Valve’s Steam Deck propels Linux into the 2nd most popular gaming operating system, beating out Apple’s MacOS.
The handheld portable gaming market is continuing to grow. One of the popular options is Valve’s Steam Deck, which runs off a Linux operating system. Compared to the competition from the likes of ASUS with their new ROG Ally, and Ayaneo going the Windows route, Valve went down the route of Linux, making SteamOS.
This news comes from Dexerto who reported on this feat saying, “The Steam Deck is soaring in popularity, causing a monumental shift in the balance of the three operating systems when it comes to gaming.” They praise the little, but powerful handheld PC, saying that it’s one of their favorite devices, with the ability to have instant access to your Steam library, noting that the device is not running Windows.
Running off the Steam Summer Sale, which saw a price drop on the device, many users are now flooding the Linux environment. Due to this, it pushed Linux above MacOS. Dexerto explains that while Mac gaming is growing, at some point it will make more sense to dive into a Windows device or SteamOS due to a larger library of games. However, this leap doesn’t mean Linux will overthrow Windows since the latter remains the popular operating system.
According to Dexerto, the current market share split across all three is, Windows users take up 96.21%, Linux now takes up 1.96%, and macOS is third with 1.84%, noting that a 0.52% jump was recorded by Game On Linux’s tracker.
Currently, out of all the Linux Platforms, GameOnLinux explains in their blog post that SteamOS is the current popular Linux system, followed by this listing below:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 42.07% +2.74%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 7.94% -0.39%
- Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS 64 bit 7.38% -0.49%
- Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.99% -0.03%
- “Manjaro Linux” 64 bit 4.29% -0.08%
- Linux Mint 21.1 64 bit 3.84% -0.71%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.97% +2.97%
- Other 25.52% -4.02%