Steam On Linux Hits An All-Time High In November (phoronix.com)
- Reference: 0180256039
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/12/02/0525221/steam-on-linux-hits-an-all-time-high-in-november
- Source link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Linux-November-2025
> A decade ago in the early Steam days the initial use was around 3% and back then the Steam user-base in absolute terms was much smaller than it is today. Back in October Steam on Linux finally re-crossed that 3% threshold after for years being stuck in a 1~2% rut. Now the Steam Survey results were published minutes ago for November and they continue an upward trend for Linux.
>
> Steam on Linux is up to 3.2%, an increase of 0.15% for the month. One year ago Steam on Linux was at 2.03% last November, 1.91% for November 2023, and a decade ago for November 2015 was at just 0.98%. [...] Due to AMD APUs powering the Steam Deck, AMD CPUs continue to power nearly 70% of Linux gaming systems. Meanwhile under Windows, AMD has around a 42% CPU marketshare.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Linux-November-2025
It's confirmed (Score:2)
2025 is the year of Linux on the desktop gaming tablet!
Going to be tiring (Score:2)
Reading this news line every month. With more handhelds and steam machines happening in the future.
What nobody notices in Steam HW Survey (Score:2)
Is the steady climb in AMD GPU share. It rose from as low as 15% to 18% this year, but all I hear in the media is the funeral march. AMD is also getting much better and more consistent performance when running on Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
The steam deck is AMD.
And most linux users will recommend AMD for a boot & play first experience
Re: (Score:2)
Plus nvidia are targeting bitcoin/llm users while gamers take a back seat.
My migration. (Score:3)
I'm a janitor, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know how to sharpen myself when needed.
My main system was first built in 2005 when my then room mate bought me all the components. Since then I've maxed out the CPU and RAM, put in a GPU as good as I could before hitting motherboard bottleneck. It ran everything I wanted well, up to and including Half Life Alyx on a second hand VR rig. Then over the past year or so the performance of the Win 10 installation started to degrade; taking literally 10 minutes to boot up and settle down enough to use and freezing up for minutes at a time or having to reboot on occasion. Frustrating.
I threw an old 1TB SSD I harvested from a decommissioned server from the IT room at work that was getting thrown out and installed Ubuntu Linux on it two weeks ago. Took about an hour. Took longer to download Steam the two games I'm currently playing on the Win 10 drive. That Ubuntu installation Steam games, and Chrome, which was pretty much all I was using that system for besides watching pirated movies, boots in under a minute now and I'm getting satisfactorily comparable performance. I know there are tweeks I need to learn about to get the best performance, and that will be a leisurely endeavor over the next few weeks.
I'm happy enough with the Ubuntu that this morning I booted up the Win 10 drive for the first time since I installed Ubuntu (because I had not found a need to do so previously) to copy over all my 'files' from my profile onto an external HDD and run chkdsk to make that external HDD accessible to Ubuntu. Once I've finished that migration I plan to clean and clear that Win 10 installation down to bare bones and shrink that drive down to free space on the 'data' partition for use when I'm running Ubuntu.
This kind of migration is probably happening all over the planet by gamers that have perfectly fine rigs of hardware capable of running their 10s of thousands of hours worth of backlogged Steam and Epic games that want an up-to-date OS but are not willing to or unable to shell out for a new system just because Microsoft wants more profits.
If you're in an IT role in a corporation, government, or NGO where they will be decommissioning a lot of old Win 10 boxes because they can't upgrade to 11 I beg of you, please, get under the skin of your marketing department to get them obsessed with the idea of getting the company 'good optics' in the local media by wiping those systems of Windows, installing Linux, and giving them away to local underprivileged children. A Linux box, a keyboard, a mouse, and an HDMI cable to attach it to the family TV will mean that there will be an entire generation of kids growing up with Linux and FOSS.
So... Hockey stick? (Score:2)
Would make sense. Even normies are fed up with Win11.
Re: (Score:2)
> So... Hockey stick
Nah, just a minor bump.
To get the hockey stick effect (like climate change), you need the new users actually feedback into improving the software they use. That doesn't happen much already much less with people with a focus on gaming.