Arch takes the majority because SteamOS is based on it. Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything in the data that would allow discerning between those two.
I'm not sure if that's the case, since looking at the stats you'd expect SteamOS/Holo to beat a couple of these listings if it was truly being counted separately to Arch
I liked Manjaro, but when stuff broke it broke in weird fuckin' ways. My last attempt with it ended when I tried to do some gamedev in Godot and Manjaro started registering my laptop's mousepad input as a joystick 😭
It could be mostly steamdeck users, but for me arch is the only distro that works well. You know what you install which makes troubleshooting easy, and it's documented very well.
I've personally switched over to Arch because steamos is arch based. I know it will probably be just as smooth for other distros but I've wanted to switch to arch before the steam deck anyways. I'm happy with everybody just embracing linux and the distros they feel comfortable in.
I wouldn't say goodbye manjaro there are still plenty of users using it.
But I'm happy that my distro of choice so far (endeavourOS) is also on the chart I feel like it's a solid choice :)
I installed EndeavousOS on Feb 18, 2023, and it has given me the best gaming experience with the fewest of issues. Previously, I've tried Manjaro, PopOS and Tumbleweed and was met with issues early on that made running the latest AMD hardware troublesome in each, but I experienced none of that with EndeavourOS.
I'm currently on Nobara after EndeavourOS nuked itself and having the pleasure of experiencing their toxic community. I'm even considering going back to Manjaro at this point because that was still the most stable Linux experience I had. Maybe their website cert handling sucks but at least my system was running stable, for much longer at that.
I used to run Manjaro, too and I was happy with it until it broke one day after an update. Arch had launched the archinstall script by then so I tried it and honestly, it makes the installation too easy for Manjaro to make sense anymore.
Pleasantly surprised that Arch tops the chart. Then again, and I might be wrong about this, but to me a clear bias in the ProtonDB data is that those who submit reports to ProtonDB are usually users who are likely used to submitting bug reports and stuff, so obviously not your average "freshly migrated from Windows" gamer.
I put Garuda on my wife's gaming PC, she absolutely loves it & it does everything it should, no problems whatsoever. And it's based on arch, so if there is something, I know how to fix it. Awesome beginner gaming distro imo, recommend!
I'd probably use arch if there was an easy general immutable/atomic version of it. I just don't trust bleeding edge rolling enough to not have that kind of a safegaurd.
It's a pain. Stuff does break for no reason. I'm a slave to it's enhanced hardware compatibility and higher success rate at running proton games that are borderline. You just can't beat the wiki and the community support. It's too good to not have. But you still run into issues it's just that I'd be no better off on a different distro.
My opinion on Manjaro seems unpopular, but I still like it. I daily-drive Manjaro happily.
It's Arch that just works out of the box.
But most importantly, I already have it set up, and I am lazy. If it's not broken (too much), don't fix it.
My sister spent hours trying to play dvds on her new windows laptop ; I found her getting pissed off , turning to percussive maintenance, and starting to fill out a warranty claim on the dvd player . . .
It took about 15 minutes to download , flash (figure out how to change the sodding boot order) and run Manjaro installer/live usb stick to demonstrate how real computers can just do things like play dvds.
Manjaro is great for cases like that, since it works, is easy, and will have pretty well up to date kernel.
I mean don't get me wrong, installing arch from scratch is a good fun and educational process and very nostalgic for the 1990s . . . but i'm not doing all that on my sister's laptop just to demonstrate how shit windows is.
and i'm very grateful for valve doing it all for steamdeck.