody is positively discriminating towards Linux.
I love when a ruleset (firewall, for example) has a "comments" field because I inevitably forget why I added something and then Chesterton's fence means I leave it forever, lest I spend hours a year later wondering why something broke.
Every time I try to change my user agent with a FF extension I get hit with brutal cloudflare captcha loops. How are you changing your user agent in a way that this is not a problem?
Actual reason: SBC retro handheld consoles now run Linux and people are using them to play steam indie games. The China holiday had some blow out pricing.
Non primary devices more likely to run Linux. Primary still windows.
Used to be worse. Something happened in the last year and I'm seeing way way less random captchas for regular use from a residential IP. In '22-'24 it used to be extremely common, now it's an event when it happens. Also went from mint to plain ubuntu so that might have something to do with it?
It's a good thing too, because when I see the Cloudflare captcha I try it once and if that doesn't work then I just close the tab and add it to the list of non-functioning websites.
Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.
Privacy minded Linux users probably also know, spoofing your user agent is likely to increase fingerprint entropy and actually decreases privacy. It may have been true in the past, but I don't think anyone even recommends it anymore.
There's still plenty of web sites that check the OS and if it's not Mac OS, Windows, or Andoid it's no service for you. Faking your UA is not always about privacy, it's about defeating stupidity.
You should only do this on websites that actually require it otherwise you're almost certainly going to cause more problems than you'll solve.
Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.
The only websites that really do this anymore are ones that are delivering native code for those platforms or those that require DRM that only work on those platforms.
Even when that is the case (what is a minority of the time), just because I'm using Linux, it doesn't mean that I don't want to download some Windows software.
But well, I haven't had to spoof my browser's UA for a few years. If some site refuses it, I'll just move on. (Including some that started doing it after I brought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them.)
Browser yes, but OS? Rarely, I have issues with Firefox, but never had Chromium not working, too.
It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.
In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D
The EFF's "Panopticlick" paper was published in 2010 [1], together with Firefox/Tor research that knowledge became mainstream. Therefore privacy guides don't recommend it. The Arch wiki linked above has this warning in bright red:
> "Changing the user agent without changing to a corresponding platform will make your browser nearly unique."
Sorry, I am not sure, if arguing about nuanced reality is the battleground, where I see you thriving.
Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%.
This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.
This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."
The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.
It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.
It's about oversampling. Due how the survey is sent, a massive influx of machines coming online all at once will be more likely to trigger the survey. They know the general composition of their users, so they need the survey to be around the ballpark of that.
> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt
Agreed.
January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.
unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.
- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.
- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.
- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.
Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.
Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased.
Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever.
Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months.
Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.
> Even if it wasn't for corrections
> Loads of people
This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.
Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch.
everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches
I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns.
Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast.
using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.
I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!
Well, if it's any indication, my sister, who is very much not a tech person, randomly asked me to help her install Linux Mint a month ago, and has been using it successfully since without needing to ask for help once (at least not from me, I suspect ChatGPT is getting a workout).
That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.
There's a tipping point and we may be getting close. A few of my friends' kids & nephews have recently switched. Now that Valve seems to have solved the gaming compatibility issue, what Windows only software is left for teenagers to use that OS?
Also, regardless of what you think of LLMs, it makes tech support for Linux a whole lot more accessible to the average person. There is going to be less of an expectation now that you need to have a Linux guru on speed dial for the occasional weird edge case situation.
to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux
the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.
next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
There is value in the gaming specific distros since they already include all the stuff like controller drivers. I installed Bazzite on my desktop which I have plugged in to the TV and it's been every bit as seamless as the steamdeck. It boots up direct in to steam big picture mode and I can do everything with my xbox controller.
Bazzite is an immutible os which is absolutely the future of linux. Your install will never break on updates since rather than a normal update migration process, it simply boots the next version of the OS image, which if it doesn't work will just revert back to the old image where you can wait for the bug to be fixed to update again.
I've been using an immutable Linux for the last year or so, and it's gone quite well, but not without pain points.
There's a lot of stuff that I do which does not have a flatpak or package baked in. To get around this, I've been using distrobox to run these things in Ubuntu containers. So I will do "distrobox enter sdr" to have a terminal open up in that environment. You can export applications so that they show up in the applications list. It really takes some experience to shift your mindset, but it was worth it for me.
Bazzite KDE picked up my 8BitDo controller immediately, with no prior configuration. I didn't even have to manually pair the Bluetooth. I was very impressed.
Where can I find more information on that? I use CachyOS but never heard of that. Googling didn't find a single result (surprisingly, not even your comment)
Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS
As a Fedora user, I would actually recommend Ubuntu for gamers new to Linux, just because companies that offer Linux builds tend to only support Ubuntu. It's a bit more work comparatively to get to smooth sailing on Fedora. I think that work is worth it, of course, but new users might beg to differ.
I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one
there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like:
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.
I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.
He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
It has been achieved with WSL on Windows, and Virtualisation Framework on macOS.
Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.
a lot of people don't even have a computer and do everything on their phone. Given androids market share, one could argue Linux is already present on most desk tops and therefore has already won.
A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I have an nvidia gpu as well, which apparently does not work very well on Linux. For me, on Nobara, it's been working flawlessly.
The most annoying thing I encountered was the Switch controller support being rather poor. Every button press was somehow interpreted as two different buttons at the same time and I had to figure out which commands to run on Terminal to stop it from happening. Even then, the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects. I don't really think this is a Linux issue per se, but I recommend people buy a couple of 8bitdo controllers on Amazon which come with USB dongles if they want to go this route.
I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard, but I think there are enough games out there with controller support that this is not going to be an issue.
The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?
Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.
I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?
> The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.
I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.
Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.
I've also never had any trouble with NVIDIA on the desktop. I think most issues people have are on laptops, which have odd hybrid/dual GPU setups, and which exercise suspend/hibernate much more aggressively.
That's a good point that I hadn't considered. I've never had a laptop with Nvidia, I probably subconsciously avoided those dual GPU setups as they sounded hacky and I never really needed fast 3D on a laptop.
FWIW I have an Asus Zephyrus G14 and the dual graphics cards works pretty well in Linux in hybrid mode. It's pretty cool, certain things (games) run on the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Everything else runs on the built in AMD GPU.
I'm guessing it's because the laptops are popular enough that there's a dedicated group of people that make it work [0].
I'm still on X11, dunno what the story is like with Wayland though.
We've had open source AMD drivers for... 20ish years now? Meanwhile Nvidia begrudgingly added drivers support in the last year or two. So maybe some recency bias.
If you have sufficiently old Nvidia GPUs, eventually drivers and supporting software stops shipping with distros. I have a bunch of older laptops that support in Ubuntu existed for like 10 years ago, but drivers stopped being updated and Ubuntu dropped them from their repos.
nvidia x11 support has been pretty good for quite some time. It's nvidia wayland support that has been less than stellar. That has gotten better in the last year to year and a half now.
Now, I think it's no big issue so long as you are using a distro that supports up to date drivers. That should be about everyone now as I think even debian stable currently has decent drivers.
I know that Nvidia is integrated into the kernel and that wayland is talking to nvidia through the kernel. I also know that for accelerated rendering, wayland is talking directly to the nvidia drivers (bypassing the kernel? IDK).
But I also know that in the nvidia release notes, they've mentioned changes to improve support and functionality of wayland.
It has more to do with how you're using the cards. I don't see you mention gaming at all, that's where the biggest performance penalty and lack of support is apparent.
> on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console.
This is the way.
I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.
I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.
edit:
> I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard
When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.
Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.
I still ran in a few snags:
- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.
- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.
Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.
Agree on both counts. I use debian unstable and is usually 50/50 on whether the machine will reboot on a working display after a kernel upgrade. Very easy to fix if you have a bit of knowledge, but certainly not ready for the general public.
I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.
dude, the whole Linus sticking his finger up at nvidia meme? Its still real in 2026. The opensource ABI whatever the fuck they call it is trash. I'm absolutely ready to purchase an AMD card next GPU I buy. I don't want to give nvidia anymore money, I'm done. It'll be AMD GPUs from now on no matter the performance diff, purely because they've got a better attitude to supporting non MS deployments.
There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.
If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!
You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.
I have an 8bitdo Pro 2 and it's... kinda okay? 90% of the time it works great, but if I don't have an application running which looks for a controller then the controller gets disconnected and reconnected every 10 seconds or so.
Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.
8Bitdo does have a gyro controller, I have the Ultimate 2. It does have some requirement to configure the gyro though, you have to boot it in `dinput` mode by holding down a button.
I have included a link from my notes, I have not actually tested it much beyond seeing that the gyro does work in steams "configure controller" thing, never got around to correctly mapping any game.
Me too. My weapon of choice is the Dualsense. Lots of great things about it in addition to gyro controls: as of late last year you can pair 4 devices with it. I have one Dualsense and roam between PS5, Bazzite desktop and Steam Deck seamlessly.
If you're asking how it's setup/configured, then Valve ships "Steam Input" that can do a lot of things and one of them is translating gyro data to mouse events.
Some games support gyro directly, but even then AFAIK people prefer Steam Input due to how configurable it is.
With controller sticks you control the 3D camera only indirectly -- by telling the rotation velocity (in very limited range) and for how long to apply it.
With gyro you have 1:1 proportional camera position input, like with mice.
It's more or less about possibility of developing muscle memory. With (linear) gyro/mice you could sharply snap camera to a point you see on screen without much overshoot. You could turn 180 degrees in split second with eyes closed (actually with gyro people often use flick stick for such big rotations, turning instantly -- but that's besides the point)
With controller stick? Well you could try to time that 180 turn takes 1.5 seconds of holding at full deflection -- good luck developing a feeling for all the speeds inbetween zero and full deflection.
I have found that you have to keep it centered in order to keep it from moving/registering input, so it worked very similarly to an analog stick to me. Am I mistaken?
If you haven't tried it, the Steam controller does a pretty good job of playing mouse&keyboard games. The original is probably hard to find now, but allegedly they'll release a new one later this year.
When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles)
When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.
Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.
My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)
On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.
On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.
after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out
Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.
Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.
Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.
You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.
You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.
AC works fine just requires a little extra setup, either use this script[0] or use the latest GE-Proton (with a fresh prefix), I recently updated protonfixes to fix a CM/CSP issue. The latter is better as newer Proton has some definite performance improvements.
Fresh should mean creating a new prefix. For example, Proton-GE enabled wow64 in Wine by default, but it requires recreating the prefix to use it. Should be easy enough with Protontricks or even Winetricks.
Yes very much this. It is possible to modify an existing prefix but there are quite a few things to do, it's easier to back up savegames and game config files and then create it anew.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it does run, even with quite comparable performance, but getting a wheel to interact with the game has been a bit challenging. But this could be resolved with a custom driver for my specific hardware.
Using the community standard mod manager seems to resolve the UI jank by completely bypassing it.
yeah, I've heard this too.. and I'd rather my rig just works rather than try and stuff around making it work under linux + I know iracing is cooked anyway, and I've spent enough money on the rig to just want it to work, and not get stuffed over by some anti-cheat, maybe soon
That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.
Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.
Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.
But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?
And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.
They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?
I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.
Ubuntu on servers has always been "a choice", Debian is definitely the preferable of the two. Even on desktops, I'd sooner suggest Debian or Mint than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a dead distro coasting on a reputation 15(+) years out of date.
(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)
Mint still uses Xorg, so it's outdated. I tried it recently, it wasn't working with my iGPU+dGPU (nothing exotic, just a regular PC), and all the other distros already went to Wayland so nobody was talking about this online. I feel bad for anyone who gets convinced to switch from Windows to Mint, being told it's the easy one. The fix was to just install Ubuntu.
Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.
I genuinely don't think Xorg is a deal breaker for newbs and I would characterize dual-GPU as at least slightly exotic, maybe because I've never owned such a computer, but that's a fair enough point. Personally I think the polish of Cinnamon makes it the best recommendation for somebody new, and I know a whole lot of people start with that and have a sufficiently good experience that they stick with linux (while maybe moving on to other distros.)
It's a typical setup: consumer-grade Intel CPU, which all have integrated graphics, with a consumer-grade Nvidia GPU. Under Xorg, this gives a black screen after the screen sleeps then wakes, which made it unusable.
The GUI layout doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at, make sure stuff isn't straight up broken. We aren't there yet.
My Gentoo system is fully systemd and Wayland based from the start. Might sound like heresy to some users, but it was my decision from the start as I liked how they worked, that they are the future, and that you don’t have to wrangle shell scripts for building an OS. I had used systemd a lot via many Ubuntu servers before, so that helps.
He's not wrong though, the amount of Snap stuff you have to remove in a fresh install is starting to get a bit annoying (I usually remove at least the Snap versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and replace them with binaries from Mozilla - they will still self-update).
> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base
When was that? I don't disagree that it appears to be the case (especially with replacing coreutils/sudo/etc and the... varied approach to .deb vs snaps) but I'm not aware of them saying it explicitly in those terms?
Is your name a reference to the Blizzard game? If so, I worked on that :)
You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.
Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging
Sorry but this comment is part of the reason anyone should rightfully be scared to switch to Linux. Not only do you have to pick one of 999 distros, but every choice is wrong according to someone. Which one do you recommend, and is it the kind that will throw random issues or be called evil?
Snap is a mess, and treating "deb-based" like a purity test is funny when plenty of Linux users have dealt with abandoned apt repos and stale PPAs.
If you want stable, reproducible systems Nix is a serious option now. Ubuntu isn't dead. You pick the distro that breaks your workflow the slowest, then backfill the choice with a story about freedom or community to make the packge manager choice seem less accidental.
i thought it would bother me, but honestly, tehre are just too many good games that dont require eac.
i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.
[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.
It's not the same as EasyAntiCheat and doesn't support the same features. It's like saying Excel works on iPad, but you can't even use VBA on that.
Or a game example: I have Minecraft (Bedrock) on my phone so therefore I should be able to do the same things as Minecraft (Java) on Windows. The problem is they're the same names for different software with similar, but not the same, functionality.
So you're saying that easy anti cheat on linux is different from on windows? I am aware it is not as effective as detecting cheating on linux, but does this affect gameplay itself? Or do game developers not want reduced efficacy of detecting cheaters, and so they don't support linux at all?
I don't play those games myself but the word is that the EAC on linux lacks the same kernel hooks that are available on Windows. I personally consider that a plus but if you're a developer obsessed with strong anti-cheat you probably do not.
It's hit-or-miss, with recent live service and esport titles being the iffiest. The older multiplayer titles, casual shooters and natively ported games are more consistently supported and form a sizable library of working online games.
Fighting off snaps would be reason enough to abandon them but Canonical has control of the snap store in a way that is antithesis to open source as they're trying to run a walled garden play. This is the exact type of crap that lit a fire under my ass to get off Windows in the first place.
If you have any unusual set-up going on personally I'd recommend a rolling release distro like manjaro (arch) or fedora, so you get latest drivers and whatnot fast. Modern releases of these distros come bundled with the same desktop environment options as Ubuntu and good, easy to use package install and update GUIs. IMO it's more noob friendly than Ubuntu because your stuff is more likely to work without weird workarounds.
Man the distro breakdown is an even bigger mess than normal:
Feb 2026:
31.58% Other
23.83% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
9.07% ArchLinux 64 bit
8.59% CachyOS 64 bit
6.62% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
5.79% Bazzite 64 bit
5.26% Freedesktop SDK 25.08
3.82% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
2.83% Ubuntu 24.04.03 LTS 64 bit
2.59% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
March 2026:
25.64% Other
24.48% SteamOS Holo 64 bit
17.60% 0 64 bit
8.78% Arch Linux 64 bit
8.01% 64 bit
6.90% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit
3.58% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit
1.90% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
1.67% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit
1.45% Manjoro Linux 64 bit
I'm guessing that "0 64 bit" and "64 bit" are CachyOS and Bazzite, as I would be surprised to see either of those fall off the list given their current popularity. It is also interesting to see the flatpack installs (Freedesktop SDK) fall off the list.
I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.
I was waiting for the steam machine and grew impatient. I instead built a PC to go behind our family room TV. I gave bazzite a chance before committing to a copy of Windows. I'm glad I did. It runs perfectly. Zero hassle, no chasing down drivers. The only thing to be aware of is that a handful of games are not compatible, generally due to their anti-cheat software (e.g. marathon won't run, but arc raiders does.)
Bazzite is incredible, I've been running it on my gaming PC for about two years now. Games just work these days, and the updates are silent so I never need to think about them.
After installation, I haven't even used a mouse and keyboard with Bazzite. Everything is controller accessible. It just feels like a console like "just works" experience.
I got my Steam Deck that month, so pleased to be a part of it. The Deck fills a gap that has been empty in my soul since the PSP was discontinued, and feels like a genuine step forward that makes technology fun again.
It's fully open! It has a KDE desktop that I can access any time! I can shove in any size of SSD I like!
And I'm playing Halo 3... on Linux... on hardware made by Steam. If you spoke that sentence to me in 2009, I'd suggest you ought to be sectioned.
Pewdiepie becoming an arch-pilled rice-maxxer who advocates Linux for freedom and gaming has surely had some effect. He's such a good sport he even swore off Photoshop and tries to learn to like Gimp.
Or maybe Microsoft continuously degrading their user's experiences has finally reached a breaking point, to the point where Pewdipie AND Linus Tech Tips are talking more seriously about linux.
So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.
If I am reading the room right, I think Wine/Proton/Steam making gaming almost effortless on linux has been the big swing. It was not like this 5 years ago.
I have been a linux user for work for a decade, but still ran Windows for a gaming PC. But with Win11 dropping the ball so hard, and the general hype around Proton and where linux gaming was it, it was not hard to make the decision to switch.
Same here. Been using Linux personally for about a decade, professionally for half of that. I still ran a GPU passthrough Windows 11 VM for games up until a couple months ago. I am now switching to running everything purely in Linux, and it's great. Night and day difference between what it used to be like 5 years ago for sure.
Certainly Microsoft is responsible for most of it. I'm just saying Felix still has a lot of influence and has been pulling in the same direction to his millions of fans.
Yes, Krita is definitely my preference, and aseprite for pixel art work (not open source, but source available and free of cost if you choose to build it yourself.)
krita looks great! I'm not a hugely creative person, so last time I spent time to learn a graphics tool that was gimp in the early 2010s. But I used krita last week to test my convertibles's pen (Dell PN7552W, on Linux of course). Pleasant experience overall, and utterly amazing how far krita came in the last decade.
GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, just like Photoshop is.
Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.
The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]
If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.
-----
[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.
[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.
[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.
If you're coming from photoshop then PhotoGIMP is a good patch for gimp. I never understood why GIMP just didn't take this approach to begin with or at least make it a built in option.
Things I hadn't had on my bingo cards, in this or any universe: Me really looking forward to a new PewDiePie video! Guy has become a wholesome tech entertainment retreat for me. It's like Martijn Doolaard, but Linux instead of Alps... I can't stress enough how wholesome and pleasant the content has become. Or maybe it's been always like that, and I was just an ignorant snob...
Granted, I have SponsorBlock installed, so the occasional predatory supplement stuff gets cut, but he also kinda made clear he's rich enough and not in it for the money anymore - and I tend to believe him. PewDiePie won life, chose sanity and took the anti-corruption path. Bless him and his family, and God please, let it be real!
I'm someone who hasn't used Windows for gaming in years, and has been enjoying Proton since 2019.
But, especially for children, a lot of these games are a big part of their social lives. Paragraphs could be expended on the vices of these games, but I disagree with considering them easily ignored.
As others have noted though, a surprising lot of these games with anticheat do work on Linux. It's not even rareOverwatch, Halo, and Helldivers to name a few.
Plenty of games without anticheat won't work either. It's far from the Windows situation of installing whatever you want and expecting it to work out of the box. And the "gold" rating on ProtonDB/WineHQ means nothing, you have to check the comments.
Sure Linux also works with a lot of games nowadays, and you can ignore whatever doesn't. I use a Mac and accept that it'll run even fewer games. Not my priority.
We're entering a world where developers are going to need to start implementing anti cheat that works on Linux. It's clearly possible, and as we break past 5% it's no longer economically viable to ignore Linux. Especially once the GabeCube comes out...
The goal of kernel mode anticheat is to prevent other kernel-mode modules from tampering with the game's memory. This can kind of be done on Windows, as there's a pretty short list of kernel binaries, and all device drivers are signed.
This is out of the question on Linux, where there's probably 100,000 distro kernel binaries floating around, plus the ability to build your own with whatever modules you wish.
The only plausible solution is to force everyone to use the same kernel image. "To run Valorant, please apt install linux-vanguard-botnet-bin!"
Unfortunately this is a plausable enough outcome, and those games are so absurdly popular, that people will do it, especially given that having support for these games will likely drive new users to Linux.
If enough people do it, this opens the door for other software to latch onto it and start requiring a "verified kernel", so I'd rather just never see these games on Linux.
We probably could run Linux distros under hypervisor (just like default Windows install those days runs not on bare metal, but under Hyper-V).
And then games that wish for anticheat start a separate VM in hypervisor with complete secure boot chain of trust. Would require GPUs to support SR-IOV though.
Maybe something using AI could be implemented - does a screenshot of your game e.g. every second and if it detects anything that would suggest cheating then it informs some central system and sends it a movie of you playing for the final verdict.
Of course this all is based on the assumption that the local AI can do this fast enough with enough precision.
Well my suggestion is that the local part (which could analyze everything that is happening locally, not only the screen) would be the initial filter and if it detects any hint it takes some data package and sends it to some centralized online system that would provide a final verdict (and ban if needed).
But as you say if it is local then you can essentially run anything on the computer and modify what is ran on it. That basically means it is impossible to make an anti-cheat that is 100% bulletproof aside from something strange like buying a locked-in camera which you need to place behind you as it records everything you do on the PC and then the AI thing happens as I explained.
Maybe for pro play and tournaments that would be acceptable but not for the average player.
I think, it's not unreasonable to see basically a verifiable reference single-purpose gaming OS everyone has to use in competitive esports games. Steam and Linux are probably positioned well there.
Would be hilarious, if all gaming ultimately settles on a hardware independent console platform running on a locked-down linux! This would really please and piss off every faction at the same time. But honestly, not the worst compromise IMO.
I’ve had a good experience running Arch Linux on my “gaming” PC in the living room. It helps that I’m very comfortable with Linux internals, but I’d say I have no issues or issues that can be fixed with 2-3 clicks about 95% of the time.
My setup is basically Arch Linux, ProtonUp-Qt (to easily install specific versions of Proton, the compatibility layer), Steam, and the proprietary Nvidia drivers/Vulkan. I generally have no issues with Easy Anti-Cheat games like Arc Raiders, but obviously anything that requires secure boot attestation like Arena Breakout Infinite won’t play. I’ve not bothered to try setting up full secure boot as the games that require it aren’t typically in my wheelhouse.
I hope Linux adoption continues for my own, very self-serving, interests. I get the sense that those who primarily use their computer for gaming are the frogs slowly being boiled by Microsoft who continues to back their these customers into uncomfortable, unnecessary corners.
I am a long time windows pc gamer, but lately I was having to re-pair my DS4 controller every week or so. But the windows Bluetooth device manager will just refuse to remove that device. So I was periodically having to open the old school device manager, click show hidden and remove the controller there. By the fifth time I got fed up, replaced windows with Bazzite and am happy now. Good riddance.
Your computer's bluetooth module could be the source of the trouble. Some people have found that using a different dongle fixed their wireless controller problems.
Fun how those things go, I've only ever had troubles with Bluetooth on Apple hardware (both phones and laptops), meanwhile I never had problems with Bluetooth on either Windows or Linux, both desktops and laptops, with controllers, headphones and keyboards. YMMV indeed :)
It's absolutely fine on Linux for all the devices I have so I'm happy with it. I daily drive arch (https://github.com/gchamon/archie), bazzite which is fedora, and the notebook my current employer provides which comes with Ubuntu pre-installed.
i run endeavour (arch) and have a handful of things using bluetooth without any issues. i even have my airpods paired and use them constantly with no problems
I was keeping a Windows install around solely to play Fortnite with my kids but they've finally found other games.
Rocket League performance on Linux used to be the other big reason but about 4 months ago I fired it up and found it ran smoother (the random stutters I have suffered through on Windows are not there on Linux).
Now that those two are no longer relevant I can finally reclaim that wasted SSD storage.
Of total users 5% is a substantial number of consumers and some would argue a non-trivial amount of market share to ignore when making a product.
This also goes without saying that the more adoption we see, the better these alternatives will get as we see consumers and businesses view Linux as worth the investment.
I've been very impressed with Bazzite on my ASUS dual screen laptop. Honestly feel like hardware support is better (especially in the absence of crappy ASUS software) and nothing on Steam runs noticeably worse. Hard to imagine going back to Windows at this point.
I wish things were working so seamlessly for me, as people describe in the comments. There seems to be something wrong with Steam and how it works, so that in my machine (and CPU and GPU from 2019, with official Linux drivers from standard repos, running Debian KDE) it almost never manages to start a Windows game. I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game. This has been going on for years and I have tried various things, Including HWE kernel, OS reinstall from Linux Mint to Debian, installing the steam client via various means, and whatnot.
I have a suspicion, that somehow Steam has issues when Guix is installed, which I am always using, but then the question is, why Steam is incapable of just shipping with whatever it needs and using the things it shipped with properly, instead of getting confused by Guix, which only puts things in the GNU store, and not in a place that Steam should ever look at. But like I said, it is only a hunch or suspicion, and I need Guix more than Steam on Linux.
Then there are games that just work, like Stardew Valley. And maybe Terraria. I suspect, that it is somehow also about what engine the games use and what those engines rely on. But these games are very few, and most bigger mainstream games like AoE2 simple won't start, like I described.
So for me it still seems, that it is not actually working that reliably on just any GNU/Linux system, and that there are still blind spots, that Valve or whoever is clearly not seeing or considering in their whole Proton development or how Proton is used by Steam. Probably some isolation thing that they are completely missing for several years now.
> I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game.
You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.
Unfortunately a lot depends on the game and software you're trying to use. There are cases where (especially older) stuff on Windows doesn't work but on Steam it works fine.
Also the hope is that when the Linux share of the market grows and more multi-platform engines like Unreal are used then we'll get native versions instead of using Wine/Proton.
On top of that Windows is now basically unusable in many ways so for me at least there is no alternative (MacOS is really bad compared to a well configured Linux desktop, could never get past it treating me as an idiot).
I had great success in such cases by just overriding the compatibility tool used, most often to just some version of proton. Default sometimes just does not work.
I have been running Guix System as my daily driver for 7 years now and I have not had any trouble using Steam as packaged by nonguix with my cursed nvidia GPU. My computer is from 2008 with a CPU/GPU upgrade in 2018.
There have only been a handful of games that I haven't been able to play, like Hitman Absolution. But other AAA games like RD2 and Witcher1-3 run without issue. Even Starcraft2, run through proton, works well.
This is similar to my experience. I find many people on the forums that can't resolve the crashes in Red Dead Redemption 2, so I suspect a lot of it depends on the specific games you've picked.
It is clearly getting better globally, so I expect in 3 years or so things will be ready for me to try again.
Maybe I didn't emphasize sufficiently just how many games don't work for me on GNU/Linux. Out of 100 games, I estimate that I get 3-5 games that work, while many people in my circles are proclaiming how great the support now is, that so many games just run fine.
I actually have more luck getting games to run when I myself make WINE prefixes using WINE and try running games that way, than running any games on Steam. Only very few games work with Steam on Linux for me. This is also part of the reason, why I think something Steam does with Proton prefixes might be the reason it is broken.
I also tried things like not putting games in my Steam library on an NTFS drive that is shared with Windows, and instead put them on my GNU/Linux partition in a new Steam library. Didn't help. Tried various Proton versions, including experimental ones. Didn't help. Simply nothing seems to make a difference.
Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves all problems for me and stopped me from distro-hopping: media consumption, software dev tooling, system admin tooling, gaming - all just works. My current install is about a year old without breaking itself (still on Fedora 42). I gave gnome a couple of tries, but the plugin system is a crapshoot as they broken an install for me once after an update. Come to think of it, I haven't manage to break KDE yet.
Then in steam itself, you can swap different versions of proton. I like to set the base version to one of the newer versions, but if a game doesn't work, I check on protondb which versions work so I override it per game. You can also give lutris a try as it has a few extra advanced levers that you can to get things working.
> Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports.
I'm having a good time in games, getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.
> don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind
I use Debian stable on my laptop and testing on desktop. It is fine. Only the newest games that need a specific 0 day patch may suffer a bit but that's only for 1-2 weeks even on testing. You want a stable system first, then to unlock the full performance out of everything, and most bleeding edge fail in the former and are a coin toss on the later.
> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.
Agree. I've had generally good experience with Fedora and Steam + tips from ProtonDB
Only have had 1 snafu with Steam i386 dependencies causing issues with x86_64 packages. I think there's a Flatpak of Steam available that should help isolate that but iirc there was some caveat
Since I used Linux Mint before and since this issue has been going on for years, I don't think lagging behind a few months is the reason for it. 1 or 2 years ago people also already proclaimed that now most games just work for them out of the box. Not so for me and my system. There is something that Steam overlooks and does not isolate from, is my guess.
This is correct, if you want a good desktop Linux experience, you want to use a rolling release distribution.
Debian will ship with old pieces of software that are updated and fixed on a daily basis upstream. Some of those changes and bug fixes really are showstoppers and you'll be stuck with them for months/years. Same thing with older kernels.
Debian is great for servers, but if you're doing graphics, sound or multimedia heavy tasks, you want the latest Wayland, Pipewire and driver support at the bare minimum.
I've played exclusively on Linux for a couple of years now. Sometimes, very rarely, you have to select a specific Proton version for a game. Otherwise, it just works.
Long time Linux user, but I got lazy into the Windows ecosystem for too many years. My son convinced me to move over and I haven't looked back. I haven't found a game that hasn't run, the worst I have to do is change Proton version. Ubuntu was good, but Nobara is amazing (ndivia 5000 series drivers out of the box).
I am impressed with the Steam Deck. Playing The Hundred Line on the deck brings back the glory days of the Playstation Vita. And it's the one device I have (including iPhone, iPad and Mac) for which AirPods are 100% a "just works" experience.
When playing eve online on Linux (via Proton), the moment any other window gets focus, or the mouse slights off the game screen onto the second monitor on the side, game minimizes.
I have a feeling it's just wine things. Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?
I remember that 13 years ago I did everything on Linux and only switched to Windows to play eve online. Now the game works beautifully (graphics and all) on Linux with just one slight modification in the "run command" in Steam.
This is nothing, as anybody who tried to play games on Linux using wine can attest. It used to be a hell of modifications, dependency hunting and obscure hacks to get any windows game to work.
Not sure why that happens, but you may want to try "borderless window" instead of fullscreen in the game options. If that does not work, you could try running the game in gamescope, or enabling the wine virtual desktop with winecfg (point it at your game-specific wine prefix, you can also run it from protontricks). These are just a few ideas, but it does sound like a mechanism that is part if the game, not wine. Just like some games crash when you alt-tab in windows; gamescope tends to fix that.
> Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?
I spent a lot of time squashing bugs like this.
Windows has one window manager. Linux has dozens. Windows apps are written to make assumptions about how the Windows window manager works. Things like windowing event message sequences, side-effects on values returned by other APIs, the exact sequence of fullscreen status side-effects such as window size and mouse cursor capture and window chrome presence. That's valid because those always work the same way on Windows. But Linux window managers all do all of those things differently, and trying to get all dozens of window managers to behave exactly the same way as Windows's does is near impossible.
Another possibility is it's just how the game works, even on Windows. It was pretty common to get windowing bugs reported, test them on Windows, and see the exact same behavior as we had on Linux.
Your desktop is set to focus where mouse cursor is not where you click. Usually can be changed. Also in conjunction with that the game is set to freeze when it loses focus. So maybe you can change that in game.
Check your mouse focus settings in your desktop environment (gnome/KDE/whatever).
There may be an option called mouse stealing prevention or something, but if you have a look you should hopefully see it. On xfce it's in its own tab in the mouse menu
There is a weird bug in Helldivers 2 when you use the maximized window without borders and you have a multi monitor setup. Sometimes, the character stops of rotating with the mouse look... like if the mouse cursor found a limit.
Another, it's with the full screen mode. When I switch windows with AltTab, sometimes the game restores with the wrong display proportions.
Personally, after using Windows at home since I was in kindergarten (3.1), having an employer-provided Macbook the last 15 years, and every few years dipping a toe into Linux for various projects, I can say they finally did it. I panic built a new PC for gaming, video editing, and messing with LLMs just at the start of the RAM crisis and thought what the heck, why not CachyOS. I might not be the average user, but it has been so much more convenient, snappy, and fun to troubleshoot than any other time I can remember. KDE just works and has sane defaults. The Arch repository has almost everything you can imagine, and usually the Cachy maintained "safe" repos do too. I downloaded Steam and immediately jumped into my saves from BG3, Cyberpunk, Claire Obscur, and more, like nothing happened. QGIS, Affinity apps (bye Adeobe), LM Studio can take advantage of my GPU. DaVinci Resolve is wonky, but Kdenlive is fine as a stopgap. I want to evangelize now as much as possible since it's all so starkly different from even 5 years ago, largely but not wholly thanks to Steam's Proton work. Microsoft really doesn't care about Win users (fine, it doesn't make them any money), and now is our chance.
I wonder if part of this is usage by newer Android based emulators [1] used for emulating x86-based PC games on powerful snapdragon based devices (Retroid Pocket 6, AYN Odin 2 line, AYN Thor, AYANEO Pocket S2, etc).
I'd be surprised if the intersection of users that have such devices, use it to emulate x86 games and use steam on it is big enough to make such an impact.
proton was the tipping point but windows 11 is doing the heavy lifting. forcing tpm 2.0 on perfectly good hardware is the best marketing linux gaming ever got.
I’m on Bazzite and I’m strongly considering switching back to Windows 11. Proton performance is just not as good as native. Games like Valve’s own Deadlock just run terribly on Proton and completely fine on Windows, using the same hardware. It’s a miracle that Proton works at all, but why compromise when I already have a Win11 license key?
Just another post saying stuck kde with the new plasma on it for my kids first computer and was blown away by the polish. Switching over my workstation this month for sure. Highly recommended
Linux’s ecosystem has also improved significantly over the past two years, especially in China. Due to the influence of “Xinchuang” (that is, domestically produced Linux rebranded under another shell), many Chinese desktop applications have been reworked in the past couple of years, switching from Windows-specific tech stacks to cross-platform ones—mostly Electron, basically browser wrappers—and now support the Linux platform. The commonly used software is basically all there.
In addition, the development of LLMs has greatly lowered the barrier to using the Linux command line. Problems that used to take a full day to solve can now be handled easily by anyone who can write a prompt—just ask, copy, and paste. This has even made Windows’ command line unfriendly by comparison, despite its own major improvements in recent years, turning it into a significant drawback.
Question: What percentage of windows gamers are actually Linux gamers who are using wine/proton or some anti-cheat workaround/VM that causes them to be reported as using windows when they are in fact running linux?
Using proton, I regularly see crash reports where games want to report that I was running some version of windows, which is a result of how proton implements wine. I never send such reports as they are of little use to developers.
Proton is a modified version of Wine. If the underlying game is sending a bug/crash report, it may "see" itself as running under windows as that is what wine presents.
"Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this."
Correct. Steam, a native Linux app, will run Windows games via Proton. As Steam itself, which is collecting the data in TFA, is a Linux app, it shouldn't be affected by thinking it's running under Wine/Proton. As to your original question, I don't think many developers release information on what OSes their players are using, so I don't think we can tell
Considering how awful Microslop's Win11 is, Linux could really gain some traction if it were to begin to consider the desktop environment as a useful target. Server is already dominated, top 500 supercomputers running linux (since 2017; https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1/) - yet the desktop area is one where I don't feel there is really a lot of real improvement. I know, I know, GNOME and KDE keep on promoting how above they are beyond epic perfection already, but this is just buzzword-PR-chaining. GTK is a mostly-GNOME-only toolkit now and qt has its own objectives. Things that should be super-simple and work on Linux, do not work that well for Average Joe for the most part. One can fix most things with some research, but not everyone knows how to do so, or will fatigue after a while. Now most gamers are usually young and tend to be more tech-savvy, so they can solve things more easily, but even then one has to wonder why so much time has to be invested to make things work well. Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority? Smartphones are a special place as the environment is mostly controlled by one private vendor or an open ecosystem (which then is usually much smaller, and still does not yield real improvements for the desktop system, for the most part, give or take; GNOME3 kind of looks and feels like a smartphone-UI).
> Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority?
No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.
Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.
The top distro is Arch - implying that the Steam Deck userbase is moving the needle.
Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.
It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.
No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.
The top distro is SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but does not appear as such in the stats. The Arch appearing in the stats has to be CachyOS and other gaming-distros, as also real Arch-users.
But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.
It's not just the single distro, but single Desktop Environment upon which app and ecosystem developers will standardise. I'm glad that the latest generation of gaming distros are converging on Plasma.
Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.
Steam Deck is currently ~25% of those 5% Linux users. Good chunk but not a majority. You can estimate it in two different ways which produce similar results: filtering to Linux only looking at OS list "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" is 24.48% and in the GPU list "AMD Custom GPU 0405"+"RADV VANGOGH" add up to 23.72%.
I've been happy with my Bazzite setup for play and work. Took a little time to get used to fedora atomic and the changes in installing and running stuff but used to it now.
Phoronix lost the plot in the last year with their click bait garbage headlines and articles. February/March user data is always skewed because of the Chinese holidays. They know it, we know it, they even write about it in the article but still a dumbass hype bait headline and article. Just fucking stop it, the quality of your reviews took a dive as well. Go ahead and produce more garbage and you have lost all value as a news site by the end of the year.
Was not the case when I wanted to use a GameCube controller via Wii U adaptor without a lot of extra lag. Yeah that's a niche, but it works fine in Windows and even Mac.
I believe most of those work with controller drivers in the application (Dolphin Emulator or Steam/SDL) rather than the OS level. That's why the Windows solution requires Zadig to replace the HID driver.
On Linux instead of replacing the driver, you have to add an udev rule that allows applications to communicate with the USB device directly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/blob/master/6... And you can see in this list, it's not the only controller with that requirement.
I did add that rule, which if I remember correctly was needed for it to work at all. But then the problem is input lag. Many recommend https://github.com/hannesmann/gcadapter-oc-kmod which the author only tested in Arch, and for whatever reason it didn't work on Ubuntu. Was printing that "Failed to acquire lock for USB device" line and then I think "Could not reset device", don't remember. Anyway seems like a hack.
This was for Slippi Melee, so even though I'm not super good at the game, the lag was too annoying.
Whilst I tend to agree, I also don't recommend just pasting every command from ChatGPT into your machine without having some understanding/validating process.
In my experience AI is unreliable more often than not. It is conflating topics, uses outdated information or straight out hallucinates. It can be good if you already know enough to call it out on its bullshit.
M$ shareholders ITT are sweating bullets! Gaming has always been Microsoft's redoubt; without it they will lose the retail market entirely and be left with only the B2B market coasting on the soon forgotten legacy of what Windows once was, and eventually that will dry up too as Windows fails to capture the attention of a new generation of engineers and administrators.
Microsoft pretty much abandoned desktop as is. They are just squeezing out what is left. Their main cash now is azure and office365. And they expect it to be AI next. Kinda obvious by the where the effort goes.
SteamDeck should be excluded from “Linux use” imho. Especially when it comes to click bait headlines.
Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s. Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!
if you are a gamedev considering support for SteamOS and considering support for generic Linux desktop they really really really REALLY are not the same. At all.
Or you just write a Windows program but explicitly target Proton. (Granted, either of those remain portable to at least any Linux with Steam installed.)
Why not? Could you elaborate? I'd love to know more. I always had the feeling that supporting SteamOS basically meant that generic Linux Desktop support was almost implied because in the end it's almost always on Proton rather than native.
That is not true. Proton and steam linux runtime which are the components actually responsible to run games are literally the exact same code provided by the steam client.
Absolutely not. If you ever actually used it you would know that the only difference is a custom big picture mode like interface. Anything else is literally the same code.
Skyrocketed above 5% is an expression I would discourage anyone from using because it's a broken metaphor. Unless the trajectory of that rocket was a few degrees from horizontal.
The number doubled in the last year. April 2025 it was around 2.3%, and has been jumping around 2-3% for several years. Skyrocking seems justified when looking at a greater picture.
Though, it's a longer process, not something that suddenly happened immediately. The combination of Steamdeck, proton, good gaming-distributions and Windows 10 phasing out, while Windows 11 sucks and becoming an AI+Ads-infested mess, seems to have pushed this trend. So let's see how high this sky will be.
Skyrocketing in this context is a fast steep rise, moving fast toward the sky; so it's about relative height in a specific timeframe, not absolute height. I mean, nobody would say Windows is skyrocketing, because it already is the sky (here).
There are no Linux kernels on Sony PlayStation nor Nintendo's Switch, or even Microsoft's XBox.
Windows with its 80% market share has no Linux kernel.
Zero Linux kernel running on the ca 15% Apple desktops.
Zero Linux kernels running on iOS and iPadOS.
No Linux kernels on Arduino or ESP32, althought they certainly can run ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS.
And then there are INTEGRITY, vxWorks, QNX, NutXX, FreeBSD, OpenBDS, DragonFly, IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath MCP, OS 2200, ThreadX, SphereOS, Fuchsia,.... and plenty more I won't bother to list, none of them with Linux kernel.
I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions.
The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else?
And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release.
At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.
The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday.
It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%
How does a Jan/Feb holiday affect this year’s March number (that was reported in early April)?
I’m not talking about the Feb number that is reported in March.
The number being discussed is not March alone, but the percent change. So March's number relative to February's number.
A holiday that warps numbers in February will no longer be warping things in March.
Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.
This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.
I don't know anyone who goes through the trouble to spoof their user agent and I know plenty Linux users.
Unfortunately I have to use some government websites which refuse to work when my user agent contains "Linux x86_64". So I just always spoof it.
This is the reality - most people won't spoof until they figure out it's the way to make a specific site work; and then they'll likely spoof for everything.
I'd also like to add that we forget that we're doing it, or at least I do. Once you set something up like that, there's never any reason to get rid of it; nobody is positively discriminating towards Linux.
I love when a ruleset (firewall, for example) has a "comments" field because I inevitably forget why I added something and then Chesterton's fence means I leave it forever, lest I spend hours a year later wondering why something broke.
Every time I try to change my user agent with a FF extension I get hit with brutal cloudflare captcha loops. How are you changing your user agent in a way that this is not a problem?
The archwiki Firefox privacy guide comes to mind, which mentions UA spoofing:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy
Actual reason: SBC retro handheld consoles now run Linux and people are using them to play steam indie games. The China holiday had some blow out pricing.
Non primary devices more likely to run Linux. Primary still windows.
I do, to access YouTube TV on my Ubuntu HTPC.
Tons of people did and do this to get higher resolution on a certain streaming site.
If you spoof user agent, you will get more captchas because it won't match their other fingerprinting.
You also get more captchas because you are on Linux, I see the Cloudflare one on my computer everytime.
Used to be worse. Something happened in the last year and I'm seeing way way less random captchas for regular use from a residential IP. In '22-'24 it used to be extremely common, now it's an event when it happens. Also went from mint to plain ubuntu so that might have something to do with it?
It's a good thing too, because when I see the Cloudflare captcha I try it once and if that doesn't work then I just close the tab and add it to the list of non-functioning websites.
Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.
Privacy minded Linux users probably also know, spoofing your user agent is likely to increase fingerprint entropy and actually decreases privacy. It may have been true in the past, but I don't think anyone even recommends it anymore.
There's still plenty of web sites that check the OS and if it's not Mac OS, Windows, or Andoid it's no service for you. Faking your UA is not always about privacy, it's about defeating stupidity.
You should only do this on websites that actually require it otherwise you're almost certainly going to cause more problems than you'll solve.
Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.
The only websites that really do this anymore are ones that are delivering native code for those platforms or those that require DRM that only work on those platforms.
Even when that is the case (what is a minority of the time), just because I'm using Linux, it doesn't mean that I don't want to download some Windows software.
But well, I haven't had to spoof my browser's UA for a few years. If some site refuses it, I'll just move on. (Including some that started doing it after I brought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them.)
I'm sure there are some, but having used Linux for 32 years, it's been at least 20 years since I needed to do that.
Browser yes, but OS? Rarely, I have issues with Firefox, but never had Chromium not working, too.
It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.
In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D
Actually that sounds like exactly the sort of nuanced reality that “privacy-conscious Linux users” aren’t that likely to know at all.
The EFF's "Panopticlick" paper was published in 2010 [1], together with Firefox/Tor research that knowledge became mainstream. Therefore privacy guides don't recommend it. The Arch wiki linked above has this warning in bright red:
> "Changing the user agent without changing to a corresponding platform will make your browser nearly unique."
Sorry, I am not sure, if arguing about nuanced reality is the battleground, where I see you thriving.
[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ (browser test since 2014)
Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Yes, this is the key. You can account for anomalies such as Lunar New year, do rolling averages and other statistical modelling to show trends.
Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.
The key word in the article is "again"
'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.'
This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.
This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."
The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.
It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.
It's about oversampling. Due how the survey is sent, a massive influx of machines coming online all at once will be more likely to trigger the survey. They know the general composition of their users, so they need the survey to be around the ballpark of that.
They are still only reporting the data they see. They are not correcting or manipulating the data like phoronix implies in their article.
> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt
Agreed.
January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.
unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.
- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.
- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.
- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.
Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.
Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased.
Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever.
The future is bright.
I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.
Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months.
Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.
> Even if it wasn't for corrections > Loads of people
This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.
> Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later?
Everyone who bought a gaming PC last year, only to be told it has to be scrapped now because Windows 11 doesn't like the colour of the power cable.
This time it's different.
Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch.
everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches
I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns.
Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast.
using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.
I have tried Arch btw
I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!
Well, if it's any indication, my sister, who is very much not a tech person, randomly asked me to help her install Linux Mint a month ago, and has been using it successfully since without needing to ask for help once (at least not from me, I suspect ChatGPT is getting a workout).
That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.
> but if random normies start using it without fanfare
From the normies I know, they only vaguely know what chatgpt is and sure don't use it.
There's a tipping point and we may be getting close. A few of my friends' kids & nephews have recently switched. Now that Valve seems to have solved the gaming compatibility issue, what Windows only software is left for teenagers to use that OS?
Also, regardless of what you think of LLMs, it makes tech support for Linux a whole lot more accessible to the average person. There is going to be less of an expectation now that you need to have a Linux guru on speed dial for the occasional weird edge case situation.
to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux
the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise.
next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
There is value in the gaming specific distros since they already include all the stuff like controller drivers. I installed Bazzite on my desktop which I have plugged in to the TV and it's been every bit as seamless as the steamdeck. It boots up direct in to steam big picture mode and I can do everything with my xbox controller.
Bazzite is an immutible os which is absolutely the future of linux. Your install will never break on updates since rather than a normal update migration process, it simply boots the next version of the OS image, which if it doesn't work will just revert back to the old image where you can wait for the bug to be fixed to update again.
I've been using an immutable Linux for the last year or so, and it's gone quite well, but not without pain points.
There's a lot of stuff that I do which does not have a flatpak or package baked in. To get around this, I've been using distrobox to run these things in Ubuntu containers. So I will do "distrobox enter sdr" to have a terminal open up in that environment. You can export applications so that they show up in the applications list. It really takes some experience to shift your mindset, but it was worth it for me.
> I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience,
Call me nitpicky, but this is why Linux desktop is not ready yet. If anything, I'm a firm believer that SteamOS will be Linux Desktop
I agree, but I'm sure Bazzite/CachySteamOS all have support for them on boot.
Bazzite KDE picked up my 8BitDo controller immediately, with no prior configuration. I didn't even have to manually pair the Bluetooth. I was very impressed.
> CachySteamOS
Where can I find more information on that? I use CachyOS but never heard of that. Googling didn't find a single result (surprisingly, not even your comment)
I think OP missed a slash
yeah, sorry
Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS
As a Fedora user, I would actually recommend Ubuntu for gamers new to Linux, just because companies that offer Linux builds tend to only support Ubuntu. It's a bit more work comparatively to get to smooth sailing on Fedora. I think that work is worth it, of course, but new users might beg to differ.
I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one
there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like:
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists.
I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set.
He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
Doesn't Cachy support all of the DEs? Use it to try them all. (I don't know how CachyOS handles it; EndeavourOS lets you pick the DE on login.
yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead
It has been achieved with WSL on Windows, and Virtualisation Framework on macOS.
Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.
a lot of people don't even have a computer and do everything on their phone. Given androids market share, one could argue Linux is already present on most desk tops and therefore has already won.
A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I have an nvidia gpu as well, which apparently does not work very well on Linux. For me, on Nobara, it's been working flawlessly.
The most annoying thing I encountered was the Switch controller support being rather poor. Every button press was somehow interpreted as two different buttons at the same time and I had to figure out which commands to run on Terminal to stop it from happening. Even then, the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects. I don't really think this is a Linux issue per se, but I recommend people buy a couple of 8bitdo controllers on Amazon which come with USB dongles if they want to go this route.
I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard, but I think there are enough games out there with controller support that this is not going to be an issue.
The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?
Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.
I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?
[1] 6800 Ultra, 7800 GTX , 7900 GTX, 8800 GTX, GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 680, GTX 760 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 4080... probably missed some.
> The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.
It could also be lucky consequence of what games you play and what else you do with your computer.
I was a long-time Nvidia user, and had plenty of problems with their drivers. They ranged from minor annoyances when switching between virtual consoles (which some people never do) to total system freezes when playing a particular game (which some people never play). It would have been be easy for someone else to never encounter these problems.
Since switching to AMD a couple years ago, I have been much happier.
I've also never had any trouble with NVIDIA on the desktop. I think most issues people have are on laptops, which have odd hybrid/dual GPU setups, and which exercise suspend/hibernate much more aggressively.
That's a good point that I hadn't considered. I've never had a laptop with Nvidia, I probably subconsciously avoided those dual GPU setups as they sounded hacky and I never really needed fast 3D on a laptop.
FWIW I have an Asus Zephyrus G14 and the dual graphics cards works pretty well in Linux in hybrid mode. It's pretty cool, certain things (games) run on the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Everything else runs on the built in AMD GPU.
I'm guessing it's because the laptops are popular enough that there's a dedicated group of people that make it work [0].
I'm still on X11, dunno what the story is like with Wayland though.
[0] https://asus-linux.org/
As far as I know dual graphics laptops are a pain no matter the OS and chips.
The one sample i know of first hand is an amd/nvidia laptop that never obeys the settings about which GPU to use. In Windows.
We've had open source AMD drivers for... 20ish years now? Meanwhile Nvidia begrudgingly added drivers support in the last year or two. So maybe some recency bias.
If you have sufficiently old Nvidia GPUs, eventually drivers and supporting software stops shipping with distros. I have a bunch of older laptops that support in Ubuntu existed for like 10 years ago, but drivers stopped being updated and Ubuntu dropped them from their repos.
nvidia x11 support has been pretty good for quite some time. It's nvidia wayland support that has been less than stellar. That has gotten better in the last year to year and a half now.
Now, I think it's no big issue so long as you are using a distro that supports up to date drivers. That should be about everyone now as I think even debian stable currently has decent drivers.
Does Nvidia need to support Wayland, or does Wayland need to support Nvidia? I.e., what is the support at the API boundary which is missing?
I'm not sure exactly what the API boundries are.
I know that Nvidia is integrated into the kernel and that wayland is talking to nvidia through the kernel. I also know that for accelerated rendering, wayland is talking directly to the nvidia drivers (bypassing the kernel? IDK).
But I also know that in the nvidia release notes, they've mentioned changes to improve support and functionality of wayland.
It has more to do with how you're using the cards. I don't see you mention gaming at all, that's where the biggest performance penalty and lack of support is apparent.
Same, no issues with any nVidia card going back two decades, several PC's and laptops, Linux and Windows.
> I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid.
Explain please?
> the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects
Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?
> on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console.
This is the way.
I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.
I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.
edit: > I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard
When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.
NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.
Definitely better now with their new "opensource" driver.
I still ran in a few snags:
- DKMS can break, e.g I had a kernel bump to 6.18 or 6.19 and the nvidia driver wasn't ready yet so the build failed. A mainline driver will always win this one.
- Suspend almost always works, but sometimes fails on lid close which is of course when you can't see it fail and my laptop battery dies unexpectedly. You'd say use hybrid sleep but that reliably always fails with the nvidia driver too. Both work flawlessly with Nouveau.
Since I don't need the extra perf on this laptop I just use Nouveau to drive the the dGPU + the AMD iGPU most of the time which is powerful enough for my non-desk needs.
Agree on both counts. I use debian unstable and is usually 50/50 on whether the machine will reboot on a working display after a kernel upgrade. Very easy to fix if you have a bit of knowledge, but certainly not ready for the general public.
I don't have a laptop with an nvidia card, but I often suspend the linux gaming machine on my living room, and sometimes it doesn't come back from sleep, while my steam deck never failed to.
dude, the whole Linus sticking his finger up at nvidia meme? Its still real in 2026. The opensource ABI whatever the fuck they call it is trash. I'm absolutely ready to purchase an AMD card next GPU I buy. I don't want to give nvidia anymore money, I'm done. It'll be AMD GPUs from now on no matter the performance diff, purely because they've got a better attitude to supporting non MS deployments.
There's too much TPM/SecureBoot/Enroll key hoops you have to jump through that a lot of distros just haven't bothered with.
If I'm being completely real, I'd be running FreeBSD 15. I just could not get a working nvidia driver going in 15 and get a working X installation. Supposedly 15.1 fixes it, we'll see in June. I've always preferred the BSD design, fs layout, etc, and I would love to have a FreeBSD desktop with a wine 11 install that actually plays games.. the dream!
Is it thanks to ML needs or is it unrelated?
You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.
I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection
I have an 8bitdo Pro 2 and it's... kinda okay? 90% of the time it works great, but if I don't have an application running which looks for a controller then the controller gets disconnected and reconnected every 10 seconds or so.
Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.
8Bitdo does have a gyro controller, I have the Ultimate 2. It does have some requirement to configure the gyro though, you have to boot it in `dinput` mode by holding down a button.
I have included a link from my notes, I have not actually tested it much beyond seeing that the gyro does work in steams "configure controller" thing, never got around to correctly mapping any game.
https://pastebin.com/YP4CD6BX
Me too. My weapon of choice is the Dualsense. Lots of great things about it in addition to gyro controls: as of late last year you can pair 4 devices with it. I have one Dualsense and roam between PS5, Bazzite desktop and Steam Deck seamlessly.
How do you use the gyro sensors to play? I looked into it before but couldn’t wrap my mind around how we’re supposed to do that.
If you're asking how it's setup/configured, then Valve ships "Steam Input" that can do a lot of things and one of them is translating gyro data to mouse events.
Some games support gyro directly, but even then AFAIK people prefer Steam Input due to how configurable it is.
More like, how does gyro help you play some games?
With controller sticks you control the 3D camera only indirectly -- by telling the rotation velocity (in very limited range) and for how long to apply it.
With gyro you have 1:1 proportional camera position input, like with mice.
It's more or less about possibility of developing muscle memory. With (linear) gyro/mice you could sharply snap camera to a point you see on screen without much overshoot. You could turn 180 degrees in split second with eyes closed (actually with gyro people often use flick stick for such big rotations, turning instantly -- but that's besides the point)
With controller stick? Well you could try to time that 180 turn takes 1.5 seconds of holding at full deflection -- good luck developing a feeling for all the speeds inbetween zero and full deflection.
I have found that you have to keep it centered in order to keep it from moving/registering input, so it worked very similarly to an analog stick to me. Am I mistaken?
I guess I just need to try it some more.
If controller isn't being rotated in the moment, then camera should be stationary regardless of controller orientation, yea.
I guess you've used some strange gyro to stick emulation (never heard of such thing, but sounds like it).
The Steam Controller will be such a blessing when it comes out.
If you haven't tried it, the Steam controller does a pretty good job of playing mouse&keyboard games. The original is probably hard to find now, but allegedly they'll release a new one later this year.
When Windows 11 was force-installed on my main game development desktop, I was skeptical, but kept using it. I was annoyed at having to turn off all the tracking and noise (like news articles)
When it updated and started shoving AI down my throat, with no easy way to turn it off and suddenly lots of data I don't consent to sharing getting used, 11 became the last Windows OS I'll ever use.
Whenever the next version comes out, Im moving fully to *buntu.
My main laptop already uses it and Steam on Linux has been fantastic. Any bugs or issues Ive experience have been due to my very unusual setup (like an eGPU over Thunderbolt)
On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.
On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.
after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out
Simucube uses the hid-pidff driver which is built into the kernel. For setting up the base using the SC2 software there is a guide available[0]. I’m not an SC owner myself but there are a few people on the SimRacingOnLinux[1] discord who seem to have everything working nicely.
0: https://granitedevices.com/wiki/Using_Simucube_wheel_base_in...
1: https://simracingonlinux.com
Seriously the only thing stopping me from putting linux on my wife's laptop is the fact that she uses a cricut, which has software that doesn't work well on linux.
Also, I really dislike cricut as a company. Such a scammy business model.
You can install programs under Steam that are not distributed through Steam.
You can install battlenet under Steam and use all the proton magic to make it work. Starcraft 2 and diablo 2 both work very well (those are the only two I've tried). At least for SC2, anti-cheat did not cause any issues if it's even there at all.
Sadly, the original Assetto Corsa is also borked on Linux (AC Evo and AC Rally, on the other hand, run great).
AC works fine just requires a little extra setup, either use this script[0] or use the latest GE-Proton (with a fresh prefix), I recently updated protonfixes to fix a CM/CSP issue. The latter is better as newer Proton has some definite performance improvements.
0: https://github.com/sihawido/assettocorsa-linux-setup
That’s excellent, thanks for the heads up! By chance, RPS covered the Mulholland Drive mod recently and I’m keen to try it on Bazzite.
I would definitely prefer to go the GE-Proton route. To clarify, what do you mean by “fresh”? Just the most recent release or something more specific?
Fresh should mean creating a new prefix. For example, Proton-GE enabled wow64 in Wine by default, but it requires recreating the prefix to use it. Should be easy enough with Protontricks or even Winetricks.
Yes very much this. It is possible to modify an existing prefix but there are quite a few things to do, it's easier to back up savegames and game config files and then create it anew.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it does run, even with quite comparable performance, but getting a wheel to interact with the game has been a bit challenging. But this could be resolved with a custom driver for my specific hardware. Using the community standard mod manager seems to resolve the UI jank by completely bypassing it.
What is your specific wheel hardware? It should simply be a case of binding the wheel axis in Content Manager’s controller options.
Hop on either matrix or discord listed at https://simracingonlinux.com and one of us will be happy to help you work through the issue.
yeah, I've heard this too.. and I'd rather my rig just works rather than try and stuff around making it work under linux + I know iracing is cooked anyway, and I've spent enough money on the rig to just want it to work, and not get stuffed over by some anti-cheat, maybe soon
picture of my rig https://www.arcturus.com.au/rig.jpg
That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.
Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.
Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.
But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?
And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.
I had the same experience! Not looking back at all.
They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?
I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.
I will warn you, Ubuntu is basically dead now.
Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.
Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.
> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.
Citation very much needed for this claim.
As somebody who has been around linux almost for as long as it exists, i must say that is a very strong statement.
In real life: systemd IS useful, Wayland is becoming (has become?) the default, ubuntu is the most popular desktop distro family.
In my experience, Snap is frustrating to use, buggy and is opinionated in ways I don't like.
It's also a weird choice for servers running Ubuntu. I recall some CLI utilities being moved to Snap and you can't install them with apt anymore.
Ubuntu on servers has always been "a choice", Debian is definitely the preferable of the two. Even on desktops, I'd sooner suggest Debian or Mint than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a dead distro coasting on a reputation 15(+) years out of date.
(And it used to be that Ubuntu was still a defensible choice for maximizing the chance of getting help online, but LLMs have effectively neutralized this advantage.)
Mint still uses Xorg, so it's outdated. I tried it recently, it wasn't working with my iGPU+dGPU (nothing exotic, just a regular PC), and all the other distros already went to Wayland so nobody was talking about this online. I feel bad for anyone who gets convinced to switch from Windows to Mint, being told it's the easy one. The fix was to just install Ubuntu.
Maybe Xorg is inherently better than Wayland, but that doesn't matter, the ship has sailed and the community evidently doesn't have time to properly support both.
I genuinely don't think Xorg is a deal breaker for newbs and I would characterize dual-GPU as at least slightly exotic, maybe because I've never owned such a computer, but that's a fair enough point. Personally I think the polish of Cinnamon makes it the best recommendation for somebody new, and I know a whole lot of people start with that and have a sufficiently good experience that they stick with linux (while maybe moving on to other distros.)
It's a typical setup: consumer-grade Intel CPU, which all have integrated graphics, with a consumer-grade Nvidia GPU. Under Xorg, this gives a black screen after the screen sleeps then wakes, which made it unusable.
The GUI layout doesn't matter compared to this. Anyone who even knows what an OS is enough to go install Linux will figure out how to use whatever GUI you give them, provided it works. The bar needs to be at, make sure stuff isn't straight up broken. We aren't there yet.
My Gentoo system is fully systemd and Wayland based from the start. Might sound like heresy to some users, but it was my decision from the start as I liked how they worked, that they are the future, and that you don’t have to wrangle shell scripts for building an OS. I had used systemd a lot via many Ubuntu servers before, so that helps.
He's not wrong though, the amount of Snap stuff you have to remove in a fresh install is starting to get a bit annoying (I usually remove at least the Snap versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and replace them with binaries from Mozilla - they will still self-update).
You don't have to remove them though, it works fine.
> Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base
When was that? I don't disagree that it appears to be the case (especially with replacing coreutils/sudo/etc and the... varied approach to .deb vs snaps) but I'm not aware of them saying it explicitly in those terms?
Is your name a reference to the Blizzard game? If so, I worked on that :)
You're not wrong, but tbh I'd move upstream to Debian. I use Termux on my phone (Z Fold) with Debian and XFCE, and have been extremely pleased with the performance. Combined with a folding keyboard and some AirNeo's, it's become a fantastic micro-development system that fits in a hand bag.
Not that I don't like Arch, it has a very few (subtle!) things that Ubuntu has solved recently, like eGPU hotplugging
Sorry but this comment is part of the reason anyone should rightfully be scared to switch to Linux. Not only do you have to pick one of 999 distros, but every choice is wrong according to someone. Which one do you recommend, and is it the kind that will throw random issues or be called evil?
Debian, if you need a rock-stable system; Fedora for cutting edge.
Yeah those are fine choices, but someone is going to say why they're actually horrible, just like Ubuntu which is also fine
If that means that package versions for commonly used tools are less than a decade old in the future that's probably a good thing though ;)
Snap is a mess, and treating "deb-based" like a purity test is funny when plenty of Linux users have dealt with abandoned apt repos and stale PPAs.
If you want stable, reproducible systems Nix is a serious option now. Ubuntu isn't dead. You pick the distro that breaks your workflow the slowest, then backfill the choice with a story about freedom or community to make the packge manager choice seem less accidental.
I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?
Anti-cheat systems that rely on rootkit-style undermining of your OS will indeed not work on Linux.
There's a good tracker here:
https://areweanticheatyet.com
i thought it would bother me, but honestly, tehre are just too many good games that dont require eac.
i would imagine eac on linux will have to be addressed once steam machines drop, but for now i look at it like, if a game requires eac, at this point the game studio is just too lazy or cheap [0] to be linux compatible so we just play something else. far too many great games.
[0] its even more silly considering eac doesnt seem to stop cheaters at all. every single popular game that requires eac is still absolutely overflowing with more than obvious cheaters.
Easy anti cheat works on linux, if the game developers permit it.
It's not the same as EasyAntiCheat and doesn't support the same features. It's like saying Excel works on iPad, but you can't even use VBA on that.
Or a game example: I have Minecraft (Bedrock) on my phone so therefore I should be able to do the same things as Minecraft (Java) on Windows. The problem is they're the same names for different software with similar, but not the same, functionality.
So you're saying that easy anti cheat on linux is different from on windows? I am aware it is not as effective as detecting cheating on linux, but does this affect gameplay itself? Or do game developers not want reduced efficacy of detecting cheaters, and so they don't support linux at all?
I don't play those games myself but the word is that the EAC on linux lacks the same kernel hooks that are available on Windows. I personally consider that a plus but if you're a developer obsessed with strong anti-cheat you probably do not.
Ah, I was under the mistaken impression EAC operated in userspace.
It does on Linux. That's the problem for developers. Unless you're talking about Windows.
It's hit-or-miss, with recent live service and esport titles being the iffiest. The older multiplayer titles, casual shooters and natively ported games are more consistently supported and form a sizable library of working online games.
I strongly suggest any other distro that is Ubuntu. Canonical is a Microsoft wannabe
Fighting off snaps would be reason enough to abandon them but Canonical has control of the snap store in a way that is antithesis to open source as they're trying to run a walled garden play. This is the exact type of crap that lit a fire under my ass to get off Windows in the first place.
If you have any unusual set-up going on personally I'd recommend a rolling release distro like manjaro (arch) or fedora, so you get latest drivers and whatnot fast. Modern releases of these distros come bundled with the same desktop environment options as Ubuntu and good, easy to use package install and update GUIs. IMO it's more noob friendly than Ubuntu because your stuff is more likely to work without weird workarounds.
Massive props needs to be given to the Proton and Wine teams and Valve and Codeweavers commercial efforts to help fund work on this.
Man the distro breakdown is an even bigger mess than normal:
Feb 2026:
March 2026: I'm guessing that "0 64 bit" and "64 bit" are CachyOS and Bazzite, as I would be surprised to see either of those fall off the list given their current popularity. It is also interesting to see the flatpack installs (Freedesktop SDK) fall off the list.I really wish that Valve would increase the number of distros they report, or stop breaking out individual versions. The purpose of having multiple versions is to see how quickly people are upgrading and when to stop supporting older ones, but the current presentation doesn't actually let you do that since there is so much churn in which releases make the top 10 cut.
I was waiting for the steam machine and grew impatient. I instead built a PC to go behind our family room TV. I gave bazzite a chance before committing to a copy of Windows. I'm glad I did. It runs perfectly. Zero hassle, no chasing down drivers. The only thing to be aware of is that a handful of games are not compatible, generally due to their anti-cheat software (e.g. marathon won't run, but arc raiders does.)
Bazzite is incredible, I've been running it on my gaming PC for about two years now. Games just work these days, and the updates are silent so I never need to think about them.
After installation, I haven't even used a mouse and keyboard with Bazzite. Everything is controller accessible. It just feels like a console like "just works" experience.
I got my Steam Deck that month, so pleased to be a part of it. The Deck fills a gap that has been empty in my soul since the PSP was discontinued, and feels like a genuine step forward that makes technology fun again.
It's fully open! It has a KDE desktop that I can access any time! I can shove in any size of SSD I like!
And I'm playing Halo 3... on Linux... on hardware made by Steam. If you spoke that sentence to me in 2009, I'd suggest you ought to be sectioned.
Yep it's crazy. The SteamDeck alone gives me the hope that we will see mainstream use of (desktop) linux within my lifetime.
People need to get their hands on real, working, consumer-friendly devices running Linux out-of-the-box.
Agreed. Roll on steam machine as well! I prefer handheld, but the more linux-based gaming we can get out there, the better
Pewdiepie becoming an arch-pilled rice-maxxer who advocates Linux for freedom and gaming has surely had some effect. He's such a good sport he even swore off Photoshop and tries to learn to like Gimp.
Or maybe Microsoft continuously degrading their user's experiences has finally reached a breaking point, to the point where Pewdipie AND Linus Tech Tips are talking more seriously about linux.
So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.
If I am reading the room right, I think Wine/Proton/Steam making gaming almost effortless on linux has been the big swing. It was not like this 5 years ago.
I have been a linux user for work for a decade, but still ran Windows for a gaming PC. But with Win11 dropping the ball so hard, and the general hype around Proton and where linux gaming was it, it was not hard to make the decision to switch.
I haven't regretted it a single bit.
Same here. Been using Linux personally for about a decade, professionally for half of that. I still ran a GPU passthrough Windows 11 VM for games up until a couple months ago. I am now switching to running everything purely in Linux, and it's great. Night and day difference between what it used to be like 5 years ago for sure.
Certainly Microsoft is responsible for most of it. I'm just saying Felix still has a lot of influence and has been pulling in the same direction to his millions of fans.
I haven't used GIMP in a while but I had great experience with Krita, even with my display tablet it all "just worked".
Yes, Krita is definitely my preference, and aseprite for pixel art work (not open source, but source available and free of cost if you choose to build it yourself.)
krita looks great! I'm not a hugely creative person, so last time I spent time to learn a graphics tool that was gimp in the early 2010s. But I used krita last week to test my convertibles's pen (Dell PN7552W, on Linux of course). Pleasant experience overall, and utterly amazing how far krita came in the last decade.
GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, just like Photoshop is.
Correction: GIMP is annoying/difficult to learn well, but not nearly as bad as Photoshop because it is organized logically and isn't burdened with sacred historical cruft, advertisements and product tie-ins.
The difference is that once you learn Photoshop it is a skill you can use at many jobs, and GIMP is not. Using this post as an excuse to rant, I've always thought that GIMP's priorities should be to be usable for print (mainly color management, which I think is almost totally fixed and becoming smooth) and to improve compatibility between it and vector drawing software (like Illustrator/Inkscape[0]), and layout software (like InDesign/Scribus[1].)[2]
If you're a European government or an individual rich person and you are really serious about software independence from the US, or if you're China/Russia/etc. and we know you're serious about it, you should throw about 50M at the problem. I think it would threaten Adobe so much that the US might lob a missile at you.
-----
[0] Inkscape also hated print, and the possibility of real exact colors and real exact measurements, and basically prioritized web icons and art. They also have a UI that requires a ton of memorization of hotkeys (which was part of the motivation for creating the software in the first place.) They seem to have wised up and made serious improvements in all of those areas.
[1] The only problem that Scribus has is a clunky UI that requires a lot of unnecessary clicks, which makes me suspect that it has deeper architectural problems. I think very few people work on it. It's ideally positioned, in the age of all books being online data, to create/become the future typesetting standard for people who want definitive versions of books rather than flowy ebook things which are not a significant improvement over .txt files. You could take a classic book and encode its typesetting, and rather than having 10M of blurry page scans combined with OCR info, you could just have 500K of text, fonts and typesetting information. With this, you could professionally print a perfect copy of the book, and as it looked when it was printed originally.
[2] Inkscape and Scribus, in turn, should be concentrating on pdf compatability, and also a way to sneak into print shops would be to write a good FOSS imposer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition) that integrated well with Inkscape/Scribus.
If you're coming from photoshop then PhotoGIMP is a good patch for gimp. I never understood why GIMP just didn't take this approach to begin with or at least make it a built in option.
Is there an English translation for those not in the latest influencer language trends?
Ricing = making your linux desktop look pretty. arch = a 'techy' flavour of linux.
Things I hadn't had on my bingo cards, in this or any universe: Me really looking forward to a new PewDiePie video! Guy has become a wholesome tech entertainment retreat for me. It's like Martijn Doolaard, but Linux instead of Alps... I can't stress enough how wholesome and pleasant the content has become. Or maybe it's been always like that, and I was just an ignorant snob...
Granted, I have SponsorBlock installed, so the occasional predatory supplement stuff gets cut, but he also kinda made clear he's rich enough and not in it for the money anymore - and I tend to believe him. PewDiePie won life, chose sanity and took the anti-corruption path. Bless him and his family, and God please, let it be real!
It’s great. Moving on from Windows has been like leaving an abusive relationship.
They are even playing the "come back, i've changed" card recently :D
"Recently"? Did people forget the whole "Microsoft <3 Open Source" flop already? Feels like it was just some years ago.
They’re still in step 2 of their general game plan: embrace, extend, extinguish.
My last Windows install was XP, but I stopped using Steam a couple years back. I prefer to own what I buy, so now only purchase on GOG.
However I'm very thankful for the work Valve has done, as this has made Wine much much better.
I can now just download a game from GOG, set it up with a winetricks one-liner, and expect it to work. Even the latest games that just came out.
Although to be fair I usually wait a couple months to get a good discount. But, before, you had to wait years for support, if any at all.
I'm also seeing some studios releasing support for Vulkan either day one or in updates, which is great.
Gaming is more than viable on a Linux PC these days.
I'm using CachyOS with a PS2 controller or mouse and keyboard. I had to do virtually zero tinkering.
Let me know how rainvow 6 runs for you :)
I wish you were right, though
yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.
And those games are easily ignored, as they should be.
I'm someone who hasn't used Windows for gaming in years, and has been enjoying Proton since 2019.
But, especially for children, a lot of these games are a big part of their social lives. Paragraphs could be expended on the vices of these games, but I disagree with considering them easily ignored.
As others have noted though, a surprising lot of these games with anticheat do work on Linux. It's not even rareOverwatch, Halo, and Helldivers to name a few.
Plenty of games without anticheat won't work either. It's far from the Windows situation of installing whatever you want and expecting it to work out of the box. And the "gold" rating on ProtonDB/WineHQ means nothing, you have to check the comments.
Sure Linux also works with a lot of games nowadays, and you can ignore whatever doesn't. I use a Mac and accept that it'll run even fewer games. Not my priority.
>yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.
*unless the developers explicitly enabled linux userspace support which some do
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
> linux userspace support
Note that this is a much less robust form of anti-cheat, which is why many developers do not enable it.
We're entering a world where developers are going to need to start implementing anti cheat that works on Linux. It's clearly possible, and as we break past 5% it's no longer economically viable to ignore Linux. Especially once the GabeCube comes out...
The goal of kernel mode anticheat is to prevent other kernel-mode modules from tampering with the game's memory. This can kind of be done on Windows, as there's a pretty short list of kernel binaries, and all device drivers are signed.
This is out of the question on Linux, where there's probably 100,000 distro kernel binaries floating around, plus the ability to build your own with whatever modules you wish.
The only plausible solution is to force everyone to use the same kernel image. "To run Valorant, please apt install linux-vanguard-botnet-bin!"
Unfortunately this is a plausable enough outcome, and those games are so absurdly popular, that people will do it, especially given that having support for these games will likely drive new users to Linux.
If enough people do it, this opens the door for other software to latch onto it and start requiring a "verified kernel", so I'd rather just never see these games on Linux.
We probably could run Linux distros under hypervisor (just like default Windows install those days runs not on bare metal, but under Hyper-V).
And then games that wish for anticheat start a separate VM in hypervisor with complete secure boot chain of trust. Would require GPUs to support SR-IOV though.
Maybe something using AI could be implemented - does a screenshot of your game e.g. every second and if it detects anything that would suggest cheating then it informs some central system and sends it a movie of you playing for the final verdict.
Of course this all is based on the assumption that the local AI can do this fast enough with enough precision.
That runs on client side, so can easily be tampered with (assuming you're suggesting that instead of secure boot chain).
Also cheat HUD elements can be simply rendered outside of game window (or even on another device like smartphone).
Well my suggestion is that the local part (which could analyze everything that is happening locally, not only the screen) would be the initial filter and if it detects any hint it takes some data package and sends it to some centralized online system that would provide a final verdict (and ban if needed).
But as you say if it is local then you can essentially run anything on the computer and modify what is ran on it. That basically means it is impossible to make an anti-cheat that is 100% bulletproof aside from something strange like buying a locked-in camera which you need to place behind you as it records everything you do on the PC and then the AI thing happens as I explained.
Maybe for pro play and tournaments that would be acceptable but not for the average player.
I think, it's not unreasonable to see basically a verifiable reference single-purpose gaming OS everyone has to use in competitive esports games. Steam and Linux are probably positioned well there.
Would be hilarious, if all gaming ultimately settles on a hardware independent console platform running on a locked-down linux! This would really please and piss off every faction at the same time. But honestly, not the worst compromise IMO.
I’ve had a good experience running Arch Linux on my “gaming” PC in the living room. It helps that I’m very comfortable with Linux internals, but I’d say I have no issues or issues that can be fixed with 2-3 clicks about 95% of the time.
My setup is basically Arch Linux, ProtonUp-Qt (to easily install specific versions of Proton, the compatibility layer), Steam, and the proprietary Nvidia drivers/Vulkan. I generally have no issues with Easy Anti-Cheat games like Arc Raiders, but obviously anything that requires secure boot attestation like Arena Breakout Infinite won’t play. I’ve not bothered to try setting up full secure boot as the games that require it aren’t typically in my wheelhouse.
I hope Linux adoption continues for my own, very self-serving, interests. I get the sense that those who primarily use their computer for gaming are the frogs slowly being boiled by Microsoft who continues to back their these customers into uncomfortable, unnecessary corners.
I am a long time windows pc gamer, but lately I was having to re-pair my DS4 controller every week or so. But the windows Bluetooth device manager will just refuse to remove that device. So I was periodically having to open the old school device manager, click show hidden and remove the controller there. By the fifth time I got fed up, replaced windows with Bazzite and am happy now. Good riddance.
YMMV, I've not had good luck with Bluetooth on any OS
Your computer's bluetooth module could be the source of the trouble. Some people have found that using a different dongle fixed their wireless controller problems.
Fun how those things go, I've only ever had troubles with Bluetooth on Apple hardware (both phones and laptops), meanwhile I never had problems with Bluetooth on either Windows or Linux, both desktops and laptops, with controllers, headphones and keyboards. YMMV indeed :)
It's absolutely fine on Linux for all the devices I have so I'm happy with it. I daily drive arch (https://github.com/gchamon/archie), bazzite which is fedora, and the notebook my current employer provides which comes with Ubuntu pre-installed.
i run endeavour (arch) and have a handful of things using bluetooth without any issues. i even have my airpods paired and use them constantly with no problems
I was keeping a Windows install around solely to play Fortnite with my kids but they've finally found other games.
Rocket League performance on Linux used to be the other big reason but about 4 months ago I fired it up and found it ran smoother (the random stutters I have suffered through on Windows are not there on Linux).
Now that those two are no longer relevant I can finally reclaim that wasted SSD storage.
That's possibly the first time that "skyrocketed" and "5%" have been used together in one sentence.
Of total users 5% is a substantial number of consumers and some would argue a non-trivial amount of market share to ignore when making a product.
This also goes without saying that the more adoption we see, the better these alternatives will get as we see consumers and businesses view Linux as worth the investment.
The first 5% is the hardest. It won’t take 35 years to reach 10%.
"You know whats alot harder? The first 50%" - windows
Given how Windows 11 is going I would guess "You know what's a lot harder? Not trending downwards." would be the more obvious one.
I heard this in a Justin timberlake as Napster guy voice
5 per cent is a significant number. In many elections for example, this is the minimum to have representatives and/or receive state funding.
Ah yes, forgot this was HN.
"OS disruptor 5Xs in 3 years thanks to innovative new multi-platform solution, securing unprecedented market share."
I've been very impressed with Bazzite on my ASUS dual screen laptop. Honestly feel like hardware support is better (especially in the absence of crappy ASUS software) and nothing on Steam runs noticeably worse. Hard to imagine going back to Windows at this point.
I wish things were working so seamlessly for me, as people describe in the comments. There seems to be something wrong with Steam and how it works, so that in my machine (and CPU and GPU from 2019, with official Linux drivers from standard repos, running Debian KDE) it almost never manages to start a Windows game. I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game. This has been going on for years and I have tried various things, Including HWE kernel, OS reinstall from Linux Mint to Debian, installing the steam client via various means, and whatnot.
I have a suspicion, that somehow Steam has issues when Guix is installed, which I am always using, but then the question is, why Steam is incapable of just shipping with whatever it needs and using the things it shipped with properly, instead of getting confused by Guix, which only puts things in the GNU store, and not in a place that Steam should ever look at. But like I said, it is only a hunch or suspicion, and I need Guix more than Steam on Linux.
Then there are games that just work, like Stardew Valley. And maybe Terraria. I suspect, that it is somehow also about what engine the games use and what those engines rely on. But these games are very few, and most bigger mainstream games like AoE2 simple won't start, like I described.
So for me it still seems, that it is not actually working that reliably on just any GNU/Linux system, and that there are still blind spots, that Valve or whoever is clearly not seeing or considering in their whole Proton development or how Proton is used by Steam. Probably some isolation thing that they are completely missing for several years now.
> I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game.
You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...
Unfortunately a lot depends on the game and software you're trying to use. There are cases where (especially older) stuff on Windows doesn't work but on Steam it works fine.
Also the hope is that when the Linux share of the market grows and more multi-platform engines like Unreal are used then we'll get native versions instead of using Wine/Proton.
On top of that Windows is now basically unusable in many ways so for me at least there is no alternative (MacOS is really bad compared to a well configured Linux desktop, could never get past it treating me as an idiot).
I had great success in such cases by just overriding the compatibility tool used, most often to just some version of proton. Default sometimes just does not work.
I have been running Guix System as my daily driver for 7 years now and I have not had any trouble using Steam as packaged by nonguix with my cursed nvidia GPU. My computer is from 2008 with a CPU/GPU upgrade in 2018.
There have only been a handful of games that I haven't been able to play, like Hitman Absolution. But other AAA games like RD2 and Witcher1-3 run without issue. Even Starcraft2, run through proton, works well.
This is similar to my experience. I find many people on the forums that can't resolve the crashes in Red Dead Redemption 2, so I suspect a lot of it depends on the specific games you've picked.
It is clearly getting better globally, so I expect in 3 years or so things will be ready for me to try again.
Maybe I didn't emphasize sufficiently just how many games don't work for me on GNU/Linux. Out of 100 games, I estimate that I get 3-5 games that work, while many people in my circles are proclaiming how great the support now is, that so many games just run fine.
I actually have more luck getting games to run when I myself make WINE prefixes using WINE and try running games that way, than running any games on Steam. Only very few games work with Steam on Linux for me. This is also part of the reason, why I think something Steam does with Proton prefixes might be the reason it is broken.
I also tried things like not putting games in my Steam library on an NTFS drive that is shared with Windows, and instead put them on my GNU/Linux partition in a new Steam library. Didn't help. Tried various Proton versions, including experimental ones. Didn't help. Simply nothing seems to make a difference.
Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves all problems for me and stopped me from distro-hopping: media consumption, software dev tooling, system admin tooling, gaming - all just works. My current install is about a year old without breaking itself (still on Fedora 42). I gave gnome a couple of tries, but the plugin system is a crapshoot as they broken an install for me once after an update. Come to think of it, I haven't manage to break KDE yet.
Then in steam itself, you can swap different versions of proton. I like to set the base version to one of the newer versions, but if a game doesn't work, I check on protondb which versions work so I override it per game. You can also give lutris a try as it has a few extra advanced levers that you can to get things working.
Debian Stable gamer here.
> Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Please stop spreading this misconception. There are only a tiny handful of packages that a Debian gamer might need to update, and those are generally available in Debian Backports.
I'm having a good time in games, getting other computing tasks done, and enjoying Debian's low-maintenance respect for my time. AMA.
> don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind
I use Debian stable on my laptop and testing on desktop. It is fine. Only the newest games that need a specific 0 day patch may suffer a bit but that's only for 1-2 weeks even on testing. You want a stable system first, then to unlock the full performance out of everything, and most bleeding edge fail in the former and are a coin toss on the later.
Think hardware also plays a big role. If you have a new AMD GPU, you'll likely highly benefit from mainline or close-to-it kernel
> Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages.
Not sure I agree. I've been gaming on Debian since 2005, and while it certainly was some work in the beginning, it's been pretty painless for the last five years or so. I'm on Debian stable (mostly) at the moment, and don't really know what "bleeding edge" packages I would be missing.
Kernel updates.
I've got 6.19.8 in stable-backports. I don't know. I don't feel massively outdated.
Agree. I've had generally good experience with Fedora and Steam + tips from ProtonDB
Only have had 1 snafu with Steam i386 dependencies causing issues with x86_64 packages. I think there's a Flatpak of Steam available that should help isolate that but iirc there was some caveat
Since I used Linux Mint before and since this issue has been going on for years, I don't think lagging behind a few months is the reason for it. 1 or 2 years ago people also already proclaimed that now most games just work for them out of the box. Not so for me and my system. There is something that Steam overlooks and does not isolate from, is my guess.
This is correct, if you want a good desktop Linux experience, you want to use a rolling release distribution.
Debian will ship with old pieces of software that are updated and fixed on a daily basis upstream. Some of those changes and bug fixes really are showstoppers and you'll be stuck with them for months/years. Same thing with older kernels.
Debian is great for servers, but if you're doing graphics, sound or multimedia heavy tasks, you want the latest Wayland, Pipewire and driver support at the bare minimum.
that's right. graphic stack is one thing you dont want to use older release.
I am part of the 5%. But not on Steamdeck. Proton has made gaming on Ubuntu feasible, and I usually don't have issues with compatibility.
I've played exclusively on Linux for a couple of years now. Sometimes, very rarely, you have to select a specific Proton version for a game. Otherwise, it just works.
Long time Linux user, but I got lazy into the Windows ecosystem for too many years. My son convinced me to move over and I haven't looked back. I haven't found a game that hasn't run, the worst I have to do is change Proton version. Ubuntu was good, but Nobara is amazing (ndivia 5000 series drivers out of the box).
I am impressed with the Steam Deck. Playing The Hundred Line on the deck brings back the glory days of the Playstation Vita. And it's the one device I have (including iPhone, iPad and Mac) for which AirPods are 100% a "just works" experience.
When playing eve online on Linux (via Proton), the moment any other window gets focus, or the mouse slights off the game screen onto the second monitor on the side, game minimizes.
I have a feeling it's just wine things. Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?
I remember that 13 years ago I did everything on Linux and only switched to Windows to play eve online. Now the game works beautifully (graphics and all) on Linux with just one slight modification in the "run command" in Steam.
This is nothing, as anybody who tried to play games on Linux using wine can attest. It used to be a hell of modifications, dependency hunting and obscure hacks to get any windows game to work.
Proton and Vulcan are Awesome.
Not sure why that happens, but you may want to try "borderless window" instead of fullscreen in the game options. If that does not work, you could try running the game in gamescope, or enabling the wine virtual desktop with winecfg (point it at your game-specific wine prefix, you can also run it from protontricks). These are just a few ideas, but it does sound like a mechanism that is part if the game, not wine. Just like some games crash when you alt-tab in windows; gamescope tends to fix that.
> Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?
I spent a lot of time squashing bugs like this.
Windows has one window manager. Linux has dozens. Windows apps are written to make assumptions about how the Windows window manager works. Things like windowing event message sequences, side-effects on values returned by other APIs, the exact sequence of fullscreen status side-effects such as window size and mouse cursor capture and window chrome presence. That's valid because those always work the same way on Windows. But Linux window managers all do all of those things differently, and trying to get all dozens of window managers to behave exactly the same way as Windows's does is near impossible.
Another possibility is it's just how the game works, even on Windows. It was pretty common to get windowing bugs reported, test them on Windows, and see the exact same behavior as we had on Linux.
Your desktop is set to focus where mouse cursor is not where you click. Usually can be changed. Also in conjunction with that the game is set to freeze when it loses focus. So maybe you can change that in game.
Maybe also try different Proton versions
Src https://www.protondb.com/app/8500
Try running it in gamescope. Or the "always capture mouse in fullscreen windows" setting in winecfg.
Check your mouse focus settings in your desktop environment (gnome/KDE/whatever).
There may be an option called mouse stealing prevention or something, but if you have a look you should hopefully see it. On xfce it's in its own tab in the mouse menu
Vulcan is the home planet of Spock, the 3D API is Vulkan ;) (sorry for nitpicking)
There is a weird bug in Helldivers 2 when you use the maximized window without borders and you have a multi monitor setup. Sometimes, the character stops of rotating with the mouse look... like if the mouse cursor found a limit. Another, it's with the full screen mode. When I switch windows with AltTab, sometimes the game restores with the wrong display proportions.
As far I know, this bugs happens on Windows too.
I moved from Windows to Linux after the lastest round of MS crap on my system. Not looking back.
Personally, after using Windows at home since I was in kindergarten (3.1), having an employer-provided Macbook the last 15 years, and every few years dipping a toe into Linux for various projects, I can say they finally did it. I panic built a new PC for gaming, video editing, and messing with LLMs just at the start of the RAM crisis and thought what the heck, why not CachyOS. I might not be the average user, but it has been so much more convenient, snappy, and fun to troubleshoot than any other time I can remember. KDE just works and has sane defaults. The Arch repository has almost everything you can imagine, and usually the Cachy maintained "safe" repos do too. I downloaded Steam and immediately jumped into my saves from BG3, Cyberpunk, Claire Obscur, and more, like nothing happened. QGIS, Affinity apps (bye Adeobe), LM Studio can take advantage of my GPU. DaVinci Resolve is wonky, but Kdenlive is fine as a stopgap. I want to evangelize now as much as possible since it's all so starkly different from even 5 years ago, largely but not wholly thanks to Steam's Proton work. Microsoft really doesn't care about Win users (fine, it doesn't make them any money), and now is our chance.
2026 is the year of Steam Linux.
I wonder if part of this is usage by newer Android based emulators [1] used for emulating x86-based PC games on powerful snapdragon based devices (Retroid Pocket 6, AYN Odin 2 line, AYN Thor, AYANEO Pocket S2, etc).
[1] GameNative, GameHub (and GameHub lite)
I'd be surprised if the intersection of users that have such devices, use it to emulate x86 games and use steam on it is big enough to make such an impact.
“I'm still working on it. It's been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I'll wear them down.” —Linus Torvalds
Go Linux. Gamers will have a better experiance in Linux. Predict that Windows will become an legacy emulation layer.
proton was the tipping point but windows 11 is doing the heavy lifting. forcing tpm 2.0 on perfectly good hardware is the best marketing linux gaming ever got.
I’m on Bazzite and I’m strongly considering switching back to Windows 11. Proton performance is just not as good as native. Games like Valve’s own Deadlock just run terribly on Proton and completely fine on Windows, using the same hardware. It’s a miracle that Proton works at all, but why compromise when I already have a Win11 license key?
GFN is releasing in India this month. Would be interesting to see to what extent that's reflected later on.
Just another post saying stuck kde with the new plasma on it for my kids first computer and was blown away by the polish. Switching over my workstation this month for sure. Highly recommended
Even if this is largely due to a change in how PCs in China are being counted, it's still amazing to watch Linux usage continue to climb like this.
It's really the only opposing force to Microsoft's enshittification of Windows.
Linux’s ecosystem has also improved significantly over the past two years, especially in China. Due to the influence of “Xinchuang” (that is, domestically produced Linux rebranded under another shell), many Chinese desktop applications have been reworked in the past couple of years, switching from Windows-specific tech stacks to cross-platform ones—mostly Electron, basically browser wrappers—and now support the Linux platform. The commonly used software is basically all there.
In addition, the development of LLMs has greatly lowered the barrier to using the Linux command line. Problems that used to take a full day to solve can now be handled easily by anyone who can write a prompt—just ask, copy, and paste. This has even made Windows’ command line unfriendly by comparison, despite its own major improvements in recent years, turning it into a significant drawback.
Question: What percentage of windows gamers are actually Linux gamers who are using wine/proton or some anti-cheat workaround/VM that causes them to be reported as using windows when they are in fact running linux?
Using proton, I regularly see crash reports where games want to report that I was running some version of windows, which is a result of how proton implements wine. I never send such reports as they are of little use to developers.
This is from the Steam hardware survey. Steam doesn't run under Wine generally so this problem shouldn't come up
Proton is a modified version of Wine. If the underlying game is sending a bug/crash report, it may "see" itself as running under windows as that is what wine presents.
https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton
"Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this."
Correct. Steam, a native Linux app, will run Windows games via Proton. As Steam itself, which is collecting the data in TFA, is a Linux app, it shouldn't be affected by thinking it's running under Wine/Proton. As to your original question, I don't think many developers release information on what OSes their players are using, so I don't think we can tell
True but irrelevant, these numbers are reported by Steam which is running natively on Linux.
It launches proton, it is not itself running on proton.
Considering how awful Microslop's Win11 is, Linux could really gain some traction if it were to begin to consider the desktop environment as a useful target. Server is already dominated, top 500 supercomputers running linux (since 2017; https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1/) - yet the desktop area is one where I don't feel there is really a lot of real improvement. I know, I know, GNOME and KDE keep on promoting how above they are beyond epic perfection already, but this is just buzzword-PR-chaining. GTK is a mostly-GNOME-only toolkit now and qt has its own objectives. Things that should be super-simple and work on Linux, do not work that well for Average Joe for the most part. One can fix most things with some research, but not everyone knows how to do so, or will fatigue after a while. Now most gamers are usually young and tend to be more tech-savvy, so they can solve things more easily, but even then one has to wonder why so much time has to be invested to make things work well. Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority? Smartphones are a special place as the environment is mostly controlled by one private vendor or an open ecosystem (which then is usually much smaller, and still does not yield real improvements for the desktop system, for the most part, give or take; GNOME3 kind of looks and feels like a smartphone-UI).
> Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority?
No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.
Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.
The top distro is Arch - implying that the Steam Deck userbase is moving the needle.
Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.
It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.
No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.
The top distro is SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but does not appear as such in the stats. The Arch appearing in the stats has to be CachyOS and other gaming-distros, as also real Arch-users.
But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.
It's not just the single distro, but single Desktop Environment upon which app and ecosystem developers will standardise. I'm glad that the latest generation of gaming distros are converging on Plasma.
Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.
Linus has been using Fedora for over a decade.
Yeah but that doesn't make Fedora the default Linux. I'd be fine if it were, but it's not branded as such, and he doesn't have control over it.
I know why he uses Fedora but I think it's long term is questionable. It's only a matter of time until IBM F's with it.
Steam Deck is currently ~25% of those 5% Linux users. Good chunk but not a majority. You can estimate it in two different ways which produce similar results: filtering to Linux only looking at OS list "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" is 24.48% and in the GPU list "AMD Custom GPU 0405"+"RADV VANGOGH" add up to 23.72%.
Are the numbers by hours played instead of by installed clients? How are users with multiple devices counted?
Only blocker for Linux gaming are intrusive Anti-cheats.
They can be bypassed on Windows, but with too much work (custom hypervisor etc.)
To bypass them on Linux, a lot more easier.
Not true. No way to even play those games in Linux....
I've been happy with my Bazzite setup for play and work. Took a little time to get used to fedora atomic and the changes in installing and running stuff but used to it now.
Phoronix lost the plot in the last year with their click bait garbage headlines and articles. February/March user data is always skewed because of the Chinese holidays. They know it, we know it, they even write about it in the article but still a dumbass hype bait headline and article. Just fucking stop it, the quality of your reviews took a dive as well. Go ahead and produce more garbage and you have lost all value as a news site by the end of the year.
AI fixes Linux on the desktop. Whatever obscure issues you’re facing, you’re a quick prompt away from the solution.
LLMs regularly give wrong advice for debugging and fixing Linux stacks, especially desktop stacks.
Which LLMs? I've had good success with Claude Opus >=4.5
Older/smaller models were far worse
Was not the case when I wanted to use a GameCube controller via Wii U adaptor without a lot of extra lag. Yeah that's a niche, but it works fine in Windows and even Mac.
I believe most of those work with controller drivers in the application (Dolphin Emulator or Steam/SDL) rather than the OS level. That's why the Windows solution requires Zadig to replace the HID driver.
On Linux instead of replacing the driver, you have to add an udev rule that allows applications to communicate with the USB device directly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/blob/master/6... And you can see in this list, it's not the only controller with that requirement.
SteamOS includes this by default.
I did add that rule, which if I remember correctly was needed for it to work at all. But then the problem is input lag. Many recommend https://github.com/hannesmann/gcadapter-oc-kmod which the author only tested in Arch, and for whatever reason it didn't work on Ubuntu. Was printing that "Failed to acquire lock for USB device" line and then I think "Could not reset device", don't remember. Anyway seems like a hack.
This was for Slippi Melee, so even though I'm not super good at the game, the lag was too annoying.
Whilst I tend to agree, I also don't recommend just pasting every command from ChatGPT into your machine without having some understanding/validating process.
Best flow is
Llm -> manual research -> apply
But no one has the time to validate everything llm writes via manually researching it unfortunately /s
Assuming you actually take the time to retroactively understand what you just did and don't become a slop-ministrator.
In my experience AI is unreliable more often than not. It is conflating topics, uses outdated information or straight out hallucinates. It can be good if you already know enough to call it out on its bullshit.
The paid plans which enable "thinking" and internet research are far better than the free tiers and open weight models
e.x. ChatGPT-5.4 Thinking, Claude Opus 4.6
Completely false. The models are nothing like they were a few months ago. Try codex 5.4
This means nothing. There is so much up and down based on the active Chinese user base. PHoronox making headlines out of thin air again
M$ shareholders ITT are sweating bullets! Gaming has always been Microsoft's redoubt; without it they will lose the retail market entirely and be left with only the B2B market coasting on the soon forgotten legacy of what Windows once was, and eventually that will dry up too as Windows fails to capture the attention of a new generation of engineers and administrators.
Microsoft pretty much abandoned desktop as is. They are just squeezing out what is left. Their main cash now is azure and office365. And they expect it to be AI next. Kinda obvious by the where the effort goes.
SteamDeck should be excluded from “Linux use” imho. Especially when it comes to click bait headlines.
Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s. Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!
> Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s.
It's really not; SteamOS is just another GNU/Linux, and pretty close to vanilla Arch Linux for that matter.
> Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!
Proton works fine on other distros.
> SteamOS is just another GNU/Linux
if you are a gamedev considering support for SteamOS and considering support for generic Linux desktop they really really really REALLY are not the same. At all.
If you are a gamedev considering native support for linux then you are using the steam runtime (i.e. a debian container) anyways.
Or you just write a Windows program but explicitly target Proton. (Granted, either of those remain portable to at least any Linux with Steam installed.)
Why not? Could you elaborate? I'd love to know more. I always had the feeling that supporting SteamOS basically meant that generic Linux Desktop support was almost implied because in the end it's almost always on Proton rather than native.
That is not true. Proton and steam linux runtime which are the components actually responsible to run games are literally the exact same code provided by the steam client.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton
Try it. Switch to desktop mode. Behold! A desktop linux!
SteamOS is so very much linux that even WebOS and Androids pale in comparisom.
SteamOS is really a desktop linux. You can switch to "desktop mode" to see the "normal desktop" and you get a KDE where you can run whatever you want.
It's "just" immutable Arch that defaults to Steam's console mode interface.
SteamOS is just an immutable Arch, and all Steam Linux games use the Steam Linux container runtime or Proton.
Bazzite and a few others provide a similar console-style experience.
What you say is not even remotely true. SteamOS is basically just Arch with steam preinstalled.
SteamOS is just steam big picture mode by default on an arch linux. You can switch to a regular KDE in one click
you can just navigate to the full linux desktop on the steamdeck?
yes
>completely different beast from desktop Linux
Absolutely not. If you ever actually used it you would know that the only difference is a custom big picture mode like interface. Anything else is literally the same code.
Skyrocketed above 5% is an expression I would discourage anyone from using because it's a broken metaphor. Unless the trajectory of that rocket was a few degrees from horizontal.
How about grasshopper-ed above 5%?
The number doubled in the last year. April 2025 it was around 2.3%, and has been jumping around 2-3% for several years. Skyrocking seems justified when looking at a greater picture.
Though, it's a longer process, not something that suddenly happened immediately. The combination of Steamdeck, proton, good gaming-distributions and Windows 10 phasing out, while Windows 11 sucks and becoming an AI+Ads-infested mess, seems to have pushed this trend. So let's see how high this sky will be.
Edit: Found a good visualization: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Right but clearly 5% is still much closer to the ground than it is to the sky. Not that ground-rocketed makes any more sense because it doesn't.
Skyrocketing in this context is a fast steep rise, moving fast toward the sky; so it's about relative height in a specific timeframe, not absolute height. I mean, nobody would say Windows is skyrocketing, because it already is the sky (here).
Things can skyrocket whilst being relatively small compared to other things.
It's been an exponential curve since 2022.
https://gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker
Let's revisit that topic if the FED raises interest to 5%.
It will reach 10% in 2050 thereabouts, given current velocity, assuming current computing models are still relevant by then.
Well, in the overall kernel space there is nothing but Linux-based kernels right now.
You should broaden your hardware horizons.
Straight out of Linux Foundation, https://www.zephyrproject.org/
There are no Linux kernels on Sony PlayStation nor Nintendo's Switch, or even Microsoft's XBox.
Windows with its 80% market share has no Linux kernel.
Zero Linux kernel running on the ca 15% Apple desktops.
Zero Linux kernels running on iOS and iPadOS.
No Linux kernels on Arduino or ESP32, althought they certainly can run ESP-IDF and FreeRTOS.
And then there are INTEGRITY, vxWorks, QNX, NutXX, FreeBSD, OpenBDS, DragonFly, IBM i, z/OS, ClearPath MCP, OS 2200, ThreadX, SphereOS, Fuchsia,.... and plenty more I won't bother to list, none of them with Linux kernel.
You are right, in the grand scheme of things, Windows is probably only 20% of gaming market share
PlayStation and Roblox have the same MAU as Steam, that says it all
Steam's MAU probably includes people who boot their PC and have steam open in the systray
> There are no Linux kernels on Sony PlayStation nor Nintendo's Switch, or even Microsoft's XBox.
Except the ones in the network cards and SSD, and probably a bunch of other embedded components.
The year of Linux Everywhere was decades ago.
Sure, that is why there are so many embedded OSes to chose from, with much better enterprise friendly licenses, aka no GPL.