It’s been moving fast. It barely moved like a decade ago
I’m surprised Bazzite isn’t higher on the list, here, it really seems like the OS I hear about whenever Linux gaming comes up.
I switched to Bazzite based on a recommendation and it’s been a fantastic OS for me (gaming and light development/home labbing) and I no longer have any desire to distro hop.
Took a bit to figure out the immutable stuff for some very niche things I needed done, but other than that ezpz
That list is just weird and only shows a few specific distros. If you go to the Linux only results you get way more info. It shows Bazzite as used by 5.53% of respondents, +1.29% from last month.
Ah, that makes way more sense. Nearly 6% of the gaming Linux market for such a new distro, and rapidly growing, sounds much more like where I would’ve expected Bazzite to place, based on my own experience and the tune of most recommendation threads here.
Agreed. Ive been active in a lot of Linux communities for a good while now, and I’ve never seen a single distro being recommended as much as Bazzite. Mint was probably the closest, but it’s always had detractors due to its stable base affecting hardware support.
I think it was more of a fad for a short while, but there are a lot of other much more entrenched and mainstream distros
Also Mint gets a ton of traction here too.
This graphic is just a bit misleading, and the more detailed results show the opposite story. Bazzite is as 5.53% of Linux users, up 1.29% from last month and one of the most used single distros, behind SteamOS, Arch, Mint, and CachyOS.
bazzite is bringing in new users, not converting old ones.
True, I think that’s usually the case for most distros. Most users aren’t looking for a reason to swap from a distro they’re comfortable with.
I’m on Bazzite because I use my PC at the TV with a controller these days. It’s simple to use for that. That’s pretty much it.
Bazzite has been one in a LONG line of Trendy Distros Of The Month. People have been trying to make CachyOS happen, Zorin has made a couple appearances, ElementaryOS and Pop!_OS traded blows for awhile, Nobara was in there, a long while ago there was Peppermint, I’m forgetting a lot of them.
Feels like youre really diminishing Bazzite’s popularity here. Ive seen it regularly talked about here and in a lot of YouTube videos for around a year now. Its also currently used by 5.5% of the Steam Linux player base (you can see by filtering the results by Linux only), making it one of the most popular distros for gaming right now. Also, CachyOS is just ahead of it at 6.74%. Definitely not flavor of the month numbers imo
CachyOS is attempting to fill the same workcase as bazzite and does it better. Which is the real problem for bazzite.
And cachyOS is basically just a gamer preset for endeavour. Since all the arch based distros kinda suffer from the same problem in differentiating themselves by just being glorified presets of all of the same thing. Which is both actually a rather good boon but also a bit of a problem with being a gimmick or a flavor of the month. You just kind of pick an arch preset to start with and go from there.
Of course manjaro being the weird one out.
Like if you’re just looking for a straight up preset up one button, go gaming distribution. Cachy and baz both are trying to be that same workload. But cachy just does it better with less weird quirks and issues.
Not to mention they’re both trying to be distribution so you can just put on a steam deck. And again the cachy option just has less issues and quirks.
But cachy is fighting against stupid outdated memes about Arch so it just won’t ever really catch on. So even as a flavor of the month distro, it struggles to really ever reach true fad territory.
While bazzite easily can reach it since it doesn’t have to deal with a decade of misinformation spreading memes.
I honestly think for most people atomic systems should become the default, so I’m team bazzite right now.
It just feels like they need to get over decades of bad app/file hygiene to improve.
I’m convinced Atomic systems are going to be useful in a lot of applications but I’m not giving up a typical Linux system for my main computer yet.
I have just run into such an insane amount of problems with atomic distros. The thing is that you don’t know it will be a problem until you start having a need for the functionality
I still daily drive bazzite, but embedded programming, wireshark (constantly breaks upgrading on atomic fedora), any VM that had to connect to the LAN, any sort of document signing, key management, using any sort of government ID software like Belgium’s EID to log in on a web browser, and much more is very difficult with most of the examples being dead in the water and will apparently never be attempted to be fixed.
It works great for most people, until they need to do 1 thing outside of the mainstream and it falls apart. Hell, there is literally no documentation at all on how adding a user to a group is fundamentally broken (fedora’s fault, not bazzite) and you have to copy groups manually from a non-documented file to /etc/group.
Atomic distros should replace Chromebooks and managed work/school computers. They shouldn’t replace personal all-purpose computers.
It’s a fad at best. And immutable distros are awful outside of extremely ridged use cases.
It basically is just a worse version of normal fedora or cachy OS.
It tries to both and successfully does neither job as well.
Why do you not like immutable distros?
I’m asking as a long time Mac user, just tried Linux this year, and have settled on atomic fedora and bazzite, so looking to learn not imply I know more than you or anything like that. I’m just very sold on them and the ostree idea.
See the problem is that you’re a normal computer user and not one of the 3% that actually like the experience that is the traditional Linux desktop.
Gatekeepy bullshit.
Bazzite is great, and immutable just means some things are done slightly differently, that’s all.
Somehow that does not help me know what I’m missing.
My point is you’re not missing a damn thing.
Basically, traditional Linux allows you to mess around every part of it and even completely break it if you weren’t careful enough. This is really great and powerful for people that knows what they’re doing, but for 99% of users, the ability to change the underlying operating system is not really necessary.
Thanks. That’s fair, I mostly don’t want to deal with that most of the time (I would if I had a spare computer)
Is that not possible while still having an ostree, or is that just because the ostrees are all basically just fedora?
Immutable distros are perfectly fine for 99% of use cases and are far less likely to be broken by and end user following poorly made guides on the internet.
It gives the "it just works"Ness that a Linux gaming distro for Linux noobs needed. (So far anyway)
Love to see it
3.2% is like 5 million active users if Steam overall has 156 million active users, but they’re likely higher than that
Some of us still duel-boot
duel-boot
Sounds dangerous! :)
That’s what happens when Windows overwrites your grub
Gaben embracing Arch has been great for Arch in general. I can’t even remember the last time my Arch install crashed.
Now that you’ve mentioned… Knocks on wood
Been using Arch for daily driver, web server, large data analytics machine, gaming, music making, programming, visual design and a while lot more for 15 years now. The only time I’ve had an issue with something in the official repos was when freecad was compiled with a version of a library that wasn’t compatible with a very specific thing I wanted to do and I had to recompile it. That’s it. 15 years. One issue. Not sure that even this Gaben fellow could improve on that…
Linux mint 21: loses a little
Linux mint 22: wins a little
my brother in christ. they just updated their pc
Importantly, there was a net increase in Linux users and a net decrease in Windows users.
Still increases in other areas ☺️👍
Thanks for the users, Microsoft!
It’s time to make Microsoft hurt. Let’s go!
3% is insane.
I am not a “year of linux” huffer. The majority of the population doesn’t even know what a filesystem is, much less (for example) how to get to the BIOS setting they need to even install linux.
But 3% is absolutely a threshold for “viral social spread” amongst those that can.
It’s like damn look how good the general Linux desktop got with barely any general consumer adoption for about 30 years. Imagine what it could get around ~10%. 20 years ago Mac’s were only around 5%. I love gaming on Linux but my main thought is how this is the trojan horse that brings users and some funding and developer attention to open source applications. Kdenlive needs love. Ardour needs love. Darktable. Get them all the Blender treatment someday
I think it really depends on your definition of what counts as year of Linux. Will Linux usage ever beat Windows or Mac? Of course not. But it can definitely get popular enough that companies have to think really hard about whether they need to support Linux or not. And meanwhile, Linux isn’t going to get popular overnight (or in a year, for that matter). So do you consider the year of the Linux to be the end of growth? Middle of growth? Or beginning of growth?
For me, I think year of the Linux desktop already passed in 2021, with the launch of the steam deck (where I’m defining year of Linux to be the point where Linux usage picks up and will hopefully end at a point where companies have to take Linux seriously)
I consider the “year of linux” when OEMs ship it in laptops and desktops, in volume.
In other words, it’s when I see several linux laptops in Best Buy.
Sadly, we might ‘miss’ that window. It seems like regular folks are moving to tablets, phones, and Android PCs for home use. Business will be stuck on Windows forever. So it appears the future we’re barreling to is iOS/Android for the masses, laptops (mostly) as pure workplace machines, and then the PC gaming sector essentially depreciating Windows and migrating to (in delicious irony) Windows APIs on linux.
I think there is a real change in people’s mind . Windows is at it worst since forever. Just this month 2 people in my inner circle just ask me how can they Make the switch and which distro should they use for their needs. Those 2 were hardcore Windows fan and gamer.
3% is insanely high for those of us who remember the early 2000s. I am loving this.
Linux use on steam has also passed mac use. The three most popular mac versions are still used by more than the 3 most popular linux versions, but the total for macs is under 3%.
And for me personally, I didn’t even have to give anything of value up to make the switch. I kept my old windows machine in a running condition as a backup, but I think I’m about ready to start retiring that machine entirely, at least as a windows machine.
I like how all Arch based distros are in “quotes” by the way.
Right? It’s oozing with sarcasm, like—ArCh LiNuX
lmao
I think it’s because they’re including steam os which is an Arch derivative.
Someone needs to show this to the higher ups of Ubisoft
I feel like the number of “I switched to Linux” videos on YouTube have exploded recently, although it might just be some algorithm thing.
All of the major gaming youtubers have made at least a couple videos featuring Linux over the last couple months, which is definitely a big change from the windows-only (except sometimes servers) content of years past.
Love to see it!
This site won’t update till tomorrow, but Steam’s English Linux numbers are >2x the overall numbers (China apparently hates Linux). Going to be something like 7% for English-speaking Linux use. :)
Edit: 7.09% :)
I find it weird that China hates Linux
Harder to centralize control over the user. That’s the big reason, I’d imagine.
Isn’t that just the language choice? I always use english for any OS because the translations just suck in my opinion, and make it harder to find any settings or menus. I assume it might be also partly caused by the translation not being ideal?
I find it weird if the admin was pushing for anything besides Linux. Especially apple/windows. But I know nothing about china
I’m thinking language may be a big factor too, but I was thinking from a different perspective. From what I’m seeing on a brief search, only about 5% of Chinese people speak English. If you consider that much of Linux documentation is a) heavily command line based, b) spread across a multitude of websites, and c) commands would seem to be more prone to being problematic for machine translation, I think that combination would seriously slow down adoption of Linux in China and other countries with low English adoption and perhaps with non-Latin alphabets.
All the penguins were nabbed.
I would think it might have to do with the distros they have access to. All Chinese controlled and curated.
