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The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday.

It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%

Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.

Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

The key word in the article is "again"

'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.'

This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month.

This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."

> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt

Agreed.

January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.

unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole.

- Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library.

- console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan.

- steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.

Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.

Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased.

Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever.

The future is bright.

I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.

Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months.

Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.

This time it's different.

Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch.

everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches

I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns.

Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast.

using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.

I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!

The "Nvidia on Linux compatibility" issues are something I wonder if I have side-stepped somehow either by lucky choice of GPUs, or lucky choice of Linux distros.

Was/is this a distro thing, or an actual issue?

Every Nvidia I've used [1] has worked perfectly, from the change for Xfree86 to Xorg, through the Compiz desktop wobbly window craze, to the introduction of GPGPU APIs like CUDA/OpenCL and recently Vulkan.

I do recall once helping a friend setup a Debian and a Ubuntu machine with Nvidia (which I never used before) and it took some figuring-out of how to install non-free drivers, so maybe my choices of Gentoo and Arch (not being as conservative towards non-free licenses as Debian/Ubuntu) always made it a non-issue?

[1] 6800 Ultra, 7800 GTX , 7900 GTX, 8800 GTX, GTX 280, GTX 480, GTX 680, GTX 760 Ti, RTX 2080, RTX 4080... probably missed some.

> I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid.

Explain please?

> the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects

Did you remember to screw in the antennas to the motherboard?

> on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console.

This is the way.

I did the same with an ITX AMD APU system. Thankfully well before the AI crunch. Running Debian because I just want it to work. Best keyboard for this setup is the Logitech Wireless Touch K400. Audio is through an older Sony receiver driving two of the floor standing Magnepan mid size speakers with a 10" sealed sub fed by a USB DAC. Mainly for music listening so no surround. The only thing I am missing is a nice wireless game pad.

I have a low power FreeBSD server running a 20TB raid z5 which serves all my media. I don't use any software contraptions like media centers or databases. I just mount file system and open a playlist in media player like god intended. Steam just works, though I haven't really gamed on this other than testing - that is what my desktop beast is for. I had issues with Hulu or whatever streaming thing in Fire Fox but had no trouble with any of them in Chrome. I know you don't get 4k but I don't care.

edit: > I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard

When I first setup the PC I had a full wireless KB & mouse, installed Half Life lost coast and played the demo using a TV table as a stand in front of the couch. NOT ideal but would work better with a proper adjustable TV table/tray thing. My friend has one and used it to work from home on his big ass 80+ inch TV.

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

You can get dongles for pretty much any controller you like.. Switch Pro, Wii U, Xbox etc. It's generally more stable than using bluetooth on a controller that supports it, especially if you position the dongle to have clear sight to your couch.

I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection

Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.

The Steam Controller will be such a blessing when it comes out.

If you haven't tried it, the Steam controller does a pretty good job of playing mouse&keyboard games. The original is probably hard to find now, but allegedly they'll release a new one later this year.

On my wife's laptop, I've uninstalled MS AI 3 times. I'm just about to lose my mind. I'd have already wiped the machine and moved it to mint but the data in her one drive, bookmarks, etc, I'm sure migrating her over won't be a totally seamless experience. I also have not tested battlenet under linux wine in a long time, and I expect some level of anti-cheat to give me hell there.

On all of my machines bar one, windows is completely gone. I have a simrig, currently running win10, but the hardware there, simucube base, simucube pedals, require some drivers I don't believe exist under linux, and/or don't work properly, and then there is iracing with it's easy anti cheat usage, from my understanding I'm screwed there as well. So it'll live on Windows 10 until the day iRacing stops supporting windows 10, or start supporting linux.

after having written that, I wonder if the simucube tools will just work under linux anyways, the UI is all written in QT, maybe simucube has/is developing linux drivers, given they're finland based :) .. I'll need to test it out

That matches my experience almost exactly. I was hanging onto Windows almost entirely due to cutting edge graphics and my Nvidia card on my desktop that I'd built.

Windows 10 was already pretty bad, but it felt fast and stable. I think they started putting content in the start menu, and I think I did regedit stuff I can no longer remember to get rid of it.

Windows 11 they made us upgrade with a gun to the back of our heads, they made it feel sluggish, they hid settings in such a way that you're expected to use Search to find the setting (although Apple has that issue too), and somehow the Search wants to include the whole Internet instead of what's local.

But the AI agentic force-feeding was the last straw. What am I, at work?

And then HN insisted Linux gaming was ready and they were right! Someone wrote to me in a comment, "join us, brother" and I'm glad I did, it's brought joy back to using my machine and playing around again.

They already crossed your line with 11, and you're still using it despite Win10 or Ubuntu also being an option. Are you really going to switch when 12 comes out, or is something holding you back?

I have had an excellent experience with KDE on Fedora. Has been stable despite being on the forefront of updates, familiar UI approach for Windows refugees while still offering plenty of customisation options for those who seek it.

I will warn you, Ubuntu is basically dead now.

Canonical announced that they are no longer using Debian as a base, but the unvetted packages compiled and uploaded by random people on Snap.

Please switch to Linux, but find a distro that actually wants you as a user.

I’ve heard there are issues with anticheat. Have you had any issues?

I strongly suggest any other distro that is Ubuntu. Canonical is a Microsoft wannabe

If you have any unusual set-up going on personally I'd recommend a rolling release distro like manjaro (arch) or fedora, so you get latest drivers and whatnot fast. Modern releases of these distros come bundled with the same desktop environment options as Ubuntu and good, easy to use package install and update GUIs. IMO it's more noob friendly than Ubuntu because your stuff is more likely to work without weird workarounds.

Bazzite is incredible, I've been running it on my gaming PC for about two years now. Games just work these days, and the updates are silent so I never need to think about them.

Yep it's crazy. The SteamDeck alone gives me the hope that we will see mainstream use of (desktop) linux within my lifetime.

People need to get their hands on real, working, consumer-friendly devices running Linux out-of-the-box.

Or maybe Microsoft continuously degrading their user's experiences has finally reached a breaking point, to the point where Pewdipie AND Linus Tech Tips are talking more seriously about linux.

So yeah Pewdiepie is part of it, but I honestly think that's only because Microsoft has done such a poor job at maintaining their operating system.

I haven't used GIMP in a while but I had great experience with Krita, even with my display tablet it all "just worked".

If you're coming from photoshop then PhotoGIMP is a good patch for gimp. I never understood why GIMP just didn't take this approach to begin with or at least make it a built in option.

Is there an English translation for those not in the latest influencer language trends?

Things I hadn't had on my bingo cards, in this or any universe: Me really looking forward to a new PewDiePie video! Guy has become a wholesome tech entertainment retreat for me. It's like Martijn Doolaard, but Linux instead of Alps... I can't stress enough how wholesome and pleasant the content has become. Or maybe it's been always like that, and I was just an ignorant snob...

Granted, I have SponsorBlock installed, so the occasional predatory supplement stuff gets cut, but he also kinda made clear he's rich enough and not in it for the money anymore - and I tend to believe him. PewDiePie won life, chose sanity and took the anti-corruption path. Bless him and his family, and God please, let it be real!

They are even playing the "come back, i've changed" card recently :D

Let me know how rainvow 6 runs for you :)

I wish you were right, though

YMMV, I've not had good luck with Bluetooth on any OS

Of total users 5% is a substantial number of consumers and some would argue a non-trivial amount of market share to ignore when making a product.

This also goes without saying that the more adoption we see, the better these alternatives will get as we see consumers and businesses view Linux as worth the investment.

The first 5% is the hardest. It won’t take 35 years to reach 10%.

5 per cent is a significant number. In many elections for example, this is the minimum to have representatives and/or receive state funding.

Ah yes, forgot this was HN.

"OS disruptor 5Xs in 3 years thanks to innovative new multi-platform solution, securing unprecedented market share."

> I will click the green "Play" button, it will change to a blue "Stop" button, as if the application was running, then shortly after silently switches back to the green Play button again, without any visible error and without actually starting the game.

You might want to enable Proton logging and have a look at what it says is going on.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/?tab=readme-ov-file#...

Unfortunately a lot depends on the game and software you're trying to use. There are cases where (especially older) stuff on Windows doesn't work but on Steam it works fine.

Also the hope is that when the Linux share of the market grows and more multi-platform engines like Unreal are used then we'll get native versions instead of using Wine/Proton.

On top of that Windows is now basically unusable in many ways so for me at least there is no alternative (MacOS is really bad compared to a well configured Linux desktop, could never get past it treating me as an idiot).

I had great success in such cases by just overriding the compatibility tool used, most often to just some version of proton. Default sometimes just does not work.

I have been running Guix System as my daily driver for 7 years now and I have not had any trouble using Steam as packaged by nonguix with my cursed nvidia GPU. My computer is from 2008 with a CPU/GPU upgrade in 2018.

There have only been a handful of games that I haven't been able to play, like Hitman Absolution. But other AAA games like RD2 and Witcher1-3 run without issue. Even Starcraft2, run through proton, works well.

This is similar to my experience. I find many people on the forums that can't resolve the crashes in Red Dead Redemption 2, so I suspect a lot of it depends on the specific games you've picked.

It is clearly getting better globally, so I expect in 3 years or so things will be ready for me to try again.

Honestly, don't use debian for gaming, as it is too far behind. Gaming stuff needs a bit more bleeding edge packages. I use Fedora + KDE and everything just works. Fedora's packages are at most a month behind but usually get updates within a week of upstream changes. Debian can be months behind (which makes it rock solid for server workloads). So give Fedora+KDE a try, it works great. It's the one combo that solves all problems for me and stopped me from distro-hopping: media consumption, software dev tooling, system admin tooling, gaming - all just works. My current install is about a year old without breaking itself (still on Fedora 42). I gave gnome a couple of tries, but the plugin system is a crapshoot as they broken an install for me once after an update. Come to think of it, I haven't manage to break KDE yet.

Then in steam itself, you can swap different versions of proton. I like to set the base version to one of the newer versions, but if a game doesn't work, I check on protondb which versions work so I override it per game. You can also give lutris a try as it has a few extra advanced levers that you can to get things working.

Not sure why that happens, but you may want to try "borderless window" instead of fullscreen in the game options. If that does not work, you could try running the game in gamescope, or enabling the wine virtual desktop with winecfg (point it at your game-specific wine prefix, you can also run it from protontricks). These are just a few ideas, but it does sound like a mechanism that is part if the game, not wine. Just like some games crash when you alt-tab in windows; gamescope tends to fix that.

> Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?

I spent a lot of time squashing bugs like this.

Windows has one window manager. Linux has dozens. Windows apps are written to make assumptions about how the Windows window manager works. Things like windowing event message sequences, side-effects on values returned by other APIs, the exact sequence of fullscreen status side-effects such as window size and mouse cursor capture and window chrome presence. That's valid because those always work the same way on Windows. But Linux window managers all do all of those things differently, and trying to get all dozens of window managers to behave exactly the same way as Windows's does is near impossible.

Another possibility is it's just how the game works, even on Windows. It was pretty common to get windowing bugs reported, test them on Windows, and see the exact same behavior as we had on Linux.

Your desktop is set to focus where mouse cursor is not where you click. Usually can be changed. Also in conjunction with that the game is set to freeze when it loses focus. So maybe you can change that in game.

Maybe also try different Proton versions

Src https://www.protondb.com/app/8500

Try running it in gamescope. Or the "always capture mouse in fullscreen windows" setting in winecfg.

Check your mouse focus settings in your desktop environment (gnome/KDE/whatever).

There may be an option called mouse stealing prevention or something, but if you have a look you should hopefully see it. On xfce it's in its own tab in the mouse menu

Vulcan is the home planet of Spock, the 3D API is Vulkan ;) (sorry for nitpicking)

There is a weird bug in Helldivers 2 when you use the maximized window without borders and you have a multi monitor setup. Sometimes, the character stops of rotating with the mouse look... like if the mouse cursor found a limit. Another, it's with the full screen mode. When I switch windows with AltTab, sometimes the game restores with the wrong display proportions.

As far I know, this bugs happens on Windows too.

I'd be surprised if the intersection of users that have such devices, use it to emulate x86 games and use steam on it is big enough to make such an impact.

Linux’s ecosystem has also improved significantly over the past two years, especially in China. Due to the influence of “Xinchuang” (that is, domestically produced Linux rebranded under another shell), many Chinese desktop applications have been reworked in the past couple of years, switching from Windows-specific tech stacks to cross-platform ones—mostly Electron, basically browser wrappers—and now support the Linux platform. The commonly used software is basically all there.

In addition, the development of LLMs has greatly lowered the barrier to using the Linux command line. Problems that used to take a full day to solve can now be handled easily by anyone who can write a prompt—just ask, copy, and paste. This has even made Windows’ command line unfriendly by comparison, despite its own major improvements in recent years, turning it into a significant drawback.

This is from the Steam hardware survey. Steam doesn't run under Wine generally so this problem shouldn't come up

> Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority?

No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.

Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.

No, the growth in Linux in the Steam Hardware survey over the last two years has little to do with the Steam Deck. When the deck was first released it had a big impact, topping out at 45% of all Linux installs in May 2024, but since then the growth has been due to other Linux distros, bringing Steam OS down to 25% of Linux installs today.

The top distro is SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but does not appear as such in the stats. The Arch appearing in the stats has to be CachyOS and other gaming-distros, as also real Arch-users.

But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.

It's not just the single distro, but single Desktop Environment upon which app and ecosystem developers will standardise. I'm glad that the latest generation of gaming distros are converging on Plasma.

Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.

Steam Deck is currently ~25% of those 5% Linux users. Good chunk but not a majority. You can estimate it in two different ways which produce similar results: filtering to Linux only looking at OS list "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" is 24.48% and in the GPU list "AMD Custom GPU 0405"+"RADV VANGOGH" add up to 23.72%.

Not true. No way to even play those games in Linux....

LLMs regularly give wrong advice for debugging and fixing Linux stacks, especially desktop stacks.

Was not the case when I wanted to use a GameCube controller via Wii U adaptor without a lot of extra lag. Yeah that's a niche, but it works fine in Windows and even Mac.

Whilst I tend to agree, I also don't recommend just pasting every command from ChatGPT into your machine without having some understanding/validating process.

Assuming you actually take the time to retroactively understand what you just did and don't become a slop-ministrator.

In my experience AI is unreliable more often than not. It is conflating topics, uses outdated information or straight out hallucinates. It can be good if you already know enough to call it out on its bullshit.

M$ shareholders ITT are sweating bullets! Gaming has always been Microsoft's redoubt; without it they will lose the retail market entirely and be left with only the B2B market coasting on the soon forgotten legacy of what Windows once was, and eventually that will dry up too as Windows fails to capture the attention of a new generation of engineers and administrators.

> Like yes it is Linux. But SteamDeck is a completely different beast from desktop Linux. They might as well be entirely different OS’s.

It's really not; SteamOS is just another GNU/Linux, and pretty close to vanilla Arch Linux for that matter.

> Especially if the SteamDeck is being used to play Win32 binaries!

Proton works fine on other distros.

Try it. Switch to desktop mode. Behold! A desktop linux!

SteamOS is so very much linux that even WebOS and Androids pale in comparisom.

SteamOS is really a desktop linux. You can switch to "desktop mode" to see the "normal desktop" and you get a KDE where you can run whatever you want.

It's "just" immutable Arch that defaults to Steam's console mode interface.

SteamOS is just an immutable Arch, and all Steam Linux games use the Steam Linux container runtime or Proton.

Bazzite and a few others provide a similar console-style experience.

What you say is not even remotely true. SteamOS is basically just Arch with steam preinstalled.

SteamOS is just steam big picture mode by default on an arch linux. You can switch to a regular KDE in one click

you can just navigate to the full linux desktop on the steamdeck?

>completely different beast from desktop Linux

Absolutely not. If you ever actually used it you would know that the only difference is a custom big picture mode like interface. Anything else is literally the same code.

The number doubled in the last year. April 2025 it was around 2.3%, and has been jumping around 2-3% for several years. Skyrocking seems justified when looking at a greater picture.

Though, it's a longer process, not something that suddenly happened immediately. The combination of Steamdeck, proton, good gaming-distributions and Windows 10 phasing out, while Windows 11 sucks and becoming an AI+Ads-infested mess, seems to have pushed this trend. So let's see how high this sky will be.

Edit: Found a good visualization: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

It's been an exponential curve since 2022.

https://gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker

Let's revisit that topic if the FED raises interest to 5%.

Well, in the overall kernel space there is nothing but Linux-based kernels right now.