this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Up to 2.7% in May 2025 from 1.5% in May 2023. Almost x2 in 2 years is very impressive.

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[–] Suffocate9920@lemmy.world 7 points 13 hours ago

Installed Fedora Linux 42 on my gaming PC with Intel Arc B580. Completed Steam Servey. Selling B580 due to miserable driver support and moving PC from a gaming to home server(TrueNAS). Still have my Steam Deck which I won't sell.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 38 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

It just goes to show you. The only way to get the Linux desktop market share up is not building. Something better than Windows we have been there for a while. It's make hardware, put Linux on that hardware and sell it in a store. Avg people don't change operating systems. They change computers. Now if we could just get steam decks in retail stores. It would be a huge.

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 28 points 20 hours ago

Exactly. Linux will never become the majority OS as long as it’s not the default OS on retail PCs.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 9 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

my country has had a law forcing manufacturers to provide alternatives to windows. many computers come with linux here, and we have a weirdly high market share for linux because of it.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 8 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Which country is that it sounds amazing

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)
[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Ah that makes sense i know Brazil has laws to keep imports low. That's why Brazil kept the saga mega drive active for so long. So having Linux on machines makes sense. Since it's both an import and not an import at the same time.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 7 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

thats not really the reason brazil does this. our restrictions on imports come because our ruling class makes pretty much nothing and rely on having a cornered retail market they can profit off of. just capitalism things, kind of unique but nothing really new.

back then, the argument was about "venda casada" (no idea how to translate this). its when you buy something and you are forced to buy something else on their terms to make it work. they ruled that manufacturers can't force you to buy a windows license from them when you are already paying for a computer from them.

instead of selling it without an os, many of them offered linux as an option and passed the savings on to the customer, not unlike some manufacturers are doing in the us nowadays. most people got it with the intention of reformatting the machines with pirated windows for free, but many tried it and stuck with linux. we got a lot of adoption for a while there.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago

Very interesting I learned something new thanks

[–] bimbimboy@lemmy.world 14 points 20 hours ago

Avg people don’t change operating systems

This is a huge argument, even Linus Torvalds said that many years ago. The average person just wants to buy a computer and use it normally for work, casual stuff or gaming. They won't make the effort to change the operating system.

Now if we could just get steam decks in retail stores

We can also get the Steam OS on different hardwares, just like the Lenovo Legion Go S

[–] BalakeKarbon@lemmy.ml 20 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

It's a shame more developers don't target Linux! Anyway I have been Steam gaming on Linux for about 10 years now and it's amazing how good games targeted at Windows run through Proton. I have many games that are targeted for Windows and run BETTER on Fedora.

[–] herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Elden Ring runs better on proton/wine/dxvk then it does on Windows.

[–] ServerForget@lemmy.ml 16 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

As far as I can gather, Valve explicitly advises developers to avoid targeting Linux when building or optimizing for the Steam Deck, instead focusing on optimizing around Proton.

[–] PushButton@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Everything that is highly CPU bound (I am looking at you, Path of Exile 1) or requires a lot of Disk access (I have no such friends) have a good chance to run better on Linux than on Windows.

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 57 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Two of my friends switched recently.
They had none to very little experience with anything Linux before, their previous win11 installs just over bloated and the copilot bullshit pushed them over. Both (indie/non-pop shooters) gamers btw.

This is the year of linux.

[–] JTheFox@lemmy.world 7 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I wish I could get my friends to switch. I even had one tell me they would rather use it if supported the games that don’t work (which of course are games with anti-cheat issues). But they at least recognize that Windows is getting quite bloated

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

My first one to switch did so recently. Gave him an open offer to help get going if he ever got interested, then proceeded to just go about using my linux system for our multiplayer gaming and couch gaming hangouts.

It took a little less than three years from when I first switched for him to follow.

My sister is also on linux, has been since she took my gaming laptop as her own, and she never felt a need to switch it back to windows.

[–] JTheFox@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

That’s actually similar to how I got one of my friends on it. I got a Framework 16 about a year ago and installed Linux on it with a very customized KDE DE and he seemed pretty interested in it whenever I brought it with me whenever we hung out. Offered him a hand in learning more about Linux, how to install, customization, different distributions, Steam Proton, etc. About 7-8 months after and he has a Framework 13 with Fedora Linux.

My other friends are just stuck on the gaming side of things sadly. The games that I dropped when I made the switch I really didn’t care a whole lot about anyways. Not the case with my other friends though.

However, I have my brother and my parents using it for their laptops as they don’t need it for anything else but a web browser and an office suite and over the last year or so there have been no complaints!

[–] mio@lemmy.mio19.uk 7 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Do they choose distros made for gamers?

[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 21 points 22 hours ago

One is trying Bazzite the other one is just classic fedora

[–] Danitos@reddthat.com 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Do they make much difference? Genuine question

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 5 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Sometimes.

They tend to make sure stuff that gamers care about are up to date and working.

You'll likely need the newest kernels and software packages if you're running the latest gen of GPU and/or CPU, to get the most out of them, or even get them to worl at all.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 8 points 17 hours ago

2.69% +0.42%

Nice, the meaning of Life. This would be perfect, if it was 3.69 instead. But we can't have it all, otherwise there would be no improvement possible and it gets stale.

[–] Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca 3 points 14 hours ago

I installed it on a partition along side windows 10.

I installed openrazer to control my keyboard and the next time I loaded it up only the number keys worked.

I'm not sure what my next steps will be but I'm enjoying it other than this issue, it reminds me of the good old DOS days back when I was a kid.

[–] Peter_Arbeitslos@feddit.org 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Google translates that as Intergalactic Bow Community =\

[–] Peter_Arbeitslos@feddit.org 4 points 15 hours ago

That's part of the fun

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 17 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

I'm quite impressed Arch comes out on top

[–] Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not honestly. As far as I know SteamOS is based on arch which should give it a massive boost in comparison to other linux distros just from the number of Steam Decks

[–] that_leaflet@lemmy.world 27 points 22 hours ago

SteamOS does not get reported as Arch.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 12 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I would expect Steam to report Steam OS as Steam OS.

They managed to differentiate Manjaro to it's own entry after all. It's Arch based too.

[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 1 points 59 minutes ago

Manjaro is not Arch based. They use pacman, but they use their own repositories. They create a ton of issues that way.

[–] spicehoarder@lemm.ee 2 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

I'm more surprised that Manjaro is so low.

[–] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 1 points 57 minutes ago

Probably because they're incapable of maintaining a distribution: https://manjarno.pages.dev/

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 14 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

They got hit by a lot of negative reviews and bad publicity those last years. Myself gave it a try last years and while it isn't a bad distro from first impression... The fact that they add bookmarks into my firefox and Manjaro bootscreen at start gave me a strange feeling... Specially because this happend after the bios bootscreen hack. And I know this is not related but it still gave me strange gut feeling and always follow your guts !

Happy EndeavourOS user !

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 11 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The numbers are 3 weeks old, but they are still good. 😋

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)
[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

To be fair the numbers are from June 1st, and are for the month of May. So a tad newer than you graph that state March as the latest.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Nah it just doesnt show the x axis label. The last spike is the May number. It has a data point for each month, but that many labels wouldnt fit.

[–] titey@jlai.lu 4 points 20 hours ago

To the moon!

Those are rookie numbers Debian GNU/Linux!

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 0 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

I wanted to switch but then saw nvidia's drivers are even worse on linux than windows. Maybe once I'm ready for a gpu upgrade I'll go AMD and make the switch because it feels like if theres little hope of nvidia fixing their drivers for PC there is zero hope for linux.

[–] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Using nvidia on endeavouros here with no problems. The drivers rebuild with every kernel update and it's as smooth as gravy. Before external sync was merged, they were problematic on wayland but fine on xorg.

[–] drasglaf@sh.itjust.works 3 points 19 hours ago

I used EndevourOS with Nvidia for years but one day an update brought a black screen and decided to use something else (downgrade didn't fix it). I'm currently using Tumbleweed and it works well, but I kinda miss Arch... So I installed CachyOS in my Steam Deck.

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I'm using an Nvidia card on Debian with 0 issues myself and the driver installation was really easy. I'm curious what source you read stating that they are worse, by how much, and in what way. Do you have a link I can read? Thanks.

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Its primarily issues reported on the linux gaming subreddit. You can just do a search on that sub. One of the more recent posts that really illustrated how bad things were (to me) was this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1l4ntj6/i_give_up_on_linux_for_now/

[–] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Okay, well to balance that anecdotal information with some more, let me put some of those bad points listed in context with what my experience has been on Debian 12 Stable with an RTX 3090.

  • Proton is great, and is really impressive, but you still must download several versions to expect running everything you want, and you must do trial and errors to find the most efficient version for you (fortunately, ProtonDB helps a lot)

Somewhat true, but protonDB is so accurate that I think I have only had to trial and error 1 or 2 games ever. Downloading multiple proton versions isn't a big problem as they aren't too large, and I have only ever needed either the latest stable release, or the experimental release. As far as actual game compatibility goes, when I moved to Linux I looked up every game in my steam library in proton DB to see what I was working with. The result was that:

95 of my games ran natively on Linux. 31 of my games were rated platinum. 73 of my games were rated gold. 12 were rated silver. 3 were rated as bronze. 3 were noted as unplayable.

  • Nvidia drivers greatly improved recently, that's true, but you still have to download the latest beta drivers to run games through gamescope, and they are not on the official pacman repo, so they won't upgrade automatically.

You have to add 1 repository for the drivers and then it upgrades when you upgrade as normal. This is like a 2 step process of editing a text file and then running one command. I have never had to use gamescope.

  • Now, let's talk about performance. Yeah, I have an Nvidia card. Yeah, I know it's bad for Linux. But that's what I got, and I bought it very recently, so I won't buy an AMD card for Linux now. When you talk with Linux users, they will always say that performance in games is way better than in Windows. Maybe that's true in some games, but I'm afraid that's only the case for AMD users. With an Nvidia card, the best you can get is the same performances as in Windows. And that is when you're lucky. Then, if you want shiny things like HDR, or DLSS frame generation, you MUST use gamescope, and it will have a cost in terms of performances. And you will need trials and errors to get everything you want.

Performance on some games is better through proton and this is true even with my NVIDIA card. This is largely because where you lose performance on emulation, typically you are making up for it in leaps and bounds because Linux is not running 1000 telemetry processes and stuff in the background like Windows does. I have only played one game where the performance was noticeably worse. I don't use gamescope at all. As far as I'm aware DLSS/HDR work fine (running armored core VI on ultra graphics for example looks and runs great and the settings seem to be enabled). As I said before, I only ever had to trial and error 1 or 2 games.

  • That said, don't expect other shiny things like RTX HDR in desktop, frame gen out of games that natively support it, DLDSR, and many other things like that, to work in Linux. In fact, everything that is available through the Nvidia App or the Nvidia Control Panel won't be available in Linux. You must be aware of that, because that's very cool features you'll likely never (or in a very distant future maybe) see on Linux. You won't be able to use Lossless Scaling neither, and there is no equivalent in Linux - even in gamescope, at least for now (but maybe that'll come, I don't despair of seeing this happen in the future).

Parts of this statement are just straight up not true. When installing the drivers, you also install the NVIDIA Settings application which does not contain all settings from the NVIDIA control panel, but a subset of them. RTX HDR in the desktop for example does work, but it is just dependent on the window manager. Here is another reddit thread stating as much. I assume the OP of the thread you linked doesn't really know what they are doing. If you want a windows-like experience you probably would be using plasma. Also I'm pretty sure lossless scaling has been a feature in protonGE since 2021, so if you really needed it for a game, you would just install that proton version and use its FSR feature there. I mean, this is stuff that comes back top link when I google for "Lossless scaling linux NVIDIA". The OP really doesn't seem too dedicated to looking up their problems.

  • Hardware compatibility too, while very good, and even more so with Arch based distros of what I heard, is still a work in progress. For example, I didn't found out how to make Dual Sense haptics work in The Last of Us Part II Remastered. Everything works, even adaptative triggers, but haptics won't work. I know it has to do with the impossibility for the game to find the gamepad's sound device, and there is many workarounds. I tried ALL of it, but still, it doesn't work. That took me several hours to try it, and that's what finally made me give up on Linux for gaming for now.

My PS5 controller including its haptics work natively on debian. I didn't even have to install any drivers or software for it to work. I just plugged in and started playing. I think it just has to be wired for haptics, or whatever you are using for wireless needs to be capable of supporting the controller and its haptics.

So pretty much all of these issues seem to be related to the OP not really investigating their issues well, or not understanding where to go to change settings, or not understanding how their package manager works.

[–] Tim_Bisley@piefed.social 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the write up. I'll give it a shot and see what its like. Another point of concern was the amount of tweaking I'd have to do. I'm used to quite a few games in Windows not working well out of the gate but it kind of drives me nuts. So I wouldn't want more of that in Linux. My steam library looks like this:

[–] MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 points 17 hours ago

This looks fine.

I have a massive library of various games, and three years in I haven't really come across any cases where I want to tear my hair out.

If ProtonDB says a game doesn't work, you're not gonna tweak your way to having it run. If it says it does, and it didn't run right away with no problems, you can usually just apply the fixes other users have found, and be off playing your game.

In fact things are often simpler than on windows, because all the fixes have been gathered on protondb. While on windows you have to google-fu your way to finding someone on reddit or the steam forums who has the exact same problem, and also figured out and posted the fix.

[–] crusa187@lemmy.ml 3 points 19 hours ago

There are some distros which completely handle this for you, eg popOS. I game on Linux with a 3080ti and it’s ez breezy