Summary

  • Bazzite is a SteamOS-style, gaming-focused Linux that offers a console-like experience.
  • The Linux distro grew 1.25x in 30 days to 50K weekly users.
  • Proton allows many Windows games to run on Linux, though anti-cheat still blocks some big titles.

Bazzite, a Linux distro that has a lot in common with Valve's SteamOS, is designed specifically with gaming in mind, offering a console-like experience that ditches the majority of Windows 11's most annoying features.

In recent usage statistics posted to X, Bazzite shared weekly growth of roughly 1.25x over the past 30 days. To put the number in perspective, this means that Bazzite pulls in roughly 50,000 weekly users. In early December, the team behind the gaming-focused Linux distro confirmed that it served over 2 petabytes of data, and then in late November, Bazzite boasted about 780,000 downloads in just one month.

If you're unaware, one petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, and each terabyte includes 1,000 gigabytes -- so 2 petabytes is a lot of data.

Windows obviously still dominates gaming, but Bazzite's growth is impressive

Linux gaming is becoming increasingly viable

Credit: Bazzite

While these aren't massive numbers, especially compared to Windows, they're still notable for a niche, gaming Linux distro, and a clear indication that with Windows 10 reaching end-of-life status, there's an audience out there that isn't interested in jumping to Windows 11.

Thanks to Proton's compatibility layer, the majority of Windows games run great on Linux, though anti-cheat systems still block some major titles, like Battlefield 6, Apex Legends and the Call of Duty series, for example. If you've used Valve's SteamOS-powered Steam Deck before, you'll be very familiar with how impressive Proton emulation can be (I've yet to find a Windows game that doesn't at least run reasonably well on Valve's handheld). However, beyond gaming, Linux still lacks several notable apps, including Adobe's Creative Cloud tools.

To be clear, Valve doesn't own Bazzite and the Linux distro isn't officially part of SteamOS, but both operating systems share the same goal of offering a gaming-focused experience on PCs. It's likely that growing anticipation for Valve's SteamOS-powered Steam Machine, which is slated to release in early 2026, has also contributed to Bazzite's recent popularity boost.

If you're interested in trying Bazzite yourself, you can find a download link here.