Still plenty of Debian/Ubuntu out there. And with bazzite even Fedora’s getting in on gaming.
Arch distros have made some truly impressive gains in userbases recently, though. Especially for being based on a distro that explicitly eschews user-friendliness
Once you’re a bit familiar with linux, arch becomes much more user friendly due to the Arch wiki and it’s wide coverage of topics. Knowing exactly what packages I need to use my Intel card to render with Blender is very handy. If you use a distro like EndeavorOS, you don’t even have to do any special setup: it installs like any other distro.
Oh, I’m keenly aware! I’m running vanilla arch on my laptop right now, and planning to migrate my desktop this year, I’m just pleasantly surprised how many have been willing to take the plunge
I feel like people discount just how useful a good wiki is. Especially on “how to” topics. It makes it better for the specifics of gaming just due to people testing and documenting it.
Isn’t it because SteamOS is based on Arch?
It’s because SteamOS identifies itself as Arch. Omitting this information is either dishonest or uninformed.
This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:
- SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
- Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.
What’s impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?
I’ll take the L on this one. It’s a combination of the article only using the screenshot of the first view as evidence and me late night posting on Lemmy while falling asleep via NyQuil.
Never attribute to incompetence what may be attributed to sleepy posting.
Good on you for owning up to it though. Cheers mate!
Am I missing something or is 36.47% not greater than 9.7%? Why is SteamOS not shown as the most popular Linux distro without the Linux only filters?
This contradicts the article claiming Arch dominates the Linux gaming scene and not SteamOS.
SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it’s not just “All OSs combined” vs “Linux only” but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they’re talking about.
Steamos identifies itself as “SteamOS Holo”.
Also, that article isn’t measuring SteamOS in the first place. When you look at the steam survey with the default filters it won’t list SteamOS. If you switch it to Linux only it will show SteamOS as 36.47% of Linux installs (0.84% of all steam installs) so it’s clearly not feeding into the Arch percentages.
The only uninformed here is you, since SteamOS does not identify itself as Arch, but rather as SteamOS Holo and it does show separately from Arch on the stats.
How? SteamOS is still Linux.
They’re all linux, friend.
Yeah, I misspoke lol. I meant to say Arch but I shortcirced or something.
Because you hear “Arch” and it gives the impression that they’re being played on a Linux desktop, not a Steam Deck
While that may be true, I still use my Steam Deck in desktop mode for a bunch of stuff besides gaming. Writing, job applications and interviews, using reddit because it’s the only device I have that isn’t detected for ban evasion, watching shows/Youtube. Maybe I’m atypical, but I don’t see why the Deck would offer a desktop mode if it wasn’t meant to be used.
Debian gamer here. Glad y’all are having fun, too.
NixOS gamer here. I can’t be the only one!
I did not know nix users had time to game due to the hours messing around with their dot files hahaah
I wanted to try nix, but gave up because it was too much too learn
Think you mean their configuration.nix file ;)
And their flakes
Nah, dotfiles is fair, it would be insane to put it in only one file, it is Kore like a flake.nix that glues a bunch of configuration files together :P
There’s dozens of us!
I’ve had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new
.nixfile with GPU tweaks and now I’m getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.I have to admit, that I have some experience with nix on 2 servers and 1 desktop, but installing steam was just 1 line in the config and everything worked. My biggest concern were the nvidia drivers, but that worked as well. Currently playing RE4 Remake.
I’ve done some gaming in my nix laptop, no problem
Exciting to see endeavoros making the list. I’m one of the 0.06%! There’s dozens of us!!
It is really great, even with a NVIDIA. Never understood the complaints about arch, but maybe I have Endeavour to thank for that
Ciao! When you are an Arch enjoyer but also too lazy to install it again.
Definitely about ease of use. After borking my system a few times it was just easier to go with endeavor.
Can anyone comment on how difficult it is to get gaming working on vanilla arch vs endeavor or… Bazzite I think the other one is.
I’m about to transition my main PC to Linux and I haven’t decided. I transitioned my laptop to vanilla arch and got everything working but it’s not a gaming laptop so that was the one thing I didn’t do. Worried it’ll be hard or impossible to get Nvidia card going and I’ll have to redo everything for one of the more prepared options.
I’m on EndeavorOS, but I basically use Arch’s wiki for any troubleshooting/guidance. I wanted Arch with an easy installation and I got just that.
No huge issues gaming-wise, but you do need to be comfortable referencing Arch wiki as needed regardless of your installation. My installation defaulted to the on-biard graphics processor instead of the gpu, so I had to install the proper stuff manually.
If you need help in the future, feel free to reach out.
EndeavourOS user reporting in. Where are the other two?
I am one of the two! Who is the last one?
hello!
Wait… There is another.
Yay!
I’m one as well. Will be running the same install of EndeavourOS for 2 years next month.
I’m running EndeavorOS on three computers (2 desktops, one laptop). My wife uses the laptop, but TBH I admin it. She’s aware it’s Linux, but not much more than that.
Anyway, does that count for 3 (per boxen), or 2 (per person)?
Also, it’s running my MIL’s desktop that just streams classical 24/7, and she uses to check her bank account once a week. So that’s 4? 4 more EndeavorOS installs, ah, ah, aaahh!
Another one here.
I’ve got the same install on 2 different machines for over a year now, EOS is the best!
I prefer
paruthese days.
Literally spent the second half of my holiday vacation moving from dual boot Mint+Win11 to EndeavourOS. The last few days has been fun getting the latest Plasma to be themed out how I want it.
To ease my move, I repartitioned my secondary NTFS days drive to free up space for an EXT4 partition and moved my /home to it. Once that was done, bye bye to the other 2 OS installs and hello to a nice clean install of eos.
It’s worked very well so far. As a long ago Arch user who battled the AUR back in the day, I was hoping for the experience to be better now. And to my joy, it is. (It’s been probably at least a decade since I last used Arch.)
Since almost all of my Windows needs are now covered natively and the few that aren’t are something I’ve gotten working via WinApps for a (mostly) seamless experience, in pretty comfortable with where I’m at now.
I’ve even got my 2024 Kraken Elite working via NZXT CAM so I have full control over the cooler until that is eventually supported elsewhere. (Including control of the screen.)
I must have joined the Arch community at the perfect time. I have been using it for probably over a decade and have had close to zero issues. AUR is amazing, and helpers make it even simpler. Only after using Arch for years did I understand that people have had serious issues with it in the past.
Hello from Bazzite, just floating along somewhere in the numbers~!
I think we’re probably counted under “Fedora”
Dang it’s me. The % .10 Mint guy over here. Good shit.
Minty Bois unite!
We like our shit boring and working. Lol.
Look you’re not really living life unless something explodes on your system at least once a year and you have to go fucking around with a tty prompt.
Green Ubuntu squad is here and ready to serve
6 hours of Monster Hunter: World today on my Mint desktop while my wife hunted with me on her Steam Deck!
If Mint would just implement HDR now, it would be my perfect system.
I knew there was something missing. But HDR doesn’t hurt me to not have it
I do most of my gaming on mint, but not for much longer as I am going to move my new configs and change to the same distro as my laptop at some point
What distro?
I wander if there are several of us gaming on openSUSE …
There are dozens of us!
Exactly. It’s not broken, so I never had any reason to fix it.
Hmh. Guess with opensuse tumbleweed, I’m a minority of a minority. Oh well, I don’t mind.
There’s at least two of us.
Linux distro sib hug.
I am one of the few Ubuntu gamers. Please don’t hurt me.
lol, I’m sure you could just casually walk away from them in a serpentine pattern and avoid any harm. Likely they are too busy clearing Cheeto dust from their neck beard anyways.
Hey! There’s not too much cheeto dust because I eat the cheetoes with chopsticks to keep my fingies clean and because the chopsticks are ₊♡⊹˚₊ kawaii ₊˚⊹♡₊
BtwOS is finally seeing proper representation :3
Part of the Arch games, Well I don’t exactly use Arch but it’s A Arch based distro for Performance (Cachyos) and I love how they leverage cpu instructions
I’ve been on Nobara for a few years and have generally loved it. Lately I’ve been thinking about switching to Cachy.
I’ve just been a little annoyed with Fedora in general recently, and I am nervous that Nobara is not only based on Fedora, but also is maintained by only one person.
How has gaming been overall on CachyOS? Any issues with Steam, Proton, Lutris, or any other gaming-related software?
In my experience, Nobara requires way less fiddling and works out of the box. CachyOS was way more fiddly. I have newer hardware so things are a bit weird for me in general.
Do wish Nobara had more maintainers. Cachyos isn’t a whole lot better in this regard either, if you wanted something for gaming that has a lot of maintainers you should probably go for Bazzite. Personally, I had issues with Bazzite as well, Nobara seems to play nicest with new hardware out of the box.
It doesn’t come with any gaming apps (but can be installed manually or use their package that installs all the essentials). they also have a proton/wine fork and has patches related to gaming no issues there, and later after some updates(idk how it gets it) you will get LFX (Latencyflex) you can enable it with LFX=1 In environment variables in games and there was no issues at all in gaming (Note you can view cachyos as more of a performance distro rather then a gaming one) .
Thanks for the info!
Yw
I’m seriously considering installing CachyOS on my laptop. And now I’m wondering why I didn’t come around to do it yet.
If you are on another arch based distro you can also add their repos: https://wiki.cachyos.org/features/optimized_repos/
The laptop I’m using is new and I didn’t bother with installing Linux on it because I was lazy and business was busy. But this weekend I’ll most likely install it. Thanks for the information by the way.
Yw
Unexpectedly outstanding distro. New favorite, by a lot.
btw
