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Steam data reveals PC gamers shifting from Windows to Linux
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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This is me. Always Windows for my gaming computer and when I built a new one recently, I went full Linux. No regrets so far.
Same. Overall it's been a great experience, but it's had a few issues. Nothing making me even consider going back though
Switched to Linux Mint a couple of weeks ago. Been playing games for 30 years on windows. So far so good. Played The Drifter through Heroic without issue. Great game btw.
Got an 1080ti. I hope I won't run into to many issues.
Which distro did you go with? I'm looking at switching soon too
Bazzite.
I found it really easy to get started with. Although I’d recommend KDE over Gnome. I tried Gnome for a few hours before changing my mind and it was just a little too different from what I was used to.
if you miss iphone + cydia, gnome + extensions is max dopamine, plus with arcmenu (customizable start menu, many presets) and dash to panel (panel like windows/kde) it's basically like any other de.
That's honestly the way. Bazzite just works without tinkering. It doesn't eat into your game time with debugging. Plus KDE is very Win10 like, so it's all just familiar and easy.
I'm glad Bazzite is what it is, but I'm hoping some of y'all get interested in other distros in the next few years. There's several great options out there (and I don't want to say … have everyone wind up on Ubuntu flavors and be having the same conversation about corporate overreach in a decade with Canonical as the new Microsoft)
Bazzite is a community-made distro.
Eh, I already have a decent amount of skill with running other distros headless. When it's gaming time I prefer a solution that just works 99% of the time.
I'm used to Debian so I prefer Gnome, but either way, congrats on being more skilled with Bazzite than JayZTwoCents!
Here's your commemorative psuedo gem!
Work computers had Gnome on Ubuntu, RHEL etc.
I installed my Debian with KDE.
Gnome is great on laptops, specially touchscreen enabled ones.
Though with extensions you can get it to behave very similar to KDE
The current gnome (3) is very different from previous versions. You might like a modern fork of gnome, like mate. Don't let something that has a gnome connection turn you off right away if all you've seen is gnome 3.
I... don't think Bazzite has a... mate flavor/spin/variant?
I think its just KDE or GNOME?
if on cachyos you get like 12+ de options which is nice when initially testing them all out, just demo each for a while
I recently switched and have distro hopped a bit, landing on CachyOS which I feel I’ll stick with for a while (though I’m very indecisive and a small part of me wants to change over to Arch). CachyOS is based on Arch but with more ease of use stuff on top, especially for gaming (they have a gaming bundle which is just one command and you’re good to go), plus I’ve heard it’s the fastest or one of the fastest out there. Bazzite is also great (Fedora-based), which I used for a bit, but I started to get into using the command line more and found immutability to be annoying. It does mean it’s harder to fuck up though, but I don’t really care if I break my machine (you probably won’t break your machine regardless, that’s mostly sarcastic). Pop_OS! (Ubuntu-based) is also supposed to be good for gaming but I haven’t tried it. Keep in mind, if you plan on doing more than gaming and decide to use the command line for downloading, most download guides out there assume you’re using something based on Ubuntu or Debian (you’ll see a lot of “sudo apt install _____”), for better or worse. If you scroll down a bit you’ll probably find stuff for Fedora and/or Arch but not always. That doesn’t mean you can’t get the program on those distros, just that you’ll have to either know where to look or download a different way, such as from a digital storefront or manually from the website of the program you’re getting. I’m still a beginner actively trying to get better, but these are all things I would’ve liked to know when I made the switch a little while ago. Another thing to keep in mind is Linux and Nvidia don’t quite get along as well as AMD or Intel. I have an Nvidia card and both CachyOS and Bazzite had no issues, but for whatever reason Mint didn’t like to run steam games, no matter what I did. I made sure to have all the drivers downloaded and looked up a bunch of guides but I never got it running properly. Bazzite just worked straight out of the box, and CachyOS works even better for me after a little tinkering. If you have any questions, I just recently was where you are now so I might have more relevant advice, though I’m certainly no expert. But I’d be happy to help.
Once you know the equivalent commands to search, install, remove, ... packages in your distro, problem solved.
honestly i see pacman/yay just as much as I see other stuff when looking at instructions, (paru is pacman/yay in cachyos for that stuff, pacman in cachyos is their own repos)
Cachyos is great if you want access to everything, debtap for the rare ocassion you need to install a deb, can install snaps and flatpak support easily, but you don't really need to mess with all that, mostly everything is available with aur + flathub (have to do one terminal line since cachyos doesn't have it by default)
Bazzite does have bazaar by default, which i like as the best flathub appstore, aur version stopped working for me.
oh and gearlever to update appimages and make desktop files so it shows up in menus, i only use this for shutter encoder right now
exactly what I ended up on with exactly the same issues with Mint (and Zorin as well). Cachy and Bazzite just worked (bazzite didn't work on live image though), but yeah Mint just didn't work.
Look at the desktop environment first. KDE is like Windows. GNOME is like MacOS.
Then look at some videos about how to get your GPU working on a distro you're interested in if you have an Nvidia card. AMD GPU works out of the box.
I would recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Excellent implementation of KDE, GUI tools to do advanced things, rolling release (i.e. constantly up to date) but also thoroughly tested. Rolls back easily if something gets messed up. This gave me the least problems starting and I stuck with it for over a year. It was great.
I started work Bazzite but didn't want to be immutable. Then I switched to Garuda. Both have been super easy.
FWIW I also switched last year and chose Linux Mint. It was smooth and easy.
I just wanted to drop in and say I use Arch btw.. lol, there multiple things to suit your use cases, Linux has a few gaming flavors.