That comes with its own risks because Windows has been known to destroy dual boot setups when doing updates. Not always, but it can happen and it's burnt people.

Dual booting also.makes it harder when you decide to get rid if windows fully, because you might yourself accidentally screw your bootloader as part of removing windows.

The option I would personally recommend if you are unsure is to disconnect your windows hard drive, keep it safe, and install Linux on a separate drive. Then you can always drive swap back if you need and you know everything is safe.

You can even put the windows drive back in after installing Linux, and then just use your BIOS boot drive selector to switch where you are booting from. Each drive has it's own boot record in that case, so there's less risk of any accidents.

0.3% overall. There might be half a million new Linux gamers on steam, but there's still hundreds of millions of PC gamers using Windows.

You can arrange the numbers how you want, the fact is that this is still a pretty small shift in the overall PC gamer landscape. I promise you, that's how any larger developer sees it. Their pool of PC gamers shifted by a fraction of a percent. A good chunk of those that they "lost" as potential customers, probably wouldn't have bought their games in the first place.

The demographic overlap for large studios of people who are intentionally using Linux for gaming, and people that are interested in their game, doesn't overlap much, if at all, I bet. Until we get their key demographic switching over in large enough quantities to threaten their profits, the majority of the industry won't budge from their windows centric views.

Look. I don't hate Linux. Quite the opposite in fact. I'm rooting for these stats to move in and significant amount. I feel that's an inevitable shift that will happen and until we do, we'll keep getting these articles, describing a fraction of a percent move in the overall numbers as if it's a huge culture shift for how people are playing games.

If you haven't seen it, maybe you should watch field of dreams, becasuse the main tag line of the movie "if you build it, they will come" definitely applies here. The larger PC gaming community, there is a statistically significant number of indie devs and indie studios that support Linux as a platform, even if it's just the steam deck they're building for.... Those studios just are not the biggest players in terms of revenue/sales... But they're the ones building "it". This is slowly but surely fueling the fires that will eventually burn down Microsoft's dominance in the gaming space. It's been a war that's been waged for literal decades, since before steam was a thing.

There will come a day when we will hit critical mass and the large studios will be forced to either accept that their user base is shrinking because they don't support Linux. That day is not today. We will need to see much more movement than a few percent difference before that happens. This isn't even a few percent. This is a fraction of a percent of the total.

So forgive me if I'm not excited by any of this. It's movement in the right direction, but it's utterly meaningless to the companies that could actually shift the industry to Linux on a large scale.

In Oregon, at least, everything below the high water mark is public land.

And that's exactly why my Windows install is locked away in VM hell. Fucked with my bootloader twice and I said never again.

I even set up a custom boot option that autoloads the Windows VM in a lightweight linux, so other than the brief Linux boot log, feels exactly like a native install, 10/10 recommend