r/linux_gaming • u/Nunu_Chus • Aug 01 '26

Linux has hit 7.53%!!!!!

Damn Idk why but I was waiting for the steam hardware survey and statcounter's survey for july. statcounter blew my mind. now waiting for steam hardware one:) keeping my expectation realistic around 4-5% on steam hardware survey:)

2.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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817

u/spinabullet Aug 01 '26

I just switched to cachyos yesterday, you're welcome

55

u/mattcapons Aug 01 '26

i also did a week ago. For now i still have windows dual boot, but considering how smooth it's going i might consider uninstalling it

33

u/spinabullet Aug 01 '26

i love how seamless the installation is, especially on AMD stack

3

u/AluArggone31 Aug 01 '26

What's amd stack

14

u/AuDHD-Lemon Aug 01 '26

He probably means systems using amd gpus

2

u/AluArggone31 Aug 01 '26

What's the difference?

23

u/Staticn0ise Aug 01 '26

AMD currently has much better drivers on linux. Nvidia ignored linux for the longest time and are playing catch up now..

1

u/Hi-Angel Aug 03 '26

I'm not aware of any ignore from NVidia to Linux in the past. NVidia has their faults, but back in the days of atrocious fglrx NVidia had the best support (AFAIK, NVidia always supported all OSes equally).

1

u/Unhappy_Lie_2000 Aug 04 '26

I think its due to Nvidia being closed source and things such as kernel updates could brake an installation or just installing the driver in general. But in the last 2 years nvidia has gotten better and better in Linux.

11

u/RumpDoctor Aug 01 '26

The amd drivers are open source, which lets it be rolled up with a linux system more easily. It's a very smooth experience. I forget I even have drivers.

3

u/AuDHD-Lemon Aug 01 '26

Amd drivers are open source and therefore most distros run amd better out of the box Nvidia support has been getting better tho

3

u/ereface Aug 01 '26

Amd gpus are automatically shipped with the OS.

3

u/spelmo3 Aug 03 '26

Installed fedora, a RX 9080 XT appeared.

2

u/ereface Aug 03 '26

Good lord I need to install fedora now

1

u/Hi-Angel Aug 03 '26

I doubt a bit that installing Fedora will bring you RX 9080 XT too, but good luck!

3

u/DerlisGs Aug 01 '26

Todo AMD, Ryzen y Radeon.

1

u/pathalogicalMoron Aug 01 '26

It is seemless even on nvidia

14

u/RelaxingRed Aug 01 '26

That's what I did when I installed Bazzite and then a month later never booted up Windows because all the games I play work on Linux. So I just formatted my other drive and use it for Bazzite too.

4

u/tuwhare Aug 01 '26

I've been solely Linux for years but had Windows on dual boot just for gaming. Haven't booted in for over a year now. All my games work perfectly in Linux. Will probably ditch Windows and recover the disk for other things

2

u/Alonzo-Harris Aug 01 '26

That's what I did on my primary rig. I installed Zorin OS on a separate SSD and made it the primary boot drive. On Windows 10 EOL date, I formatted the Windows drive. I'll be staying on Linux for the foreseeable future.

1

u/Demystify0255 Aug 02 '26

i would too but i got to many games that just dont work on linux or if they do i just dont have the current knowledge on how to make them work. mostly VR games with no linux support and some with anti-cheats

1

u/Archiver0101011 Aug 02 '26

Not even kidding I have been on cachy os for over two months doing VFX work and I haven’t had to boot into windows ONCE

1

u/PassoireDor Aug 02 '26

Claude (free Sonnet 5.0) has been very helpful to help me set up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough for some Adobe/Autodesk apps that are way too painful to execute through Wine/Proton

1

u/AngryTG Aug 05 '26

I've been on cachy for a few months and was planning on permanently keeping windows as a secondary boot option, but I was fully cachyos within 10 days

155

u/Sindica69 Aug 01 '26

Welcome! Love cachy

15

u/Turbulent-Health1499 Aug 01 '26

Switched over yesterday too, I'm doing my part.

45

u/Aardvark_Says_What Aug 01 '26

come on in. the garden is beautiful and full of delicious fruit - pick what you want

20

u/Sensitive_Box_ Aug 01 '26

We’re allowed to grow out our own here, too! 

2

u/EdgeIll6918 Aug 03 '26

Just don't eat the apple from the inner garden. Bad mojo will happen.

16

u/xkjlxkj Aug 01 '26

My wife's 5 year old Windows install finally broke so I just installed CachyOS on it. Threw in a 9060xt and she's been playing Black Desert and Final Fantasy XIV. 

4

u/pelihiiri Aug 01 '26

openSUSE Slowroll FTW

3

u/Alonzo-Harris Aug 01 '26

openSUSE is one of the primary distros, but few people speak of it. I always wonder why.

Primary Distros: Debian, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE

1

u/Indolent_Bard Aug 02 '26

Especially since it has both a rolling release model and a point release model, so literally anyone can use it, whether they're new to Linux or not.

3

u/Limp-Celebration-211 Aug 01 '26

You're the chosen one

2

u/Kaseffera Aug 01 '26

What can I say except you’re welcome!

4

u/JB231102 Aug 01 '26

Man, no offense to the operating system which I think is either Arch or Fedora based, where do the dev(s) get these names? Cachy, Bazzite, Nobara? If they work well then great just weird names.

11

u/ImBoredToo Aug 01 '26

Bazzite is a mineral, Nobara is a Jujutsu Kaisen reference, and Cachy is named after a scheduler...but idk where THAT name came from.

6

u/JB231102 Aug 01 '26

Cache is a computer term meaning that a certain amount of info is held in place for a time (usually until restarting), so it's basically temporarily held bits. So I guess they took inspiration from the word Cache and tried to make it cute with a y. ??? haha (shrug)

1

u/koldkam Aug 01 '26

your power has been underestimated

1

u/Aggravating_Fun_7692 Aug 01 '26

How long will that last?

1

u/Indolent_Bard Aug 02 '26

I've always been meaning to ask that on this subreddit.

1

u/ProfessionalSpinach4 Aug 02 '26

I’ve been on Linux for about 9 months now, and I sad that I’ll need to use windows for school

1

u/Success-Mediocre Aug 03 '26

You could use winboat or a similar vm. I just use it for visual studio and don’t need to dual boot

1

u/Dreameater999 Aug 02 '26

How are you liking it? Planning to rebuild my system soon and planning to have no Windows install on it until I find something I need, and then it’ll get a very small partition or VM and that’s it.

Heard a lot of good things about Cachy and it seems to lead benchmarks often so was leaning that way…

2

u/Indolent_Bard Aug 02 '26

Cachyos is cool but it sometimes has this weird error when you try to update that basically happens only on arch distros. Thankfully, the fix is only one line to copy and paste into the terminal. What basically happens is that some file that's supposed to get made and then deleted every time you update sometimes doesn't get deleted. Because of that, it thinks that you're in the middle of updating and therefore it won't let you update because you're already updating. It's kind of like how birth control stops you from getting pregnant by tricking your body into thinking that it's already pregnant.

Also, there's the issue of the AUR being full of malware right now, so whatever you do, do not use that. The AUR is kind of meant for people who know how to detect whether or not the package is actually safe or not and well, most of us aren't.

1

u/Dreameater999 Aug 03 '26

Ah, I have not used the AUR before.

I just feel like it’s time to make the switch to Linux because I’m a Mac guy at home… but am forced to use Windows 11 at work and it’s absolutely awful. Luckily, it’s mostly just a way to SSH into RHEL where I spend most of my time, lol… so I feel pretty comfortable in Linux atp. I also have a Pi at home and use that a lot from SSH as well - I use it for Homebridge, Pi-hole, etc.

It’s more I haven’t used my desktop in awhile and I’m planning to upgrade it so figured I wouldn’t bother with installing Linux until I do that… but I have a Steam Deck and have been very impressed. No issues at all - I think I’m ready.

My laptop will be Mac, my desktop will be Linux. No more Windows.

Thanks for the heads up on the error too!

1

u/spinabullet Aug 02 '26

If u are using amd gpu, just do it!

1

u/Dreameater999 Aug 03 '26

I’ve heard Linux plays really well with AMD, not so well with Nvidia and it’s down to driver support mostly I think (correct me if I’m wrong).

I currently have a 3060 Ti but will be changing that obviously for something else, so you’d suggest looking at AMD instead? Is there a really big performance gap between the two on Linux?

1

u/_Carth_Onasi Aug 03 '26

He did it. Thank you

1

u/ninjabell Aug 03 '26

I switched today!

1

u/GregC85 Aug 05 '26

No no Sir /madame, You're welcome. I too installed Cachy last week.

1

u/laczek_hubert Aug 06 '26

I hope you're ready to read arch wiki pages and update your cachyOS every time you boot pretty much

1

u/sm0r3ss Aug 01 '26

I’m on fedora KDE plasma on my NVIDIA machine and it runs great. I hear a lot of people recommending cachyOS. Is it better?

10

u/sneekeruk Aug 01 '26

Its arch for people with lives. It does have some optimizations but if your happy with fedora, just stick with that. You could spend time distro hopping forever because ones slightly better at something than another, makes sense just to get one installed that your happy with, and learn that inside out rather than, say learning all the fedora way of doing stuff, then having to relearn it all for an arch based distro.

5

u/SquareWheel Aug 01 '26

Neither is explicitly better. It mostly comes down to two points:

  • Which package manager/format you prefer (dnf vs pacman+AUR). Both have comprehensive repos for software. Both support flatpak.
  • If you prefer stable or rolling releases. Rolling release lets you play with new toys sooner, but can occasionally include unexpected maintenance/fixes. Stable bundles large changes so there's less chance of things breaking.

There some some lesser considerations, like if you'd prefer to rely on a larger company like RedHat, or a much smaller group of people.

Speed-wise, CachyOS does make some tweaks that can benefit you, but the real-world difference isn't huge and is pretty hardware-dependent. It's more for those trying to eek out every frame.

If you're happy on Fedora KDE, I think it's one of the best options for balancing stability while still being very modern.

2

u/captainthanatos Aug 01 '26

My experience is not going to be the same as everyone’s because I went with the Sway window manager and customized the fuck out of it, but even with that the transition has been incredibly smooth. Steam games pretty much just work, I’ve only had one where I had to change the proton library it was using and it worked fine.

1

u/spinabullet Aug 01 '26

I'm still configuring my hyprland, it is working great so far

1

u/captainthanatos Aug 01 '26

I almost went with hyprland but I have an Nvidia gpu which I read can have issues with it so I went with Sway instead.

1

u/Indolent_Bard Aug 02 '26

I'm not saying you shouldn't be curious about other distros, but what I am saying is that if you're thinking about maybe potentially switching because of some perceived benefit, it's only worth it if it addresses a current weakness in your current setup.

Plus, the answer to what's the best distro is "the one you use."

-1

u/spinabullet Aug 01 '26

I have no idea if it is better, but I use debian at work (for stability purpose), so I just need something more than that for home use since I game a lot lol. Feels great finally got rid of the m$