Happy New Year Everyone! This is going to be another exciting year for the world of Linux gaming: how can it go any other way!? There have been recent reports of Steam support on ChromeOS (Chromebooks) in the future, which could, if true, open the door to a larger market of (Linux) gamers on such machines.
In the meantime, let me share with you an update about the distribution chart created from ProtonDB data, namely what distributions gamers use. Without further due, here goes:
Now you have an additional 2 months in the dataset (November and December), and the trend of a declining Ubuntu choice for gaming continues, and it seems to be mainly coming from an increase of Manjaro and Arch gamers.
Incidentally, we can also see that 5 distros out of 26 (namely 19.2%), account for 80.8% of the total market share. Yeah, the good old 80/20 rule is at play! It’s amazing to see how often that rule can be applied to almost every situation out there.
I have started to look at the growth of Arch-based distros a bit more, to see what may be driving it, and I think there is definitely something related to AMD gamers (and their need to run the latest Mesa to fully take advantage of their hardware), but so far the explanation is not as simple as one might think (as in, it does not explain everything). At some point I will probably want to conduct a new market survey with specific questions to address such points.
In the meantime, enjoy the rest of January, and from our end we will back with a few more articles by the end of the month.
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I tried Manjaro KDE on two laptops. It worked fine until I had to update then I kept on getting an error on both laptops. I tried recommendations from a couple of forums, nothing worked. So I switched to KDE Neon. Haven’t had a problem since.
Manjaro is Arch for brainlets, so it’s no surprise that the brainlet developers break things regularly…
The same reason trump won the elections. They are memeing the people without an oppinion
It’s because at the end of the august there was a update on Arch that required lsb-release with the steam client, so Arch started to be properly counted. Before that only counted for those who manually installed lsb-reelease:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/63028
That is true and somewhat explains the jump after August, but a little besides the point. Arch has been growing further even after that bug, and Manjaro has been growing over time for longer than that so the trend is real. And Ubuntu is correctly identified anyway and is clearly declining in usage.
They should be using /etc/os-release. LSB is a dead and failed experiment.
Arch is just a better distro. That is quite simple explanation, but the truth.
I agree from experience, but that does not explain in itself the recent growth. It has been better for ages.
Special survey: why do you guys use Arch, by the way?
Quite frankly… It’s the distro that’s caused me the least amount of headaches! I’ve had an arch install going for three years now, no problems at all.. still cutting edge, still solid.. it’s the perfect distro for people that have a Linux education 👍
Rolling release – gradually updates and having always the latest. In Ubuntu I had to reinstall after every release, because for my laptops it was always hopelessly broken after release upgrade. Having latest and greatest also means first to get fixes and not waiting an year. Since I’m early adopter, with Ubuntu I always had disabled features and broken drivers for long. But my initial switch to Arch was due to huge lack (back then) of hidpi support and with Arch+Gnome I had decent 4k support out of the box. There so many small things that you have in Arch… Read more »
Latest software. Rolling release. AUR. If it breaks, it is very easy to fix.