Year of the linux desktop
Last October, I set up my system to dualboot either Windows or Linux Mint. Since the start of 2026, not once have I booted into Windows. Mint works great. May that number continue to go up.
Valve is going to be a significant contributor to the death of Windows. Legit one man’s integrity is going to bring an end to a literal monopoly as adjudicated in the late 90’s. Hail gaben.
Not just windows but also Google. Can’t wait to destroy them by installing SteamOS everywhere.
May he live forever.
Someone please lead a Great Linux Crusade across the wall.
Anyone from that side of the world? I wonder why their Windows usage is so high.
Probably because of League of Legends. Half of the playerbase is in China.
Chinese government uses Linux though. They have their own homegrown distro called NeoKylin.
There’s a few key games that some people can’t easily give up.
I also think if anyone has any interest in streaming, there’s often software built for specific desk tools they have (like stream decks) that can be hard to find reliable linux drivers for. I did see OBS is native, but that may be only part of it. Plus, many people are just starved for time, and don’t want to take a day to process a backup/reformat/reinstall that they may have to go back on.
Gaming centers that buy the same hardware in bulk, is what I understand. So naturally, they’re going to buy them with Windows pre-installed.
What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:
OS Total % of Players Monthly Change Windows (Total) 92.33% -4.28% Windows 11 64 bit 66.85% +10.57% Windows 10 64 bit 25.36% -14.89% Linux (Total) 5.33% +3.10% Arch Linux 64 bit 0.34% +0.15% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 0.27% +0.13% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 0.14% +0.06% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.07% +0.02% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% Manjaro Linux 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.
I hope you are correct. If we extrapolate out, Linux could easily approach 10% as more people leave Win10 and split. There may even be a positive feedback loop where people leaving Win10 (and frustrated Win11 users) see that Linux is completely viable for gaming.
This is not being ignored my Microsoft
My impression is that Microsoft won’t care all that much. They are primarily a cloud service provider at this point, and while they will try to squeeze Windows users for as much money and information as possible before it goes down for good they have no real interest in keeping on developing Windows. It’s just not where the real money is at.
It doesn’t make sense outside the world of capitalism, but we see again and again that big tech companies are happy to kill even profitable services if they are not their most profitable services. Microsoft’s revenue these days comes from selling cloud office solutions to (seemingly) every company on the planet. Even their own cloud runs on Linux, meaning that Microsoft themselves makes more money off Linux than Windows these days.
Windows is now in the extraction phase of enshittification, and Microsoft will profit as much as they can from it while they still have market power while spending minimal resources developing the product. Windows has effectively been declared dead already, and remains as a sofware zombie just like Facebook. Windows 12 is not going to be an improvement upon 11; it’ll be another fuck you to the customers, and the beatings will continue until customers leave for good and Microsoft are finally relieved of their side gig of making an operative system.
That 3% jump seems almost too big for me to believe. With the seemingly annual increase of Chinese users in February, which is then corrected in March (which we can see this time), I’d probably wait another month or two if more stats get adjusted or if Linux stays at over 5%.
I would be more suspicious of starting the year at 3.5% and dipping to 2.23% in Feb. If we ignore that oddity it makes for a less exciting headline, but jumping from 3.5% to 5.33% in the months after Microslop canned Win10 and slopped up Win11 tracks.
Last month had Chinese New Year in it, and apparently China isn’t big on Linux
iirc, the steam survey data isn’t always well distributed, and so it isn’t the most reliable. Sometimes most of the surveyed are in China and the swings are more relevant to usage there, and then when the next survey comes out the shift is more based on demographic than broad trends. That being said, we will been seeing consistent growth on linux usage across the board for months so I don’t think this is a fluke
In lifetime customer value it’s billions
The majority of people will ignore advertisements. Usually less than 10% of people will respond to advertisements and an even small percentage will buy something. Out of 742,000 advertisement impressions, they’d be lucky to get 1,000 sales.
Hah! I contributed to this, was quite happy when I got the steam survey on my Linux rig.
I switched to linux in december 2025, and was part of the steam survey in that month, but unfortunately they did the survey before my switch, so have yet to be part of the statistics.
I’ve dabbled with Linux over the past 25 years. Last November, I built a high end gaming PC spec’d for Bazzite.
I haven’t touched Windows for gaming in over 4 months.
what type of hardware did you pick for Linux vs Windows? I know for GPU AMD works better, but anything else?
Yep, my steam rewinds have been 100% Linux for a couple of years now.
I think the only exception in that time was AW2 because it’s an EGL exclusive (and ray tracing/mesh shading support in proton were still a bit lacking in performance).
There are sacrifices. Space Marine 2 doesn’t work despite having a beast of a machine. It seems to be optimized for Windows / Nvidia. I can’t use my racing wheel. It is detected as a device, but I’m unable to configure it due to how Bazzite sandboxes devices and programs from each other.
Eventually these may be resolved. In the meantime, I’m playing Kingdom Come 2 and Arc Raiders along with hopping around a massive backlog playing 5-30 min of games I’ve accumulated over the years, like wandering a massive arcade. Any given evening, I turn on the TV, switch to input 1 and there’s the Steam Deck UI where I left it last. No mysterious reboot showing me a Windows login, no surprise, required Windows update forcing me to wait 15 min before I can start playing.
It’s fucking awesome.
You might have had the same issues with SM2 I did; periods of smoothness followed by severe stuttering. In the past few weeks, they put out a patch that fixed things for me. That said, I’m on Nvidia.
Are you a Fanatec user? If so, that’s a bummer that Bazzite is causing issues. I’ve been on Nobara for a couple years and have had no issues with my CSL DD.
I’ve played SM2 (single player) just fine with a 6950XT on Mint. Was it multiplayer that didn’t work?
What the f is this? (If you click Linux only.)
IIRC someone one internet once said that was from Flatpak installations.
In the past Flatpak was listed as “Flatpak”. Its possible that something changed and this is actually Flatpak.
It’s issues with data gathering.
Huh, March is the month I switched and I don’t plan to go back.
I’ve had some issues with xwayland crashing but outside of that gaming has been awesome.
And oh also the whole experience is higher performance, faster boots, less bloat, I’m loving it!
I didn’t want to use Windows 11.
Nobody likes using Windows. People merely tolerate it because of the other stuff the like that runs only on Windows.
I’m extremely skeptical about Steam’s statistics. They seem to have wild fluctuations like this on a regular basis. Not to mention the statistics they show about me in their “year in review” are often just very very wrong.
The survey is always offered only to a random subset of Steam users. The results only ever represent the fractions of users who took the survey, and are not representative of the entire Steam ecosystem as a whole. Unfortunately, this means that the increase/decrease in Linux usage is probably within the margin of error and is not a reliable statistic.
They fluctuate a lot, but I have yet to see a fluctuation that can’t be explained away as “a ton of Chinese players played this month” or “a ton of Chinese players did not return this month”. You can check Gaming On Linux’s Steam Tracker page, and the rise has been fairly steady when you filter for English only. That said, these surveys are often revised a handful of days after initial posting, so check back in a week to see the more accurate data.
What statistics that they show you for year in review are very very wrong?
I haven’t seen any issues with year in review, I’m curious what you’ve seen.
Especially when compared with macOS, an operating system famously known as NOT a gaming operating system.
That’s like saying you made a car that gets better gas mileage than a bicycle.
Like, ok. But how well does it run Photoshop or AfterEffects?
I have a MacBook that I use opportunistically for games. It’s not my primary gaming machine, but I keep Steam on it for if I’m on a work trip and have some down time or whatever. I imagine a lot of the Mac users in the survey are in the same boat.
I certainly am
I’d be pretty impressed if you showed me a car with better fuel economy than a bicycle. I don’t know about you lot, but I haven’t had to refuel my bicycle a single time since I bought it.
If I don’t refuel my bicycle I die
Sounds like you need a riksha.
Yeah, but how far will it go if you try to power it with gasoline?
Don’t know yet but it seems to just be running on fumes.
This isn’t a conversation about cars or bicycles or even about fuel economy. it’s not even about transportation.
What you were trying to say and how it pertains to bicycles was very unclear but I think I deciphered it. But there are lots of Mac users who ride bicycles, I know one or two of them myself.
No, but that was a joke about bicycles.
I distro hopped a bunch in March. Tried like eight distros, maybe more. I installed steam on all of these to see how it works.
I’m guessing most people are not buying Macs if they want to play games on it. Macs are excellent work computers but not suitable for anything more intensive than the Sims 4. Which is fine if you only want to play that, but most people buy Macs because they want to do work on them.
I have used Macs for more than twenty years and have also played games on everyone of them. They run just fine.
If you buy a computer for gaming, Macs are not the best choice. However there are more great games that run well than you can ever play.
