Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didnt realise that Arch adoption was so high. I (don't) use arch, BTW. Although now I feel like I want to give it a spin to see what all the fuss is about!

Or maybe I'll stay fat, dumb, and happy with Fedora and Nobara on my desktop and laptop.

Not that it would change anything for me personally, but I really think Pop! OS is a poor naming choice. Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.

Pop is stagnant while they work on Cosmic. I'm one of the people who left because of that.

Yeah, I love me some Flatpak distro ;-)

On the serious note, I'm sad openSUSE is so low. Tumbleweed's great distro!

An interesting trend graph of the most used distros for gaming and their adoption by users over time.

These days I'm most interested in Endeavour and Garuda, mostly as gateways into the Arch world without the headaches. Endeavour seems more mature so that'll be my next install.

I'm giving up on Manjaro since it seems to lag and have odd discrepancies with Arch/AUR.

Going further back I liked Mint and SuSE and even Ubuntu, but the lack of gaming focus has driven me to other distros.

It's probably best to take this whole graph with a grain of salt. There's already some questionable relationships in it, like for every 4th Manjaro user coming in a Gentoo user, which I find hard to believe to say the list.
Second, it's hard to say Pop exclamation mark underscore OS is on the decline when the whole field just looks more diversified in general. Sure the hype around gaming distros from the lockdowns seems to have cooled down a bit, but there isn't any distro that just disappeared. On the contrary, it seems to have gotten just more.
As already mentioned, we can expect another hype again when Cosmic DE launches.

I was just looking at this graph and thinking of posting it here... thanks for saving me the trouble! I only had a couple of thoughts (and accepting the data comes only from ProtonDB and I'm a gamer so this makes the data especially interesting): it's nice to see Arch and Arch-based distros doing so well; if you add them together they're quite a large block, and I'm also not sad about Ubuntu's falling share (it's become very corporate - at least that's my feeling, I don't follow such stuff very closely). Oh, and I just tried out Nobara and was very impressed with it as a gaming distro (I got better FPS playing Warframe than I did on Windows 11) and it's good to see that getting a small but growing share.

I'm running Pop on my living room pc and it's fine, looking forward to Cosmic when it arrives. Also have Linux Mint cinnamon on my bedroom pc. Been thinking of going back to Arch, but i'm lazy so i'll stick with what i have unless i get annoyed enough to switch.

PopOS is what got me into Linux, and the only one that worked "out of the the box" for the handful of things I wanted, esp remote desktop.

Yes, anecdotal, but I'm running 3 PCs on Pop and loving it.

Edit: reading the article, and graph, it also looks like the field is more crowded in general. Also, would be good to see total installs over time, not just %.

I used Pop on my main computer for almost a year before switching back to Mint last year. There were a lot of good things about it - for instance, it had the best compatibility out of the box with my hardware out of everything I tried. But I also saw some stability issues, and I personally dislike it's aesthetic, and I'm not really interested in trying Cosmic. I still recommend it to people but it's not for me.

Pop os is incredibly ancient. I imagine it will explode in popularly when Cosmic is released and the distro gets a refresh.

Makes sense to me. I'm a Pop! user since 22.04 and the wait is painful, although the blog posts definitely help a bit. Currently I have no problems but if something breaks I'll try out Nobara I guess. My /home is already partitioned so I can make that hop with minimal loss.

I guess the Pop bubble has... Popped.

Sorry.

Very interesting. My rig is still on Pop mostly because I've just never had issues with it. I use the Liquorix kernel for a little added spice.

On my laptop I've been playing with NixOS lately (used to run Arch btw). I love it so far, but haven't explored it for gaming.

Pop has not received feature updates for years, because the dev team focuses on implementing Cosmic.

Given the overall progress of Linux Desktop environments, this might have led many users to switch away from Pop.