Linux overtakes macOS users on Steam thanks to Steam Deck

Mac OS does have 15x the number of users (in the US at least, closer to 6x the users outside the US), so this is still an accomplishment in my opinion.

This is awesome. As someone that games on all 3 platforms, I’m happy to see that Linux usage has gone up so rapidly, even if it is only because of the steamdeck. It’s a great way to introduce people to the wonders of Linux! And yes I do game on my MacBook. The sims lol, it is actually nice to have SOMETHING to play when I feel like not working. And a surprising # of my favorite games work on Mac wonderfully like cities skylines and the 2 point games and many more. I’m always happy when any platform other than windows can play games as collectively these smaller platforms need to dethrone windows, in my opinion.

Everybody knows that the one true game on Mac is Apple Chess. That's why hardly anyone makes ARM Mac games: the competition is just too stiff.
Two decades ago, we at KDE always said that 5% was the magic number. If we got to 5% market share on the Linux desktop, then commercial games, applications, etc. would directly target it rather than ignore it. The steamdeck is wonderful, and if you include it, Linux is at about 3% right now. But it actually caused a huge acceleration in game adoption. So gaming is now ahead of that projection. Applications (i.e. Photoshop) probably still need 5%. Although we made that projection two decades ago, so it may no longer be valid due to cloud apps.
(I'm no longer involved with KDE, but was for a decade. It was an awesome decade.)
- Thanks for all your work on KDE! My favorite DE, hands down. O7
I started using Linux / GNU/Linux based operating systems for more than a day or so at a time when I got Puppy Linux on my USB drive back in 2016 or so. Ever since then I put Fatdog64 and other Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint on my laptop.

I really hope the Linux area keeps growing and helps push for like better drivers.

I'm praying they NVK becomes as good as proprietary stuff. I would contribute if I was more knowledge 😓

And yet some developers decide to pour over resources to make a MacOS native port over a Linux port

People who buy Macs probably have money and are willing to spend it.
- ...it their money aren't already gone for a 999$ monitor stand.
  SteamDeck buyers on the other side...
- @emergencyfood @UnaSolaEstrellaLibre I would spend money on a great Linux laptop that could game at 1440p max settings but I have not found the one, yet. Any recs?
A mac port gets you mac users.
A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
- A mac port gets you mac users.
  A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.
  Apple's new porting helper is nothing but Wine + D3D to Metal wrapper + Rosetta x86 emulation.
- Those devs have a boner for huge corporations for some reason. They hate anything that is “community driven”. Fuck’em, we will manage without them like we always have.
  SteamOS isn't a community project. It's a corporate project. It's just that Valve themselves aren't even pushing for native SteamOS games. There was an interview once with one of the SteamOS guys who merely said in passing during an interview that native games are better but that remark was lost in pretty much all reporting. Even developers of games based on Unity don't care to export Linux builds because Windows builds work just fine (until they don't because a Proton update breaks something).
I use both and I can tell you that is rare. Mac gaming is trash.
Well, they probably use Macs.
- Quick search shows only like 30 of developers as a whole use Mac's and I'm sure share is lower there because I know plenty of devs using macbooks that are running Linux or Windows. If we are talking game developers as a whole then that percentage of osx devs is far far smaller than the general usage. Windows using devs still dominate as a whole, Linux is not far behind, MacOS is a very vocal yet, smaller in reality group.
We don't bother with Linux ports anymore, instead they just added directX and win32 application support to Linux so it can just run the native Windows application.

I've been gaming on Linux for a while now. The pace of improvement in Proton has been staggering since the steam deck was released. I noticed the other day that I've gotten so used to games just working now that I don't even bother to check to protonDB before I purchase. I'm sure that won't bite me any time soon -_-

I usually check PCGW first, because the issues with most games are usually cross-platform.

Just in time to exit Windows due to their "telemetry" programs.

I'm so happy that I never have to use that dog shit OS ever again, or any of their software for that matter.
- Sadly corporate institutions still require windows
- I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don't care anymore. I'm more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn't be happier.
- Every time I have to use a Windows VM for something, I become more and more grateful that I don't have to use their crap anymore. What got me recently was finding out that you are forced to create an account and be online to even install the latest version!
Just in time to exit Windows due to their “telemetry” programs.
I fear I have bad news for you about commercial games even on Linux...
- Well I guess I should just go to Windows to get it 24/7, I got nothing to hide anyway.

The gaming support is what got me to completely switch to Linux for daily driver. Havnt used windows in 3 years thanks to proton. My computing experience has never been better.

Can I ask what got you initially interested, and were there any speedbumps you had to deal with on the way? As a long-time Linux user, I see a lot of pushback against it from gamers online, and I'm curious to hear about your pathway.
- Not OP, but personally i got bored of windows and wanted more control over my OS, especially as internet surveillance and data harvesting continue to be on the rise.
  In my opinion a lot of the pushback comes from the fact that most distributions(especially recommended starters like Mint) don't come with the packages you need for gaming out of the box. Things like Lutris/vkd3d/gamescope/dxvk/gamemode/mangohud/WINE/ProtonGE, etc.
  As someone who shifted to linux over the past year or so there was a metric fuckload of things i needed to learn and things i needed to tweak, especially when things went wrong. To the point i have over 10-20k character count tutorials i wrote for myself whenever i need to reinstall from scratch. These days i can get everything up and running fairly quickly, but that initial learning experience wasn't all fun and games for sure.
  I had a leg up by already having my feet wet in linux server/virtual machines, but for someone who's coming directly from windows with zero experience and wants things to just work out of the box i can see why so many aren't interested. It doesn't help nvidia drivers are still horrible(in terms of desktop feel) for one of the most popular desktop environments for windows converts out there, KDE. Don't get me started on how you somehow need to know to disable compositing(or toggle via hotkey constantly like i do when i'm forced to use xorg instead of wayland) if you have more than one monitor in KDE or else your FPS will effectively halve itself.
  Linux as a whole has a MASSIVE user experience problem if you want to do anything outside of basic office work and web browsing. Distributions like Garuda(my personal choice) help a lot because they give you the ability to have all of that stuff in the OOBE or an easy to use GUI, but that still only goes so far when little niggling issues crop up and you effectively need to relearn your entire workflow. It's just not something everybody is willing to do for the sake of not having Satya Nadella know when and where they poop.
  My biggest hope is valve finally publishing SteamOS as an actual desktop OS. Because i know they could do it well as they seem to be keenly aware of the needs of the average gaming user, unlike most distribution maintainers these days which just assume you're a linux intermediate by default and have completely forgotten the long and arduous path to mastery the OS requires compared to rock-dead-simple windows.

More like "...thanks to years of neglect by Apple."

Years? More like decades at this point. Apple hasn't really given a shit about gaming since the late 90s.
- Imagine if MS let them have Halo. The world would be so different. Gamers would have flocked to macs instead of Xbox.

I'm as happy as you all, but having a teenager that starts to mod games, I realize the whole modding ecosystem of many popular games is Windows only.

Many peoples say you should play on pc because of modding. I would say from a Linux perspective, having the modding community switching to Linux is the next big step.

What kinds of things are you having a hard time modding in Linux? I generally stay away from AAA games and especially AAA games that don't have mod support. There's gimp. There's blender. There's audacity. There's an abundance of good text editors. Almost every file explorer is easier to use and more powerful than the one in Windows. Java development kit kind of sucks in Linux with that export path variable nonsense that never ever works correctly but other than that, I don't think I could do half the modding in Windows that I do in Linux.
- When the game has no official modding support you need base modifications probably already compiled by someone else with who knows really what exact modification.
  An example is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Base, unmodded game is actually Platinum on Wine's AppDB. But when you mod (by running injecting scripts via a modified dinput8.dll file) the game gets very unstable no matter what mod unlike on Windows.
You mean mod managers? A lot of those actually still work under WINE and you can even run them in a game's prefix using Winetricks and Protontricks (which is how a lot of us do it)
It performs exactly as expected, all mod managers really do is automate putting files where they need to go.
This might be true of some things, but I jumpstarted a software engineering career modding Minecraft and running Minecraft servers on Linux

🥳🥳🥳

Is this finally the year of Linux "Desktop"...?

The year of Linux handheld console

Steam deck and my desktop. The only thing that would be useful is if I could find a program that would work with excel macros for union business. I basically have always used computers for gaming and browsing.

I've replaced everything I actually use which is something I haven't been able to do before. for anything else there's VirtualBox.
~~2020~~ ~~2021~~ ~~2022~~ 2023 the year of the Linux desktoop
- I'll read up on it myself, but can virtual box run a windows instance from inside my Linux partition? I've never done any virtualization but that would be about the only thing from windows that would be useful. Just so I could use our excel doc to do billhead.
Isn't Excel Web compatible with its own macros?
- As far as I understand, the wbe versions are very stripped down compared to their desktop counterparts. That's a great question though and one I should explore. When I actually spring for excel/365 I can check out the web version while on Linux and if it doesn't work, look into setting up a virtualized Windows setup.

The thing that suprises me in the headline: You can actually run steam and games on macOS?

Well, you COULD, but very few companies port now due to Apple refusing to update their OpenGL drivers in favor of Metal. Nowadays it's a bit better, with MoltenVK providing Vulkan support, but you're still mostly limited to Apple Arcade games and emulators for your gaming needs
MacOS still has horrible support for wine. Linux's implementation of proton has become so good, that r/wine_gaming essentially has become nothing but MacOS helpdesk tickets now!
Yeah. There was a whale event in TF2 back when it was ported where you got Apple earbuds ingame if you played the Mac port during a certain timeframe.
Since maybe 2010? That's when I first played portal and it was on a Mac.
The thing that suprises me in the headline: You can actually run steam and games on macOS?
Steam on my Mac is merely an updater for Krita.
No
You will be unable to read bullet #1 without using Apple's undocumented, unversioned mystery Apple Silicon translator that "Just works"
it does not, in fact, "just work"

NGL I thought this was already the case lol

NGL, I'm surprised macOS was even ahead of Linux given Apple's deep-seated, cultural disinterest in gaming.

No, you're wrong! Apple is going all in on gaming. Again! First Myst, then Quake 3, then iPhone games on M1, and now a port of one game from 2019 using Wine. What a time to be a Mac gamer.
- lol! Weirdly the upcoming release of MacOS actually will be the most they’ve tried in decades.
  https://youtu.be/jTsc_UvlT3E
  Their translation layer is basically a rip of Proton. Obviously this isn’t going to replace anyone’s Desktop or gaming laptop. But it’s nice to see Mac users are at least being thrown a bone.

and there was much rejoicing!

This is kind of like saying you’ve beet a Toyota Prius on the track.

Gaming is the only reason I still bother to install windows on desktop PCs.

The topic of market share, and ports and lack of them, are nuanced but I highly doubt Linux won't overtake macOS even more each year unless Apple wakes up. Valve and Linux community are a force to be reckon with. There are other individuals in the scene as well, who are chipping away at improving the gaming ecosystem, such as System76, Redhat and Canonical.

- Not sure how the happened haha. Thanks for the call out!

I switched to Windows for gaming this year. With advances in Wine/Proton it was super easy; there's nothing I play that isn't perfectly convertible to Linux anymore.

Even using an Nvidia card in my desktop seems fine.

You switched to Windows?
- You switched to Windows?
  Maybe installing Windows versions of games instead of native Linux versions?
- They probably meant "Switched from windows" or "switched to windows version of the games they play".
It was supereasy! Barely an inconvenience!
- Oh really?
The only thing holding me back is VR, I have a Quest 2 and the PC drivers are only for Windows.

I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS

I doubt that will last long with the introduction of the game developer tool kit and the next macOS
Apple's GPU cores suck. As much as you can genuinely praise their CPU work (which you can somewhat easily upscale with more cores and more cache), even the most high-end ARM Mac has a GPU that's just an iPhone GPU with more cores but without any actual high-end features such as raytracing (more of the same limited cores can't just magically become a raytracing engine). Even Steam Deck's GPU is capable of raytracing because it's not an upscaled phone GPU but a downscaled high-end GPU.