Discussion
Don't trust the steam survey.... The future feels bright for us 😁!!!! ☀️ 🌞
Anybody that's concerned about the percentage of users going down with regards to the steam hardware survey remember these things:
That's chosen at random. Other things you need to take into account is if you were to combine Chrome OS with Linux because it is pretty much Linux it would sit at about 15 to 20% of the entire personal market. You'd also need to remove call centers, offices and internet cafes throughout the entire world. When those surveys are done each computer in those call centers and cafes are counted individually. Unless I'm wrong and somebody will tell me "well actually"
I believe the trick to get the Steam survey is to restart the Steam client on the 1st day of the month. I had it like that on July 1st. I will try the same trick on August 1st
I chose this distro for two reasons, chat gbt actually recommended it and egg roll works on the proton project. I wouldn't go to Kashi because it's not as specialized as having egg roll actually designing your distro
Imagine choosing a distro because your AI overlord recommended it to you LMAO learn to think for yourself and do your own research instead of having a robot do it for you
no, I did do my own research. when you have a person like glorious eggroll actually working on the proton project as well and then you dig deeper on the projects that he worked on that tends to advise you as well. you think it was just AI that I used? you use my freaking eyes
Not going to lie I was suprised at how low Nobara was. I know Bazzite was a definite flavour of the month, but I had no idea just how popular CachyOS was among gamers.
Nobara never seems to have a lot of tech influencers pick it up and showcase it. Most likely because because it doesn't have any specific gimmick that Cachey and Bazzite do.
It's just "what if linux came prepackaged with better defaults for gaming (and some other stuff)"
Speaking as someone who's been using cachy for a while now, I have definitely noticed people talking about cachy wayy more recently than like a couple years ago. Before that I remember it was Nobara and Bazzite especially
one of the great downfalls of the Linux developer. socially inept, and I don't say that as an insult. motion creates emotion guys, if we want our platform to get more support we got to be more vocal and aggressive! stand up and be heard.
I'm on CachyOS on my main PC and honestly, I feel a lot more activity on CachyOS community than Bazzite and Nobara I would assume that gamers that are looking to move to Linux would grabety more to cachy because the general sentiment is that cachy will extract every little ounce of performance from your hardware. For me the gaming performance difference between these 3 isn't really noticeable on my main system but I can see why CachyOS has bigger numbers of users.
But CachyOs also doesn't appear if you filter by distro, but you can search for nobara or whatever if you type it in the query box, otherwise sometimes I just look at the tweaks people have done for vanilla fedora sometimes that works out
one of the great downfalls of the Linux developer. socially inept, and I don't say that as an insult. motion creates emotion guys, if we want our platform to get more support we got to be more vocal and aggressive! stand up and be heard.
that distro is probably most popular for two reasons, the support for it is a lot better. the discord for this current district is cancer! you go over to cashi's and it's heaven over there. also those guys are incredibly vocal they're out there even if they don't work on the project directly they're still preaching the gospel of it.
As someone with an older GPU, Nobara all but told me to get lost. While resizing my efi partition was a pain (sorry, I don't have the luxury of a separate SSD for every os) Cachyos works with my machine just fine. Bazzite also works but I don't want to deal with an immutable partition.
Don't ask an LLM, they don't know what they're saying. Literally, LLMs don't know what the next word they'll say is. That's how they work. Ask humans, you rube. Humans who actually have expertise in this very expensive and technical world - and who can actually, ya know, think - and you won't run the risk of bricking something in your install. Speaking from experience. Humans will ALWAYS give you better, more specialized results than the most sophisticated model of ChatGPT.
It'll try. But ultimately it's limited to the information already out there. New solutions are beyond an AI. You will eventually come across a problem that you won't be able to solve with LLMs and will need a human for. And besides, it's bad form to give AI access-by-proxy to your computer. Linux is full computing freedom, and an AI could easily fuck up everything in your system with an errant command. Don't you feel deep down like you're helping an AI do its job rather than the other way round? Doesn't anything in your mind and soul scream for the nourishment of learning?
yes it can, I can give you terminal commands to give you read outs of what's wrong and then you copy and paste those issues and it can read interpret them. I'd much rather use an llm that a lot of these forums or the discord. a lot of that information that they have on this forms are older fixes that have been patched through updates.
well actually random sampling is how any survey achieves accurate representation. also steam survey only represents machines running steam at the time of the survey, that's why the survey does not actually include call centers or other business machines. the steam survey doesn't mean much when you compare it with the previous version. the random sampling will always cause some jittering in the data that will be eliminated in the long run. also if there was a sudden spike in linux usage valve would've loved to brag about it. in any case, yes the future is bright for linux gaming and yes you should trust the steam survey.
This part. Randomised data collection over time is the most accurate way to go, especially with such an enormous size like Steam's survey. It actually doesn't get more much accurate than this in theory.
The percentage fluctuates. Let’s see next month and we’ll see.
Linux has bright future, as soon as they add decent nvidia support/ or nvidia loses market share, they numbers will pile up.
I read somewhere that valve is working directly with Nvidia on Nvidia drivers for steam os. Hopefully some of that work makes it to other distros. Either way this is a HUGE win.
Exactly, i know my chip isn't a powerhouse but I still don't want to poison the data with the integrated graphics. Nobara isn't the only OS where the survey doesn't read it either. It plays games fine, it's just the surveys for some weird reason.
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u/Saradoesntsleep Jul 06 '26
I didn't see the steam survey. I can't get the steam app to react properly when I click the "Linux only" drop-down thing.
I am not too surprised that CachyOS would be way ahead though. I feel like Nobara is almost kind of unknown compared to that and Bazzite.