Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
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I did my part, at a gentle age of 48 i installed linux Mint.
You kids and your new fangled computers.
2026 is the year of the Linux desktop for me at work at least. I really don't use it much, but so far it does everything I need it to do, and what it doesn't I use wine and it's fine.
I have a Windows external SSD for gaming but that's only for GTA online, I'm not gonna buy GTA 6, fuck em
I like that the line appears to take an exponential growth curve. Hopefully it will keep going. Microslop sure is helping right now.
I don't think it can keep going at an exponential pace, but I think we can pass 5% in Q2 maybe Q3, especially with Steam Machine
It must level off at some point, if anything for purely mathematical reasons. But the higher it gets before that happens the better.
The big players are driving this trend. Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel, etc are making the old status quo too expensive and obnoxious.
Adoption typically takes an s-shaped or sigmoid curve. A slow start, rapid growth, and then stagnation.
I'm curious whether gamers are going to pull Linux desktop into the mainstream. Discord is a good example. For many years only gamers knew what it was, now most of the users on aren't using it for gaming, and it has fundamentally changed the platform.
Luckily Linux is an open source system with tons of variety and tailor made environments for specific use cases whereas Discord is a for profit company that shoves unwanted features like Nitro down everyone's throats for their endless revenue chasing. So if it takes off because of gamers, we'll see lots of needed features and bugfixes.
Wrong, we're gonna blow right past the 100% marker and keep it going!! WOOOOO
🚀 800% here we goooo
To infinity and beyond!
Steam Machine would have helped, but now I'm pessimistic the price and availability will be decent because of the damn AI mania.
Yeah the unthinkable happened. One of my friends switched to Linux and I feel confident this is only the beginning. Microslop finally pushed one of my semi-normie friends to switch. 🎉
I've had multiple of my normie friends ask me about linux in the last few months and I even got 2 to switch over. Which blew my mind I got them to.
I think my favorite comment I've heard from them since switching is how much it just gets out of their way. It's there and does the thing and is only there as much as it needs to be.
Before doing the switch, part of my mind thought that it was accepting a new pain that might equal or exceed the familiar pain in the short run but would be worth it in the long run to get away from the frustration of windows.
The reality that I experienced is that it was less painful than wrangling windows to behave more like how I want it to.
TLDR: It's been revised to 3.58% from 3.19%
Also, what's up with those dips in March ?
Maybe spring break. Lots of kids are at home from school and they disproportionately use Windows.
Heavy sampling of Simplified Chinese machines which primarily run Windows. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/#languagesanchor
If we all got together as a team and each put Linux and Steam on 5 old/cheap/e-waste/whatever PCs for the next survey we'd pump those numbers up to ~20% and freak Microsoft out.
Does Microsoft care about steam numbers?
The way they're going I don't think they even care about windows numbers
I dunno, but they cared enough to get the Xbox team in to build a handheld friendly interface to compete with Steam OS.
I will be replacing windows on all five of my home computers with Linux
I'll leave a couple as a dual boot, but the media server, laptop, primary desktop, and two media/'console' PCs (connected to TVs) will be swapped over. hopefully it will be easy to get the same setup on all of them and run reliably.
Just a suggestion but for the two htpcs I'd recommend using bazzite or steamos. Both are stable and hard to break and booting into a console likr interface is great. Use anything else for the rest of your machines. They lock both down a bit too much to be practical every day machines.
So just put steam on all those computers we're already refurbishing into linux servers anyway?
Seems kinda crazy to me that Windows is still so dominant after all the shitty stuff MS has done.
As someone who semi-recently made the jump (june) to linux, you need a lot of time to do it, even for something that would seem trivial to an experienced user like going to mint. Most people don't have the time to do something like that. New systems built by curious nerds will probably be where linux gets most of its new users. (so it's a shame no one can afford to build one)
I installed Mint on my 72 year old fathers new Thinkpad. He loves it and has had relatively few complaints.
I've installed Windows on thousands of machines and IMO, major Linux distros are usually easier to set up for home use but I say that having used both for a good amount of time, so my opinion is definitely biased compared to someone who doesn't really use computers.
I would argue though, where Linux really shines is old systems, much like the many that MS chose to drop support for in Windows 11. There's a pretty decent chance that the bullshit going on with RAM and drives might actually further drive Linux adoption as people try to get more out of their existing machines or old used\refurbished machines that they can actually afford (which Linux runs great on, unlike Windows).
Time will tell though...
It doesn't really matter which is easier to install because only a very small percentage of people are comfortable with installing an OS of any kind. The vast majority of people just keep whatever OS was pre-installed. 99% of the time that's Windows or MacOS.
Hopefully 2026 brings some more mainstream options to buy computers with Linux pre-installed. I think that's unlikely though, other than Steam OS for some handhelds and Valve's new hardware.
It would be great if Lenovo or Dell or others prominently featured Linux options to try to capitalize on all the Microsoft hate. I know they already sell some Ubuntu options but they aren't featured or advertised. I suspect they are afraid of pissing off Microsoft.
Windows won't turn around and go back to a simpler advertisement-free offline account model this decade. Core Windows developers may know that they're making things worse. Leadership won't care as long as they get temporary boosts in numbers for office, copilot, and OneDrive subscriptions
Amazing thing for open platform operating systems when Windows Phone failed (MS managed that like trash. It didn't have a chance)
The other thing too are the shareholders. It’s not enough to just make a profit, there has to be quarterly growth or it’s seen like a failure. Because the PC market is saturated, they have to switch from expanding user base to extracting more value from each user. This is where you get things like upsells for subscription-based services which continuously generate revenue from each user instead of just once (no more one-time license purchase), data harvesting, and ads that are carefully tuned for each user to maximize engagement and conversion rate.
I also suspect this is part of why Microsoft lets you use Windows without activating, even though they want you to (and will nag you to do so). Even if you never buy a license, there’s still ecosystem lock-in, data collection, ads, and future upsell potential. That’s just my thinking though. I haven’t personally used modern Windows (10/11) in over five years so I don’t know if it’s changed since.
They go for quarterly growth regardless of the, uh… tradeoffs it actually creates. There is no way Microsoft isn’t aware of the growing irritation from users, the backlash, and resistance to frivolous and aggressively added AI features, which makes the fact that they keep doubling down all the more baffling to us. While I know this is a broad oversimplification and I’m not hitting every point involved, I’m fairly sure the user base is not who they’re serving, they’re more interested in meeting market and shareholder expectations.
Keep in mind that I’m not an expert on the matter (not even close), I’ve just watched a few videos and articles to give me some sense of this sort of thing, so I am just speculating and thinking out loud. I am in no way defending what Microsoft is doing, and I’m glad I did that little lockdown-based experiment in 2020 to see if Linux really could replace Windows for me (it was a resounding success!!).
Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) 64 bit 1.72% +0.14%
🫡 Whoever caused this stat - I salute them!
These are people who do not tolerate any nonsense from their computer, but also aren't going to let anything get in the way of playing their games.
This great and I hope to make it as a statistic in the round 😉
A friend I didn't expect said he was interested, but idk how willing he is to break free of Windows-brain. I am most certainly am willing to learn (just check out my comments history).
if your friend is already a basic knowledgeable user and can partition their drives, tell them to just go install xubuntu and try it out. no need to worry about the multiple partition options during install, just do a basic single partition install and try to do a few common tasks. see how it goes and then wipe it and reinstall later.
edit: it took me maybe 3 hours total to install Linux on two computers, including downloading and creating the installation media and waiting for it to finish running the installation etc. and the installs themselves were problem-free, all of my issues were related to other things like trying to sort out SSH and remote desktop viewing access.
Hmm, yeah I think they can handle it. I've showed them massgrave to not pay microslop for Office and they seemed fine*. It's really not too different than that. And besides, as windows users, they have to had reinstall windows cleanly at least once in their lifetime. Personally I found installing linux distros a lot easier, so they might think that way too.
It's just which distro. and it's mainly for gaming first. So maybe bazzite because it's atomic? But it's relatively new and maybe the community and docs aren't as many as say fedora or ubuntu. as far as I understand it despite bazzite is atomic fedora, there's still some quirks that's not fully applicable fully? So maybe just vanilla fedora? I kind of don't want to suggest ubuntu even if that's what they might have heard of before.
*I know, I know, libre office suites are out there and I personally already use them. But it's being used to it is the thing.
see this is what I mean, stop thinking about it and just tell them to go install xubuntu with the knowledge that they're going to wipe it in a few days anyways
Maybe something other than Ubuntu? Ubuntu is past its prime, it used to be good, but as other distros got better, it didn't, leaving it outcompeted. I'd recommend Mint, Bazzite, Fedora, or PopOS, but that's just the sentiment I'm getting from the community; I myself have only used Ubuntu and openSUSE on desktop, and have used Debian in VMs for stuff.
Currently I use openSUSE, which I like, but it's not a beginner distro. It's quite universal, but that means not targeting beginners nor advanced users specifically. Debian is also like that (Maybe I'd use Debian if it had a good rolling release, but Debian Unstable is for testing and not meant to be stable, as opposed to openSUSE Tumbleweed which is probably the stablest rolling release out there, with a good QA system, because it's meant for daily use.). I've also heard that Fedora is universal like this. So why is it regarded as so good for beginners? Maybe openSUSE is actually fine for beginner usage? I don't know. The install would probably require the guidance of a Linux user though.
as a Pop user, it's surprising to see most of its users sticking to the old 22.04.
https://blog.system76.com/post/pop-os-letter-from-our-founder At the bottom, "Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS users will receive an upgrade notification in the OS starting January 2026. If you wish to upgrade to Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS before then, after backing up your files, open Terminal and run"
Probably the Feb numbers should reflect a larger migration to the latest Pop.
I'm not surprised by this at all. I tried 24.04 and found it lacked what attracted me to 22.04. It had some great new features, but overall the 22.04 experience is better. I'll keep trying it though, still early days.