Summary
- Bazzite users jumped from ~20,000 to 68,200 in eight months, more than tripling.
- Bazzite runs many games via Proton, making Linux a viable gaming alternative to Windows.
- Adoption spiked around Oct 2025 after Windows 10 EOL and handheld demos.
People have begun to wake up to the idea that, in some situations, installing a gaming-oriented Linux distro will give you a better experience than Windows 11. Once pinned as the one operating system you don’t want to use if you care about gaming, Linux has since come leaps and bounds with tech like Proton that allows games to run on the FOSS operating system without the game’s developers lifting a finger.
Bazzite is one of the more common recommendations for people who want to move away from Windows. It’s a top-tier choice for both desktops and handhelds, and we’ve seen people replace Windows 11 on both to move away from Microsoft’s ecosystem. In fact, the official Bazzite website is reporting that it has over tripled the number of users it had this time in June 2025, so they’re clearly doing something right.
These are the only two Linux distros I’d use for gaming
Bazzite and CachyOS should be primary considerations for gamers looking to get out from under Microsoft
Bazzite soars from ~20,000 to 68,200 users in the space of eight months
And it’s still going up
Someone sounded the alarm over on the Linux subreddit that Bazzite’s userbase has been looking very healthy lately. Interestingly, the chart they posted shows that Bazzite had 67,100 users, but when I checked in a few hours later, the chart had grown to 68,200. You can check out a snapshot of what I saw above; note the user count at the top-left corner.
By the looks of the chart, it seems that Bazzite really began taking off around October 2025. This is the same month that Windows 10 entered its end-of-life phase, and while people could extend their Windows 10 support for another year if they met the criteria, it seems people preferred to instead jump ship to Linux. One could also argue that recent videos of people running Bazzite on Windows handhelds also encouraged people to give it a try, as some of the improvements Bazzite offered over Microsoft’s OS were truly impressive.
If you’d like to take a look at the graph yourself (maybe it has grown even more since this article went up), head over to the Bazzite website. Scroll down all the way to the “Join the community” section, then go past the social hub links and contribution stats to find the chart. It uses DNF Count Me to track the number of users using Bazzite, and you can read how it works over on Fedora Documentation.