It’s summer. Usually everything is pretty quiet. There’s no reason to make waves unless you are on the beach. Just out of curiosity, I was checking a few days ago what happens to the Linux distros used for gaming, expecting no change at all from a few months ago. Boy, I was wrong. I told you last time that CachyOS was the fastest growing distro back in May 2025. You would expect such statements to tamper down over time: you can’t usually grow forever on a very competitive market. Well… until now.
First before the results, the usual disclaimer, as this data comes from ProtonDB:
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.
Now on to the results. You might want to click on the picture to enlarge it.
Now let’s review the changes in more details.
CachyOS overtakes Ubuntu
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