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.

  • scala@lemmy.mlEnglish
    115·
    6 hours ago

    I’m kinda in the same boat. I have an old gaming laptop that just barley didn’t make the win11 arbitrary cut. Not because it was below spec, it was way above. Just because it was too “old”. I installed Bazzite. But I do have a top tier premium gaming PC I built recently that’s still on Win11 with Dualboot with Bazzite.

    Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command lines. The average user will give up there really quickly.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      4 hours ago

      Bazzite is great, but it still has the failure(maybe it’s not failure to you and me, but the average gamer) is that most stuff isn’t just, download .exe, run that .exe there are loops and frameworks that need to be installed through command line

      Strong disagree on “most”

      For the vast majority of users? Everything they need is in Steam and MAYBE Heroic, which is the same as on Windows.

      In terms of non-gaming? I… have very strong Thoughts on atomic distros and the hoops Bazzite et al make you jump through with regard to layering and the like, but they are in Discover and the like. So “app store” experience.

      I personally don’t think Bazzite is a good desktop OS (but I love it for my HTPC). But any of the user friendly distros (e.g. Fedora, Mint, and Ubuntu) should be almost zero command line usage unless you have a reason to use it.

      • theparadox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        the hoops… [they]… make you jump through with regard to layering

        I played around with a few atomic distros and it seems like rather than layering, running things in containers is the preferred solution.

        It won’t be the solution for everything that layering could “fix”, depending on your situation, but it is something that I wasn’t initially aware of when I started playing with Bazzite, Fedora Atomic, and now Aurora.

        Basically, if you could just run whatever you need to run in a container, that might be another solution.

    • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      Bazzite is a vehicle for Steam. If your basis for using it isn’t ‘gaming through Steam’, you’re already intentionally venturing into un-average lands.

    • dogs0n@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.

      No longer do we live in the days of visiting a vendors website to download their executables. They are conveniently packaged for us in the App Store (package manager).

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Haven’t used bazzite, but there is an App Store you can get all of the apps anyone would need.

        Its one of the quirks of a lot of the atomic distros. Because they are specifically built around the idea of having a specific set of packages at a specific range of versions for every rev of the distro itself… adding more packages is kind of a clusterfuck.

        For flatpaks (and I think appimages too?), it is seamless. For anything else you are googling the commands to add packages as “layers” and so forth

        And, to be fair to Bazzite (which I use for my HTPC and love it on there), I have had zero issues with actual gaming. Steam out of the box and Heroic is one flatpak away. But holy shit was adding iperf3 to test some network infrastructure tweaks a Thing.

        Its why I personally recommend to friends to just raw dog Fedora rather than use one of the atomic distros. Atomic distros make a lot of sense for deployed machines but for anything someone is going to use as “their” computer? Just learn to not type sudo before every command you run… and maybe get a jetkvm so your tech savvy friend can fix your computer after an nvidia driver update.