Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
That's just noise
Use habits in Dec diverge from the rest of the year because of the holidays. People are gifted new systems that come with windows 11 pre installed, and people who don't usually have time to game come online. I would not take this to mean that anything has stopped using Linux and is using windows 11 instead.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-December-2025-Survey
Edit: Here we go: https://wallpaper-house.com/data/out/9/wallpaper2you_359831....
The slow but steady move to 6+ CPU core systems seems at least a bit more interesting.
Switch to Linux today. Unless you're working with a shit company, chances are pretty good that all of your software and workflows will work on Linux too, and possibly even work better. Plus, you'll be able to actually triage your own computer (if you want).
I wouldn't call the company where I work shit, but in Germany many big companies are deeply entrenched in the whole Microsoft ecosystem, and some sectors are even more entranched. So, I am very certain that a lot of insanely business-critical software at the company where I work at (which is about a market where easily billions of EUR/USD are moved) will not work in a GNU/Linux ecosystem.
Over many, many years, many parts of the (often custom-built) software was developed to work together with the existing big ecosystem of existing (also often custom-built) software. Some parts of the programs that I work on are deeply intertwined with various products from Microsoft - if they weren't, the users would not be able to work so productively with these programs (i.e. the workflows would take a lot more time for the (highly qualified) users, which would cost the company a big load of money).
While I (generally) like the hardware, I don't like the UX in MacOS but more than that I have a strong distaste for having my runtime deployment environment be entirely different from my working environment. I prefer to eat my own dogfood and have Linux all the way through, and I really like my own tooling and configuration I've set up over the years.
I had a job recently where the whole deployment stack was NixOS (to Aarch64) but the issued devices were Mac laptops, and you couldn't even build the software on MacOS (not even Nix Darwin) so had to do everything inside Parallells etc and it was a giant PITA.
I've never understood why .. if you're going to pay people six figure salaries for their time why would you slow them down with process and tooling that makes them less efficient...
If I have a laptop, it boots and contacts Microsoft, but I wipe it and install Linux, does that count? Microsoft doesn’t say.
I would guess the Steam switch to Linux is mostly driven by the adoption of the Steam Deck.
A company that bet the farm on gamers back in the '90s needs to embrace their bread and butter. AI is cool, but don't forget what got you here.
My kneejerk says it is more likely the first explanation as it’s either leave windows (unlikely) or finally go to 11 whereas the latter is about making a deliberate, pricey purchase. But I don’t have a lick of data to support that of course ha
Meanwhile, the most recent estimates show the Steam Deck, the most popular handheld gaming PC by far, having sold around 4 million units, while every other handheld gaming PC (including the Asus ROG Ally, the predecessor to the ROG Xbox Ally) having sold around 2 million units combined. While the Xbox name carries some weight, I highly doubt the Xbox Ally has sold significantly in the two months since its launch.
TLDR: You’re likely correct that numbers from Windows handhelds did not contribute significantly to the added Windows 11 users in December.
Says “Windows Central”.
Measuring growth along a tiny time frame; nice try.
Fact is most modern Linux Kernels >6.8.x don't support the legacy nvidia driver 470. Thus, on modern OS distros a lot of legacy video cards and laptops running Linux >6.18.x just isn't practical without a GPU upgrade.
The situation will probably get worse in the next few years as perpetual permutation kernel culture hits unmaintainable EOL hardware driver Blobs.
Most dual boot a Windows 10/11 ssd, as it still sort of works. YMMV =3
I'm not sure what the state of the open-source drivers is for the really old nvidia GPUs, but for Pascal and such it's pretty decent. No video hwaccel though. However, for hardware encoding, NVENC has improved a lot over the generations. So the old chunkers are probably beat on every metric by e.g. a T400 card. Or Intel Arc (business model: "Quick sync for AMD").
Depends on the hardware codecs use case, as some legacy cards are valuable to people that own legacy workflows.
Without CUDA + hardware-encoders a GPU is just a paperweight regardless of age for some use-cases. =3
You've repeated this FUD about DKMS breaking, but it's exclusively a rolling-release issue. And even then you can still fix it, tons of places will containerize their workload and dump it into a proxmox:latest instance.
It is not FUD, but rather the consequences of out-of-band proprietary mystery blobs, dependency injection, and major structural changes within the kernel or user space programs. Many legacy dkms simply don't survive the code permutations over the long term (usually Wifi cards, equipment, and GPUs.) Thus, projects relying on such drivers break eventually as people start to abandon the legacy platforms.
Linux is good at many things, but LTS only slows the compatibility decay cycle to years instead of weeks. The several thousand tonnes of waste hardware it turns into garbage, and locked offline Application licenses do matter to some folks. It is the hidden Spiral development liability in most FOSS projects. =3
Windows Service Packs do the same thing. Install Windows 10 software on a Windows 7 machine and you'll end up with a similarly-bricked system.
Abandonware popularity is a relatively recent phenomenon, as hardware became cheap enough to be disposable... and SaaS/DRM hit the entertainment industry.
Most people are not going to port AAA title dependencies to ancient hardware, but the "Doom will run" on just about anything meme is usually still true. =3
That is goalpost-shifting. You started this by critiquing Linux' drivers and security patches, you don't get to carve out excuses for Windows.
> but most static-linked applications tended to work fine
Sure. Most static-linked applications tend to work fine on Linux and macOS with a modern Wine environment. It's a moot point.
NVIDIA abandoning legacy drivers had to happen eventually, but it isn't an excuse for Linux bricking the hardware. The vestigial deprecated areas of the kernel is covered in foundation courses to help explain what mess to avoid, as the rule to never break user space hid a lot of the uglier bodges. In terms of code volume, linux source has been mostly driver code for quite a few years.
Trying to mix commercial blob binaries in a FOSS project is rarely stable over the long term (hence why recent RTX and AMD open drivers is very important.) Yet how many android devices are in garbage or recycling heaps? Answer, _all_ of them eventually, and usually in less than 3 years on average.
Linux will also soon no longer include 32bit x86 support if upstream planning goes as planned. It also had to happen eventually.
It should be noted the CUDA enabled drivers on windows is quite a bit more complex than the windows kernel itself. Yes it is still an awful adware OS, but it will still let you run 10 year old titles mostly without an issue. YMMV =3
1. outdated legacy OS that has to rely on a limited subset of flatpack, snap, containerization, and CVEs...
2. modern OS with unfix-able driver issues, NVIDIA wanting people to buy a new GPU, and broken abandonware drivers
I'd say a bricked GPU is appropriate terminology, as your screen will be forced into 800x600 by the hardware recovery mode and be functionally useless. For Linux users the only solution is to buy a compatible GPU, and or throw away the laptop/tablet/phone devices that can't run legacy Windows drivers.
When the collapse cycle of spiral development happens: a lot of Applications are also lost in the process, as the original publishers may not be maintaining an application a decade later. dkms with mystery Blobs would fall into the same out-of-band classification.
It is funnier people are upset about slop articles nonsense assertions.
The question about whether something is qualitatively "good" is meaningless if its demonstrably broken. =3
From the chart, it looks that Windows took some small share to some older OSX in December and Linux stayed mostly the same.