This is me. Always Windows for my gaming computer and when I built a new one recently, I went full Linux. No regrets so far.

the switch to linux felt like getting out of an abusive relationship

The July 2025 data shows that Windows' market share on Steam dropped by 0.44% while Linux's market share grew by 0.32%.

While okay this is growth, it's not exactly meteoric. Hopefully the trend picks up steam (cough) as the win10 EOL approaches.

I switched to Linux so I could spend $200 more on actual hardware for my build.

Fuck microsoft. Fuck the Idea that everything needs to make a profit. Essential stuff should be publicly owned.

The change is even more dramatic if you consider only those users who use English as their language in Steam. Also, Linux adoption rate has sped up this year. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ collects various data about Steam usage. One of the charts (screenshot below) show Linux market share among Linux/English users and overall Linux market share. I added the red line to demonstrate how I see the growth. There's only few data points this side of the year, so my drawing is most likely wrong, but the growth starts around March. The green line is at 4.8% in January and February and 6.31% in July, so a nice 30% increase within about 6 months among Linux/English users.

EDIT: The post is now more in line with reality. Couple more data points:

• Linux market share among all Steam Linux users has gone from 2.06% in January to 2.89% in July. That's a 40% increase within the first seven months only. And as another commenter said, the growth rate might increase towards the end of the year as more people starts abandoning Windows 10.
• The same numbers for last year are 1.95% in Jan '24 and 2.08% in Jul '24, which is only a 6% increase.
• But because the data is a bit jumpy, if I use approximate values of 1.75% for Jan '24 and 2.05 for Dec '24, the Linux market share increased by 17% in the entire last year.
• I'll stop now.

People don't have a choice. Microsoft made W11 incompatible with a lot of hardware and Microsoft said, "lol, buy new hardware"

Giving nary a single fuck about whats best for their users.

I liked the comment going "Steam doesn't have data on PC gamers, only Steam gamers.", hinting at the seven gamers that stubbornly refuse to use Steam and still hunt for CDs, or old archives of shareware. They are people too dammit!

I'm really not far off. Once my Tiny11 install breaks, it's on to Bazzite.

Doesn't really help that the AAA scene has gone straight in the shitter, while the quality games are all coming out of the Indie scene.

It's good to see people making a switch to Linux. But the real tell will be in finding out how many of those people actually stick long term.

Are we going to make a big deal out of every 0.3% shift in steams stats towards Linux?

Wake me up when we're dealing in whole percentages.... That's when I'll be excited about it, until then this could just be a sampling bias. A rounding error.

author has never used desktop linux and doesn't really grasp what it is 😜

I'm currently configuring my new linux dev/gaming machine. Thanks for giving me the push I needed, Microsoft!

Fuck windows, and copilot, and recall, and most especially OneDrive, and start menu ads, and unnecessary upgrades and ... And ... I gotta say I'm so much happier on Ubuntu, took me a little googling on some stuff and proton is still finicky sometimes, but man o man is it nice to have an OS which does what I tell it to.

If the survey hit for me 1 week from now I'd be on Linux, I'm literally setting my system up properly next Saturday

Been on gaming kn Linux for a while now. Overall with Steam and Proton I rarely have any issues.

I don't plan on moving to spyware11. just too lazy to reformat and start from scratch on everything so haven't made the jump yet.