alt Hacker NewsThe top distro is Arch - implying that the Steam Deck userbase is moving the needle.
Linus has said on a few occasions that the main thing holding back user adoption for desktop is a single distro with a clear focus. What Android did for mobile.
It's clear that SteamOS could be "that guy" if Valve wants it to be.
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Steam Deck is currently ~25% of those 5% Linux users. Good chunk but not a majority. You can estimate it in two different ways which produce similar results: filtering to Linux only looking at OS list "SteamOS Holo 64 bit" is 24.48% and in the GPU list "AMD Custom GPU 0405"+"RADV VANGOGH" add up to 23.72%.
It's not just the single distro, but single Desktop Environment upon which app and ecosystem developers will standardise. I'm glad that the latest generation of gaming distros are converging on Plasma.
Can Linus bless a particular desktop Linux distro where he can at least veto unreasonable decisions? So when someone says "I'm switching to Linux," it means that one.
The top distro is SteamOS, which is based on Arch, but does not appear as such in the stats. The Arch appearing in the stats has to be CachyOS and other gaming-distros, as also real Arch-users.
But yes, SteamOS makes ~25% of the users. Though, thinking about, do they collect per account, or per device? I do have a Steamdeck, but mainly play on the big desktop running on debian, so I'm curious if I'm appearing as one or two entries in that stat.