And now, just a few months later, we're starting to get a good look at exactly how much damage Canonical/Ubuntu did to their own cause with PC gamers, thanks to a great post at Boiling Steam, which sums up the trend with this chart:
In case it isn't clear enough from their infographic, Boiling Steam spell it out in words, too:
Ubuntu is not the hot pancake it once was. It’s been losing popularity and share progressively. Like Joe Biden, it’s still first on the ticket, but give it a little more time and it will slide down the line.
Who’s benefiting from the weakness of the old leader? Well, two very clear challengers emerge: Manjaro and Arch. So, basically Arch, since Manjaro is a close derivative. If you were to add them together, they would be bigger than Ubuntu now. Pretty impressive, that was not the case 6 months ago.That's a pretty rapid fall from grace by Ubuntu. Although if you add in Pop_OS!, which is Ubuntu-based, you can tip the scales back in Ubuntu's favour, but given that Pop_OS! dropped over a full percentage point last month, I wouldn't be banking on that to keep my distro relevant to gaming if I were in Canonical's place.
Whether the damage is fatal remains to be seen; Canonical could always make nice with Valve, committing to supporting the libraries that Steam required in exchange for earning back Valve's recommendation, but right now, it looks like Arch/Manjaro is the hot ticket for Linux gaming, something which was not the case just six months ago.
As someone who'd tried Ubuntu gaming last year, and struggled with it, I'm seriously considering going Manjaro myself this time around. And, since I get two whole weeks off in December, and an urgent need to get off Windows 7 which exits support the following month, I'll be making the leap to Manjaro soon. The journey is about to begin, so watch this space...