We have received the freshest batch of ProtonDB data and we are back with an analysis of how the distros have been doing over the past few years. Following our last article focusing on Manjaro (whose usage is dropping continuously) we now have done a couple of changes to make the analysis more accurate:

• We have included Flatpak for Steam, which was not taken in account until this iteration.
• We have also added Nobara (a few other distros) that were unaccounted for until now.

This does not change most of the observations we have made until now, but it did bring something to light: Nobara has been growing, very, very fast:

Nobara is a fork of Fedora, led by Glorious Eggroll - yes, the same person behind the famous Proton-GE fork as well. Nobara is a version of Fedora with multiple aspects tweaked for a better gaming experience (check out our interview with Glorious Eggroll previously about Nobara), and it seems like quite a few people have heard about it, since it’s the distro with the fastest growth so far in the past year. It went from nothing to about 4% market share in about a year or so! EndeavourOS took more than 4 years to get there, and Garuda has been around for a little more than 2 years and is still around 3%.

Here’s the same data used in the above chart in video, if you prefer animations:

One last observation for this time, since we have Flatpak on the chart: the usage of Flatpak for Steam only concerns a minority of users, but it is growing as well - probably as some of the distributions people use are limited by older OS-level libraries and Flatpak becomes a nice option to go around such problems.

In any case, the landscape of distro used by ProtonDB users (and probably Linux users at large, too) is changing fast, and the new face of the market goes into more fragmentation, not less.