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.

There always seems to be some sort of controversy going on about the devs' behavior from an ethical perspective.

The only controversy I've heard of was Manjaro forgetting to renew an SSL license a while back (probably 2 years ago by now), I wasn't aware there had been other issues.

I’ve been considering doing the same recently for the reasons you listed but I’m fairly technologically stunted. How did the process go for you? How smooth was the transition? I’m fed up with windows and need a change but I’m not tech savvy at all.

I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and the installation process was exceptionally easy and the desktop environment is very straightforward.

You might want to try to install Linux on like an old laptop or something first just to get the hang of it. I installed it on my main desktop first and it went well, but now all my computers run it.

I switched over about 2 months ago after I couldn't get an older game to play after a windows update and kinda just rage quit Windows. It was building for a while, but in the end it was just a little thing that brought it tumbling down. Game worked perfectly fine with proton without any problems or tinkering. I've only had trouble getting a couple games working, and neither are big deal breakers.