In my personal bubble of power users, Windows' dominance in gaming and coding has been heavily eroded. Even I switched to a Mac (considering I can't even play Red Alert 2 on this machine, that's a huge deal)!
Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
21–30 of 59 posts
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#22Wild how less than 24h ago we were told to assume Linux was finally a hardened contender for gaming OS. The facts are the facts, and they're yet again trending opposite of journalism's opinions. The users have chosen Windows. Again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457770
Users are using Windows, not choosing it.
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#23Is there a specific Win 11 setup that gamers prefer? The non-IoT versions seem to be bloatware.
It's trivial to debloat with an unattend.xml during install or the various debloat tools.
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slop content is still slop... especially when saying things people want to hear. 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 E…
470 is for GTX 700 series and older - these are ~13 year old GPUs.
note 580 is now also EOL, and a rack of hardware video encoders is less demanding than gaming. =3
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#25It brings a nostalgic tear to my eye to see the OS flame wars heating up like it's 2002 again. Time to re-download some of those 1024x768 3D render wallpapers of Tux smashing a Windows computer
Edit: Here we go: https://wallpaper-house.com/data/out/9/wallpaper2you_359831....
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
470 is for GTX 700 series and older - these are ~13 year old GPUs.
note 580 is now also EOL, and a rack of hardware video encoders is less demanding than gaming. =3
No, 580 is the new legacy driver branch, it's still supported for a couple years. Just not optimized for new titles iirc.
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").
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#27Wild how less than 24h ago we were told to assume Linux was finally a hardened contender for gaming OS. The facts are the facts, and they're yet again trending opposite of journalism's opinions. The users have chosen Windows. Again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46457770
These are not contradictory statements. Linux can be a contender and not currently be in the lead.
Using this definition means Firefox is a contender in the browser wars, an independent will be a contender in the next Presidential election, and a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is a contender for your next car. Can we just leave out this contender nonsense and replace it with exotic choice?
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#28Windows is doing great! Says “Windows Central”.
2026 is the year of the Windows desktop! :)
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#29> That increase is likely being driven by users migrating away from Windows 10 as its end-of-life occurs, but could also be a surge of new users from devices like the Xbox Ally or other Windows handhelds. 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…
The last reported monthly active user count for Steam by Valve puts it at 132 million users per month. Since this was in 2021, it’s a conservative estimate now. But based on that conservative figure and if my numbers are correct, Steam added roughly 7 million Windows 11 users in December 2025.
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.
Re: Windows 11 surges among PC gamers on Steam as Linux stalls
#30In my personal bubble of power users, Windows' dominance in gaming and coding has been heavily eroded. Even I switched to a Mac (considering I can't even play Red Alert 2 on this machine, that's a huge deal)!
Say "Good bye!" to your free time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991853 (but looks like you already knew, lol. Dishonest wink)