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.

  • webpack@ani.socialEnglish
    6·
    11 hours ago

    ngl the hk and silksong native ports were pretty crap on my machine (but proton + Windows version worked perfectly)

    • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      6 hours ago

      It’s sad in a way but I kinda feel like proton is going to near wipe out the very few Linux native ports we get. It’s so much easier and more stable than trying to build and package for Linux.

      • Johnmannesca@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Yeah, even more casual games like Balatro are proof of that, despite how easily you can port a game of that nature otherwise, people will choose to use proton because it’s still able to sync with their progress and symlinking is too inconvenient to consider unless you’re running like 2gb ram or something.

        • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          And, I totally get that! It’s like yeah, I know how to setup a symlink to probably make that work, but you know what’s a lot easier than that… Just not doing that and just having it work.