Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve's Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well
... plus people get more and more fed up with Windows.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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I’ve had 4 or 5 tough to solve problems with Mint Linux so far, and every time I start to get frustrated, I remember I no longer have to choose between “Yes” and “Remind me later” when I want “No”. After that I’m happy again.
People can get fed up all they want, if there's no alternative (wine/proton) then there's not a whole lot most people can do besides suck it up
And? The opposite is also true: If people are happy with Windows, then it does not matter how good the alternative is.
While true, there is an alternative. Your comment is moot.
I know this is a tiny percentage overall, but it’s a very substantial boost to the Linux percent, perhaps correlating with Win10 losing free security updates, and a minority of savvy gamers swapping to Linux. (Myself included, so obviously bias to my statement)
It's easy to forget what these "tiny" percents represent but steam has 132 million monthly active users, 3 percent of that means that we now have over 3 million linux players.
I partially switched to Linux this week, I had an older Windows machine just laying around so I decided to install Linux (I went with Mint) sit it next to my regular Windows machine and set up a switch to easily switch between them. That way if I really need Windows, I still have it. I don't think I will.
I'm still configuring the (now Linux) machine and getting everything like I like it, and all I keep wondering is why I didn't try this sooner. There are so many cool things (like sftp right in the File Manager? right on). I have no complaints.
Steam has run every game I've tried with only minor tweaks (switching to recommended Proton versions for each game, basically). Gaming is not a problem on Linux anymore. I've run old games (Torchlight II, Portal 2, Skyrim) and new games (Oblivion Remastered, Baldur's Gate) and the only problem has been my shit-ass video card just can't run them basically (1050Ti, time to upgrade, lol).
A little while doing all this and I'll convert the Windows machine to Linux and be rid of Windows altogether. Before the end of the year, hopefully. Everyone should give it a try.
all I keep wondering is why I didn't try this sooner.
I think your experience is the most common way people first try Linux: most people first try Linux when they have a computer that is no longer valuable to them.
That was what happened to me. I had a Windows laptop that was running too slow for use, and a friend suggested setting up a Linux partition before I bought a new one. I did, and got another two years out of the laptop.
Now I see a lot of libraries and hackerspaces offering folks help doing this.
I understand that things have changed a bit since I first moved over to Linux - moving from Red Hat Linux to Ubuntu 'Warty Warthog' was such a revelation in overall user-friendliness and usability, back in the day. But upgrading my graphics card from an NVidia one to an AMD was a similar change. I might have only just installed the base operating system and a desktop environment and haven't got around to a web browser yet, but I've already got full hardware accelerated graphics - that's crazy.
Most distros now make the NVidia drivers a complete non-issue, I think? My 6600XT is requiring just a few too many compromises on new games, so I'll need something new too, sooner or later. I used to hold off on graphics cards updates until I could get something twice as good so that it was a noticeable upgrade, but I could buy a pretty decent second-hand car for all the ones which are 'twice as good' now.
An upgrade from a 1050 Ti shouldn't be such a problem. Well done on keeping it alive so long - I had a GeForce GTX 970 that would have been a similar age, but it let out its magic smoke years ago.
I have been noticing a boost in people using Linux with gaming. There's a lot of benefits. Most of the time Linux is better at battery and performance than the alteratives.
In addition, windows 11 is pretty unstable right now. Even the task manager has bugs haha.
Did they add AI to the task manager too?
They are vibe coding it.
Instead of closing out, task manager creates another instance of itself.
Its hilarious.
I'm doing my part!
Interesting to see that the KDE version of Fedora is more popular than the Gnome one, considering how long Gnome was the main DE there.
its probably because of how awful gnome is and being able to use it as if it was intuitive is like being some kind of 4th dimensional leftie with a wireless robotic hand.
or maybe because kde is much easier to use coming from windows
I honestly can't stand GNOME and I've given it several tries to try and either appreciate it or understand why others adore it. I don't get it. Like ok I want to open an application launcher or simply see my dock. default click on those odd looking buttons that represent your workspaces but also is your launcher/dock view? ok...I just want to open firefox why do I have to see an overview of my workspaces? I don't care about that I just want to open firefox. How come I can't customize it easily? why do I need to download extensions via my web browser to do so? ok time to upgrade GNOME...wait why are ALL my extensions now broken? Let me go to the GNOME forums or discord to get help...wait why am I getting chewed out by the devs for wanting to customize my GNOME experience? ok I'm going back to KDE.
KDE has also improved A LOT in the past year. it's a damn solid DE now. I primarily use Niri on my NixOS machine but I do have KDE installed also because every now and again I like going back to it to play around with and honestly...I'm starting to prefer Konsole over other terminals.
Or just press super and type "fir" and enter
Extensions are third party, meaning if they are broken you need to complain to the extension developer. If you want to use extensions on GNOME i recommend keeping to the popular ones (dock, justperfection...) as they are regularly updated, and to hold off from upgrading GNOME asap to give the extension developers time to update.
The thing about customizing is that it's never free, someone has to write in the feature and someone has to keep it up to date, which is why GNOME delegates a lot of its customization to third parties allowing a more stable experience and faster development.
I think the problem you have with GNOME is more about you refusing to learn new ways to interact with your pc and instead trying to mold GNOME into what you think the desktop experience should be, and that's always going to be an uphill battle.
That's interesting, because according to statcounter, linux usage actually went down last month, but I guess most browsers on linux will block those stats scripts
I'm willing to bet decent money that there is overlap between users that always participate in the steam hardware survey and users who have permanently installed uBlock Origin and don't save cookies.
Linux stats on statcounter was growing a lot, up to almost 5%, then reduced quickly back to less than 3%. Maybe the new users learned to install privacy tools?