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Linux continues to grow and has reached a new peak of 3.20% in the November 2025 Steam Hardware & Software Survey (lemmy.ml)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
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https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

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[–] 59 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I'm surprised Bazzite isn't higher on the list, here, it really seems like the OS I hear about whenever Linux gaming comes up.

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  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I switched to Bazzite based on a recommendation and it's been a fantastic OS for me (gaming and light development/home labbing) and I no longer have any desire to distro hop.

    Took a bit to figure out the immutable stuff for some very niche things I needed done, but other than that ezpz

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Without having tried it, I think Bazzite fits a certain user group very well, but is less suited for other users. Which is fine.

    I don't really see how it's particularly good for homelabbing, but use whatever works for you.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I don't really see how it's particularly good for homelabbing

    I'm assuming by that he meant as a distro for his personal PC that he uses to SSH into his home lab or access the web interfaces. Not to run on the servers

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago

    This is correct.

    I didn't pick it for home labbing as a primary as I mostly use that machine for gaming, but just to show how well it works overall as a general purpose OS. I did end up switching over to their Dx branch for updates so that helped for some of that stuff as well.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    The person who replied to you is correct. I meant as a machine to write scripts on, manage servers, etc. I do agree though Bazzite probably isn't the best for everyone, but that's what is great about Linux, there is a OS for everyone

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  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    That list is just weird and only shows a few specific distros. If you go to the Linux only results you get way more info. It shows Bazzite as used by 5.53% of respondents, +1.29% from last month.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Ah, that makes way more sense. Nearly 6% of the gaming Linux market for such a new distro, and rapidly growing, sounds much more like where I would've expected Bazzite to place, based on my own experience and the tune of most recommendation threads here.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Agreed. Ive been active in a lot of Linux communities for a good while now, and I've never seen a single distro being recommended as much as Bazzite. Mint was probably the closest, but it's always had detractors due to its stable base affecting hardware support.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I think it was more of a fad for a short while, but there are a lot of other much more entrenched and mainstream distros

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Bazzite has been one in a LONG line of Trendy Distros Of The Month. People have been trying to make CachyOS happen, Zorin has made a couple appearances, ElementaryOS and Pop!_OS traded blows for awhile, Nobara was in there, a long while ago there was Peppermint, I'm forgetting a lot of them.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago

    Feels like youre really diminishing Bazzite's popularity here. Ive seen it regularly talked about here and in a lot of YouTube videos for around a year now. Its also currently used by 5.5% of the Steam Linux player base (you can see by filtering the results by Linux only), making it one of the most popular distros for gaming right now. Also, CachyOS is just ahead of it at 6.74%. Definitely not flavor of the month numbers imo

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    CachyOS is attempting to fill the same workcase as bazzite and does it better. Which is the real problem for bazzite.

    And cachyOS is basically just a gamer preset for endeavour. Since all the arch based distros kinda suffer from the same problem in differentiating themselves by just being glorified presets of all of the same thing. Which is both actually a rather good boon but also a bit of a problem with being a gimmick or a flavor of the month. You just kind of pick an arch preset to start with and go from there.

    Of course manjaro being the weird one out.

    Like if you're just looking for a straight up preset up one button, go gaming distribution. Cachy and baz both are trying to be that same workload. But cachy just does it better with less weird quirks and issues.

    Not to mention they're both trying to be distribution so you can just put on a steam deck. And again the cachy option just has less issues and quirks.

    But cachy is fighting against stupid outdated memes about Arch so it just won't ever really catch on. So even as a flavor of the month distro, it struggles to really ever reach true fad territory.

    While bazzite easily can reach it since it doesn't have to deal with a decade of misinformation spreading memes.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I honestly think for most people atomic systems should become the default, so I’m team bazzite right now.

    It just feels like they need to get over decades of bad app/file hygiene to improve.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    I have just run into such an insane amount of problems with atomic distros. The thing is that you don't know it will be a problem until you start having a need for the functionality

    I still daily drive bazzite, but embedded programming, wireshark (constantly breaks upgrading on atomic fedora), any VM that had to connect to the LAN, any sort of document signing, key management, using any sort of government ID software like Belgium's EID to log in on a web browser, and much more is very difficult with most of the examples being dead in the water and will apparently never be attempted to be fixed.

    It works great for most people, until they need to do 1 thing outside of the mainstream and it falls apart. Hell, there is literally no documentation at all on how adding a user to a group is fundamentally broken (fedora's fault, not bazzite) and you have to copy groups manually from a non-documented file to /etc/group.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    This graphic is just a bit misleading, and the more detailed results show the opposite story. Bazzite is as 5.53% of Linux users, up 1.29% from last month and one of the most used single distros, behind SteamOS, Arch, Mint, and CachyOS.

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  • [+] -13 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    It's a fad at best. And immutable distros are awful outside of extremely ridged use cases.

    It basically is just a worse version of normal fedora or cachy OS.

    It tries to both and successfully does neither job as well.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Why do you not like immutable distros?

    I’m asking as a long time Mac user, just tried Linux this year, and have settled on atomic fedora and bazzite, so looking to learn not imply I know more than you or anything like that. I’m just very sold on them and the ostree idea.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    See the problem is that you're a normal computer user and not one of the 3% that actually like the experience that is the traditional Linux desktop.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Somehow that does not help me know what I’m missing.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Basically, traditional Linux allows you to mess around every part of it and even completely break it if you weren't careful enough. This is really great and powerful for people that knows what they're doing, but for 99% of users, the ability to change the underlying operating system is not really necessary.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Thanks. That's fair, I mostly don't want to deal with that most of the time (I would if I had a spare computer)

    Is that not possible while still having an ostree, or is that just because the ostrees are all basically just fedora?

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