It's good to see people making a switch to Linux. But the real tell will be in finding out how many of those people actually stick long term.
I am moving over once win10 support ends and it starts to cause friction for me.
I liked the comment going "Steam doesn't have data on PC gamers, only Steam gamers.", hinting at the seven gamers that stubbornly refuse to use Steam and still hunt for CDs, or old archives of shareware. They are people too dammit!
I will be, too, sometime next year. instead of just doing the regular reset of windows, which as I recently learned is now an absolute pain in the ass instead of something quick and easy, I'm going to be switching over to Linux
I'm sure I'll still keep a windows PC around, but I'm pretty fed up with Microsoft just being so goddamn shitty at designing an OS for user experience
Would be mostly steamdeck
The change is even more dramatic if you consider only English-speaking areas, and it seems to have sped up this year. China, for example, is a big market, and they like Windows a lot. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ collects various data about Steam usage. One of the charts (screenshot below) show Linux market share in English only areas and overall Linux market share. I added the red line to demonstrate how I see the growth. There's only few data points this side of the year, so my drawing is most likely wrong, but the growth starts around March. The green line is at 4.8% in January and February and 6.31% in July, so a nice 30% increase within about 6 months in English only areas.
Considering how people love to delay things until the last minute, I expect it'll sharply rise in October.
I know this because I'm one of those people. Linux on several PCs and servers for years, but I've been too lazy to format & rebuild my gaming PC to get it off win10 and onto Linux.
I run Linux in English (because translated Unix looks weird) even though I'm not in or from an English speaking country. Sorry for skewing the stats.
Only thing not working properly right now for me is Trackmania 2020, i get massive lagspikes due to it.using 100% Cpu for some reason.
I mean its ubisoft so thats probably why its shit but i like.the game and would love it if it would work properly
Are you on an Nvidia gpu?
Yes why? 3070ti
I have had the most issues with Nvidia gpus. Have you double checked it didn't go back to the open source drivers after an update? Sometimes you need to download the proprietary drivers from Nvidia's website after every kernel update.
Funnily, my performance in trackmania is fine... But I have an entirely different issue - if at any point I open the Ubisoft overlay, from that point on, if I tab out of the game and back in, I'm unable to control the car until I open and close the overlay again. The UI accepts inputs normally, it's just the car that doesn't.
Previously I had an issue where the game would refuse to accept controllers being connected while the game was running - the button prompts would actually switch to controller style, but the game would refuse to accept controller inputs, and the controller wouldn't show up in settings.
But yeah, those are issues very specifically with that game, I don't even know how they managed that.
The game is also horribly optimized. Are you using open planet? You can install the tweaker plugin and reduce render distance, although this probably only reduces the load on the GPU. For me on steam deck it works fine if the maps aren't too big, at least I don't get cpu spikes.
~95% on windows. Sub-1% shift to linux on non-desktop equipment. These are not the same thing.
What‘s non desktop equipment?
Yeah, I can plug a Nintendo Switch into a display but that doesn't make it a desktop.
No, because a Nintendo console is not a PC. Steam Deck and the other SteamOS devices have a literal "Enter Desktop Mode" feature and desktop use is (as seen in the promotional picture) an advertised feature.
KDE as I see.
Linux only gamer for 3+ years now. It is a good time for the penguins.
I just had to change my expectations a bit (which might be a lot for some), but the end result is pretty good.
Always having bad Ping times in multiplayer games, helped out a lot with it.
the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship
Linux is not a perfect rose-colored relationship but it's a mature one.
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.
author has never used desktop linux and doesn't really grasp what it is 😜
For someone out of the loop, could you explain what it is? What is wrong with desktop linux?
Honestly? The problem is the people who use desktop Linux. The environments are fine. It's the people. Can confirm. I use Arch, btw.
The July 2025 data shows that Windows' market share on Steam dropped by 0.44% while Linux's market share grew by 0.32%.
While okay this is growth, it's not exactly meteoric. Hopefully the trend picks up steam (cough) as the win10 EOL approaches.
Well uh... if that is month to month growth...
A year at .32% growth works out to about 4% growth, if that is rate is sustained for a year.
That would be roughly a doubling of linux marketshare in a year.
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