This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out the ebbs and flows of Chinese players on largely-identical hardware and operating systems) is more than 6%, up from under 2% just 5 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with Windows in general, and especially 11, and Windows 10 is about to force the issue in just a few months as it loses official support. I have a friend whose computer is still in decent shape for gaming but with TPM settings that don’t meet the minimum spec for Windows 11; at some point, he’ll lose compatibility and have to throw out an otherwise perfectly functional machine, so it’s good that some other OS is shaping up to be a good enough option for many people.
This has been an upward trend since slightly before the release of the Steam Deck, as you can see on the graphs, and I’ve come across YouTube videos from both James Lee Animations and PewDiePie about how they got to be so sick of Windows (and Adobe) they both switched to Linux with middle fingers raised at their old workflows. Folks like them making videos like that can have real effects on the market. Linux has been my daily driver for gaming for about 8 years now, and it’s matured so much in that time that I’ve hardly booted to my Windows partition for any reason. It’s not perfect, but if I’m choosing between the quirks that Linux has by accident and the deficiencies that are in Windows on purpose, I’ll take LInux every time, and it seems like more people are coming to that same conclusion.
No doubt the biggest remaining frontier is live service gaming with kernel level anti-cheat, but if Linux becomes a larger user base, as it’s doing right now, the developers making those games will have to solve that problem to reach that addressable market, and everybody wins.
I think Windows is kicking anti cheat out of their kernel (thanks, crowd strike) so it may become a non issue.
What I had heard was that they were looking for other hooks into the operating system that weren’t as deep, not that they were removing the deeper hooks.
The Windows team has been looking for ways to remove the deeper hooks ever since the CrowdStrike outage last year.
That is still kicking it out of the kernel. For all functional purposes anyways.
The short of it to what I understand is they want to provide an official standardized way for anti virus and anti cheats and other software that would normally live in the kernel to do what it needs to.
Basically making everything live in user space unless it’s made by microsoft. It should result in basically there being an entire layer between the kernel and the user and their software.
Which is perfect for Linux. If it lives in userspace, it can be made compatible.
This is wonderful news!
I’ve been using Linux full time for around 3 or 4 years. I just bought a Legion Go handheld gaming PC, which comes with Windows.
I knew before I bought it that I was going to load Linux on it instead, but decided to check out the Windows experience a little out of curiosity first. Holy fucking shit, it was a shitshow. A buggy mess and terrible experience .
And you hang out in the online communities for devices like this and you will see even totally nontechnical users who have no dog in the fight for a Linux bias are still vastly preferring the Linux experience. This is completely unprecedented.
Anticheat is the only thing Microsoft has ‘‘going for them’’’ if you can even put it that way. Really starts to feel like Windows is toast.
It’s interesting, anticheat and the xbox game pass are the only things stopping me from changing my main OS over. Not many other reasons to keep it, really.
I gave up game pass, i looked into paying more to be able to stream games from it… but i decided it just was not worth it… at some point the great deal is going to become shitty…
I don’t regret dropping it and have just used steam…
I also didn’t play games that had kernel level anti cheat… just never seemed worth it
I can’t say the same, I enjoy some competitive games from time to time and would rather not maintain two OSs just for when I want to play one.
For now, game pass is a great value. Once they inevitably raise the price and restrict things for pc users, I’ll gladly drop it. I’ll get a lot of value out of it until then though!