I’m somewhat surprised there isn’t a Fedora there, it’s a pretty great and up-to-date distro. And pretty popular.
I’m also surprised Flatpak isn’t higher!
Fedora or Bazzite (Fedora-based) are my top recommendations for new Linux users. I’m constantly surprised at Mint’s general popularity, especially for gaming. Even openSUSE Tumbleweed is a better option when it comes to gaming.
Also surprised about that. I use Nobara and that too is based Off Fedora.
Yeah, it seems there’s something going on with what’s listed here. It doesn’t match any other measurement.
Phone is Android, PC is now Linux Mint, for gaming I use a Steam deck, and my NAS is now TrueNAS.
I use Debian. Does this mean I’m in the top 0.05% of Steam users?
Awesome. Will be interesting to see the November December numbers with unpaid Win10 support ending.
My prediction: Ten percent increase for Windows 11 with 25 percent still on 10 and barely an increase for Linux.
I hope I’m wrong.
I don’t know. Most of the increase above appears to be win 10 users. Win 10 lost 1.09% and the percentage gain was close to evenly split between linux and win11 with a little going to MacOS.
I could see a bunch of people paying $15 to keep win 10 going , but not that much.
Man, if only Linux would be adopted by the masses for gaming…
🙋🏼♂️ new to Linux gaming.
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Where are all the Ubuntu Core 22 installs coming from? Is there some large device or distro that uses it?
I feel like Ubuntu has the greatest exposure among non-Linux folks. It’s the only OS any place I’ve ever worked used on WSL back when I was still on windows. Probably a lot of corporate nerds want to stick to what’s comfortable?
I have no idea if that’s the reason, but Ubuntu and Mint are the only two distros I’ve tried for basically that reason. Heard good things about PopOS. Might try it some time if I wind up with an extra computer.
Regular Ubuntu I get; it’s specifically the separation in the list between core and the standard 24.04 distro that I don’t get. I can’t imagine that droves of nerds are installing straight Ubuntu Core unprompted. I’d absolutely buy though that some distro or some handheld is based on one.
I think PopOS was made especially for the System76 hardware, no? While it can still work on other hardware, System76 hardware is the one it was meant for.
Honestly, Ubuntu is great. It’s not bleeding edge where you can encounter yet unfixed bugs or other problems, and it’s not old enough that you can run into problems where the software is so old it doesn’t support the latest gaming stuff. It has great support from the community, it’s widespread, and comes with tons of quality of life things like tools to install 3rd party drivers, like graphical drivers for NVidia. Why change?
I worked with a guy who ran PopOS and loved it. He said the UI was really good. I’ve seen it get some love in social places. Figured I’d give it a shot some time.
I’m pretty happy with Mint. It’s comfortable and the conventions feel more familiar than even my work MacBook—like I don’t even know what the desktop is for except my screenshots show up there for some reason. I don’t think corporate would let me run Linux, but if they would I’d be happy with Mint or Ubuntu. They probably don’t want to support a million flavors of Linux desktop.
Personally I prefer Kubuntu.
I find Mint’s or Cinnamon’s look and feel a little too outdated. Reminds me too much of Gnome 2.
And Gnome changed their whole desktop paradigm since Gnome 3. I find Gnome 4 more suitable for a tablet. I feel too constrained and limited by it on a desktop PC. It’s awesome on my Surface Pro tablet though!
KDE Plasma kept the classic desktop paradigm like Windows, with a fresh modern look and tons of customizations. (Though I try to limit those as much as possible) You can configure it to your liking and add tons of really practical shortcuts. Its applications are also very powerful. Much more so than Gnome’s I find, which are more minimalistic.
Kubuntu is the way to go. KDE Plasma is such a great desktop. Just be sure to do the “Minimal” install so you can avoid Snaps like the disease they are.
Snaps aren’t as bad as people make them out to be. The only problem in Kubuntu is thflathead. Independent app to manage Snap security and access like flatseal. There is one, but you gotta install so much dependencies that you almost end up with the whole Gnome desktop. Otherwise it’s a great solution for use in Ubuntu Core for example.
I do prefer Flatpaks though.
the problem with snap is that it’s centralized around canonical’s server
I’ve not heard of CachyOS, but to capture 2.54% of the steam linux market feels significant. It jumped right past other established Arch-based distros like Endeavor and Manjaro.
I’ve been using it for a while now, and it’s genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it’s been great.
What kind of out of the box things?
Well, I started using their repos for their x86-64-v3 optimized packages and builds of popular packages from the AUR. Later I started using their kernel because it pulls in upcoming features and is compiled with optimizations like ThinLTO and AutoFDO and has a more advanced scheduler. I also like how Cachyos comes with things like zram pre-enabled and scripts for things like zink and NGX. It’s basically just a ton of small things like that, some that I don’t even know about yet, that makes CachyOS really nice and easy to use.
A big one IMO is it defaults to building aur packages for the native CPU, which base arch and endeavorOS do not. There isn’t really any benefit to not doing so, as aur packages are going to be installed locally anyway.
Also fish is the default shell and I love fish
A lot of gamers want better performance, so a performance oriented distro with gaming quality of life features fills that gap. And ultimately there are a lot of YouTube channels promoting it and it kind of turned into a cool distro to use. This might explain the phenomenon.
Is Nobara still a thing? That was the gaming distro a couple years back, last I checked.
they offer some optimisations to the kernel and the packages that are supposed to yield a tiny bit better performance.
an incredibly small thing that rubs me the wrong way more than it probably should about their setup is that they set Plasma animation speeds to much higher values than the stock Plasma desktop uses. sure, it could be just a part of their customisation tweaks the same way using
fishas the default shell is, but it feels like a cheap trick to reel in the “I installed it on my desktop and it’s soooo much snappier” review kind of people. like, if your work is as good as you claim, you shouldn’t need to artificially make the improvements seem bigger than they really are.If it feels snappier, it is snappier.
It’s like saying it’s cheating to use instanced rendering to display millions of asteroids when it’s not even real draw calls
it’s like making the car audio play wind whooshing noises when accelerating to make it feel faster.
It has a dedicated steam deck ISO, is the most well put together preset up arch distro there is for gamers. Period, there are no real good faith arguments here. It’s like if someone took an endevour install and spent over 50 hours doing nothing but making every possiable part of it as easy as possible for gamers to just play games.
Its what Bazzite is functionally a knock off of. Anyone whos using Bazzite is litterally using an objectively worse option then cachy is their first and only goal is gaming. Which is bazzites entire gimmick basically.
I agreed with everything in your first paragraph but your second one just seems like needless ‘holier than though’ drivel. Bazzite has it’s own unique pros, and both are great options for gamers.* However, when it comes to having a OEM-like experience on a Legion Go under Linux, Bazzite, Nobara or Chimera are a better fit. That’s my usecase and why I chose Bazzite, I wanted a Steam Deck experience with a better screen and more powerful chip. It was also well before SteamOS had any support for other devices.
Yeah, that’s not Bazzite’s “only gimmick”
More people should use EndeavourOS. It’s fantastic for gaming.
Cachy is just endeavour but with like 20 hours + of all the extra stuff you do after an install already done if you are only focused on gaming.
Endeavour is fantastic but it’s a general purpose project. Cachy IS first and foremost gamer/performance focused.
So if you love endeavour but want to only game then cachy saves endless time and effort and for new users or gamers wanting to be lazy it’s just a no brainer to go cachy
I’ve already used Cachy, but went back to Endeavour. I found Cachy’s “optimizations” to be a bit janky. At the time they enabled some items for ntsync that were clearly not ready for primetime.
Performance-wise, I compared the two head to head and found Cachy and Endeavor to be equally performant for gaming. Cachy just didn’t offer anything for me that Endeavor didn’t already do.
On top of this, I found Cachy’s packages to lag a bit behind the Arch and Endeavor repos, particularly in the Cachy-extras repository, and it ended up causing me issues with things I used from the AUR due to packaging conflicts (the old Manjaro type crap).
Cachy isn’t for me, though I get why people like it.
I mean, that’s basically the same as Arch.
Yeah, just much easier to install, which is what I want from it, I never got the argument that by installing arch manually you “learn” what’s on your pc, idgaf, even as a software developer let alone a normie, I want a working system, that just works
You could still wonder why endeavour in particular is so great though, in the end it’s all linux.
I just installed Mint and picked the nvidia drivers in the manager. Am I doing something wrong?
Sounds fine to me. What i meant to say was that since it’s all linux, the distro you pick is just customized for a certain usecase, but you can pretty much do whatever you want to do with any distro, but if you don’t want to bother setting it up yourself, a distro that is already configured a certain way is more convenient, but which one is “best” in that case purely depends on what you want to do with it, but there isn’t really an absolute “best” distro that everyone should use.
As I just migrated from windows this year it’s just wild to me that “comes with x pre-packaged” is an argument at all. That sounds like having a windows version that already has, say, steam preinstalled, which takes 2-5 minutes to do myself (in Windows or Linux). I wouldn’t specifically pick that to save the 2-5 minutes. Researching it would take longer.
Now, if we’re talking about things that are actually hard to integrate into some distros that’s a different question, but I clearly am not informed enough to imagine what that could be.
Huh. The Year of the Linux Handheld.
The Year of the Linux Handheld on the Desktop
