Linux surpassed MacOS in marketshare for the first ever time this month. Let’s go! :)
False alarm everyone. I run Garuda but have been playing around with Nobara and I filled it out on both distros on the same machine. Sorry to get everyone’s hopes up.
Proton is doing god’s work!
Hope this trend continues to strengthen over the next few years!
I do wonder how Microsoft buying up basically the entirety of the western game dev world will influence this in the future though
If Proton keeps getting better, it won’t matter. I mean it matters, because this is clearly where governments should step in and bust up the monopolies, but they obviously aren’t going to.
Might become a problem if Microsoft starts making all their games windows store exclusives. Doesn’t seem to be their strategy right now, but it’s always a danger.
Exactly. They won’t do it now while their Activision/Blizzard acquisition is under scrutiny but they could easily adopt a new strategy in a few years that restricts purchases through stores Microsoft controls
Isn’t this just the Steam Deck?
Probably, though does that actually matter?
The SteamDeck is showing people that Linux can in fact game. And while we’re always saying “ThE yEaR oF lInUx!” This is actually a huge step in the right direction.
Agreed. I have a deck and I’m now definitely gonna switch my main pc from Win10 to Linux. Steam deck desktop mode helped show me I could be comfortable using it, and the deck in general showed the gaming support is there nowadays.
I now see no reason to not put Linux on my desktop. Just deciding on which distros to check out. Probably mint. Maybe garuda…
I’d also suggest Linux Mint if you are just starting out. In fact, it’s still a great distro for advanced users as well. I use it as a fallback distro sometimes.
You could also check out Fedora or rather a gaming optimized fork of Fedora named - Nobara Linux.
I use Garuda and love it, but I also don’t think it’s the best for a first Linux distro, unless you’re good with needing to consistently use the command line for things, and you are interested in learning more about Linux and want a distro that requires you to occasionally get your hands dirty.
From what I’ve seen, Linux Mint is a great first distro. If you want something that’s more purposed to gaming, then Nobara is great. It’s made by GloriousEggroll, who makes Proton-GE. It’s not going to be as new-user friendly as Mint, but more so than Garuda.
Thanks for the tips.
I’m a dev by day, and no stranger to bash/zsh and powershell. That said I don’t want to constantly be tinkering in the terminal just to use my OS.
Cheers for the pointer to Nobara, I’ll look into that as an option too!
It’s showing people Linux is acceptable as a handheld os. Which the world already knew with Android. Linux as a desktop is another story. Steam deck has desktop mode but I highly doubt the percentage of those who use it as a desktop is high. I wonder how many bought the dock.
I think you’re wrong. It’s showing that Linux has the capability to actually run these games. Some/most people won’t be able to equate the Linux on their handheld with Linux on a desktop, but those who do are welcome to the fold.
The Deck is basically a laptop in a handheld form factor, so no, it’s not just showing that Linux can game as a handheld.
No wonder! I’ve lately noticed that some non-AAA games run way better on Linux than Windows on my computer (5950X, RTX3090). For some reason Barotrauma seems to lag heavily while playing on Windows but runs buttersmooth on Linux. Valheim has similar effect as well.
Also I have already decided that Win10 is going to be the last Windows version on my machine ever. Gaming on Linux has gotten so damn good over the last few years that I see no reason upgrading my Windows installation anymore.
I wish that would be the case for VR too. But with VR there is lots of stuff just not being supported unfortunately. If you have any Headset that basically isn’t the Index good luck using Linux. Also there are still Software issues with certain stuff there that won’t properly work or not at all. I once tried Linux but unfortunately ran into several issues which caused me going back to windows 11.
Nah, I have an index and was not able to get steam vr running. Its problems everywhere in VR on linux I guess.
Oh i expected the hardware that basically is made for the software to actually work with SteamVR always. Guess I’m wrong. But unfortunately proves my post more true.
Nah, for most people SteamVR works ootb with the Index… but SteamVR is also quite buggy.
Mmh ok. But people without Index and for example Quest or Pico are pretty screwed i guess since you can’t install Virtual Desktop or the oculus thing. ALVR exists but i always had weird issues with it regarding stability and image quality.
@ReverseModule Looks like the growth comes mostly from Windows (-0.56%) users switching to Linux (+0.52%). MacOS (+0.05%) users mostly seem just to upgrade MacOS and are mostly unaffected by the overall numbers. Inside of the Windows numbers, Windows 10 (-1.56%) users switching to either Windows 11 (+0.92%) or choosing an alternative platform (-0.56%). Numbers do not add up perfectly, because these statistics are estimation based on asking randomly a fraction of the user base.
Not to mention that steam is no longer the sole gaming platform on PC which makes statistic anomaly even higher. They just discounted the steam deck for the first time in it’s history. This small change could just be people who have windows machines booting up steam decks and getting the survey.
Steam Deck is very underrepresented in the hardware surveys, as the questionnaire can only show up in Desktop mode.Not anymore. It’s possible to get the hardware survey in gaming mode on Deck for months now (I got it iirc).
I stand corrected then. Never received it on my Deck so far.
It might be that more Mac users are moving away from Steam as their gaming client - from my experience, it’s very glitchy, and hasn’t been properly updated in years
The client on macos was buggy as hell, but after the UI refresh update a month or two back it’s fine again now
Oh cool, I haven’t used it in a while. Good to know!
And isn’t there extremely limited support for M1 Mac on Steam? As Mac users upgrade their machines, they can’t continue to use Steam like they used to.
You can use the client just fine. It’s just some games that won’t work. We’ll see what GamePortingToolkit makes in term of difference. Heroic Games Launcher has apparently made it fairly simple to add it on Mac ala Proton. (I haven’t had time to dig into it yet, so I’m just going from what I read in updates/release notes)
Right, what I meant for limited support for M1 on Steam was that the library of games on Mac is essentially obsolete. And their toolkit requires intervention from developers in a way that Proton does not, I understand. Which means it costs money to continue supporting your customers who already paid you a long time ago. I don’t see the situation improving much.
My own limited testing was actually more positive than expected. The real limiting factor is games that never received a 64 bit update. It turns out that - at least among many of the games I gave a shot - many have received that 64 bit version and run just fine under Rosetta. I think many Mac porting houses / developers just don’t rush out in the same way app devs do to support the latest versions, but they tend to get around to it eventually if they still have the rights and are in business. I hope Mac will eventually see a compatibility layer, so games will stay functional while Apple monkeys around with system stuff.
How is Linux game compatibility doing in current year?
How about user experience? Should one still expect to have to troubleshoot things on a consistent basis?
Considering doing a rebuild of my win 10 system in the near future and am getting tired of all these obnoxious pop-ups that I can’t disable asking me to “finish setting up my PC” by connecting to /signing up for various services.
Pretty good. I haven’t had to play around with proton launch options in a good while, Valve and the Heroic team have done a good job making it all plug and play. I don’t generally play the latest releases and am not really interested in multiplayer though, so YMMV.
Yup exactly the same. The only time I ever need to swap to my windows boot is when my friends want to play something with a specific anti-cheat that won’t work on Linux. Everything single player has been playable for me.
