Linux

I liked the comment going "Steam doesn't have data on PC gamers, only Steam gamers.", hinting at the seven gamers that stubbornly refuse to use Steam and still hunt for CDs, or old archives of shareware. They are people too dammit!

the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship

The change is even more dramatic if you consider only those users who use English as their language in Steam. Also, Linux adoption rate has sped up this year. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ collects various data about Steam usage. One of the charts (screenshot below) show Linux market share among Linux/English users and overall Linux market share. I added the red line to demonstrate how I see the growth. There's only few data points this side of the year, so my drawing is most likely wrong, but the growth starts around March. The green line is at 4.8% in January and February and 6.31% in July, so a nice 30% increase within about 6 months among Linux/English users.

EDIT: The post is now more in line with reality. Couple more data points:

• Linux market share among all Steam Linux users has gone from 2.06% in January to 2.89% in July. That's a 40% increase within the first seven months only. And as another commenter said, the growth rate might increase towards the end of the year as more people starts abandoning Windows 10.
• The same numbers for last year are 1.95% in Jan '24 and 2.08% in Jul '24, which is only a 6% increase.
• But because the data is a bit jumpy, if I use approximate values of 1.75% for Jan '24 and 2.05 for Dec '24, the Linux market share increased by 17% in the entire last year.
• I'll stop now.

This is me. Always Windows for my gaming computer and when I built a new one recently, I went full Linux. No regrets so far.

Linux only gamer for 3+ years now. It is a good time for the penguins.

I am moving over once win10 support ends and it starts to cause friction for me.

The July 2025 data shows that Windows' market share on Steam dropped by 0.44% while Linux's market share grew by 0.32%.

While okay this is growth, it's not exactly meteoric. Hopefully the trend picks up steam (cough) as the win10 EOL approaches.

I switched to Linux so I could spend $200 more on actual hardware for my build.

Just my two cents. I personally own a lot of different gaming devices running different platforms. I don't have an allegiance to one particular platform because::I just think they're neat::.

I don't think I'm unique in this case either. In reality it's always been "use the right tool for the right job" kinda scenarios.

With that being said, open source platforms have broken into the scene in a big way recently. I built a bd790i/radeon7800xt system a little while back and it has become my primary gaming platform. It runs Bazzite and it's always just ready to go with most (if not all) of my steam games running.

I basically use windows on machines running Nvidia hardware. Even on my workstation where Nvidia has basically decided their chosen platform is WSL2 and chosen not to embrace the larger Linux ecosystem completely (yet).

I do have a test box that constantly runs bazzite-dx where I am testing Nvidia compatibility. It's getting REALLY GOOD. however I just had a set back where Bambu studio flatpaks do not render 3d objects anymore. Flatpaks integration with Nvidia is a major pain sometimes as it can break with driver updates. I'm really new to this but fltapak needs the driver as well as the base system and then the flatpacked application needs to support it as well? It seems cumbersome. I don't have this problem with AMD GPUs.