The popularity of Valve’s Steam Deck has caused developers to take PC handhelds more seriously with major AAA games like the upcoming Final Fantasy Remake Part 3 focusing on the handheld. However, more importantly, the handheld has popularised the idea of gaming on Linux with Valve’s Proton compatibility layer.

While SteamOS is the most popular Linux gaming OS right now, the Fedora-based Bazzite OS has been skyrocketing in popularity. Designed not just for Steam Deck but also other PC gaming handhelds, the operating system is objectively better than trying to game on a handheld with Windows… and that’s including the new Full-Screen Xbox Handheld UI.

In an update on social media, Bazzite announced its biggest month ever with over a petabyte worth of ISOs delivered to users in a single month. With PC gaming handhelds releasing constantly, the SteamOS alternative has continued to grow in popularity.

“Very proud to announce that we’ve finally pushed past the petabyte barrier and delivered over 1 petabyte of Bazzite ISOs in just the last 30 days,” Bazzite told fans on social media. “Thank you to everyone that helped make this possible! None of us would be here without you.”

Over that month, Bazzite confirmed that they had received over 730,000 unique visitors requesting an ISO download. While far from the staggering number of Windows users, the Linux distro is rapidly growing as a powerful gaming alternative.

While SteamOS is a fantastic gaming operating system for the Steam Deck, Bazzite has proven itself as the best alternative with even more customisation and options. While Windows handhelds switching to the OS will find themselves losing out on some games due to the lack of anti-cheat support—something that Valve is hoping will change in the future—it really is the best option for handhelds that can’t use SteamOS.

At the time of writing, the latest stable version of the operating system is 43.20251127, and the OS supports most major PC gaming handhelds as well as desktops and laptops.