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I just made the switch. I had been developing on Windows for the last couple of years, mostly to get used to the ecosystem. I wanted to be able to write C and C++ like I do on Linux, without an IDE and with the native toolchain (i.e. no cygwin). On top of that, I play Overwatch every night.

Windows just seems to have zero focus on performance though. React based start menu with visible lag, file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them, mysterious memory leaks not reflected in task manager processes.

I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough. I can run Overwatch via Steam and pull comparable FPS to Windows (500 FPS on a 3090 with dips into the 400s). Memory usage is stable and at a very low baseline.

It is nice to come back to Linux, and with games I don't really have a need to run Windows anymore.

I made the switch more than a year ago and it's been basically problem free.

Almost all modern games work flawlessly through proton and I get better compatibility for really old stuff through lutris than I ever did on windows (I used to have to run a win 3.1/95/98 vm to play certain older games, now I just use lutris/wine).

The only stuff that doesn't work is multiplayer games with unsupported anticheat - it's always a crapshoot when something new and multiplayer launches. My backup plan for those if I really want to play them is to just get them on PS5.

IMO the biggest barrier to linux is disappearing - the requirement to know how to use the command line. You still have to use it, but you don't have to know how to use it anymore with the introduction of LLMs.

I also have switched my primary desktop from Windows to Linux, and now when I have an issue, I just ask an LLM. I play pretty fast and loose with just chucking commands it gives me into the command line. I'm pretty well versed in linux sysadmin things, but LLMs make it so easy I don't even bother trying to solve things myself first.

I have a few people in my friend group who aren't well versed, but they're able to navigate linux just fine by doing this same approach.

There's still friction, don't get me wrong, but it's a different type of friction. On Windows there are far fewer bugs, but there's friction introduced due to it being non-unix based (especially when it comes to code/doing any sort of model training) and due to anti-patterns Windows keeps shipping into the OS. On linux, the friction is just bugs. You can address / fix bugs for the most part, but you can't fix Windows' friction points.

I was really proud that my kids (8,10,12) all have used linux for gaming for the last several years. Steam runs perfectly for most games.

And, they know how to to use "flatpak update" to update the sober runtime for Roblox (I know this is not steam, but it is an example of how well other things run on linux). I'm so proud (and ashamed they play Roblox, but choose your battles).

But, Fortnite.

I tried to run a Windows VM, but that was a poor substitute.

Is there an option for Fortnite on Linux?

As strange as it sounds, I think Valve is extremely well-positioned to ship what becomes one of the first true Linux desktop experiences. There's a huge demand for gaming x ai development, both of which have similar hardware requirements, and Valve is already polishing their linux experience with Steam Deck. If they launch their own desktop with a properly managed OS and hardware, I think it would legitimately become a contender among a very wide range of users.

27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.

Steam and Ubuntu has worked really well for me, big picture mode + hdmi switch has made for a very-close-to-console experience

I am playing mostly single player campaign type games (Assassins creed, RDR2, etc) which certainly improves the picture.

If steam really wanted to put a knife in games on windows, it would develop an anticheat and give it away for free. That is AFAICT the only thing keeping people on windows for modern, multiplayer games.

It's weird how Steam doesn't automatically set the toggle that lets you play most Windows games through Proton instead of having that be an opt-in you need to know about. It really is extremely stable and polished these days.

Biggest hurdle for me to do this is just multiplayer games. I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.

Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.

I zeroed my (last ever) Windows gaming rig just yesterday. I’ve been eyeing Bazzite but ended up going with Pop, since I’ve previously had good experience on it with Nvidia.

What finally let me do it was moving all my social gaming to PS5. Ime it’s really only games with anti-cheat requirements that can be a crapshoot on Linux. I can’t really recall ever running into other issues with anything on my (Linux-based) Steam Deck over the past couple of years. I’ve emigrated from my home country so gaming is important to me as a way of staying in touch with friends and family - something I wasn’t willing to risk by switching away from a working setup. A PS5 is a convenient and reasonably economical way to address that.

Feels pretty great to know that after 40+ years of relying on it - some good but a lot bad - I’ll never have to touch Windows again.

Made the switch to Mint recently. Steam says that of 750 games on my account, 748 can run on Linux, and I've had no problems with the dozen or so I've played lately.

Evidently it's not all Steam Deck either; I checked our internal stats and on PC yesterday 1.24% of Warframe players were using WINE and another 0.76% were playing on Deck!

I'm one of them! I dipped my toe in the water with a Steam Deck and had such a great experience that I recently purchased a Framework Desktop and installed Bazzite on it. It's been great. Everything I play just works and the performance is good enough to just forget about as a concern.

After many years playing on Linux, first struggling with Wine then with Proton when it came out, had to install Windows on my gaming pc. I mostly play Overwatch 2 with friends on my very short free time, thanks to a Steam bug (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1028...), on every single evening I had to wait forever (seriously, 15+ min) for shaders to compile or start the game immediately but suffer on every match beginning (different map) with stuttering.

That’s a deal breaker for me, I tried a fresh Bazzite install (from Arch) before giving up, exact same issue.

I wish Valve comes around one day and fixes that, I’ll kick Windows out of life in a heartbeat.

I've been running Fedora at home for about a decade now, and I've been doing my gaming on it for the majority of that period.

I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.

The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.

That linear trend line does not seem to fit very well, I say we are looking at the beginning of a hockey stick :)

Stopped dual-booting for games and formatted the partition some time after Windows 7 EOL. Thank you Wine contributors, Valve and lord Gaben.

I recently played Age of Empires 4 on Bazzite on a Framework and I was surprised at how well everything worked. I didn't have to wade through a forest of permission dialogs and popups. Compared to macOS, Steam even opened up faster.

The minor things were wonky default graphics and mouse acceleration settings, but these were easily fixed from the game menus.

It's crazy to me that Arch Linux is the second biggest Steam distro.

That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists. You'd think the more 'user-friendly' distros would be higher.

For me I have been enjoying bazzite os

Recently, I had to switch from Windows 11 to macOS at work. While the MacBook's hardware is truly impressive, the desktop experience is so poor that I wonder how you are supposed to use it.

At least it reminded me of why I like my KDE Plasma desktop so much. And then I wonder why people are talking about the year of the Linux desktop, because in my experience, Linux already offers the best desktop experience.

I was tired of sound stuttering on windows in expedition 33, nothing helped. Installed bazzite, issue almost solved. Game works much better.

Whoa, I thought Ubuntu was the most popular distribution. Arch and even Linux Mint are beating it?

Again, I should mention that Linux users usually only see the survey once a year, if you want to get the survey once a month (like it does on windows), you have to close steam monthly and edit your config.vdf file to set the survey date to last year.

Make that 3.0000001%

After trying Bazzite for a few weeks around 1.5 years ago, I was pleasantly surprised but the (back then) poor state of nVidia support was an issue. I went back to the Windows 10 partition with the intention of switching over for good once the support ran out. I went a few days past that date, but seeing this article yesterday evening made me pull the trigger. Made a CachyOS USB stick, swapped the NVME out for a fresh one (the 3080 was blocking it and the release springy thingy on the PCIe connector was almost inaccessible, grr) and it's been smooth sailing. I'm also trying not to install Chrome at all this time, let's see if I manage.

I was keeping my games in a separate drive already, so when I mounted it and told Steam to look there, it just recognized everything and let me play right away!

It also exposed me to a new shell (fish) but that didn't go well. I ripped it out within seconds when the tab completion picked up files NOT matching what I had already typed, WT actual F? I'm sure it's configurable but screw that.

It is always with great fear and trepidation that I install the drivers for my discrete GPU on my Ubuntu system and configure the system to use it. The state of affairs might be better these days, but I remember it rarely working and having a high likelihood of horribly breaking the configuration, and trying to rectify it in the terminal while frantically searching forums on my phone.

I am a big fan of gaming on Linux, but I've been running into weird bugs with some of my favorite games.

For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)

As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.

It hasn't been totally flawless but I am able to play expedition 33 and poe1 using mint on my Thinkpad (it's not a toaster it has a 3080ti, biggest issue is cooling).

My son (8yo) and I have been running bazzite on mid tier AMD hardware for almost a year. It was so solid and such a good experience that I just upgraded us to a desktop with an nvidia 5080. Bazzite deck mode (beta) has been glitchy, but desktop mode has been rock solid. This is a total game changer. I gave up my Xbox subscription and am so happy to be back on Steam without having to tolerate windows.

Steam Deck on the go, Bazzite for desktop. Match made in heaven.

Considering how Microsoft is handling the Windows 10 to 11 upgrade it wouldn't be surprising to see many developers jump ship over to Linux. Some European countries/companies are already trying to get away from Microsoft due to security and monetary concerns, so why wouldn't developers and consumers do something similar?

This weekend I finally freed my pc from Windows10 and installed cachyOS. It all worked better and easier than expected.

I finally got around to switching to Ubuntu, keeping my windows partition open just in case. Other than a few configs I needed to copy from windows, I haven't felt the need to go back to windows. I control my work computers from my gaming machine using Synergy and a customizable keyboard (Zsa moonlander), and though it took some time to get things to work properly, it works without a hitch. I play games on my Ubuntu machine and also do some imagen work with comfy ui and it works a treat. Other than the keyboard shortcuts for deleting a word Vs deleting a line differing (cmd delete deletes a line, whereas ctrl delete deletes a word, but in 99% of other case, ctrl/cmd are interchangeable in shortcuts), the experience is great.

The Year of Linux on the Desktop is actually coming...

About every 3 months or so, I install some gaming Linux distro (or, if I'm in the mood, install Linux Mint from scratch and try to configure it for gaming) and get solely disappointed and return to windows.

Most of the Linux hurdles in day to day work can be overcome (mostly is the lack of the apps I normally use that cause some attrition, but with some compromises and some work I can get around it). But for gaming (at least in NVIDIA GPUs) it keeps failing.

I have very limited time for gaming (around 2-4h per week), I don't want to keep having to eternally fiddle with game settings, fixing bugs, fixing launchers, try different Proton versions, etc, etc, etc, every time I sit down for a bit of gaming. And Linux, unfortunately, is just not really there.

There have been a few mentions in this thread of portable gaming PCs like the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally. Has anyone here tried using them as a primary machine? I've been thinking that since I travel with a portable keyboard and mouse anyway, maybe one of those machines might not be too bad for actual work?

I am considering making the switch to Linux for my software + data science (primary) and gaming (secondary) setup.

I use a LG OLED TV as screen, so no displayport inputs. Only HDMI 2.1.

How is the support for Linux + HDR + HDMI 2.1 + 120 Hz + VRR + Nvidia (5000 series)?

Does this over count because I think good chunk of Linux people (including me) have dedicated windows or maybe old windows machine where they play some of the games that are unplayable on linux. Also double boot is something that would be common in situations like that. In such case, I think this should be higher a little bit. Or Am I missing something?

I contributed 2 devices of Linux Steam devices, I can now play windows only game, such as black myth: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2358720/Black_Myth_Wukong...

I suspect that if this number gets much higher and I also suspect it will, MS is going to deploy nuclear options to break Proton and, with it, Valve's Linux ambitions.

I recommend everyone to switch not only to linux but TWM (thin X11 desktop) and ARM (3588 to be specific).

That way you are saving 10x electricity AND moving away from M$ in one blow.

Then stop using closed source software, and start releasing your software as open or source-available.

And I promise the world will become a more peaceful place, slowly then all at once.

Windows will maintain its user base until schools adopt a different OS. Until that happens, Linux will keep growing into the single digits.

Nice!

Meanwhile Wine fixed 32-bit OpenGL path performance problem in new wow64 mode, so now you don't need 32-bit Linux dependencies to run 32-bit games in Wine anymore (that affects DX7 games for example that run through OpenGL via WineD3D).

I only wish Fortnite were possible. that’s the only thing I keep windows around for.

I'm using Steam on Arch and am very happy with it.

The recurring compilation of Vulcan shaders after every update bothers a bit, but it works very well.

As a Steam game developer I don’t think I can ever forgive Linux for being 1% of our players but 50% of our support tickets. I probably shouldn’t hold a grudge, but I do!

I suppose it’s probably better in 2025 now that the best API for Linux gaming is Win32. Proton is genuinely spectacular.

I love my Steamdeck. SteamOS is great. Supporting one distro is easy. It’s supporting a million unique permutations that is pure nightmare fuel.

I doubt I was included in this survey but I finally wiped my Windows partition and went all in on CachyOS on my gaming PC this week. Gaming Copilot spying on me in Windows 11 was the last straw.

I’m using steam on Ubuntu 24.04 with 9y old hardware (which was mid-tier when new), playing mostly 2d platformer games and older resident evil titles. Never had any issues, this setup runs like a champ

After 20+ years with Apple, I'm 90% on Linux at this point.

Two desktops, two AI workstations, two laptops, and a handheld. Even my wife is running Linux.

My personal phone and work laptop are the last holdouts.

With the Steam Deck included, I had no idea we are so few.

macOS even fewer, which I can understand. That Apple had to introduce a literal Game Mode in their OS, to make games viable at all, speaks volumes.

2026 WILL BE THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

I honestly can’t believe it’s not much higher. It’s so easy these days with SteamOS and Bazzite.

Going on 2 years of linux only, between Debian and Endevour, other than linux nvidia drivers crapping themselves basically every update its been awesome. I do miss Fusion360 and League with friends, but its been overall very good and I recommend it to anyone on the fence. Break free.

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.

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

I installed steam os this week on some old hardware I had lying around (all AMD) everything runs perfectly, zero fiddling around. All my games run fine - admittedly I'm not playing any of the latest and greatest aaa titles but baldurs gate 3 and the latest katamari game run great.

These things go slowly an then all at once. The catalyst will be one or a few of the AAA November titles shipping with Linux support. That will eliminate most of the gaming crowd's last reason to cling to Microsoft.

It may even kill console gaming because the Steam Deck is already a fantastic experience just waiting for more games. It's not a small demographic either, it's something like 40% of males age 18-35, plus all of the people in their circles who come to them for tech support. Once market share gets up to 30% or so it becomes a cool trend, that other gamers want to emulate, streamers and influencers get involved. Then around 50% market share the bullying starts. "Windows is for people too stupid to figure out Linux" says a Linux Mint enjoyer to a Windows 11 plebian.

Valve has done a great job getting things started, but it's the studios' turn to make a move now.

I'm no stranger to Linux and its setup. homeservers, pi's and any old laptop I come across.

But for my main Desktop(gaming,dev,fun,...) I've reluctantly bought a W11 key (cheap one thank god).

I don't mind working through driver issues and needing time to figure stuff out but the thing that bothers me is 'Compatibility between online games and Linux is hindered by anti-cheat software, which often lacks Linux support, especially kernel-level anti-cheat systems' (thx google).

I could go on a very technical rant, or start about setting up w10/w11 vm's with 5% loss in performance etc...

But honestly, I wanna play my online gaems =(

I started using Proton recently and it is quite impressive. Some games have native support, some use Vulkan, others want to run on SteamDeck. I haven't booted Win 11 in more than a month. Not having to dual boot any time I want to switch work/fun is great - even if reboot doesn't take that long these days. I tend to play older, single player games, not everything is perfect, but I like it much more than being frustrated by Windows - using Fedora btw.

Gaming on Linux is great. I do it on PC and my Steam Deck handheld, on my laptop, with Steam, Heroic Launcher, and sometimes plain Wine. For anti-cheat multiplayer stuff, I reboot to my Win 10 LTSC, and that's about it for my Windows usage for the last 10 years.

running supertuxkart windows build with proton.

That's awesome! I've come to take "the year of the Linux desktop" as a prophecy of sorts. It might take another 20 years, or desktops might vanish, but it is going to happen. Slow and steady wins the race. Best regards from a decade-plus Linux full-timer!

Guys, we can do it!

LET'S GO FOR BROKE!!!

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

I didn't expect Linux to be above macOS despite Wine's awesomeness.

- Windows 94.84%

- Linux 3.05%

- macOS 2.11%

Good. Hopefully it will tip to 95% in a few years. I'm so sick and tired of the Windows dependency. Microsoft doesn't give 2 fucks about games unless they can make money off it. I have a few Steam games I can only play on Linux now, ironically.

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.

Another Linux W, I love to see it. Thats 4 million gamer which is a sizable chunk of people to target