The average Linux gamer is likely to have a very different setup to the average Linux user in general. It's a subset of a subset.
Arch is rolling release and bleeding edge.
This helps a LOT with games, especially new ones needing the latest drivers or hardware support.
Coming from being a Windows power user for decades, Mint just felt like more of a natural shift for my daily driving than Ubuntu. I wonder if that's a common opinion or if there's another driver.
The survey only shows Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22 for 8.25% vs Mint's 22.1 and 22.2 at 9.21%. There's a whole 18.04% hiding in the "Other" category that I suspect contains a lot of other Ubuntu interim and older LTS releases.
Wouldn't there also be more mint versions in the other category?
That would explain the recent move to rewrite things in Rust on Ubuntu, they need the marketing to grow their user base.
Steam Deck is Arch-based, that's most likely why.
SteamOS is counted separately.
Yes, but a lot of linux games use an Arch distribution such as CachyOS since SteamOS also is. They get updates faster because of the rolling releases.
I wonder how much Omarchy (based on Arch) made a dent... DHH said that it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
The hard part is never installing an Arch-like distro, it's making it past 5 sudo pacman -syu iterations without an AUR package going thermonuclear and requiring 45,000 pinned dependencies.
Just don’t use the AUR. Problem solved
This isn't really a thing that's happening though?