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.