Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 Linux now nearly twice as popular as MacOS on Steam Summary Following the conclusion of the March 2026 Steam Hardware survey, we have seen a massive jump in reported Linux users on Steam. The currently reported number is 5.33% (as compared to the 2.35% of OSX users and 92.33% of Windows users). Although this jump seems abnormal, this is likely caused by a long standing bug in the survey where Chinese users were heavily over represented for unknown reasons. The jump in Linux users coensides with a 31.85% DROP in reported users using Simplified Chinese as their primarily language.   Current Results:   Detailed Breakdown of distros: Quotes Quote Steam on Linux ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February. That's still much better than several years ago in the pre-Steam-Deck days when Steam on Linux was at around 1%. In absolute terms with the continued growth of the Steam user base, 2~3% was rather healthy considering all of its bumps over the past decade.   My thoughts For the longest time, the more cynical of the industry has been able to brush off Linux as a niche. But with the combination of the Steam Deck, Bazzite becoming more popular, and perhaps even MacOS being hostile to games lately (no official Vulkan support on M1+ has actually dug their grave for the games industry, no one wants to port to their platform specific API besides for their mobile games), it's going to become harder to ignore. Most games have worked by community effort but I hope these results push studios even further to actually test Proton and resolve bugs that arise when running in that environment. As for anticheat, I have a educated prediction: Someone (as in some anticheat dev) is going to make proper kernel level anticheat for Linux. I predict that it will require TPM 2, secure boot using Microsoft's keys (and shim for loading Linux which is how many distros handle secure boot), and be provided as a binary kernel module which may or may not work with DKMS. Attestation of the Linux kernel is already a thing in most distros. Your kernel modules are signed and Linux report when the kernel is tainted. https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.html AFAIK this way better than what Windows can provide. If an anticheat was developed that required a known signed kernel that wasn't tainted, it would probably stop a large amount of cheating on its own.   I'm excited. Maybe we'll actually get proper Linux optimization on major engines.   As stated in the summary, this jump seems abnormal especially given that we've had weird behavior with the survey before but I believe this is likely more accurate. Previously the survey reported Chinese as the most popular language (which is seemingly impossible even while co