Happy Birthday, GamingOnLinux

Happy Birthday, GamingOnLinux – 16 years today

原始链接: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/07/happy-birthday-gamingonlinux-16-years-today/

GamingOnLinux is celebrating 16 years of reporting on Linux gaming! Despite other sites shutting down or changing hands, they're still going strong, thanks to reader support. The rise of AI search engines is a concern, as they prioritize data collection and advertiser revenue over crediting original content creators. Microsoft's Bing News has also unfairly penalized them, impacting visibility on other search engines. To combat these challenges, GamingOnLinux urges readers to directly follow the site and share articles on social media. They're committed to human-written content and have exciting updates: expanding their Steam Tracker page to include Linux distribution usage data and reviving the PC Info system. Readers can support GamingOnLinux through Patreon, donations, and using affiliate links. They're also exploring reviving their article round-up mailing list. Despite the challenges, GamingOnLinux is thriving with high web traffic and plans to continue providing Linux gaming news.

Here's a short summary of the Hacker News thread: The thread discusses GamingOnLinux's 16th anniversary and a potential issue with their visibility in search engines. The founder of GamingOnLinux reports a significant drop in traffic from Bing News after a brief downtime, and suspects Microsoft might be intentionally sidelining them due to GamingOnLinux's focus on Linux gaming, which competes with Microsoft's Xbox "OS" push against Steam Deck and Linux handhelds. A DuckDuckGo representative clarifies that they've been changing their news sources, particularly in the US, though the specifics of those changes are not provided. Users speculate on the degree to which DuckDuckGo still relies on Bing for news. Another commenter asks about how websites track the source of their traffic, and another points to a referrer header that web servers receive when someone follows a link to their site.

原文

Time really flies huh? GamingOnLinux has now been around officially for 16 years.

Over the last year or two we've seen a good few other sites shut down, some had big layoffs, others got sold and turned into gambling sites, and various got sold off to the owners of IGN but we're still here to keep reporting on everything related somehow to Linux and the wider gaming industry. A big thank you as always to everyone reading, commenting and sharing our articles. An extra big thank you to all our supporters for keeping us going!

Right now, things are pretty great. But, all that could change. With the continuing rise of AI being shoved into our eyeballs at every opportunity, the web is going to look quite different a year from now. With Google, Bing and others determined to get you to use AI that barely credits the writers that actually power all their responses (like me, hi).

What this does is remind everyone that the big search engines are not your friends. They want your data and for you to never click away from them. The longer they keep you, the more data they can grab and the more adverts they can show you.

Annoyingly, Microsoft also back in May decided to just remove us from Bing News and massively deranked us, following 1 single hour downtime due to a data centre problem and show no signs of putting us back in - which was a bit of a blow (so we barely appear in anything like DuckDuckGo now). I've tried explaining this to Microsoft, and they just don't care.

Following GamingOnLinux directly is now more important than it ever has been before. How you can help: be sure to share your favourite articles to social media, Reddit and wherever else.

It's not all doom and gloom though, fear not, GamingOnLinux has no plans to go anywhere. Web traffic is still currently somehow the highest it has ever been! And we have no plans to use any AI generation for anything. It's all hand-crafted spelling errors and terrible grammar here.

Our Steam Tracker page also recently expanded to begin to include the top Linux distributions used on Steam over time. It's a manual process and will take a while to fill up, but I thought it would be interesting to see for the trends.

Oh, and for those who liked it, our PC Info system is coming back. Stay tuned, it needs some work though to modernise it and fix a lot of issues it had in the background.

You can follow GamingOnLinux across:

I'm always looking for other ways for you to follow along. If you have any good ideas you can reach out any time. I do also wish to revive our article round-up mailing list, but the expense of it due to the amount of subscribers on it is a bit problematic. Still researching the best way to do it.

If you wish to support the continued news on GamingOnLinux and ensure we stick around, the best way is via Patreon.

All other donations, without any special rewards can be done by:

You can also buy games using GamingOnLinux affiliate / partner links:

You can find all the links to support GamingOnLinux on this dedicated page any time.

Thanks for reading and for being here!

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.