The summer is now over, and I wanted to check again what has happened in regard the choice of Linux Distros used for gaming, using our favorite dataset: the ProtonDB data.

I don’t want to bore you with the disclaimer, but the following needs to be said nonetheless:

• This may not be representative of all types of Linux users. I’m sure this is not what your AWS engineer uses on EC2.
• This may not be completely representative of all Linux gamers either. But I’d wage this is actually a good predictor where the market is going to shift. We saw first that Manjaro was getting the boot here first, before going under pretty much everywhere.
• There may be some additional biases, due to whoever used ProtonDB.
• Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
• Arch Linux is Arch Linux on desktop. The Steam Deck’s OS is reported as HoloISO, not Arch Linux, so stop trying to claim that Arch is first because of the Steam Deck! This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines. This may change as Valve starts providing official support beyond the Steam Deck.
• We have no relationship whatsoever with any the devs who develop the distros mentioned in the list.

Now on to the results. You might want to click on the picture to enlarge it.

Now on to a few comments about these developments.

CachyOS: You can’t stop a running train

We have never seen anything like it. We already called it the fastest growing distro back in May 2025, and it’s still the case now in August 2025. This puts CachyOS in second position at 10.7%, right after Linux Mint at 10.8%, and frankly it looks like CachyOS is going to be second just right after Arch before the end of the year. At the same time, the subreddit for CachyOS has doubled its user count in a few months, going from 9000 to about 18000 now. There seems to be quite a few posts related to Windows users making the jump to Linux via CachyOS, too.

Why is their growth not slowing down? Well, there’s a feedback mechanism in place apparently. New users jumping on the CachyOS train have positive experiences, spread the word and recommend the distro, and while there are some criticism as well they seem to be drowned in an ocean of enthusiasm around their offering.

Surely there are other factors explaining their growth in recent months. What are their latest releases like? Well, they have been fairly busy.

The July 2025 release was particularly impactful, introducing a series of key updates that directly addressed community feedback and aligned with modern Linux desktop trends. The release defaulted KDE Plasma to the Wayland display server, a forward-looking change, while ensuring a seamless fallback to X11 for systems with legacy NVIDIA drivers to prevent issues. It also provided a long-requested feature: the ability for users to select their preferred shell (Fish, Zsh, or Bash) during installation. On the gaming front, the release brought crucial updates like AMD’s Anti-Lag 2 support and the PROTON_FSR4_UPGRADE variable, which further solidified the distribution’s reputation among gamers.

The August 2025 release continued with a focus on stability and user convenience. They made the strategic decision to include the linux-cachyos-lts kernel as a fallback on all new installations and as the default on the live ISO, a move that directly responds to recent reports of stability issues with the latest stable kernel. This release introduced a new, web-based package dashboard for enhanced transparency and a Cachy-Update tool (a fork of arch-update), which simplifies system maintenance by providing a tray indicator for updates, a feature particularly valuable for users new to rolling releases. On the gaming side they added a DLSS upgrader (that download the latest libs for you), and the same thing for XESS.

One very interesting aspect is that despite the continuous growth of CachyOS, based on Arch, there is absolutely no cannibalisation of Arch usage. The two have apparently a different enough audience to keep living and growing together. Arch comes with nothing included and can be used without a GUI, while CachyOS brings a lot of pre-installed software and is much more aimed towards desktop usage and gaming as a whole.

How are the other distros faring?

Ubuntu, not so hot at the moment. It had some little ups and downs but it’s reaching another low point at 8.2% in August 2025. Fedora is much more stable in comparison, staying pretty much between 9 and 10% of market share. While I was expecting Bazzite to stop growing as SteamOS was being made available for other devices, they proved me wrong with 3 consecutive months of growth in usage. They are now just behind Ubuntu.

EndeavourOS seems to have lost a little of usage, maybe in favor of CachyOS. Nobara seems to have taken a few steps back as well, from a 5% share down to about 4% at the moment. Manjaro, as expected, is a dying distro and is now headed for the depths of this chart, with just 3% share. Sadly, this is also the case for Pop_OS! at less than 3%, mostly self inflicted because they never bothered to update their base on the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

What Comes Next

We will probably do one more check by the end of the year (November or December) to see how things are standing. It’s now very apparent that are there are two winning poles forming: the Arch-based distros, leading the pack, and the Fedora-based ones. The third one based on Ubuntu/Debian, while still important, is clearly losing appeal among gamers in the past twelve months.