This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out the ebbs and flows of Chinese players on largely-identical hardware and operating systems) is more than 6%, up from under 2% just 5 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with Windows in general, and especially 11, and Windows 10 is about to force the issue in just a few months as it loses official support. I have a friend whose computer is still in decent shape for gaming but with TPM settings that don’t meet the minimum spec for Windows 11; at some point, he’ll lose compatibility and have to throw out an otherwise perfectly functional machine, so it’s good that some other OS is shaping up to be a good enough option for many people.
This has been an upward trend since slightly before the release of the Steam Deck, as you can see on the graphs, and I’ve come across YouTube videos from both James Lee Animations and PewDiePie about how they got to be so sick of Windows (and Adobe) they both switched to Linux with middle fingers raised at their old workflows. Folks like them making videos like that can have real effects on the market. Linux has been my daily driver for gaming for about 8 years now, and it’s matured so much in that time that I’ve hardly booted to my Windows partition for any reason. It’s not perfect, but if I’m choosing between the quirks that Linux has by accident and the deficiencies that are in Windows on purpose, I’ll take LInux every time, and it seems like more people are coming to that same conclusion.
No doubt the biggest remaining frontier is live service gaming with kernel level anti-cheat, but if Linux becomes a larger user base, as it’s doing right now, the developers making those games will have to solve that problem to reach that addressable market, and everybody wins.
I think Windows is kicking anti cheat out of their kernel (thanks, crowd strike) so it may become a non issue.
What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.
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This is wonderful news!
I’ve been using Linux full time for around 3 or 4 years. I just bought a Legion Go handheld gaming PC, which comes with Windows.
I knew before I bought it that I was going to load Linux on it instead, but decided to check out the Windows experience a little out of curiosity first. Holy fucking shit, it was a shitshow. A buggy mess and terrible experience .
And you hang out in the online communities for devices like this and you will see even totally nontechnical users who have no dog in the fight for a Linux bias are still vastly preferring the Linux experience. This is completely unprecedented.
Anticheat is the only thing Microsoft has ‘‘going for them’’’ if you can even put it that way. Really starts to feel like Windows is toast.
The latest Windows update that rolled out a few days ago literally bricked my Surface.
I had the same CPU & RAM load running before and after the update. After, even Task Manager wasn’t responding!
Next paycheck, I think I’m buying a Framework
Why not just use linux on your current device
I can’t replace the battery easily, or any component in a Surface. Microsoft products get the worst repair score from iFixit. I’ve been wanting a Framework as my daily driver for a while now so I can make repairs as I need them over time (or even make upgrades in the case of the 17" product).
I don’t think I’ll get rid of the laptop tho. Can probably add Linux to it and use it as a server. Right now though, I don’t have the time for that. I want something out of the box that will work play-and-play
Have you considered booting up a live USB to try it out?
Any guides for how to do that?
An interesting fact: English-language adoption of Linux on Steam is over 2x the overall, all-language adoption. This mostly cuts out Chinese (25% of users), Russian (8% of users), and Spanish (5% of users). Seems America and Europe is adopting at record pace while China isn’t.
I wonder what it’d look like with English+German only.
I’ve been advocating for Linux for a long time. At least to people I know use nothing but the web browser. Gaming and art have been a slow grind. Gaming Steam Deck was the game changer for single player gamers.
Art, it’s people that never use software close to their fullest but feel like they have to use what their favorite YouTuber/social media personality uses. Professionals I never encourage a switch unless they’re paid too. Already stressed doing edits in the software they know to make a deadline let alone adding in learning new software
Hobbyist and aspiring indies, you don’t work with a team of a dozen editors, try Kdenlive. Solo music artist, try ardour especially if you don’t even plan to drop your day job for a full time pursuit of a music career. At least practically every hobbyist I’ve met that focuses on digital drawing/painting uses Krita
I’m there as soon as I get a hard drive to dedicate to it.
The moment Marvel Rivals is functional on Linux, is the moment I leave Windows forever.
…cue someone telling me it’s already been done
Seems like you are in luck https://www.protondb.com/app/2767030
It’s interesting that Android operating systems aren’t included in this metric. It is absolutely linux based.
