The Steam data is pretty noisy. We got a big spike two months ago and now the anomaly went away. The import part is to pay attention to the trend, something that is quite the oppose of "falls hard":
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Thats a positive trend and we still have the Steam Machine ahead of us. The writing is on the wall.
Which comes at the worst possible time price wise 🥺 damn AI bubble
It still sold out 🙂
What sold out?
Woops, the Steam Deck sold out. I bet the Steam Machine will to.
You had me shitting bricks. I'll be damned if I don't get my hands on a Gabe Cube and Gabe Goggles.
I'll get a steam frame even at the inflated prices... It runs linux, seems quite open, and it not made by facebook. I'm already sold on just that. I also fear though it'll sell out almost immediately 🙁
And I predict the Steam Frame will sell out as well. Unless they implement some unprecedented preorder system or something.
Yeah it's the toe of a sigmoid curve. We're entering the early adopter phase roughly.
Funny to read this when I've been using Linux for over 20 years
I've been using it for about 8 years myself, but I think it actually is this time? It's got a pretty obvious exponential increase shape, it's just spread out.
We will be 80 and still looking at the charts going "It is the year of the Linux desktop yet?"
The year of the Linux desktop is already there for me. There is more and on a better foundation than I ever thought would happen when I started using it. Personally, I miss nothing.
Well aware that this isn't the case for everyone.
Great observation!
The anomaly itself even looks periodical and March related.
But the trend goes brrrr!
Why is english-only higher than the sum?
It's percentages, with English speakers using Linux at 2x the rate of the world average. The world average is mostly drug down down by China, which has almost 0% Linux use.
Some of that gets more apparent when you see all the different graphs here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Oohhh thank you!
Sorry, that's my fault. I haven't had time to play games recently.
My fault, too. My Linux PC (which I use for 90% of things, including this post) doesn't have Steam installed on it.
Still happily using Linux.
I did switch the DE to kde plasma because the cosmic desktop was giving games a lot of trouble. Opening in weird window sizes, mostly. I did some light trouble shooting but decided I didn't care that much about the desktop environment, so I installed the 2nd one.
Many people bounce back to Windows after their first attempt at running Linux.
Typically after experiencing a technical issue and either failing to find a resolution, or finding a resolution written in a way that assumes the reader is already familiar with Linux.
While some of the contraction may be noise I think the steam survey is large enough to be a decent representation.
That's like bouncing back to eating a turd sandwich because you've found a pit in your peach dessert.
If you are a gamer, you don't care, me thinks, sadly so
That was a valid reason 15 years ago, but wine/proton have gotten really really good.
But still, from my very brief experience, sometimes it requires fiddling or game might just not work or crash here and there. Whereas games on windows just work. More or less. Remember, there are plenty of none tech savvy gamers out there who just want to play games.
Windows just plain doesn't work, more or less.
Anytime a game goes fullscreen, it would mess up my desktop. Sometimes the screen would just be stuck black or the display resolution wouldn't revert properly with fullscreen. Heck, fullscreen was so broken that I avoided it as much as possible. Borderless windowed was the way to go, where it was available anyway (which is most newer games but more rare as you look at older titles).
Actually, for fun, one of my friends was trying to install an old game from the era in a Windows 98 emulator to play it again because he couldn't get it to boot on 11. He spent hours and ran into so many issues, eventually giving up because it had no audio, wouldn't boot, etc. For fun, I tried the game's installer on Manjaro (through Wine) and it installed and booted with minimal issues on the first try.
Where you'll have an easier time on Windows is pretty much exclusively with games that are hardcoded to only work on Windows, whether because of an anticheat or because of some kind of DRM. I don't play any titles like that, and every game I've run on Linux Just Works™. I'd probably just boot into Windows for those titles if I played them, but otherwise, the experience on Linux is just so much better.
Many people bounce back to Windows after their first attempt at running Linux.
this was me from Vista to 10, swore every time i'd do it, endless dual boots with Ubuntu that lasted a couple days.
3 years ago with 11 looming, I took the plunge and grabbed a new nvme, installed Mint, made sure it booted and I could use FF, then reformatted my Windows drive and installed LMDE and have been using that ever since. The rest of it I just muddled through, mostly still muddling though.
First Windows was 3.1 at work, MS Dos prior to that both on top of Netware as the default IT guy but used an Amiga 1200 at home (from a C64, to Amiga 1000 to 1200.
The CLI is bullshit as the default for near everything, it's not 1990 anymore. It should be there but eg the dick around I had installing Signal on my desktop as the Flatpak is some not authorized version , same with my VPN, what a fuck around needing Nord themselves to diagnose it, having the default boot drive fill up with what seems like a zillion kernels and need to delete them on my laptop etc etc
still have zero chance of going back to Windows but I get the ipad generation steering away from Linux.
20+ years ago I needed to know how to burn a CD before making the switch. I think WinXP was the last, I have use on a private PC.
All my windows use today is work related; no games there.
How much of the drop can be attributed to people who were trying different distros before settling on one?
Ngl these numbers keep acting so wild I don't know what to make of them anymore.