A lot of mainstream TechTubers have been doing Linux content and challenges lately. Dankpods, LTT, Jay, etc. I think its really having an effect on people realizing they have other options outside Windows.

When this reaches 10%, that's a critical mass and things will start ramping up a lot. We'll see more native ports and compatibility will increase. Software companies care about 10% a lot more than twice as much as 5%

Definitely feels like it's snowballing. From barely moving for like a decade after 2012 to really pumping after the Steam Deck came out. Hoping hardware shortages can be resolved well enough for the Steam Machine to hit. It's the perfect form factor to me for my living room to finally make couch multiplayer comfortable for me and guests

I got my not-quite-as-techy friend to switch, and they're like a week in and already so pissed off about how bad windows was.

I do most of my gaming on Linux now.

It’s better than macOS has ever been, and I’m playing less PlayStation than I used to.

There’s a lot of smaller games I’m enjoying, like Esoteric Ebb or Slay the Spire 2

Games will just work these days, its amazing. Except when they want to run anti-cheat as a kernel module... And I dont want those games anyway.

Going to add one more PC in day or 2. The courier company is holding my PSU. GIVE ME MY PSU!!!!

No more Chinese New Year, back to year of Linux!

I hope windows 12 pushes even more AI. The shitter it gets, the more people move to linux.

I bet whoever at Valve that looks over this data was very confused because I got prompted for the hardware survey on my M1 MacBook Pro running Asahi. They probably looked at the reported hardware and scratched their head

Edit: actually, two of my systems probably made them scratch their heads. My main rig has a 7800XT as a main GPU and a 3090 as a secondary (video encoding/local LLM usage) and they both show up in my system info lol

Year of the Linux desktop, baby!

I play all kinds of games and they just work. Sometimes you have to adjust the settings a bit, but to be honest, that is rarely the case. At first I had problems because I wanted mod support for Cyberpunk 2077 and I tried to get the Nexus apps to work (any of them) and it just would not work. But then, someone suggested the native Linux app Limo which works very well for me for installing and administrating mods. For installing and starting the games, I used to use Lutris a long time ago, but now I rely on Heroic Games Launcher, and unlike Lutris, it has not let me down so far.

I use Bazzite btw.

Non-Windows systems fucking doubled. I'm going to have to say it: THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

I dream about the times when all software and games are made for Linux first and have Windows users use Wine lol.

I've been running games that advertise they run in linux for a few years, but only within the last 6 months or so started trying out made-for-Windows games, and it's really incredible just how good the Proton compatibility layer is now. All of the games I've tried are at least playable - most run perfectly, a few are a bit slow, and some you have to tweak settings but there's a big database of how to get different games to work at appdb.winehq.org. Not one of the games in my library don't run on linux at all, other than a couple with kernel anti-cheats that I don't play any more anyway.

I was dual-booting but a couple months ago I deleted my Windows partition and now I just run linux full time. If a game only runs on Windows, I just won't buy it.

For dummies like me, is the +3.1% of the total or just the subtotal of Linux machines?

To put it less crazy, is that a more than doubling of Linux since last time or lower, but still respectable 3% growth of Linux machines?

One is amazing and a beautiful omen, other is cool.

Such a huge increase compared to previous months, with most of it coming from ‘64 bit’ and ‘0 64 bit’ seems suspicious. Don’t give me false hope…

Looks like an error.

There's '0 64bit' and '64bit' along with huge number of 'others'

There's not a single Fedora based distro on the list, looks like they have problem identifying it.

I wouldn't be surprised if it got counted multiple times in this mess.

My bet is once they sort it out, Linux will be back to 2.5%

Slowly but surely 👀 Proton and Steam Deck really changed the game for Linux gaming.

I have a theory: Windows users don't have the skill to fix their broken PCs, and now they don't have the money to replace them.