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I didn’t want to use Windows 11.
Nobody likes using Windows. People merely tolerate it because of the other stuff the like that runs only on Windows.
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.
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’m extremely skeptical about Steam’s statistics. They seem to have wild fluctuations like this on a regular basis. Not to mention the statistics they show about me in their “year in review” are often just very very wrong.
They fluctuate a lot, but I have yet to see a fluctuation that can’t be explained away as “a ton of Chinese players played this month” or “a ton of Chinese players did not return this month”. You can check Gaming On Linux’s Steam Tracker page, and the rise has been fairly steady when you filter for English only. That said, these surveys are often revised a handful of days after initial posting, so check back in a week to see the more accurate data.
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
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.
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%.
Hah! I contributed to this, was quite happy when I got the steam survey on my Linux rig.
I distro hopped a bunch in March. Tried like eight distros, maybe more. I installed steam on all of these to see how it works.
Someone please lead a Great Linux Crusade across the wall.
Anyone from that side of the world? I wonder why their Windows usage is so high.
Probably because of League of Legends. Half of the playerbase is in China.
Chinese government uses Linux though. They have their own homegrown distro called NeoKylin.
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.
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.
Year of the linux desktop
