Steam On Linux Hits An All-Time High In November (phoronix.com) 32
Steam's November 2025 survey shows Linux gaming climbed to its highest share in a decade "thanks to the success of the Steam Deck, the underlying Steam Play (Proton) software, and now further excitement thanks to the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: A decade ago in the early Steam days the initial use was around 3% and back then the Steam user-base in absolute terms was much smaller than it is today. Back in October Steam on Linux finally re-crossed that 3% threshold after for years being stuck in a 1~2% rut. Now the Steam Survey results were published minutes ago for November and they continue an upward trend for Linux.
Steam on Linux is up to 3.2%, an increase of 0.15% for the month. One year ago Steam on Linux was at 2.03% last November, 1.91% for November 2023, and a decade ago for November 2015 was at just 0.98%. [...] Due to AMD APUs powering the Steam Deck, AMD CPUs continue to power nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems. Meanwhile under Windows, AMD has around a 42% CPU marketshare.
Steam on Linux is up to 3.2%, an increase of 0.15% for the month. One year ago Steam on Linux was at 2.03% last November, 1.91% for November 2023, and a decade ago for November 2015 was at just 0.98%. [...] Due to AMD APUs powering the Steam Deck, AMD CPUs continue to power nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems. Meanwhile under Windows, AMD has around a 42% CPU marketshare.
So... Hockey stick? (Score:2)
Would make sense. Even normies are fed up with Win11.
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Eh. To some value of yes and some value of no.
The library aint nearly as large, but surprisingly a lot of it is there. But don't expect it to be equivelent to a frebreathing 64 core Ryzen 9 with 5090 GPU. Obviously.
Re: I mean (Score:2)
You think people complaining about Windows 10 computers were "only" supported for 10+ years will end up being perfectly fine when they realize that Apple supports their devices for years less?
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So... Hockey stick
Nah, just a minor bump.
To get the hockey stick effect (like climate change), you need the new users actually feedback into improving the software they use. That doesn't happen much already much less with people with a focus on gaming.
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Aren't alternate versions of Windows bad to just give a reason to upgrade again? I suspect the windows slice of the pie will shrink a bit, until Windows 12 when some users will be tempted back to something that looks more like Windows 7 or Windows 10.
It's confirmed (Score:2)
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Give it time, he also doesn't watch TV, but only just recently stopped announcing it.
Going to be tiring (Score:2)
What nobody notices in Steam HW Survey (Score:4, Insightful)
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The steam deck is AMD.
And most linux users will recommend AMD for a boot & play first experience
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Plus nvidia are targeting bitcoin/llm users while gamers take a back seat.
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As are the GPUs on both the mainstream major gaming consoles (PS5 and Xbox). AMD GPUs arent going anywhere, especially now that their AI picture is starting to come a bit more into focus
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Yes, and also the open driver is worth a shit unlike the closed driver for Windows, which provably is not. So not only do you not have the Nvidia driver shittiness, you don't have the AMD Windows driver shittiness either. If you're not deeply into LLMs then AMD is the obvious choice for a GPU for Linux.
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I saw an interview with Linus Torvalds the other day, and he seems to think Nvidias getting better behaved with its drivers now (although my understanding is he's not as fussed by closed source drivers as others are in the industry).
Nvidia are shits though. I know they used to maintain a CUDA implementation for macs. Now? Nope...
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Right, but this is Steams numbers, who're mostly interested in gaming, and the Linux Nvidia drivers are way behind AMDs. I've been buying Nvidia for decades- but having recently dropped Windows in its entirety- My next big GPU will be AMD.
My RTX2080ti runs fine, but an equivalent AMD card would just run better.
My migration. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a janitor, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know how to sharpen myself when needed.
My main system was first built in 2005 when my then room mate bought me all the components. Since then I've maxed out the CPU and RAM, put in a GPU as good as I could before hitting motherboard bottleneck. It ran everything I wanted well, up to and including Half Life Alyx on a second hand VR rig. Then over the past year or so the performance of the Win 10 installation started to degrade; taking literally 10 minutes to boot up and settle down enough to use and freezing up for minutes at a time or having to reboot on occasion. Frustrating.
I threw an old 1TB SSD I harvested from a decommissioned server from the IT room at work that was getting thrown out and installed Ubuntu Linux on it two weeks ago. Took about an hour. Took longer to download Steam the two games I'm currently playing on the Win 10 drive. That Ubuntu installation Steam games, and Chrome, which was pretty much all I was using that system for besides watching pirated movies, boots in under a minute now and I'm getting satisfactorily comparable performance. I know there are tweeks I need to learn about to get the best performance, and that will be a leisurely endeavor over the next few weeks.
I'm happy enough with the Ubuntu that this morning I booted up the Win 10 drive for the first time since I installed Ubuntu (because I had not found a need to do so previously) to copy over all my 'files' from my profile onto an external HDD and run chkdsk to make that external HDD accessible to Ubuntu. Once I've finished that migration I plan to clean and clear that Win 10 installation down to bare bones and shrink that drive down to free space on the 'data' partition for use when I'm running Ubuntu.
This kind of migration is probably happening all over the planet by gamers that have perfectly fine rigs of hardware capable of running their 10s of thousands of hours worth of backlogged Steam and Epic games that want an up-to-date OS but are not willing to or unable to shell out for a new system just because Microsoft wants more profits.
If you're in an IT role in a corporation, government, or NGO where they will be decommissioning a lot of old Win 10 boxes because they can't upgrade to 11 I beg of you, please, get under the skin of your marketing department to get them obsessed with the idea of getting the company 'good optics' in the local media by wiping those systems of Windows, installing Linux, and giving them away to local underprivileged children. A Linux box, a keyboard, a mouse, and an HDMI cable to attach it to the family TV will mean that there will be an entire generation of kids growing up with Linux and FOSS.
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Then over the past year or so the performance of the Win 10 installation started to degrade; taking literally 10 minutes to boot up and settle down enough to use and freezing up for minutes at a time or having to reboot on occasion. Frustrating.
What storage were you using to boot windows 10 from? Was it a hard drive? And how old was it? Because you clearly left those parts out, after you had switched to a 1 TB SSD, to then praise Ubuntu was booting so much faster. It sounds like you just needed to clone your windows 10 install to the replacement SSD, since your storage clearly was dying.
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The Win 10 OS partition was 2Tb of Western Digital 4TB WD Red NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD - 5400 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, SMR, 256MB Cache, 3.5" - WD40EFAX bought and freshly installed in July 2023. It was running nice and fast and I had no problems with it at first, but performance degraded over time. I ran the drive diagnostics a couple of months ago and it came back with no issues.
You're right that I am making a somewhat unfair comparison. I have another of the exact same 1Tb SSDs from the exact same decommissi
I want to see cyberdecks become popular (Score:2)
Actual reality (Score:2)
This year in late october and early november a lot of popular youtube techie channels did a bunch of "gaming on Linux" themed reviews and opinion pieces.
They generally focused on Linux on desktop, and there was a lot of pushing of Bazzite, which is a distro with a very windows-like UI and that is generally configured to have best possible compatibility with steam for gaming purposes.
Marketing works.
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\o/ (Score:1)
For some reason I can hear the theme song from Star Trek Enterprise whilst reading this.
Win 11 Bootloader Signing (Score:1)
Regardless of my hardware compatibility (I never really checked since the Windows 10 nag screen for 11 saw I had TPM turned off and told me I was not able to upgrade), the idea of needing Microsoft to sign my linux boot turned me off. "My bootloader kneels not to Redmond."
For years I really only played two games; Civ 6 and Diablo 3
So does it natively play Civ VI? (Score:2)