I voted on deck and my laptop.
When I installed Linux, everything worked fine. When I installed Windows, my WiFi and Bluetooth wouldn’t work until I downloaded the drivers on another computer, loaded the on a USB drive and installed them.
Opposite for me. I’ve never had 100% Linux drivers, any distro, work out the box. Been screwing around with various distros for 25 years. As of 2026, I’d shit if Windows didn’t light up all my hardware.
Full time Linux here. No complaints.
Been playing expedition 33 and vampire survivors.
Release steam OS and see it shoot up. For the people saying : just use this or that distro. I don’t want to tinker.
I know people are holding out for legit Steam OS, but Bazzite exists specifically for those people, who would prefer to hold out for Steam OS.
Might be worth looking at, its not for tinkerers.
Bazzite is amazing, highly recommend.
Most Linux distros you don’t have to tinker anymore. I like Garuda, for a traditional desktop experience, but also including everything for gaming. I’ve heard CachyOS is similar but I haven’t tried it yet. If you want SteamOS (aka, a somewhat limited experience built for a handheld/console-like experience) Bazzite is great. None of these will require tinkering. They work out of the box and are easier to install than Windows even. SteamOS will be very similar. You won’t be getting anything you can’t already have.
Having daily driven Bazzite for ages now…
…nah, you still will tinker.
Linux advocates just don’t parse what “tinkering” means for most users, and frequent distro hoppers tend to think anything that doesn’t break in the install process is “tinker-free”. Neither is even remotely accurate.
Bazzite is alright, but it defaults to autoupdates, so you may want to understand how rolling back on a Fedora atomic distro works if you don’t want to be confused later when something fixes itself/breaks randomly for no reason.
Fine. As tinker free as Windows. I don’t know anyone who uses Windows and hasn’t had to modify it. The difference is that on Windows that’s often editing registries, or things like that. It’s a total pain in the ass. Every system will require you to change things to fit what you want. These distributions include pretty much everything you’ll need though.
I definitely advocate for some key tweaks to Windows 11, for sure. Just one specifically as a manual registry edit, two perhaps, but absolutely.
Still, depending on your setup, your hardware and your use case you may or may not need to mess with some configs beyond what you’d do on Windows. Back when I moved into Bazzite I was more annoyed by this argument because I had all the setup tweaks fresher in my mind. These days I’m more part of the problem because I tweaked the tweaks and I genuinely forget all the things that needed tweaking, so in my head it was more straightforward than it was.
I’ll say that I do regret somewhat going with KDE Plasma, which is a bad fit for Bazzite, but that I haven’t reinstalled with Gnome because, man, do I not want to go through that process again. So that’s probably a good gauge of whether that sounds like too much or not.
At what percentage do you think Linux will be a serious target for large game developers?
For something like FIFA & Call of Duty for example?
I imagine somewhere between 8% and 20% just for enabling anticheat support. That would be around 20 million monthly active users.
Some smaller devs are already doing the extra mile and making native ports, like Baldur’s Gate 3 for example.
I reckon you’d have to be at least in the double digits for larger studios/orgs to take notice. Though the steam deck has already had a very positive effect on the number of Linux native games in the indie space.
Sounds about right. Console install counts start being “relevant” after 20-ish million unit sales. The Deck itself isn’t close to that, and the overall Linux install base on Steam is maybe what, a third of that?
But I’d argue you need more for Steam, because a lot of those Linux users also have Windows available as it is, given that about 20% of them are on a Steam Deck and many of those likely have a Windows PC on the side rather than only using Steam on the Deck.
I’ve been on steam for over 10 years now. Was never picked for the hardware survey until yesterday. Glad I’m part of the Linux number.
Also Windows 11 up 5%, including seemingly all of Win10’s 2.5% drop and a bunch more over, with Windows overall growing slghtly by .16% (holiday purchased new hardware, presumably?).
Maybe I can just link people to this first one in all the upcoming "told you so"s regarding the crazy disproportionate hype from Linux advocates about Win10’s EoL, how fast that was going to go and in what direction.
Expect with more expensive hardware coming up and no holiday sales that move to continue to be largely towards Win11 and very slow, as people continue to not give much of a crap about security patches.
