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.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    17 hours ago

    That’s really too bad. I’ve heard great things about Bazzite, and it’s what I recommend when someone wants SteamOS.

    That said, that’s a bit different from what I’m talking about. I’m suggesting OEMs ship a pre-installed Linux desktop, and users are presented an option on setup about which DE to use. So all that would change is enabling one and not the others, but they’d always be present. After install, you could switch between them if desired without messing with the package manager.

    I personally use openSUSE (leap on server, tumbleweed on desktop, Aeon Desktop on laptop), and their installer is solid, but I haven’t tried it on a 4k monitor (worked fine on 1440p). Unfortunately, I don’t recommend my distro of choice because it’s not popular enough to have a good newb support network, whereas that’s basically Bazzite’s core demographic.

    • Holytimes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      17 hours ago

      Stop recommending bazzite, just r commend cachy.

      It has a steam deck iso. It’s based on the same thing steamos is built on.

      Bazzite is literally the worse option and more likely to lead to problems.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        21·
        17 hours ago

        I don’t recommend Arch forks as a rule, unless it has fantastic support from the maintainers (e.g. SteamOS curates updates). It’s going to by break eventually, and it’s going to require manual intervention (probably minimal), and users will get mad. Maybe it’ll be fine for 6 months or a year, but it will break eventually.

        That’s much less likely with something built on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or OpenSUSE. Those all have solid testing and upgrade rules, unlike Arch, which is basically “works on my machine.” I used Arch for years until I got tired of the random breakage, and now I’m on Tumbleweed which has far less breakage and stays reasonably close to Arch package versions.

        My first recommendation is either Linux Mint (I prefer Debian edition) or Fedora, because those have good new user experiences and aren’t super opinionated like Ubuntu.