It’s nice to see that Linux is doing well on Steam.
But with Steam deck being pretty successful, and showing that gaming on Linux is viable now, I kind of hoped for more.
But as the AMD numbers showed for years after Ryzen came out, the inertia in the market is huge. And change takes time.It would be unrealistic to expect a faster growth. The userbase already used windows and the global linux userbase is small. People don’t change habits so easily, and most still don’t see a reason to.
Linux is almost twice as big outside of gaming tho. In the Steam survey it sits at ~2%, whereas Statcounter has it at ~4%, based on browser data. Gaming actually lacks behind mainstream Linux adoption
But you’re considering that all linux users are gamers, and that all linux gamers use steam.
We want so much to see linux growing, that we tend to get hyped easily, but the reality is that the growth is likely to be slow and steady for the while being. If it keeps growing continuously, at some point it may break a popularity barrier and then grow faster, but it’s still far from that stage
IDK, Steam Deck is kind of a game changer, with SteamOS also getting a lot better. Kinda easy to say it is what it is in hind sight IMO.
I think the thing a LOT of people forget is that the majority of steam users aren’t hardcore do-nothing-but-gaming-on-their-pc types.
If you do things that aren’t gaming, your linux experience is still going to be mixed and maybe not good enough to justify the switch: wine is good, and most things have alternatives, but not every windows app runs, and not every app alternative is good enough.
Windows is going to be sticky for a lot longer because of things other than games for a lot of people.
deleted by creator
My hope is that there will be an uptick at the end of support for Windows 10.
I know I will really try to completely ditch windows at this time.
It’s better to try sooner. Dual booting as you figure things out like software replacement and what distro
Yes, i already installed a PoP OS in dual boot and tried things out.
I will test games on it in the next months to prepare for Windows deletion. I just hope a game I really like won’t go out not working decently on Linux or I’m afraid I will lose my momentum/motivation.
At the very least I intend to only boot windows for those game that really don’t work on Linux.
Yeah i went down the same path about a year ago and ended up forgetting i even had a dual boot of windows. I ended up just wiping the windows drive and reinstalled popos as a raid0 across both drives for that little extra speed bump for loading.
I don’t really play multi-player games but I haven’t come across anything not working from steam. The only issue I had was openRGB was detected by the insurgency sand storm anti cheat so I disabled it from launching on boot so my PC leds are just on default most of the time
Do it
There was clearly an increased popularity of Linux when Windows Vista and Windows 8 came out.
IDK if Windows 11 is bad enough to make much difference. People were really pissed about Vista and 8 which helped Linux some.Vista was what pushed me to Linux originally, and I still haven’t gone back!
That’s a pretty decent amount of time ago. I switched a bit earlier, when XP was still going strong. In 2005 when Ubuntu Breezy Badger came out. Goddam it was a good distro for the time, and it became my main OS. For years it was like free gifts when a new Ubuntu came out. In the early Ubuntu days, Ubuntu was way ahead of all the rest, and the forum was amazing.
I really miss Ubuntu from around that era, was by far the easiest thing to get up and running!
Win11 has arbitrary hardware reqs
Good Linux marketing IMHO
Yeah well, you can say anything and I wouldn’t know. I haven’t used Windows for 15 years, and Linux became my main OS in 2015.
I just ordered a new CPU and SSD, and I’m quite looking forward to making a new install, because my current system is running on a 6 year old installation. Although it’s a rolling release distro, I can see there are desktop improvements I haven’t got. Also I’ll be going back to KDE, since they’ve fixed the hotkeys on numeric keypad issue. I’m almost giddy about it. 😀 😜Even given that, I’d still think there would be an uptick in Linux market share, but only a small one. Certainly no “year of the Linux desktop” levels.
Last month, I switched from an all-AMD system to a 2+ times better all-AMD system and I couldn’t be happier! (okay, 32GB RAM and a bigger than 59W battery could’ve made me happier but I digress).
I’ve been on AMD throughout my entire Linux journey and I’ve never had any issues related to that hardware.
What laptop?
Old one was an Acer Aspire 5 with Ryzen 4500U, 8GB RAM and 512GB SSD.
New one is Thinkpad T14 with Ryzen 7840U, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD.
