Bazzite did it for me, never looked back.

I do wonder if there's any selection bias in the hardware survey steam does. I'm sure they sample randomly, but I think a user on Linux might be much more eager to participate in the survey than a Windows user, simply because Linux users tend to have a desire to be more vocal about their OS use than Windows users.

Three months of using Arch and you've not included your 'btw' when claiming to use it? Most suspicious.

But yeah, agree completely. I made a new-years resolution about five years ago to try 'Linux only gaming for a month' rather than dual booting; worked so well that I wiped Windows a few months later and have never missed it for a minute. That was for Mint, which is great but hard to keep cutting-edge. Decided to try Arch instead, and after a couple of false starts (hadn't read the install guide carefully enough to have networking after restart, that kind of thing) it's been absolutely superb - rock solid, got everything I want at the very latest versions for work and games, best documentation of any distro.

I switched to Linux mint a year ago and play most of my games on it. However, i still need a windows installation for those games that refuse to work on Steam (I play Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 coop and I can’t get expedition 33 to run on Linux. But besides that, i spend most of my time on mint (mainly Monster Train 2 and Mechabellum)

Zoring boi!

I am one of them now.

im using fedora and its nice, but i installed bazzite on a mates laptop recently, and when it comes to nvidia, and especially hybrid graphics (laptops with nvidia gpus), it’s so much easier to use bazzite with their preconfigured nvidia stuff than anything else. so, bazzite is really nice to use and based on fedora, but for my main machine i’ll probably stick to fedora for now.

manjaro really does some things right. it’s the best grub boot menu i’ve ever seen, with perfect dual/triple booting detection and such, but it kept breaking all the time and was a pain to fix. switched to fedora and never looked back. i got debian on machines where i don’t want to fiddle with the is often. then fedora on what i use a lot and need to be flexible. bazzite on machines where its supposed to just work and manage the nvidia optimus pain, which it does really well. also i’d opt for mint for people starting out, or not as tech savvy people.
different distros for different use cases, but manjaro has proven to be too much work (on my workstation and those of multiple friends).
(also i’m looking into nixos)

This is most likely a combination of:

• Trump's tariffs driving international users to seek alternatives to American OSes

• Windows 10 support coming to an end soon despite most people not wanting to upgrade or not having a desktop capable of upgrading to 11

• Steam supporting Linux increasingly well

And steam deck

Thanks. I was hoping there was some way to voluntarily help those stats along. It's a known phenomenon in the linux community how much we hate leaving a crumb trail of any kind, but it would be nice to send a signal to game developers to start taking us seriously, and that might just be through steam stats after all.

Well that comes under point #3 but yeah

i still need a windows installation for those games that refuse to work on Steam (I play Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 coop and I can’t get expedition 33 to run on Linux

All three of those have a gold or higher rating on Linux, meaning they run fine on linux with little to no effort. Helldivers 2, Space Marine 2, Expedition 33. If you are having specific issues, check out the linked pages where people share their fixes.

Linux users are also more likely to be private people and not willing to share info about their system. Both of those two effects are probably pretty small and cancel eachother for this survey.

2 months in.
Linux Mint.
I am doing my part!

THERE ARE DOZENS OF US

I'm on Fedora and I always use the flatpak version of steam, which is listed as 4th. If you redistributed the flatpaks to the actual distro, I wouldn't be surprised if Fedora was in the top 10. Probably above CachyOS. Fedora encompasses all the immutable child distros like Silverblue, Kiniote, and Bazzite.

To your first point, it's not even so much the tariffs; it's the threat to our Canadian sovereignty. A lot of Americans see it as a joke, but a president shouldn't be talking about their allies like that. We don't really expect better from that waste of skin, but the lack of a response from the average American about this specifically is a slap in the face from our closest allies.

I think most of us have experience of the concept of something being said ironically, as a joke, at first but then being increasingly serious. It's like magic really does exist and if you say words often enough they start affecting reality, like a spell. Freedom of speech is a right but it's also a profound responsibility.

I installed Bazzite earlier this year and it's working great for me!

My dad installed Steam OS on one of his secondary PC's not too long ago.