Non-Windows systems fucking doubled. I’m going to have to say it: THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
Every year will be that year from now on, but unironically!
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.
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.
Shout out to Switch and click doing a run through of different distros as well. Probably the best from a “normie” perspective IMO.
Love following her journey. Most recent one she tried was endeavourOS for arch-with-training-wheels
I really like her videos!
I’ve seen those videos pop up in my recommended, but haven’t watched them yet. Might give it a watch later today, I really enjoyed the one video I watched of hers.
It makes me sad Wade said he wasn’t gonna do Linux videos anymore because the videos didn’t do well, especially his Linux Olympics video. Sure his testing methodology wasn’t perfect but for the every man type of tech tuber usually playing with old crap electronics he’s a good point of entry for that type of audience
The methodology is logical considering the constraints he has and set, IMO
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%
5% is kind of crazy already. We went from "almost 1% to 5% in not even a year
It is definitely going to rise even more these coming months as the Windows 10 ESU program reaches end-of-life in October this year.
cries in Firefox browser share
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 gave all my friends pcs , perk of the job they all run mint . my friends parents pc was win10 and borked , asked them what they need pc for , web browser . mint . i dont even ask hahha . no complaints , my one friend thought it was windows.
I have the opposite experience. They want to hate linux so much that they complain about everything they have to do differently. I told them to just use windows please
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
Same. I just don’t bother with games that don’t run on Linux anymore. I’ve got so many games, it’s not a big deal if I can’t play some even if I did pay for them.
For a little over a year now, “deck verified” directly controls my purchases lol. The markets so saturated and there are so many great games that either directly run under Linux, or run perfect with proton. I just skip the titles that don’t. So far, all my must play games work. Pound sand, shit developers and windows.
A great deal of non-deck verified games also work out of the box. ProtonDB has good information about how well something will run on Linux.
Even the game’s page on steam is usually useful. If you click on details in the deck verified page it tells you exactly why it’s not verified. Most of the time it’s something like not selecting the deck’s screen resolution by default, or needing the keyboard to enter a character’s name.
It’s tried, I have a lot installed. But it’s just so easy with the verified ones when it all just works with minimal mucking around
I do all my gaming on linux now. I consciously stopped playing online competitive games several years ago already, because I found that they stressed me out more than they entertained me, so I have no problem with most of those not working on linux.
Getting away from those felt as much of a relief as getting away from Windows was, so literally win-win for me.
Other than first-party Nintendo games, I do all my gaming on Linux
Slowly but surely 👀 Proton and Steam Deck really changed the game for Linux gaming.
Yeah, my steam deck was a gateway drug to Linux for me, I know a couple of other people who had the same experience.
Going to add one more PC in day or 2. The courier company is holding my PSU. GIVE ME MY PSU!!!
You bought a PC? In this economy?
I guess now is as good as time as ever, because they are only going to become more rare and expensive going forward. If you have the money for it of course.
Maybe, maybe not. I wonder if after the AI bubble pops (whenever that happens - crosses fingers) data centers will close and suddenly have to liquidate a bunch of assets. Kinda like what happened after the NFT crash.
It will crash but we don’t know when. It could be 2-3 years from now for all we know or it can be tomorrow. And when it crashes a lot of people are going to lose their incomes and I don’t want to be in a position when everything is cheap but I still can’t afford.
The AI bubble bursting will probably cause a shitload of tech companies to go bankrupt and cause divestment in data centres, but it’ll be enterprise hardware mainly I think. Prices likely will fall as a second order effect. And the economy will probably also collapse as bad or worse than 2008. Lots to look forward to.
The NFT crash was more digital assets with no other use-case. I can imagine there is a slight drop in adjustment pricing but if large resellers and producers want continued massive profits they will just keep the prices inflated like we’ve seen with so many other money grabs after the covid-pandemic.
Actually, at least RAM prices are currently dropping.
I don’t stuff’s gonna get cheaper anytime soon (I hope I am wrong) so might as well just get it now than later (when the world has been more unpredictable than ever)
most likely bought it in parts over a period of time, before everything went to shit as much as it is now
I hope windows 12 pushes even more AI. The shitter it gets, the more people move to linux.
I hope that too. Can’t wait to get a reason to switch back.
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.
While that page is great I think for proton https://www.protondb.com/ is a lot easier as you don’t have to be aware of how proton wraps wine to apply the fixes from winehq.
oh, proton and how it integrates has been that good for at least 2 years now
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.
I find that I don’t have to tinker with settings anymore than I did on Windows — which is to say that it’s pretty occasional
But what I like about Linux is that in the rare instances of struggling to make stuff work (like when I found out how to run mods in Baldur’s Gate 3 — big love to the random person who made an excellent Steam Community guide on how to mod Bg3 on the steam deck), at least at the end of it, I come away from the process with some additional knowledge that’ll be useful beyond the problem I was dealing with.
The OS is just way more transparent and communicative in a way that facilitates learning (once you learn the basics of how to communicate with it, such as not being terrified of the terminal)
The OS is just way more transparent and communicative in a way that facilitates learning (once you learn the basics of how to communicate with it, such as not being terrified of the terminal)
I could not agree more. Linux is not perfect in any way, but at least it tells you what the problem is. Windows? Oh sure, you can probably get that information somehow, somewhere, in some event log that is only recorded if you sacrifice a chicken at midnight and dance around a campfire on one foot.
The only settings I ever change are Linux Native to Proton 9 because it’s just SO much better for games more than 5 minutes old.
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
Wtf is “0”? 🤔
We don’t know, but Windows market share went from around 96% to 92% which is definitely a reliable stat. It could be because they have missing entries for Nobara, Bazzite, Fedora and Zorin which are all popular with people migrating from Windows. Worth mentioning that Flatpak will be under Ubuntu Core.
I read elsewhere that it’s probably what you said. A mix of others like cachyos, mint etc.
And yes totally. When I grew up Linux was nowhere except servers and some very few supernerds who mained it. MS is really helping with all the shit they do 😁
Might be the new beta for the 64 bit Steam client
Steam client is not listed as a Linux operating system. There are two entries, 64 bit and 0 64 bit.
When I click the link above, the list is different BTW. Very sus 🤔
You have to choose “Linux only” from this list, otherwise the bare link has different results:
Ah okay, just quickly checked on the phone (where i hate surfing).
yeah that’s sus
Unidentified
No more Chinese New Year, back to year of Linux!
