Did you find mint easy? I am a bit of a computer person, and I've been struggling a bit with it

I'm gaming with an NVIDIA GPU, so my VRAM is kind of limited. I'm at my limits in games because the company cheaped out on VRAM in their GPUs after the 10 series.

Well, screen is running at 4k, so i think its normal.

Interesting, my devices always come without OS. And on preconfigured Windows for family first thing I do is wipe it to get rid of all the bloatware it comes with.

I see your point, but installing your usual linux distro on a new device is quite easier than switching to linux for the first time, which is what people don't wanna do.

I've seen it first hand recently with a friend who sought advice regarding a low budget laptop purchase for school work and multimedia use. While he was open minded about what hardware to choose, there was no convincing him to ditch Windows. I told him he'd be better off using a lightweight linux distro on such modest hardware, but he insisted on Windows 11 based on questionable arguments ("I need office"), even knowing it'd be slow, bloated, full of ads and AI features no one care for. Old habits do die hard.

People buying Steam decks are likely the majority of those numbers.

The Steam Deck shows up as Arch Linux in the steam numbers; Arch is only 10.7% of the Linux user-base on Steam. And this is on top of the fact desktop Arch Linux is a thing as well sharing space in that line-item.

The Steam Deck (and Microsoft tomfoolery) certainly was the catalyst for the current wave of adoption, but it is barely a notable percentage of Linux installs on Steam.

What do you mean OSes are sticky as hell?

What are your feelings on switching to a different OS, such as MacOS?

I’m currently on Arch ... I’m thinking of switching to gentoo

These are both the same OS: Linux. And one of the nice things is Linux lets you switch around so much at-will as you are thinking of doing.

Until they want to play a multiplayer game with their friends, that doesn't work because of Anti-Cheat

It's my understanding that anti-cheat CAN work in Linux and does with some games. The point is still valid of course. If a specific game someone wants to play doesn't work, that's going to be a frustrating experience. But still I foresee the percentage of Linux gamers will continue to grow. And gaming companies increasingly making sure to use anti-cheat software that does work with Linux, as that market share is becoming too large to ignore.

Almost all multiplayer games work fine. It's 9noy the garbage that companies like EA put out that choose not to. Just think of it like being a console exclusive, and you don't own that console. Ignore it. Their games aren't worth playing anyway. It's the same garbage as the last 10+ years.

It's Linux because for devs it's a Linux platform.

And yeah 11% growth month to month compounds quickly. It won't hold forever but all things like that are sigmoidal Wich does start as an exponential growth.

Huh. That’s odd. I guess it balances out though.

I use steam, I do check protonDB but I've never had to tinker with much.

Historically I've used lutris but more recently I've been observing more broken scripts than not. But Lutris is extremely handy for mapping to a pile of game data that I might grab from Itch for example. I also havent been gaming as much lately so maybe I'm just hitting some weird games and that's all.

I've heard good things about Heroic Launcher which apparently is actually sponsored by GOG, but I've yet to try it on my Linux machine