The Linux user share on Steam has been slowly but steadily trending upwards, with May 2025 showing the highest point in years.
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it’s easier to get games working on Linux then it is to get them working on Mac thanks to the new and amazing Apple Silicon

BombOmOm
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Damn, that is a solid upward trend.

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Ay, moved over to Arch 3 months ago! It’s been fantastic and nearly every game has worked out of the box, protondb solved most other issues.

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Three months of using Arch and you’ve not included your ‘btw’ when claiming to use it? Most suspicious.

But yeah, agree completely. I made a new-years resolution about five years ago to try ‘Linux only gaming for a month’ rather than dual booting; worked so well that I wiped Windows a few months later and have never missed it for a minute. That was for Mint, which is great but hard to keep cutting-edge. Decided to try Arch instead, and after a couple of false starts (hadn’t read the install guide carefully enough to have networking after restart, that kind of thing) it’s been absolutely superb - rock solid, got everything I want at the very latest versions for work and games, best documentation of any distro.

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deleted by creator

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Bazzite did it for me, never looked back.

thermal_shock
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Zoring boi!

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This is most likely a combination of:

  • Trump’s tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes

  • Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11

  • Steam supporting Linux increasingly well

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To your first point, it’s not even so much the tariffs; it’s the threat to our Canadian sovereignty. A lot of Americans see it as a joke, but a president shouldn’t be talking about their allies like that. We don’t really expect better from that waste of skin, but the lack of a response from the average American about this specifically is a slap in the face from our closest allies.

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I think most of us have experience of the concept of something being said ironically, as a joke, at first but then being increasingly serious. It’s like magic really does exist and if you say words often enough they start affecting reality, like a spell. Freedom of speech is a right but it’s also a profound responsibility.

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As a liberal in most ways (except on guns), and as a pro 2nd Amendment LGBT American, I’m sorry.

Many of us have “evil fatigue” and “ignorance fatigue” and are just exhausted from how many people in our country are total shitheads.

The list of people for me to apologize to: -dead people in Gaza -alive people in Gaza -all Latinos -all transgender people -Canada -all scientists -intellectuals at Harvard -Ukrainians -Women who were killed due to abortion policies -Anyone in a country killed due to a sudden lack of aid without much warning to even prepare

As a mostly liberal American, I just don’t know where to begin. I also think bad environmental policies are going to destroy the planet, and when I look at conservative middle America and how intolerant and racist their values are, I am sort of like “well, maybe total planetary extinction isn’t that bad”

I just don’t know if I could change it at this point, if there’s anything I could do.

The constant horror of the policies being enacted in this country is so terrible, that it’s hard to really continue to say “sorry, we don’t all believe this!” Some people protest, some don’t, but really many liberals are also just treading water psychologically. It’s quite possible that the fatigue being felt is being intentionally induced.

There may be a way to get past the fatigue, but it’s being combined with financial stress, and for me, apologizing to Canada, standing up for Canada, is just not on the top of the list.

I really do not see what is happening as a conservative revolution. I see this as the self-centered wealthy class realizing they can exploit white trash and technology to destroy the middle class and create a permanent underclass and them. I do not think JD Vance Trump Thiel etc are actually religious, I think it is this final push towards neofeudalism.

It feels like it will unfortunately lead to either communism/socialism or neofeudalism, that there isn’t a middle groud.

The neo-feudalists have made a bet: the white trash class is so numerous and so hateful towards transgenders and Latinos and “the other,” that they can simultaneously eliminate many jobs using tech, reduce social services for poverty, and create a new Chinese-style of quasi-authoritarianism in America based on technology ans biometric information… And they can do this as long as they distract the white trash class with tricks and diversions: oh! Look! Mexican criminals! Look over here! Oh no! Transgenders in bathrooms! Look over there!

And so far, the magicians seem to be right. The yokel white trash of middle America, well over 60 percent of the country, is too stupid to realize they are being tricked by a magician.

So, many middle class people, and lower middle class people, especially technological enthusiasts, see what is happening. But what now? I’m exhausted. I do not know how to reason with idiots. I am just trying to brace myself for impact.

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As a mostly liberal American, I just don’t know where to begin.

As an Irishman, I would say Ranked Choice Voting. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does solve the main problem that prevents the other problems from being solved.

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141M

And steam deck

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61M

Well that comes under point #3 but yeah

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Steam deck isn’t just support for linux, it’s also a fully fledged portable PC. Perfect for those who don’t want to upgrade (#2) and those who want to play desktop games without messing with a desktop setup.

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I do wonder if there’s any selection bias in the hardware survey steam does. I’m sure they sample randomly, but I think a user on Linux might be much more eager to participate in the survey than a Windows user, simply because Linux users tend to have a desire to be more vocal about their OS use than Windows users.

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It’s not a manually filled out survey. It’s just a box that pops up on Steam, you click OK to share info, and that’s it. I think there’s very little bias involved in it.

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There’s the bias between users willing to share that data and those not willing. All sorts of correlations could be hiding there.

I can’t find out what the rate of refusals are, but I’d guess them to be rather low, maybe 10% at most. The survey is incredibly easy to perform and very transparent about colleted data.

The important thing to realise is that the survey is very consistent, so while the baseline may have some bias, the trends are very representative.

BombOmOm
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Linux users are also more likely to be private people and not willing to share info about their system. Both of those two effects are probably pretty small and cancel eachother for this survey.

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101M

I switched to Linux mint a year ago and play most of my games on it. However, i still need a windows installation for those games that refuse to work on Steam (I play Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 coop and I can’t get expedition 33 to run on Linux. But besides that, i spend most of my time on mint (mainly Monster Train 2 and Mechabellum)

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I had to change Proton version and use Gamescope to run Expedition 33, and it runs quite well.

BombOmOm
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i still need a windows installation for those games that refuse to work on Steam (I play Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 coop and I can’t get expedition 33 to run on Linux

All three of those have a gold or higher rating on Linux, meaning they run fine on linux with little to no effort. Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, Expedition 33. If you are having specific issues, check out the linked pages where people share their fixes.

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222d

Thank you, i‘ll give it another try

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91M

2 months in. Linux Mint. I am doing my part!

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111M

THERE ARE DOZENS OF US

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I’m a part of that percentage!

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I just built a new machine, for a time I’ll try some Steam on Linux. For the latest version of Ubuntu and an Intel 570. No idea what I’m doing, lol. (Normally just use Linux server).

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Just don’t install Steam with snap. Many have had issues in the past with it. Either flatpak or grabbing the deb file from Steam

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Yeah I agree, snap sucks big time. It’s so sad that Ubuntu decided to go all in on that shit

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Ok, so re-install Steam! 😆 Pretty sure what I got was Snap. I was presented an App installer thing that kinda reminded me of the Microsoft Store (except, way less laggy). I think I remember seeing the word Snap.

Is there a way to verify that I have the right drivers for the video card? When it comes to GUI, I have a very Windows mindset, where I need to install the proper drivers, else I get the basic “well it works” drivers which aren’t good for gaming.

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Yeah, just remove and grab the deb file instead.

I was under the impression that intel dgpu drivers were in the kernel and part of the mesa library. Not sure what kernel Ubuntu is using but you may want to grab a more recent kernel.

Quick search shows people are using kernel 6.12 and mesa 25 with decent success but not in all games. Could also swap to distro with more recent kernel.

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Fedora did not break the top 10. Is it not good for gaming? Genuinely curious as I was thinking of hopping to Fedora.

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It’s simply reflective of how Steam publishes those numbers on its own platform. For some reason, Fedora isn’t explicitly accounted for while it’s very likely to possess a huge chunk of the “Other” category.

To illustrate this point, we’ll look at Boiling Steam’s latest report. It uses ProtonDB’s data to give us (possible) insight on what’s found within “Other” (that accounts for 23.27%). Before I delve further, it has to be said that ProtonDB’s data contrasts Steam’s in significant ways. It’s not a huge departure, but one definitely notices a slight discrepancy between the numbers.

FWIW, as per Boiling Steam’s report, we find the following numbers for Fedora (and related derivatives):

  • Fedora - 8.7%
  • Nobara - 5.2%
  • Bazzite - 4.5%

Which (together) amounts to 18.4%.

If we would scale this down, as Boiling Steam’s report doesn’t include SteamOS Holo[1], we’d get:

  • Fedora - 6%
  • Nobara - 3.6%
  • Bazzite - 3.1%

Totaling to 12.7% this time. And thus, it('s at least likely to) constitute the majority of the “Other” category.


  1. I’ll assume its share is 30.95% based on Steam’s own numbers. ↩︎

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Most of it is probably steamos devices, which is an arch derivative

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I’m on Fedora and it’s great. I think I had a GNOME-related performance issue the other day, so I’m trying Plasma KDE

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It’s as good as any other distro

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I’d argue that for Nvidia and their drivers management there are better choices, such as Manjaro.

Although on desktop I didn’t have any problems, laptop with AMD iGPU and Nvidia dGpu, prime etc. It’s really a PITA on Fedora.

AMD 9070 on Wayland and Plasma isn’t perfect neither.

I don’t get the hateboner the linux community has against Manjaro, it’s the only distro that booted correctly in live image mode with full nvidia support on my PC, so seems like they at least take Nvidia pretty seriously.

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There always seems to be some sort of controversy going on about the devs’ behavior from an ethical perspective.

The only controversy I’ve heard of was Manjaro forgetting to renew an SSL license a while back (probably 2 years ago by now), I wasn’t aware there had been other issues.

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Obligatory insert Manjarno.

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There was also an issue with a dev wanting to use donation money to buy a gaming laptop. That rubbed some people the wrong way.

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manjaro really does some things right. it’s the best grub boot menu i’ve ever seen, with perfect dual/triple booting detection and such, but it kept breaking all the time and was a pain to fix. switched to fedora and never looked back. i got debian on machines where i don’t want to fiddle with the is often. then fedora on what i use a lot and need to be flexible. bazzite on machines where its supposed to just work and manage the nvidia optimus pain, which it does really well. also i’d opt for mint for people starting out, or not as tech savvy people. different distros for different use cases, but manjaro has proven to be too much work (on my workstation and those of multiple friends). (also i’m looking into nixos)

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I game on fedora (nobara) fulltime and its enjoyable and works great

CubitOom
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Fedora is fine for gaming. The biggest issue I had with it was that if i had an issue with it, I had to do a web search for fedora + issue and I got a lot of unrelated hits for hats.

That said, gloriouseggroll made their own Fedora based gaming distro called Nobara. However I don’t know if they would have based their distro off of fedora if they didn’t work for Redhat.

Personally, I prefer rolling releases which is why I no longer use Fedora.

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People are still choosing Ubuntu too much which feels annoying to me considering how much better the alternatives are, including mint which is second highest.

I guess more likely Fedora being an RPM distro with its own set of system standards keeps people from switching.

I would think Bazzite and Nobara would have boosted the usage, but I guess not as much as I think.

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im using fedora and its nice, but i installed bazzite on a mates laptop recently, and when it comes to nvidia, and especially hybrid graphics (laptops with nvidia gpus), it’s so much easier to use bazzite with their preconfigured nvidia stuff than anything else. so, bazzite is really nice to use and based on fedora, but for my main machine i’ll probably stick to fedora for now.

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I’m on Fedora and I always use the flatpak version of steam, which is listed as 4th. If you redistributed the flatpaks to the actual distro, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fedora was in the top 10. Probably above CachyOS. Fedora encompasses all the immutable child distros like Silverblue, Kiniote, and Bazzite.

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51M

It was really cool of Microsoft to decide 202X is the year of Linux on the desktop.

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I installed Bazzite earlier this year and it’s working great for me!

My dad installed Steam OS on one of his secondary PC’s not too long ago.

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