According to Statcounter, Windows 11 held a 55.18% market share in October 2025. That share dropped to 53.7% in November and dropped again in December. Now, Windows 11 holds a 50.73% market share.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
Many are rollback to Windows 10, but Linux is increasing as well.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Swapped to Linux Mint over the weekend. No major issues. Steam works, LLMs work, web browser stuff all transferred over…it wasn’t perfect but pretty easy to figure it out with a few online searches. The best part - it actually runs better. No more f*cked up bluetooth and audio as well.
A lot of customization can be done on it, but I think for most people, Linux is fine for the vast majority of users already out of the box. Some criticism is that I think the UX can be improved and a more layman-friendly streamlined partition mounting + file security management.
Same for my partner’s old gaming PC: she used Windows 10 until recently, and Bluetooth as well as the steam overlay didn’t work properly.
Now on Bazzite hey do.
It sounds like Bazzite is the most “plug and play” version at the moment, is that right?
For most things, I’d agree.
Yet, I found it tricky to get Optifine working on Minecraft (Vanilla, i.e. no Forge and such) since there seems to be no way to install JRE on the system. Had to work with a distrobox container, install JRE there and run the .jar file through it. I’ve managed, but beginners won’t find this very “plug and play”.
So YMMV.
Honestly, I don’t know which distro is not plug and play with steam nowadays. I’ve tried Garuda, Manjaro and Linux Mint so far, no notable issue.
I’ve heard lovely things about Bazzite with Steam.
However I have only run Steam on Ubuntu and Linux Mint, where it ran flawlessly.
I think the Linux Mint workflow of “click on software center”, “search for steam”, “click install” - is hard to beat.
Well, Bazzite has it pre-installed, but that’s the experience for other stuff lol.
I don’t recommend mint for newbies because it comes with X11 even still.
Bazzite has closed source software preinstalled? Yikes
I get the sentiment. That said, if you want to do “gaming”, there’s no way around proprietary software for the time being, since both titles and some drivers are and will continue to be proprietary.
Regardless, running some FOSS is already better than none. So if Bazzite helps wean people off proprietary Windows, why not?
Probably more like it automatically installs is when you install the system but yeah.
This isn’t Debian. It has a live image that comes with Nvidia drivers so you can have these from the start too.
I need to try mint
Ehh, I’ve had a few problems with it, from the installation wizard crashing, to my wifi drivers disabling on system resume, to it completely freezing when I switch language input, to sometimes crashing when I load a web page. I’d try a different distro than risk the instability.
E: And before someone chimes in saying it’s my laptop, I will say I had none of these problems using Windows, other than it was very slow.
I think sometimes there are hits and misses when installing a distro. Could not get Mint to boot after installing it so I ended up installing Debian - where Mint should be easier to get going, Debian installed perfectly fine for me.
It’s your laptop.
Hah, but no seriously. It’s just always kind of a shot in the dark which distro is the best for your computer. Mint has been best for my laptop, but really did not get it even installing on the desktop. Manjaro or Tumbleweed worked on it.