Valve is going to be a significant contributor to the death of Windows. Legit one man’s integrity is going to bring an end to a literal monopoly as adjudicated in the late 90’s. Hail gaben.
The fact that he worked on the early versions of Windows makes it even better.
May he live forever.
Not just windows but also Google. Can’t wait to destroy them by installing SteamOS everywhere.
Been on Linux for gaming for almost a year now and completely windows free since November last year. It’s glorious.
I use Arch, btw.
What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:
OS Total % of Players Monthly Change Windows (Total) 92.33% -4.28% Windows 11 64 bit 66.85% +10.57% Windows 10 64 bit 25.36% -14.89% Linux (Total) 5.33% +3.10% Arch Linux 64 bit 0.34% +0.15% Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 0.27% +0.13% Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 0.14% +0.06% Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.07% +0.02% Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% Manjaro Linux 64 bit 0.06% +0.06% From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.
In lifetime customer value it’s billions
That 3% jump seems almost too big for me to believe. With the seemingly annual increase of Chinese users in February, which is then corrected in March (which we can see this time), I’d probably wait another month or two if more stats get adjusted or if Linux stays at over 5%.
Last month had Chinese New Year in it, and apparently China isn’t big on Linux
Yeah, but it’s not like it was at almost 5% in January.
As I wrote in another comment, if you ignore February completely, ~3% to ~5% in a month or two is gigantic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it drops back down again next month, but maybe it stays at 5% because the old data was faulty.
If you add a rough trendline since Win10 EoL then 5% is pretty reasonable
Nice, what software is that?
This is not being ignored my Microsoft
My impression is that Microsoft won’t care all that much. They are primarily a cloud service provider at this point, and while they will try to squeeze Windows users for as much money and information as possible before it goes down for good they have no real interest in keeping on developing Windows. It’s just not where the real money is at.
It doesn’t make sense outside the world of capitalism, but we see again and again that big tech companies are happy to kill even profitable services if they are not their most profitable services. Microsoft’s revenue these days comes from selling cloud office solutions to (seemingly) every company on the planet. Even their own cloud runs on Linux, meaning that Microsoft themselves makes more money off Linux than Windows these days.
Windows is now in the extraction phase of enshittification, and Microsoft will profit as much as they can from it while they still have market power while spending minimal resources developing the product. Windows has effectively been declared dead already, and remains as a sofware zombie just like Facebook. Windows 12 is not going to be an improvement upon 11; it’ll be another fuck you to the customers, and the beatings will continue until customers leave for good and Microsoft are finally relieved of their side gig of making an operative system.
I think we’re both right in a way. They won’t care about Windows specifically, but Windows to them isn’t the product anymore. It’s the entrypoint for users to Microsoft services, which is why they advertise so much in Windows now for OneDrive, Office, Copilot. You’re essentially already in their store just by using Windows. So the real loss isn’t that people aren’t using Windows, it’s that people are cancelling OneDrive and Office subscriptions. That is what is going to be noticed.
I’ve dabbled with Linux over the past 25 years. Last November, I built a high end gaming PC spec’d for Bazzite.
I haven’t touched Windows for gaming in over 4 months.
what type of hardware did you pick for Linux vs Windows? I know for GPU AMD works better, but anything else?
- AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
- XFX Speedster MERC310 AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX 24GB GDDR6
- Corsair Vengeance DDR5 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 6000MHz CL30
- Gigabyte X870E AORUS Elite WIFI7 AMD AM5 LGA 1718 Motherboard
- 4 TB Samsung NVME
Yep, my steam rewinds have been 100% Linux for a couple of years now.
I think the only exception in that time was AW2 because it’s an EGL exclusive (and ray tracing/mesh shading support in proton were still a bit lacking in performance).
There are sacrifices. Space Marine 2 doesn’t work despite having a beast of a machine. It seems to be optimized for Windows / Nvidia. I can’t use my racing wheel. It is detected as a device, but I’m unable to configure it due to how Bazzite sandboxes devices and programs from each other.
Eventually these may be resolved. In the meantime, I’m playing Kingdom Come 2 and Arc Raiders along with hopping around a massive backlog playing 5-30 min of games I’ve accumulated over the years, like wandering a massive arcade. Any given evening, I turn on the TV, switch to input 1 and there’s the Steam Deck UI where I left it last. No mysterious reboot showing me a Windows login, no surprise, required Windows update forcing me to wait 15 min before I can start playing.
It’s fucking awesome.
I’ve played SM2 (single player) just fine with a 6950XT on Mint. Was it multiplayer that didn’t work?
Never played multi. I reinstalled yesterday and have had no problems. It looks and plays amazing. Very happy to see this working now.
You might have had the same issues with SM2 I did; periods of smoothness followed by severe stuttering. In the past few weeks, they put out a patch that fixed things for me. That said, I’m on Nvidia.
I reinstalled after this thread. I no longer have performance issues! I’m on AMD. Hell yes.
Are you a Fanatec user? If so, that’s a bummer that Bazzite is causing issues. I’ve been on Nobara for a couple years and have had no issues with my CSL DD.
It’s a Logitech G29. I’ve read that other distros do not have this issue, that it’s something to do with Bazzite being an immutable operating system. Does Nobara have a gaming mode? I like Bazzite because it feels like Steam Deck.
Last October, I set up my system to dualboot either Windows or Linux Mint. Since the start of 2026, not once have I booted into Windows. Mint works great. May that number continue to go up.
Same, at this point I’m worried booting into windows will brick my bootloader.
If your reason to keep windows is “but I luv Fortnite and LoL and CoD” then you should be banished to an Amish community.
Fuck those entire playerbases. I hope they all get mandatory $70/wk battle passes.
this is you on the left (i use arch if anything)
Accurate.
To be fair some great mutliplayer games unfortunately have battle passes. That’s not on the playerbase… I could swap to Linux, but then I couldn’t play PUBG as their antivirus doesn’t work in Linux. That’s not a compromise I’m willing to take, unfortunately.
I want sitting in the concept entirely, I just hate those games so much that I want those players pushed out so they die off.
No game should make your OS choice for you. I’m an ideal world it wouldn’t matter, but getting off windows is way, waaaaaay more important than playing a specific game. (Or it should be, if you have any idea how bad m$ really is.)
I’m doing my part!
But seriously I would encourage everyone to try a dual boot with Linux even if you don’t end up switching. Just to get the numbers higher. Developers see these numbers and if it gets high enough they are going to take it seriously. Can’t wait to see what happens with the steam machine numbers.
