The State of Linux Gaming - 2023 in Review

With the Year of 2023 coming to a close, it is time to look at how much progress Linux gaming has made over the course of the previous 12 months. When I did a mid-year review, Linux had a modest 1.44% marketshare on Steam and over 3% on StatCounter. At the time, Linux gaming was having a boring, but respectable year. Growth, while slow, was evident.

Then, Valve unexpectedly dropped a bombshell in November 2023, announcing the Steam Deck OLED. At first glance, it merely sounded like Valve swapped out the LCD screen with an OLED screen and called it a day. But when looking further into the nitty-and-gritty, it actually provides numerous upgrades, including:

Going from TSMC's 7nm process to 6nm, making the 4-core Zen2/8 CU RDNA2 chip more power efficient
A more color accurate, visually pleasing OLED screen that can run up to 90Hz
Better speakers
RAM clocked at a higher frequency (6400 MT/s vs 5500 MT/s)
Smaller bezels on the screen
A larger capacity battery courtesy of the OLED display's smaller thickness
Upgraded wifi chip and bluetooth

When you add all that together, it's actually a pretty big upgrade even though the core counts are still the same. Valve definitely listened to the feedback of the LCD Steam Deck and addressed all, if not, the vast majority of its flaws. And much of the tech-tubers would agree:

As for whether the operating system, SteamOS, will finally hit the desktop, we may be unfortunately waiting for quite a while yet. Lawrence Yang said that [it is high on Valve's priority list](https://archive.ph/YwkHW#selection-1997.1-1997.107), but SteamOS will likely make its way onto other handhelds first before the desktop. It is a little bit of a bummer, but understandable. SteamOS is finely tuned for the Steam Deck, a platform with fixed hardware. Desktops can have a wide variety of configurations which makes a desktop version of SteamOS more difficult to develop. Releasing SteamOS on other handhelds is a good middle ground as most of them use AMD APUs.

There are many other options available. ChimeraOS offers a pretty close SteamOS-like experience on desktop. If you want a light laptop that's capable of light-to-moderate gaming, there's the Ryzen 7840U Framework 13 or the upcoming Framework 16 where you can install a modular Radeon 7700S GPU. There's also the TUXEDO Pulse 14 that sports a Ryzen 7840HS APU and the TuxedoOS that comes with the laptop is very well maintained.

Linux will remain a very niche platform for gaming, but it is clearly getting more popular. It's currently at a 3.21% marketshare on StatCounter and 1.91% marketshare on Steam. Where will it end up by the end of 2024? Hopefully, higher than it currently is.

This article is co-published on Odysee, Publish0x, and Read.cash.