alt.hn

4/2/2026 at 3:12:24 AM

Steam on Linux Use Skyrocketed Above 5% in March

 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-Tops-5p

by hkmaxpro

4/2/2026 at 3:55:43 AM

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.

by thrdbndndn

4/2/2026 at 6:02:57 AM

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%

by ThatPlayer

4/2/2026 at 7:32:28 AM

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%.

by zokier

4/2/2026 at 7:41:25 AM

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.

by helterskelter

4/2/2026 at 8:39:27 AM

I don't know anyone who goes through the trouble to spoof their user agent and I know plenty Linux users.

by pantalaimon

4/2/2026 at 9:25:34 AM

The archwiki Firefox privacy guide comes to mind, which mentions UA spoofing:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy

by helterskelter

4/2/2026 at 10:48:54 AM

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.

by brador

4/2/2026 at 9:08:21 AM

I do, to access YouTube TV on my Ubuntu HTPC.

by blackmage8532

4/2/2026 at 8:03:01 AM

If you spoof user agent, you will get more captchas because it won't match their other fingerprinting.

by microcode

4/2/2026 at 9:41:34 AM

You also get more captchas because you are on Linux, I see the Cloudflare one on my computer everytime.

by LtdJorge

4/2/2026 at 9:57:46 AM

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?

by NitpickLawyer

4/2/2026 at 10:39:39 AM

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.

by Aerroon

4/2/2026 at 9:41:28 AM

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.

by jijijijij

4/2/2026 at 10:25:11 AM

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.

by bregma

4/2/2026 at 10:38:18 AM

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.

by dns_snek

4/2/2026 at 6:59:23 AM

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/

by krs_

4/2/2026 at 4:28:05 AM

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."

by HDBaseT

4/2/2026 at 9:17:46 AM

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.

by keyringlight

4/2/2026 at 8:34:49 AM

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.

by BoredPositron

4/2/2026 at 9:14:20 AM

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.

by braiamp

4/2/2026 at 9:30:50 AM

They are still only reporting the data they see. They are not correcting or manipulating the data like phoronix implies in their article.

by BoredPositron

4/2/2026 at 9:56:59 AM

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.

by bilekas

4/2/2026 at 8:09:08 AM

I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.

by Tade0

4/2/2026 at 5:05:01 AM

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.

by HerbManic

4/2/2026 at 10:17:28 AM

> 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.

by ErroneousBosh

4/2/2026 at 5:54:29 AM

> 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.

by jstummbillig

4/2/2026 at 4:03:16 AM

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!

by amarant

4/2/2026 at 7:44:17 AM

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.

by BigJono

4/2/2026 at 8:04:27 AM

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?

by antihipocrat

4/2/2026 at 9:55:28 AM

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.

by majewsky

4/2/2026 at 4:15:11 AM

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.

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 4:39:06 AM

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.

by Gigachad

4/2/2026 at 7:10:15 AM

> 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

by fyredge

4/2/2026 at 7:29:03 AM

I agree, but I'm sure Bazzite/CachySteamOS all have support for them on boot.

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 9:31:33 AM

> 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)

by dalmo3

4/2/2026 at 9:44:49 AM

I think OP missed a slash

by LtdJorge

4/2/2026 at 10:04:29 AM

yeah, sorry

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 7:34:41 AM

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.

by SquareWheel

4/2/2026 at 4:18:40 AM

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

by amarant

4/2/2026 at 4:35:49 AM

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.

by cwnyth

4/2/2026 at 4:25:23 AM

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

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 6:14:53 AM

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.

by mcv

4/2/2026 at 7:28:26 AM

yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 4:31:00 AM

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.

by HDBaseT

4/2/2026 at 7:41:39 AM

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.

by pjmlp

4/2/2026 at 8:28:33 AM

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.

by taskforcegemini

4/2/2026 at 4:23:22 AM

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.

by faangguyindia

4/2/2026 at 9:04:46 AM

I have tried Arch btw

by unixhero

4/2/2026 at 4:08:34 AM

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.

by simmanian

4/2/2026 at 8:44:12 AM

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.

by matja

4/2/2026 at 9:10:45 AM

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.

by simonask

4/2/2026 at 9:13:19 AM

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.

by matja

4/2/2026 at 10:41:16 AM

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.

by nottorp

4/2/2026 at 9:57:33 AM

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.

by heavyset_go

4/2/2026 at 9:58:21 AM

> 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?

by Jach

4/2/2026 at 4:50:39 AM

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

by seaal

4/2/2026 at 8:36:29 AM

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.

by lloeki

4/2/2026 at 10:46:28 AM

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!

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 4:18:45 AM

I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection

by kelvinjps10

4/2/2026 at 4:18:54 AM

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.

by manbash

4/2/2026 at 6:05:24 AM

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.

by darkteflon

4/2/2026 at 7:33:04 AM

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.

by deafpolygon

4/2/2026 at 8:47:35 AM

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.

by petu

4/2/2026 at 10:21:40 AM

More like, how does gyro help you play some games?

by deafpolygon

4/2/2026 at 4:39:55 AM

The Steam Controller will be such a blessing when it comes out.

by pkulak

4/2/2026 at 8:07:54 AM

Massive props needs to be given to the Proton and Wine teams and Valve and Codeweavers commercial efforts to help fund work on this.

by esskay

4/2/2026 at 9:52:28 AM

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.

by mikkupikku

4/2/2026 at 10:56:22 AM

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.

by alex_duf

4/2/2026 at 10:59:12 AM

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.

by mikkupikku

4/2/2026 at 10:50:04 AM

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!

by jijijijij

4/2/2026 at 3:52:58 AM

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)

by sonzohan

4/2/2026 at 4:05:29 AM

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

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 6:12:09 AM

Sadly, the original Assetto Corsa is also borked on Linux (AC Evo and AC Rally, on the other hand, run great).

by darkteflon

4/2/2026 at 7:41:11 AM

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

by rounce

4/2/2026 at 9:16:06 AM

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?

by darkteflon

4/2/2026 at 9:51:36 AM

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.

by LtdJorge

4/2/2026 at 7:29:24 AM

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.

by ga_to

4/2/2026 at 7:55:32 AM

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.

by rounce

4/2/2026 at 7:45:25 AM

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

by malbs

4/2/2026 at 5:25:35 AM

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?

by traderj0e

4/2/2026 at 4:23:54 AM

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.

by DiabloD3

4/2/2026 at 5:39:05 AM

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.

by vkazanov

4/2/2026 at 10:04:43 AM

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.

by heavyset_go

4/2/2026 at 10:22:40 AM

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.)

by mikkupikku

4/2/2026 at 9:56:42 AM

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.

by LtdJorge

4/2/2026 at 8:28:51 AM

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).

by imp0cat

4/2/2026 at 6:37:33 AM

> 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.

by theevilsharpie

4/2/2026 at 4:55:00 AM

> 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?

by yjftsjthsd-h

4/2/2026 at 4:45:02 AM

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

by sonzohan

4/2/2026 at 6:49:08 AM

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 ;)

by flohofwoe

4/2/2026 at 9:12:03 AM

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.

by hrmtst93837

4/2/2026 at 7:40:51 AM

I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?

by cryptoegorophy

4/2/2026 at 9:13:41 AM

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.

by toofy

4/2/2026 at 9:35:31 AM

Easy anti cheat works on linux, if the game developers permit it.

by Gander5739

4/2/2026 at 7:55:07 AM

Anti-cheat systems that rely on rootkit-style undermining of your OS will indeed not work on Linux.

by mcv

4/2/2026 at 7:53:46 AM

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.

by bigyabai

4/2/2026 at 7:25:45 AM

I strongly suggest any other distro that is Ubuntu. Canonical is a Microsoft wannabe

by Zardoz84

4/2/2026 at 6:47:49 AM

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.

by komali2

4/2/2026 at 10:45:59 AM

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)

by ameen

4/2/2026 at 10:48:10 AM

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.

by gchamonlive

4/2/2026 at 4:08:46 AM

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.)

by geetee

4/2/2026 at 4:23:04 AM

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.

by tapoxi

4/2/2026 at 4:41:06 AM

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.

by Gigachad

4/2/2026 at 4:06:22 AM

It’s great. Moving on from Windows has been like leaving an abusive relationship.

by october8140

4/2/2026 at 8:39:15 AM

They are even playing the "come back, i've changed" card recently :D

by cafebabbe

4/2/2026 at 10:18:25 AM

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.

by gchamonlive

4/2/2026 at 6:02:35 AM

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.

by LennyHenrysNuts

4/2/2026 at 6:14:43 AM

Let me know how rainvow 6 runs for you :)

I wish you were right, though

by ramon156

4/2/2026 at 6:20:26 AM

yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.

And those games are easily ignored, as they should be.

by jabwd

4/2/2026 at 7:16:19 AM

>yes games with kernel anticheat won't work.

*unless the developers explicitly enabled linux userspace support which some do

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

by akimbostrawman

4/2/2026 at 6:50:10 AM

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...

by komali2

4/2/2026 at 8:43:56 AM

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.

by nananana9

4/2/2026 at 8:53:42 AM

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.

by petu

4/2/2026 at 9:53:32 AM

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.

by margorczynski

4/2/2026 at 10:15:06 AM

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.

by jijijijij

4/2/2026 at 8:43:41 AM

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.

by HeckFeck

4/2/2026 at 8:47:10 AM

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.

by Levitating

4/2/2026 at 8:33:36 AM

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.

by zelphirkalt

4/2/2026 at 9:49:31 AM

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).

by margorczynski

4/2/2026 at 8:51:00 AM

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.

by mchinen

4/2/2026 at 8:45:07 AM

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.

by BatteryMountain

4/2/2026 at 10:16:31 AM

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.

by heavyset_go

4/2/2026 at 10:54:00 AM

that's right. graphic stack is one thing you dont want to use older release.

by tuananh

4/2/2026 at 9:34:55 AM

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.

by zelphirkalt

4/2/2026 at 9:24:00 AM

> 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.

by braiamp

4/2/2026 at 9:09:29 AM

> 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.

by scbrg

4/2/2026 at 9:26:22 AM

Kernel updates.

by BatteryMountain

4/2/2026 at 5:21:10 AM

That's possibly the first time that "skyrocketed" and "5%" have been used together in one sentence.

by kleiba

4/2/2026 at 10:59:19 AM

5 per cent is a significant number. In many elections for example, this is the minimum to have representatives and/or receive state funding.

by nickserv

4/2/2026 at 6:34:37 AM

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.

by dannersy

4/2/2026 at 6:50:38 AM

The first 5% is the hardest. It won’t take 35 years to reach 10%.

by sph

4/2/2026 at 6:58:37 AM

"You know whats alot harder? The first 50%" - windows

by samrus

4/2/2026 at 7:36:27 AM

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.

by 59nadir

4/2/2026 at 4:16:47 AM

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.

by rigrassm

4/2/2026 at 8:31:03 AM

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.

by ph4rsikal

4/2/2026 at 6:42:30 AM

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.

by wafflemaker

4/2/2026 at 7:25:26 AM

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.

by MayeulC

4/2/2026 at 7:09:39 AM

Try running it in gamescope. Or the "always capture mouse in fullscreen windows" setting in winecfg.

by the8472

4/2/2026 at 7:18:16 AM

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

by roomey

4/2/2026 at 6:45:29 AM

Vulcan is the home planet of Spock, the 3D API is Vulkan ;) (sorry for nitpicking)

by flohofwoe

4/2/2026 at 7:20:45 AM

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.

by Zardoz84

4/2/2026 at 8:21:53 AM

Go Linux. Gamers will have a better experiance in Linux. Predict that Windows will become an legacy emulation layer.

by acd

4/2/2026 at 10:39:18 AM

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).

by shevy-java

4/2/2026 at 4:06:27 AM

2026 is the year of Steam Linux.

by bb88

4/2/2026 at 5:40:36 AM

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).

by scubadude

4/2/2026 at 7:40:31 AM

“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

by throwaway45460

4/2/2026 at 8:03:56 AM

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%?

by TurdF3rguson

4/2/2026 at 8:34:55 AM

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/

by PurpleRamen

4/2/2026 at 10:25:33 AM

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.

by TurdF3rguson

4/2/2026 at 8:27:55 AM

Let's revisit that topic if the FED raises interest to 5%.

by KeplerBoy

4/2/2026 at 9:32:44 AM

Are the numbers by hours played instead of by installed clients? How are users with multiple devices counted?

by crest

4/2/2026 at 5:44:42 AM

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

by conception

4/2/2026 at 8:10:59 AM

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.

by Fokamul

4/2/2026 at 3:37:51 AM

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.

by mikenew

4/2/2026 at 3:48:07 AM

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.

by WaterRun

4/2/2026 at 6:43:05 AM

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.

by christkv

4/2/2026 at 4:14:42 AM

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.

by legitster

4/2/2026 at 9:12:30 AM

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.

by PurpleRamen

4/2/2026 at 6:09:43 AM

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.

by kombine

4/2/2026 at 7:26:36 AM

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%.

by Karliss

4/2/2026 at 5:28:48 AM

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.

by traderj0e

4/2/2026 at 4:24:00 AM

AI fixes Linux on the desktop. Whatever obscure issues you’re facing, you’re a quick prompt away from the solution.

by thinkloop

4/2/2026 at 10:22:27 AM

LLMs regularly give wrong advice for debugging and fixing Linux stacks, especially desktop stacks.

by heavyset_go

4/2/2026 at 5:29:45 AM

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.

by traderj0e

4/2/2026 at 6:28:12 AM

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.

by ThatPlayer

4/2/2026 at 7:11:19 AM

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.

by traderj0e

4/2/2026 at 4:34:23 AM

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.

by HDBaseT

4/2/2026 at 6:10:51 AM

Best flow is

Llm -> manual research -> apply

But no one has the time to validate everything llm writes via manually researching it unfortunately /s

by ozgrakkurt

4/2/2026 at 6:31:38 AM

Assuming you actually take the time to retroactively understand what you just did and don't become a slop-ministrator.

by Underphil

4/2/2026 at 7:29:59 AM

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.

by akimbostrawman

4/2/2026 at 7:55:04 AM

Completely false. The models are nothing like they were a few months ago. Try codex 5.4

by coreyburnsdev

4/2/2026 at 7:00:39 AM

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.

by BoredPositron

4/2/2026 at 10:37:10 AM

[dead]

by ugurs

4/2/2026 at 5:23:04 AM

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

by ekianjo

4/2/2026 at 10:01:48 AM

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.

by mikkupikku

4/2/2026 at 4:16:08 AM

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!

by forrestthewoods

4/2/2026 at 5:01:57 AM

> 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.

by yjftsjthsd-h

4/2/2026 at 7:02:36 AM

> 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.

by forrestthewoods

4/2/2026 at 7:19:47 AM

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.

by leononame

4/2/2026 at 5:43:50 AM

Try it. Switch to desktop mode. Behold! A desktop linux!

SteamOS is so very much linux that even WebOS and Androids pale in comparisom.

by vkazanov

4/2/2026 at 5:11:54 AM

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.

by tribaal

4/2/2026 at 4:26:27 AM

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.

by tapoxi

4/2/2026 at 8:25:13 AM

SteamOS is just steam big picture mode by default on an arch linux. You can switch to a regular KDE in one click

by poulpy123

4/2/2026 at 6:59:53 AM

you can just navigate to the full linux desktop on the steamdeck?

by conceptme

4/2/2026 at 7:37:31 AM

yes

by Zardoz84

4/2/2026 at 7:19:23 AM

>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.

by akimbostrawman

4/2/2026 at 5:14:34 AM

It will reach 10% in 2050 thereabouts, given current velocity, assuming current computing models are still relevant by then.

by pjmlp

4/2/2026 at 5:41:39 AM

Well, in the overall kernel space there is nothing but Linux-based kernels right now.

by vkazanov

4/2/2026 at 6:23:50 AM

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.

by pjmlp

4/2/2026 at 10:31:11 AM

> 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.

by ErroneousBosh

4/2/2026 at 10:50:10 AM

Sure, that is why there are so many embedded OSes to chose from, with much better enterprise friendly licenses, aka no GPL.

by pjmlp

4/2/2026 at 8:46:22 AM

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

by WhereIsTheTruth