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Posted by haunter 11/2/2025

Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark(www.gamingonlinux.com)
832 points | 536 commentspage 7
senectus1 11/3/2025|
My son and I made the cut over to Fedora about a year an a half ago.

Neither of us miss windows at all. There are some games we cant play but at the end of the day... I dont really want what they offer (in the kernel level shenanigans.), so I cant say I miss them much.

periodjet 11/2/2025||
I honestly can’t believe it’s not much higher. It’s so easy these days with SteamOS and Bazzite.
haunter 11/2/2025||
Look at the most played games, half of them won't work under Linux because of the online components / anti cheat system. BF6, PUBG, Rust, GTAV Online etc.
drnick1 11/3/2025|||
Then it is our responsibility not to buy these games and send game studios a clear message. I would have almost certainly bought BF6 if it ran well on Proton, but EA decided to punish Linux users and also killed games that previously ran without issues when they "upgraded" their anticheat.
WhereIsTheTruth 11/2/2025|||
https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=playerCount

only 6 out of the 50 most played right now aren't working

10 millions players ingame, 90% of players are not playing these titles

jsheard 11/2/2025|||
Some of those ratings are generous to say the least. Apex Legends is probably the worst example, it's still clinging to its Silver rating despite being completely unplayable on Linux since last November.
ThatPlayer 11/2/2025||
Similar with GTA V. Still very popular, but the multiplayer doesn't work anymore. Singleplayer works though and that's enough for some people to rate it good.

Rust is also similar: multiplayer community servers with anticheat do not work. When the majority of players are on those servers, switching to Linux is not an option. But people on Linux looking for servers think it's good enough that you can play on servers with anticheat disabled.

yerich 11/2/2025||||
I have no idea where that list is coming from but many top games are missing. Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Roblox, FC26, and Battlefield 6 all do not run at all on Linux due to anti-cheat.
jsheard 11/2/2025||
It's based on Steams numbers, so yeah games like Fortnite, LoL, Valorant and Roblox won't show up at all since they aren't distributed through Steam. Battlefield 6 should be on there though, maybe ProtonDB just hasn't refreshed the stats in the few weeks since that came out.
ziml77 11/2/2025||||
That doesn't cover games not on Steam, is incorrect in at least one case about playability, and an analysis of currently active players does not account for people who play multiple games.
IshKebab 11/2/2025|||
6 out of 50 is a huge number in terms of annoyance.

It's the same reason alternative web browser engines like Ladybird are probably never going to take off. It might support 99.99% of web features - which sounds amazing! - but that probably means it's going to fail in some way on like 0.1% of sites which in practice is extremely frustrating.

efreak 11/3/2025||
Chrome no longer has the ability to run a number of extensions I like, and Firefox has abysmal performance at some bulk indexeddb operations. Safari isn't available outside Apple, and Opera and Microsoft are stuck following Google (along with all the other engines built on Chrome). There's no options left.

I hope ladybird makes it far enough that smart people start optimizing small features that rarely get used. Do that and I think it'll be successful enough to be used as a daily browser.

As much as the browser wars sucked, I can't wait for them to happen again. I'm already using 5 different browsers on mobile, since nobody wants to support containers, profiles, or organizing tabs with multiple windows.

jeroenhd 11/2/2025|||
The lack of accessible devices with first party support make mainstream Linux gaming rather annoying.

For many games, people prefer Nvidias's graphical tricks over AMD's, making AMD cards a worse deal, while at the same time Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards. It's not impossible to use their hardware anymore, but you need to know of their bullshit beforehand and even then you run the risk of messing up.

I hope Valve can get something similar to a Steam Machine programme off the ground now that games actually run on Linux. Unfortunately, I kind of doubt any vendors will bother to go through the effort of supporting their hardware on a firmware level for anything but Windows (and even at that level Windows is full of ACPI patches and driver workarounds to clean up their trash).

drnick1 11/3/2025||
> Nvidia's Linux support remains abysmal for most cards.

I can't relate. My 3090 works flawlessly on Arch, and I can play any game that does not intentionally ban Linux users through anticheat.

jeroenhd 11/3/2025||
If you can figure out how to install Arch, you're not exactly a mainstream gamer.

My 1080 also runs ~fine in Ubuntu (driver updates require a full reboot or GPU accelerated applications fail to launch). Guessing the right kernel parameters to make sleep work was a fun game that lasted a while, though. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting is that long for a reason.

Laptop GPUs are hit the worst, of course. No distro I've found can figure out how to keep the iGPU and Nvidia dGPU 1) running at the same time (so screens and HDMI work) and 2) run at more than 40fps. Nvidia forum posts go unanswered, laptop vendor forum posts are basically useless, and reported bugs/issues go stale and eventually get autoclosed.

Nvidia hardware either works fine out of the box, or you're going to lose many hours beating it into functioning form.

snowram 11/2/2025|||
You over estimate the will/knowledge of everyday people to do anything else than buy a branded PC, install Steam and be done with it.
yoz-y 11/2/2025|||
When I decided to get back into PC gaming during covid, I built a PC put Windows on it and installed GOG, Steam and Epic to turn it into a glorified console. It has been like that ever since. For anything other than gaming I use a Macbook.

If you got the means and space, I think it's the easiest solution. I do play some games on the Mac, but the experience has been rather poor outside of indie games which usually work very well.

That said, the controller support on windows constantly sucks. On macOS though, it's really easy to set up. Go figure.

drnick1 11/3/2025||
> I built a PC put Windows on it and installed GOG, Steam and Epic to turn it into a glorified console.

It's fine, if you are willing to put up with the forced logins, spyware, ads, unwanted cloud/AI integrations, requests to update/reboot when you don't want to, and dozens of other anti-features that suck up resources and actively work against the user.

andoando 11/2/2025|||
I mean that is how it should be. Im a huge nerd and even for me Im real tired having to go troubleshoot bunch of shit to get something working
BoredPositron 11/2/2025||
Because people use their PCs as general computing devices. Immutable distros are irritating for people that are used to Windows or macOS.
lawn 11/2/2025|||
Linux is miles better than Windows as a general computing device, it's not even close.
Dedime 11/2/2025|||
I wouldn't say it's perfect quite yet. I just installed Debian on my Framework, and my microphone isn't working. Debugging it for the last 30 minutes has gotten me nowhere, and half the answers on the internet don't apply to my distro. Until basic issues like this go away or have easy solutions, it's hard to recommend it to anyone.
dotancohen 11/2/2025|||
I'm going to be shown the door for this suggestion, but go consult with ChatGPT about your mic. ChatGPT had been very good for debugging Linux usability issues and papercuts in my experience.
Arech 11/2/2025||||
Is it a normal mic, or bluetooth? I think, Trixie have some regressions in bluetooth stack of Cinnamon - it worked nicely in Bookworm, but I had weird issues on Trixie that just disappeared once I switched to KDE (didn't try Gnome).
ok123456 11/2/2025|||
Audio has always been overengineered and brittle. Vanilla alsa was the sweetspot, but things like pulseaudio and all the projects that followed it to "fix" it have too many things that can go wrong.
macNchz 11/2/2025||
I don't seem to have any issues with audio anymore since Pipewire became default on Ubuntu, as a non-professional but fairly demanding user with a bunch of wired headphones plus bluetooth. I definitely used to have plenty of annoyances!
BoredPositron 11/2/2025|||
Ignorance is bliss. We are not talking about general Linux in this chain.
pacifika 11/2/2025|||
Interesting, why is that, considering macOS is itself immutable?
BoredPositron 11/2/2025||
It's not on the application boundary...
gnarlouse 11/3/2025||
I’m so sick of Windows. Steam and VSTs (music production) are the core hold outs im grappling with to make the permanent linux switch.
AuthAuth 11/2/2025||
Another Linux W, I love to see it. Thats 4 million gamer which is a sizable chunk of people to target
keyringlight 11/2/2025|
It's one of those scenarios where I've felt for years that the steam survey doesn't break things down enough to be useful for anything besides the broadest generalizations. The PC gaming market is huge, but there's going to be a lot of variety and sub-groups within it and I expect few developers are trying to target 'everyone' (the opposite of targeting).
0xedd 11/3/2025||
[dead]
shevy-java 11/2/2025||
Guys, we can do it!

LET'S GO FOR BROKE!!!

LET'S BREAK THE 3.5% BARRIER BEFORE GNU HURD WINS NEXT YEAR!!!!

wiseowise 11/2/2025|
Haters cheat sheet yo help you out, in case you’ve forgot your “arguments”:

* SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with Steam launcher

* “Only 3%?”

* Windows is still the biggest platform

bobim 11/2/2025||
I have a coworker who usually say that billions of flies can't be wrong. Maybe we should just start eating what they eat.
dotancohen 11/2/2025||
I've been saying it for years. Windows are for bugs.
ErroneousBosh 11/2/2025||
> * SteamOS is not real Linux, because normies only interact with Steam launcher

Not quite sure what your point is.

Not sure you are either.

> * Windows is still the biggest platform

100% of Windows users are using Linux every single day.