Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Apple's macOS has been the second most popular operating system on the Steam game distribution platform for a long time, but that has now changed.
Linux has surpassed macOS for the number two spot, according to Steam's July user hardware survey.
Steam regularly asks its users to give an anonymized look at their hardware, and the company makes the information it gathers available each month.
The Steam Deck was first released a while ago, but it only became widely available without a waiting list last October.
It worked with game publishers to see high-profile releases like Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky in recent months, and those games run pretty well on modern Macs—certainly better than similar titles on Intel-based Macs with integrated graphics chips.
It also announced a new gaming porting tool in an upcoming version of macOS that works in some ways like Proton, as seen on the Steam Deck.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
- Holy shit, the tl;dr bot has made it over. Thank the lord!
  
  i know, right? i fuckin love this thing
- It's really cool they're considering a Mac version of Proton, it shows to me a more genuine attempt to improve the gaming ecosystem than I'd expect from most companies.
  
  Ever since Catalina and 32x support dropped it became nearly impossible to tell someone with a straight face you could game in a macOS environment. I used to love flaming pc and Xbox gamers with the knowledge that Halo was originally developed to be a Mac exclusive, and loved pointing out the long list of good ports for the Mac like Fable: the Lost Chapters, Spore, Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc.
  
  I don’t know if anything will come of it. The proton tool is only to let game devs run their game on Mac hardware to evaluate performance.
  They are not allowed to sell games using this tech, they need to make a native port of the game.
  I think the real solution would be to let them sell their games using this tool. It worked very well for linux, and apple has plenty of money to put into something like this. A lot more than valve does.

It's not just Steam Deck. It's also Proton, which managed to do what Lutris couldn't: make Magic Arena consistently work in WINE on my Linux desktop.
- Proton is the reason I don't need any Windows machines anymore
  
  I just need to suck it up and make the switch over already.
- I still can't figure out how to implement proton into my wine build
  
  Use ProtonQT-up (I think that's the name) and Lutris. Works perfectly
  
  Despite what the OP of this thread said, I use proton through Lutris. I haven't used any other tool for this yet, though I hear heroic games launcher is good too.
  I'm not looking at it right now, but on Lutris you can add a new game, say it should run under wine, and then pick one of the versions of wine with proton.

Nice but I'm surprised it took this long when Apple is doing its best to make OSX the worst possible platform for gaming.
- Because people use their computers for more than just gaming, and there are a lot of Macs out there. I have Steam installed on my MacBook, and I can't remember the last time I played a game on it.
  
  Eh, I use Steam occasionally on my macbook, and it works reasonably well for my intended use: taking breaks at work. I didn't choose to have a Mac, that's just standard issue for my team, but my boss is cool with me running Steam games on it from time to time provided I get my work done.
  However, games just don't run well on macOS, even with official support. The CPU just isn't as powerful as my desktop, so I can't play heavy strategy games, and the GPU isn't much to write home about, so the few graphics-intensive games are out too. So I mostly play casual and story-heavy games on it, but only like once every other week or so.
  99% of my gaming is on my Steam Deck or my Linux desktop, I only use macOS for a small game here and there (usually Risk or a visual novel or something).

there are games for mac?!
- Depending on what games you played, mac was a decent alternative for gaming. Blizzard treated mac as a first class platform for many years, indie games using multi platform engines often targeted it, and porting studios like aspyr would bring over a few big titles here and there.
  Linux was in a similar boat before proton really opened things up, but with even less support than mac from game devs.
  
  I wonder if steam will make a proton for mac.
  
  Ambrosia Software published a bunch of Mac games back in the day, but the app store crunched them.
- Yeah apparently, or at least mac users with steam installed
- Yup, I play a few on my work laptop (not my choice of hardware/software). A lot of stuff doesn't work, but as an occasional time-waster when I'm taking a break, it works okay.
  I mostly just play quick Risk matches, but there's an okay selection of games. It basically feels like Steam on Linux back when they first launched the Linux client before Proton a thing. It kinda sucks, but there's enough selection for what I need it for.
  These days I just keep my Steam Deck at my desk and play games that way instead. But before I got my Steam Deck, I played natively on macOS.

- Those people with a Mac that want to play a game.
- People said this about Linux before the steam deck and well, here we are.
- There are people.
- Appearently more people than Linux. I assume people who just want to be superior with status and money or just straight up hate Windows/Microsoft and don't know anything else. Or they think Apple is the solution... i really don't know.

Love to see it. Really keen to see the type of new handhelds we're going to get in the future and how that'll impact market share

And I helped!