Gaming used to be the reason to stay
Will my games still work?
Short answer: Mostly
Mostly. Of the games checked here, 87 per cent run well on Linux. The exception is competitive multiplayer with kernel anti-cheat, which blocks four of Steam's twenty most played.
In July 2012 Gabe Newell stood up at a games conference in Seattle and called Windows 8 “a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space”. He predicted manufacturers would walk away and margins would be destroyed. Then he said what Valve intended to do about it: “We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It’s a hedging strategy.”
Fourteen years later the hedge has its own hardware line.
It failed the first time. Steam Machines arrived in 2015, with Valve publishing a minimum specification and leaving the building to other companies. Almost nobody bought one, because the games weren’t there, and Valve’s own engineers said as much afterwards. The line was dead by 2018.
The thing that fixed it shipped that same year.
Proton
Proton is a translation layer. It takes a game built for Windows and converts what that game asks for into something Linux can answer, turning Direct3D graphics calls into Vulkan ones on the way through. It’s built on Wine, Valve pays CodeWeavers to work on it, and all of it is open source.
The architecture matters less than the pace. Proton 11 arrived in July 2026 on a fresh Wine base. Open the project’s release feed on any given day and you’ll find experimental builds going out several times a day, including this morning. It’s maintained like infrastructure rather than like a product, and it has been for eight years.
Where that leaves the games
Valve rates games for the Steam Deck, which in practice means rating them for Linux. Counts drawn from SteamDB at the end of August 2026 put 30,006 titles with a rating attached: 8,939 marked Verified, 21,067 Playable, against 6,848 marked Unsupported.
This site keeps its own list, checked on 19 and 20 September 2026. Of the 743 games on it, 737 carry a community rating on ProtonDB. Of those, 87 per cent sit at Gold or Platinum, meaning they either run perfectly or need one setting changed. Fifteen come out Borked. That’s two per cent.
It wasn’t the Steam Deck
This is the part that surprised me.
Linux is 3.90 per cent of Steam users in Valve’s August 2026 hardware survey. Break that down by distribution and SteamOS, the system the Steam Deck runs, accounts for 21.07 per cent of it. So the Deck is roughly 0.82 per cent of Steam. The remaining three per cent is ordinary desktop Linux on ordinary computers, and it’s close to four times the size.
The Deck didn’t shift the market by selling units. IDC estimated in February 2025 that Valve had sold more than 3.7 million of them, and Valve has never published a figure of its own. What the Deck did was make a decade of compatibility work non-optional, because Valve finally had a product that would fail without it. Everybody running Linux on a desktop got that work as a side effect.
How big is this, honestly
Small. Growing.
Linux on Steam went from 2.64 per cent in August 2025 to 3.90 per cent in August 2026. That’s most of a percentage point in a year, on a base that took two decades to reach three. It’s also down on July, when it sat above four, and the monthly figure moves for dull reasons. The survey samples rather than counts, and a rise in Simplified Chinese responses reliably pushes the Linux share down without one Linux user going anywhere.
Windows is 93.95 per cent of Steam. Nothing here should be read as suggesting otherwise.
Away from Steam the figures get less trustworthy rather than better. StatCounter had desktop Linux near nine per cent in August 2026 after a two-point jump in a single month, which is not how operating systems behave. Cloudflare’s human-only traffic puts it nearer 4.7 per cent, the difference being automated traffic, which runs on Linux almost by definition. Trust the lower one.
Developers are dropping native Linux builds, and that’s the good sign
That reads backwards until you see their reasoning.
In September 2024 the studio behind Last Epoch pulled its native Linux client, explaining: “We’re no longer building a native Linux client and recommend Linux players use Proton on Linux which provides a much better experience.”
Their own port was worse than their Windows build running through a translation layer. That’s become common. A native port is maintained by a small team for a small audience, while Proton is maintained by Valve across the whole catalogue and improves whether any individual studio does anything or not.
Not everybody is happy about it. Ethan Lee, who has ported more games to Linux than almost anyone alive, called the trend “deeply troubling” and added that “any developer who says otherwise knows they’re full of it and they’re just not ready to admit it yet”. He’s right about the dependency. The platform now rests on one company continuing to care.
The framerate question
You’ll read that games run faster on Linux. Sometimes they do, and the claim deserves more care than it usually gets.
The cleanest comparison available is the Lenovo Legion Go S, which Lenovo sells in two versions with near-identical internals, one on Windows and one on SteamOS. Same chassis, same chip. In Dave2D’s testing in May 2025, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 59 frames per second on the SteamOS unit against 46 on the Windows one, with Helldivers 2, Doom Eternal, Spider-Man 2 and The Witcher 3 each landing nine to eleven frames ahead. That’s one reviewer comparing two retail machines rather than a controlled dual boot, so read it as a strong indication rather than a measurement.
On the desktop, NJ Tech benchmarked a Ryzen 5 5600X with a Radeon RX 6700 XT in April 2026, Windows 11 against CachyOS. Cyberpunk at 1080p Ultra came out 98 frames on Linux against 91 on Windows. Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p Max, 85 against 81. The Division 2 scored 128 on both, exactly.
Then The First Descendant at 1080p Ultra: 54 on Linux against 63 on Windows. Linux lost that one by 14 per cent.
A wider sweep by PC Games Hardware in January 2026, across roughly ten graphics cards, shows the pattern underneath. On AMD hardware Linux matched Windows or beat it by a few per cent. On NVIDIA hardware Linux came in around 15 per cent slower.
So the accurate version goes like this. With an AMD card, expect somewhere between parity and a modest gain. With an NVIDIA card, expect to give something up. And the machines posting the biggest wins are running tuned gaming distributions rather than a stock install.
Some of the gain exists because Valve pays for it. The Mesa drivers that AMD cards use on Linux have Valve contractors working on them directly, and one change published in January 2026 reworked how ray tracing work is handed to the GPU, claiming about a 30 per cent frame rate improvement in games using Unreal Engine 5’s hardware lighting. That’s a Linux-against-Linux figure rather than a comparison with Windows, but it shows where the money goes.
The eighty dollars
When Lenovo shipped the SteamOS version of the Legion Go S in May 2025, the model with the Z1 Extreme chip listed at $749.99. The Windows model, same chip, listed at $829.99.
Eighty dollars, sitting on a shelf next to an identical machine that doesn’t need a Windows licence. Microsoft has not previously had to compete with its own price tag quite that directly.
The wall
None of this applies to competitive multiplayer, and the optimism should stop here.
Anti-cheat software that runs inside the kernel mostly refuses to run on Linux. Two of the big systems, Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye, have working Linux support that a developer can switch on with a few clicks. Plenty decline. Are We Anti-Cheat Yet tracks 1,167 games using anti-cheat, and on the date this page was last checked 640 were broken on Linux with another 53 actively refused.
The numbers here look better and mean something worse. Of the games on this site that use anti-cheat, 81 per cent run. But four of the twenty most-played games on Steam are blocked, and eight of the top fifty. PUBG, Apex Legends, Grand Theft Auto V, Rainbow Six Siege, Rust, Battlefield 6, Call of Duty, Destiny 2.
Proton solved the general problem and lost the specific one. If your evenings are Civilization or Baldur’s Gate or Elden Ring, Linux has been ready for a while. If your evenings are Warzone with three friends, it isn’t, and progress everywhere else doesn’t help you.
The line moves backwards too. Ubisoft switched For Honor off for Linux on 10 September 2026, saying it could not “meaningfully deploy protection on this platform” there.
There’s a real argument on the other side, as well. Facepunch’s Alistair McFarlane, explaining why Rust won’t support Proton, called it “a vector for cheat developers” and said that after dropping Linux they saw “more cheat users exploiting Linux, than actual legitimate users”. You needn’t agree with him to accept he’s describing a genuine problem rather than hunting for an excuse.
Valve isn’t a charity
Worth saying, given how generous the last thousand words have been. Valve raised the price of the Steam Deck OLED by about 45 per cent in May 2026, taking the 512 GB model from $549 to $789, with no announcement of any kind. The Steam Machine landed in June 2026 starting at $1,049, and Valve admitted that was well above what it wanted, blaming the component shortage.
Valve isn’t undercutting Microsoft on hardware. What it removed was the reason the operating system underneath had to be Windows.
What this means for you
My favourite game is Civilization VI, and on Linux it runs on an old Intel machine with 8 GB of memory. That’s a dull story, which is rather the point. Most games are a dull story now.
Check yours before you move anything, because it takes about five minutes. Can I play my games on Linux covers how, and the games list has everything checked here, verdict first.