113
Steam On Linux Just Under 4% For October 2026
(www.phoronix.com)
Fellow Debian users, unite!
Lol is Debian not still the "I don't wanna fuck with this too much" distro? On the complicated spectrum, I think Debian fell pretty fairly in the approachable side :D
It absolutely is. I don’t think it’s too popular for gaming given you’re not getting the latest and greatest by default. Arch being up top doesn’t surprise me at all. I know people who use Arch, btw.
You just have to use debians rolling release. Debian-testing
I find the popularity if Arch frustrating. Not that I have anything against it but because I worry people will go to arch and get scared away from Linux as a whole. I'm on Ubuntu and fedora and both those distros just work with no screwing around. Its so chill.
I'm doing my part
I just wanted to say thank you for continuously posting these numbers. I find them very interesting and am glad someone puts in the effort :)))
You can access the numbers directly on https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ at any time. If you click the Linux icon, then only Linux related stats are displayed:
Why Cachy?
Genuinely asking.
It's snappier than other distros and has fantastic defaults. It also comes with a button that installs all gaming-related packages you need, so it's become the most popular choice for gaming. It's also arch-based which is nice because you get access to basically every application you need.
I've been on Cachy for a while now, zero issues.
Other gamning distros like Bazzite and Nobara use the gaming optimizations from Cachy. But Nobara has a single maintainer and Bazzite is immutable
The optimisations are gotten from each other. CachyOS gets configs and patches from nobara, pika, bazzite and garuda and they get vice versa from cachyOS. Its a pretty close ecosystem sharing wise.
FYI, the sole maintainer of Nobara is GloriousEggroll, who's also the head maintainer for CachyOS. They're also the person who maintains Proton-Experimental.
Oh that makes sense. Didnt know eggy worked as a maintainer on cachyOS.
It sounds like you dislike Bazzites immutable nature. Genuine question, why is that? I've been using Bazzite for about 8 months and I love it. I like the fact that I can rollback to a previous iteration. But I genuinely don't know the issues with it beyond maybe that the distro has a strong say in what gets updated and when.
Educate me plz
I like the fact that I can rollback to a previous iteration.
That's a feature of the btrfs filesystem, not from the distro being immutable. I have the same functionality on Nobara. With immutability, what happens is that extra services outside of flatpaks are often reset and/or deleted during updates.
I also believe you're getting the kernel rollbacks confused with full backups. That's a different option you get with most distros, immutable or not, anf it's something you have to set up yourself because they take up a lot of storage which some users might not have.
It sounds like you dislike Bazzites immutable nature. Genuine question, why is that?
I'm not trying to hate on immutability, just pointing out that not everyone likes it, hence it's a contributing factor to CachyOS being more popular.
I personally need some more customizability with my setup, such as with heavy Skyrim modding and extra services like SyncThing, so an immutable distro ends up getting in my way. Not everyone needs those, so that's not an issue for them.
And yes, I'm aware Bazzite has workarounds for SyncThing. But that's specific to Bazzite. It's a nightmare to get it working consistently on SteamOS because it's also immutable.
Immutable distros have several downsides. The OS is locked down/gets reset every update, so you can't make any custom changes to the OS. More importantly, that also means you can't install many programs. The only software you can install natively is Flatpak since those install to your home folder. Other software have to be installed through workarounds like distrobox to get them to install to your home folder as well, but those workarounds are hacky
I have several things installed via layering. It doesn't feel like a work around but I can see it feeling hacky.
I'm not a power user yet so I'm not running into issues where major customizations have limited me.
I do appreciate you sharing though!
Btrfs snapshots before and after every update out of the box, dead simple rollbacks from the bios.
It was a half dozen clicks and 45 minutes from windows shutdown, to playing a modern AAA game in cachy.
It was easier to get it running on my Nvidia laptop using the attached monitor and an external monitor at two different resolutions, and then play games, than any OS Microsoft ever made. Arch is also the distro steamos is based on.
I've been running it about two years. It seemed to be the best distro with my above mentioned hardware requirements. I had planned to distro hop quite a lot, as I'm not averse to troubleshooting and cli work, but I have never had any serious issues and I can't bring myself to mess with perfection. At least, perfect for my setup.
It comes with defaults that are very close to what I'm looking for.
Fedora lost me to the mesa-freeworld dance I had to do every major update.
~~There are dozens of us~~
Didnt see the meme at first :p
Happy Linux gaming is doing well. Fedora user here.
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
113 points (98.3% liked)
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