Boiling Steam's latest analysis based on ProtonDB's dataset | Linux Distros in March 2025: Here Comes A New Challenger!
Linux Distros in March 2025: Here Comes A New Challenger!
It crushes me, CRUSHES ME, that the wretched Fedora beats my beloved openSUSE Tumbleweed in popularity! Why, oh why!??!
Seriously though, why do people prefer Fedora? I used it for 2 years and was very, very happy after switching my daily driver to Tumbleweed. It felt faster, had better repos, defaults, stability, etc. — aaaaaand it's rolling release, which is so much easier (ironically) from a stability perspective (every, EVERY, Fedora release something would break for me, gosh-darn-it). I just don't get it; am I the only one experiencing this?
Most of it is historical momentum. Regardless of relative quality, far more people try Fedora and so far more people stick with it.
As for Tumbleweed specifically, many people do not like rolling distros. I do.
I tried openSUSE a few months back because I wanted to be more closely associated with SUSE than Red Hat (I had to update to a new RHEL release at work about a year ago and really hated some of the shit they were pulling).
Here's a list of issues I had:
Now, all of these I problems I could probably fix. But it just wasn't really worth the effort when my main issue was: "The downstream company associated with my Distro did some dumb shit that doesn't really impact my system."
I like Fedora because it’s a very forward focused distro, pushing things like Wayland and btrfs instead of clinging or dragging their feet like some other distros. I used OpenSUsE on my desktop towards the very end of my time with KDE but when I decided to switch to Gnome I stuck with fedora since it was what I had been using on my laptop for a while.
I will concede I rarely had a clean upgrade when new releases of fedora came out, but since I switched to silverblue that’s a thing of the past :)
My 2 cents. I started with Bazzite and switched to Fedora after some things broke. Fedora works for my use case and I don't see any reason to switch further. Even upgrading from 40 to 41 worked without hickups.
I'm surprised bazzite broke
Sooo... The author mentions that Manjaro fucked up, but I'm not sure what they're referring to...?
I mean, like... To which Manjaro fuckup are they referring?
https://manjarno.pages.dev/ Manjaro's Pamac took AUR down twice, also their website had its SSL certs expire 4 times
Yes, I'm on staff with Arch. I'm very aware of all of these. That's like, one of my favorite pages to link to. The fact that I'm aware of these is the whole point of my comment.
I said:
To which Manjaro fuckup are they referring?
I mean, like… To which Manjaro fuckup are they referring?
Obviously, I'm not the author. But if I'd have to guess, their answer would likely be "Yes.".
Arch is the most "just works" distro I ever tried.
Reducing the workload of the distro maintainers by keeping packages vanilla and close to upstream, not writing a shitload of distro-specific GUI tools, and off-loading all the weird stuff to a user repo, is genius.
That way, there's more capacity to focus on getting it right.
Other distros have a lot more "features" (looking at you, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu) but Arch just gives you a high quality package of the newest stuff, and it's amazing how solid it is nowadays.
I went wild and started using it for servers about 5 years ago and I shit you not, it’s far more stable than I would have thought. I parse the blog for update notes if there’s any big changes to anything I’m using but given most stuff is offloaded to containers, I pretty much yolo a yay -Syu every week. Zero issues.
I had more issues with Debian and Ubuntu due to bugs in stale packages or weird default configs than I have running bleeding edge vanilla via Arch.
People underestimate the issues that stale packages cause as well as the fragility that comes from the ways people introduce either newer packages or packages missing from the repos.
With Arch, everything is super up-to-date and you pretty much never install from outside the repos. It makes the system extremely robust and reliable (what I want from “stable”).
Finally pacman (and yay) are awesome and I trust them to do updates of thousands of packages at once. With Debian and Ubuntu, I lived in fear of those kind of updates uninstalling essential parts of my system. I had Fedora botch more than one upgrade release to release.
So, I also find Arch the most “stable” system I have used (though Chimera is looking awesome so far as well).
In the Linux world though, the word “stable” has come to mean “static” and unchanging as in RHEL and Debian. Arch is not “stable” by that definition.
I did have an issue with Arch in the past couple years. A kernel update cause the WiFi on one laptop to stop working on the latest kernel. I also have an LTS kernel install so rebooting into that brought me back up in a minute. When I checked a few days later, the problem had been fixed in the current kernel as well.
I wouldn't call it stable. To me that implies I can run it for 5 years and don't have to worry about compatibility changes.
But I never had it break on me.
It's interesting to see how much nixos grew over the last 2 years, even though the distribution exists since 2003.
The Ubuntu and Manjaro era is over. Arch is the new Ubuntu (by popularity for gaming). Fedora and Endeavour also grew a lot. Question is if they reached their ceiling already. Pop OS could explode in popularity once COSMIC is out, but maybe not for gaming. Bazzite got even a patch note addressing an issue with this specific distribution in the game Marvel Rivals. Here is a lot of potential for this distro, as an alternative for the future general SteamOS distro (if it ever comes out as a general install media). BTW, nobody seem to talk about HOLO ISO anymore.
I root for bazzite. It's so easy to setup and update all while providing superb support for gaming. I actually run it as a desktop os and I love it.
Debian, always stable...
“Without further due”…
… yeah …
Flatpak is surprisingly low
Wow, fascinating to see I am one of the Few Debian users. It works great on the distribution, even better than what I had heard about other platforms.
Do you run Steam from Debian repos or Flatpak?
I go from the repos myself.
Weird, am I blind or is there no SteamOS?
I know it's based on Arch, but it is NOT Arch.
This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines.
If only it was mentioned in the article...
This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines.
It's interesting that you can see exactly when antergos shut down where Popos and Manjaro surge in popularity.
Ah, yes, "Flatpak", my favourite distro 😸
Author's disclaimer:
"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."