It's crazy to me that Arch Linux is the second biggest Steam distro.

That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists. You'd think the more 'user-friendly' distros would be higher.

> That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists

I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.

Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.

But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to recommend anything else for the average Windows gamer/prosumer but first-time Linux user.

- Rolling release, so you don't have to do a major upgrade twice a year - which would otherwise be much more often than Windows.

- Latest kernel and graphics drivers, so it works with newly released hardware with the best performance.

- Steam, NVIDIA drivers, H.264/H.265 codecs, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, etc. all in the default repos - a huge boon for new Linux users compared to having them in an external repo like RPM Fusion or having to install them manually, which can otherwise cause confusing dependency problems over the life of the installation.

- Nothing unusual about it that would be confusing or cause compatibility problems. It's just a normal mutable binary distro with a normal package manager, upstream packages, glibc and systemd.

The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.

I was about to comment that SteamOS is based on Arch, but after looking at the actual graphs, they've got SteamOS as its own separate category.

I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?

* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.

Weirdly enough, if someone with the latest generation hardware wants a distro that mostly works out of the box, Arch will be the safest choice.

Install is (now?) relatively easy as well and there's enough of a community around it.

It might help that Arch has an absurdly good wiki.

I think if it does come from SteamOS, but indirectly. When you have pieces in place selecting distro becomes simpler. Even if it not actual SteamOS.

I would guess that having easy access to more recent kernels (including -zen) a and gpu firmware is a big draw for arch.

After arch got an installer much of the initial barrier went away

Steam Deck runs Arch.