It finally happened. Linux gamers on Steam as of the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2025 have crossed over the elusive 3% mark.

Free Windows 10 support ended for most people this past month, and the trend line of Linux usage has been quite clear leading up to this, as people prepared for the inevitable. An increase in Linux usage is also correlated to a drop in Chinese players, which did happen this month a little bit, but Linux usage is also trending up when filtering for English only. It’s worth noting that for all the official support Macs ever saw in gaming, they never represented anything better than about 5% of the market.

  • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
    302·
    22 hours ago

    Is that really needed?

    I think what could really drive adoption is if computers with Linux pre-installed was more easily accessible. Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install and then it’s done. It doesn’t need to be SteamOS. Just any good distro will do.

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 hours ago

      Strong agree.

      Everyone agrees chromeos is not THE best OS but you won’t see a single person dualboot windows on their personal chromebook.

      How google fucked up gentoo is another topic.

    • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      241·
      21 hours ago

      Just boot the computer, choose which DE you want to install

      Yeah, that’s not at all accessible to the average consumer; they don’t know what a “DE” even is, much less why they should choose any over any other.

      Very, very few people want to deal with something other than a ‘just works’ situation.

      • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.ccEnglish
        1·
        12 hours ago

        I think the “friendly” distros like Linux Mint with built-in driver detection/management and pretty broad package repositories (surfaced as an “App Store”) are probably to the point where many normal people could use them, without significantly more technical chops than Windows. Particularly as a gaming rig where you basically just need Firefox, LibreOffice and Steam.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        51·
        21 hours ago

        They don’t need to, just give them 3 screenshots and ask which they want. Show KDE, GNOME, and whatever the distro wants as the third. Maybe include some bullet points below each explaining what they are (pick one from the last two):

        • KDE - familiar, extensible
        • GNOME - modern, minimalist
        • Cinnamon/Budgie/MATE - something in the middle
        • XFCE/LXQT - super lightweight for older systems

        Maybe select one by default that the OEM likes, but showing the option helps nudge them toward the idea that this is a flexible system.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          9·
          20 hours ago

          Bazzite offers KDE or GNOME, and in the menu mentions KDE is what is used in SteamOS.

          I installed Bazzite on my HTPC recently. It was the worst install process I’ve seen in over ten years of using Linux. I shall enumerate the problems I had:

          1. The image is weirdly large, it’s like 9GB in size. It takes awhile to download and a weirdly long time to write to a USB stick.
          2. Once written, you boot the image, and GRUB has the options to Install Bazzite or Test Media And Install Bazzite. By default, Test Media is selected. It always fails this test.
          3. If you use the typical non-live environment image, the scaling is tiny on a 4k monitor, and there’s no way to adjust this.
          4. If you use the live environment image (in beta at time of writing), it might just lock up. I had that happen twice just while clicking through the Anaconda installer.
          5. The Anaconda installer, which I think they inherited from Fedora, was I think designed by one of the contrarian idiots who work for Gnome. There’s a DONE button up in the far upper left hand corner of the screen that sometimes acts as a back button, sometimes acts as a forward button. You have to move the mouse from the top corner of the screen to the center of the screen a lot, for no reason. The top-left corner of the screen is a dumb place to put a DONE button because most languages read top to bottom, left to right, the DONE button is where a START button should go.
          6. There isn’t a simple way to tell it “put / on this drive, put /home on that drive.” There’s an automatic installer which will do god knows what…fail, most likely. There’s a “custom” partition dialog which I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and then there’s a “custom advanced” one that lets you set the size and position of each partition to the byte. Doing it this way apparently REQUIRES you to not only set up a /boot/efi partition, but also a /boot partition separate from /root.
          7. If you’re in the habit of putting /, you know, operating system and software, on one drive, and /home on another drive, you have to learn from osmosis that part of Bazzite’s immutableness means that there is no /home, there’s a /var/home symlinked to /home.

          And if it doesn’t randomly lock up, you’ve got Bazzite installed!

          Bazzite markets itself as a newbie friendly Linux. They’ve got that configurator on their website that gives you a little Cosmo quiz about what system you have, what desktop you want etc. which is good! That is good user friendly design. But the actual software you get rattles like a Chrysler. How many noobs are going to bounce right off that?

          • LupertEverett@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            4 hours ago

            You forgot the part where the installer fails just right before the end. Every time.

            Had this occuring on both my laptop and someone else’s that I was trying to install Bazzite to, which resulted in installing Fedora on their laptop instead (and back to EndeavourOS on my end), and even Fedora’s new installer errored out too. Thankfully the OS was working though.

            I am suspecting your 6th point for that one, which even if it wasn’t I consider it a colossal failure on their part because it is NOT TELEGRAPHED AT ALL. I shouldn’t have to stumble upon random forum posts to learn about it, come on.

            • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              2 hours ago

              I had one fail fairly early, giving me a cryptic message because apparently it couldn’t cope with how I’d set up the partitioning.

              I’ve had a Linux Mint install fail because it couldn’t cope with a BIOS setting, the error message gave a plain English explanation “it’s probably the XMBT (or whatever acronym) setting in the BIOS, see this page on the Ubuntu wiki for details:” and it gave a hyperlink, because the installer runs in a live environment, it had a copy of Firefox ready to go, AND it gave a QR code so you could easily open that link on a mobile device. THAT’S how it’s done.

          • Holytimes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            19 hours ago

            Bazzite is just a shit option vs using cachy. It’s the same goal and work load target. And bazzite manages to just be worse in every respect.

            • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              18 hours ago

              Having played with it for a little while now that I’ve got it installed…I think it’s alright for a mostly or entirely gaming machine. I wouldn’t want to use it, or any immutable distro, as my main computer.

              I’ve attempted to stay out of the trendy distro of the month club, remember Garuda? Remember Peppermint? Remember Endeavour?

              • poolhelmetinstrument@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                7 hours ago

                I switched to Bazzite as my daily driver and won’t be switching distros or going back to Windows.

                I ran into an issue during install with my main drive previously having BitLocker. Had to clear the drive with a live USB installer. Had another issue with secondary LUKS drive auto-mounting, but was able to address it through the GUI.

                Other than that it has been a magical experience. I do full-time work/school on the system.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            19 hours ago

            That’s really too bad. I’ve heard great things about Bazzite, and it’s what I recommend when someone wants SteamOS.

            That said, that’s a bit different from what I’m talking about. I’m suggesting OEMs ship a pre-installed Linux desktop, and users are presented an option on setup about which DE to use. So all that would change is enabling one and not the others, but they’d always be present. After install, you could switch between them if desired without messing with the package manager.

            I personally use openSUSE (leap on server, tumbleweed on desktop, Aeon Desktop on laptop), and their installer is solid, but I haven’t tried it on a 4k monitor (worked fine on 1440p). Unfortunately, I don’t recommend my distro of choice because it’s not popular enough to have a good newb support network, whereas that’s basically Bazzite’s core demographic.

            • Holytimes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              21·
              19 hours ago

              Stop recommending bazzite, just r commend cachy.

              It has a steam deck iso. It’s based on the same thing steamos is built on.

              Bazzite is literally the worse option and more likely to lead to problems.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                31·
                18 hours ago

                I don’t recommend Arch forks as a rule, unless it has fantastic support from the maintainers (e.g. SteamOS curates updates). It’s going to by break eventually, and it’s going to require manual intervention (probably minimal), and users will get mad. Maybe it’ll be fine for 6 months or a year, but it will break eventually.

                That’s much less likely with something built on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or OpenSUSE. Those all have solid testing and upgrade rules, unlike Arch, which is basically “works on my machine.” I used Arch for years until I got tired of the random breakage, and now I’m on Tumbleweed which has far less breakage and stays reasonably close to Arch package versions.

                My first recommendation is either Linux Mint (I prefer Debian edition) or Fedora, because those have good new user experiences and aren’t super opinionated like Ubuntu.

                • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  1·
                  50 minutes ago

                  At least some of the problems I reported about Bazzite are inherited from Fedora. Bazzite didn’t create Anaconda.

                  Fedora has the problem of being generally fine, but most of the world for the last decade has been targeting Ubuntu as THE Linux distro, so there’s a lot if Git repos out there that don’t include instructions for Fedora. Way fewer things are packaged in rpm rather than deb. I’ve never seen Linux Mint kernel panic unless I was fucking around with the video drivers, I’ve seen Fedora kernel panic.

                  The main reason I’m using Fedora right now rather than Mint is Mint tends to have an older codebase, and we’re at a point in PC technology where things like wayland offer support for video and graphics stuff that don’t work well under X11. like my 1440p ultrawide 144Hz monitor sitting next to a 1080p 60hz side monitor. Fedora KDE has it ready to go, Mint Cinnamon does not.

        • magic_lobster_party@fedia.io
          3·
          19 hours ago

          EndeavourOS has that kind of menu during the install process. A few screenshots and a brief explanation of each option.

          I thought it was nice. It’s something I want to see more with other distros. The DE is what most people will notice about the OS either way.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            19 hours ago

            Yeah, that is nice. I won’t recommend EndeavorOS or any other Arch installer/derivative for other reasons (IMO, every Arch user should do the official install process once or twice to have a better shot at fixing stuff later), but I do like that UX.

            I wish more distros did it. My distro (openSUSE) does something similar, but I also don’t recommend it because the community isn’t all that good for new users IMO.

            • Holytimes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              19 hours ago

              Your like 5+ years out of date with your preconceptions of arch.

              Arch at this point is breaks less from updates than most other options if your using a prebuild like endeavour or cachy.

              Fuck even the aur breaks shit less than windows breaks which is literally the bar for stability for your avg normies.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                18 hours ago

                That tracks since I left Arch about 5 years ago, maybe a little longer, and I used it for at least 5 years.

                I used it through the /usr merge which broke nearly everything, and for a few years of stability afterward. But even when it was super stable, there were still random issues a couple times each year. It wasn’t anything big (I’ve been a Linux user for 15 years or so), but it did require knowing what to do to fix it (usually documented clearly on the Arch homepage). This was especially true for Nvidia updates. After switching to openSUSE Tumbleweed, most of those went away, and even the Nvidia breakage seemed less frequent, and if something broke, I could easily snapper rollback and wait for a fix, whereas on Arch I had to fix things because going back wasn’t an option (I guess you could configure rollbacks if you had that foresight).

                I just took a look, and it looks like manual intervention is still a thing. For example, the June 21 Linux firmware change required manual intervention. There were others over the last year, depending on the packages you use or your configuration.

                That’s totally fine for Linux vets, but new users will have issues eventually. In don’t even recommend my distro, which solves most of those issues, because new user support isn’t there. The main reason I left was because I wanted to switch to btrfs (for snapshot rollbacks), and Tumbleweed had that OOTB so I gave it a shot.

                • Leon@pawb.socialEnglish
                  2·
                  16 hours ago

                  The main reason I left was because I wanted to switch to btrfs (for snapshot rollbacks), and Tumbleweed had that OOTB so I gave it a shot.

                  This is precisely why I went with Tumbleweed as well. I wanted a rolling release distro because having initially gotten into Linux via Ubuntu back in 2007, I didn’t really like the “upgrade twice a year to keep up to date with new features” method. It felt really cumbersome back then, as a regular distro upgrade often brought problems with it.

                  When I looked into other features I wanted, I discovered Snapper and I was all “that’s the one for me!”

                  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                    2·
                    16 hours ago

                    Yup!

                    Here’s my progression:

                    1. Ubuntu because I was a noob; got pissed at breakage at the release upgrade
                    2. Fedora, because that’s what my university used; got pissed that release upgrades took an hour (since fixed I think?)
                    3. Arch, because my coworker recommended it
                    4. openSUSE Tumbleweed because of snapper and they had a server distro (had recently set up a NAS and tried Leap before switching desktop to TW)
                    5. Aeon on laptop because I wanted to try an immutable distro and it was in the family

                    I’ll probably switch my laptop back to Tumbleweed at some point and my NAS to MicroOS, but for nos things work fine so I’m not motivated.

        • someguy3@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          16 hours ago

          I agree with the other guy, that’s too much choice. People don’t want to deal with it.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            16 hours ago

            Three options is too many? If one is already selected, you can just click through without thinking. Windows already does that stupid “setting up your PC” crap, and this would be far faster.

            • someguy3@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              16 hours ago

              Yes.

              And they need to sort out the defaults to something good. 99% of basic users won’t/can’t change them.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                15 hours ago

                Sure. If you have all three options be properly configured, it shouldn’t matter too much which you pick. The point is to make it apparent that you can change stuff, if you want.

                • someguy3@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  15 hours ago

                  One. Option.

                  Do you know why Mac is successful? Because they have extremely few options. You basically have 3 laptops to choose from. That’s not 3 software options, that’s basically 3 hardware options.

                  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                    1·
                    14 hours ago

                    I don’t think that’s why. I think it’s more the features that work with the iPhone that are selling Apple laptops. If you want to use iMessage or iCloud between your phone and computer, you need both to be from Apple. That, plus the better performance and battery life of the M-series is more the cause of increased market share, not the single desktop offering.

    • Annoyed_🦀 @lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      20 hours ago

      The issue with that is, people have no idea what these “choice” even mean. SteamOS is SteamOS, Windows 11 is Windows 11, MacOS is MacOS, but Linux is a big list. If pushing adoption is the key purpose, the manufacturer need to pick one that they believe is reliable and in active development. Just one. All these editions will very likely cause choice paralysis, which lead to people deem it as “too complicated”.

      Also Valve will not likely go that path again.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      22 hours ago

      Who else has an incentive to do so other than Valve? Even when you buy a pre-built with Windows today, those things are subsidized by bloatware that’s already installed on the machine.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldEnglish
      2·
      20 hours ago

      Some companies sell Linux prebuilts, like System76, but that’s pretty niche for the average person to even know to search for.

      Now, if stores like Best Buy had a section for Linux prebuilts, that would reach a lot of people.