Valve released the Steam Hardware & Software Survey results for April 2025, so here's your usual round-up of where things stand right now.
For Linux in April, it's nearly flat with a small dip now those with Simplified Chinese as their language have settled down in the stats, although there's a small overall bump again in the numbers for Simplified Chinese which is usually what causes Linux to drop.
Overall operating system use on Steam for April:
- Windows 96.10%
- Linux 2.27%
- macOS 1.62%
From our dedicated Steam Tracker page here's how it looks over time
The most popular Linux distributions listed by Valve are:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit (Steam Deck and others) 33.78% -0.70%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 9.45% -0.23%
- Freedesktop SDK 24.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.41% +0.15%
- Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 6.20% +0.89%
- Ubuntu Core 22 (Steam Snap) 64 bit 4.62% +0.23%
- Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS 64 bit 4.44% +0.26%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 2.61% -0.05%
- EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit 2.46% +0.06%
- Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) 64 bit 2.27% -0.08%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.23% +0.02%
- Other 25.54% -0.53%
Source: Valve
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
You can also find comments for this article on social media: Mastodon
All posts need to follow our rules. For users logged in: please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Guest readers can email us for any issues.
wytrabbit a day ago
So for English only on Steam we're at 5.19%, interesting!
2 Likes
I wonder why the numbers get so much . . . bouncier, starting late in 2022.
2 Likes
R Daneel Olivaw a day ago
Interesting not to see fedora on there ... this is apparently what comes from protondb:
https://boilingsteam.com/linux-distros-in-march-2025-a-new-challenger-emerges/
which is mostly similar, but with the notable difference of fedora?
https://boilingsteam.com/linux-distros-in-march-2025-a-new-challenger-emerges/
which is mostly similar, but with the notable difference of fedora?
0 Likes
CatKiller a day ago
I wonder why the numbers get so much . . . bouncier, starting late in 2022.They stopped going back later in the month to correct for Chinese overcount.
1 Likes
Linas a day ago
I do wonder how are they sampling Steam OS stats? I would imagine most Steam Decks are in Big Picture mode basically all the time, and the survey only pops up in Desktop mode. Wouldn't that skew it heavily against a Steam Deck ever being included in the survey?
0 Likes
CatKiller 24 hours ago
The survey doesn't only come up in desktop mode.
0 Likes
As far as China goes or any other country. We need all of the support we can get. If say a larger market like Japan were to take a serious look at Linux and be counted this would help tremendously!
Makes no difference where someone is from in the IT world. The more users the better! Count them all!
Makes no difference where someone is from in the IT world. The more users the better! Count them all!
0 Likes
Linas 14 hours ago
The survey doesn't only come up in desktop mode.Really? I have been running Steam primarily in Big Picture mode for something like 7 years now, and I have only ever seen the survey pop-up when I switched to desktop mode.
0 Likes
elmapul 13 hours ago
Interesting not to see fedora on there ... this is apparently what comes from protondb:
https://boilingsteam.com/linux-distros-in-march-2025-a-new-challenger-emerges/
which is mostly similar, but with the notable difference of fedora?
speaking of this site, i was reading the article :
https://boilingsteam.com/the-steam-deck-is-back-in-stock-in-japan/
and the end of the article:
These are machines you are supposed to play with, but the level of incompetence of the staff is abysmal. The ROG Ally X had no games that you could run - it was basically a useless brick in demonstration. The Steam Deck had at least several games playable, but it was turned off (or in sleep mode) and did not react until you pressed the power button. I doubt that most visitors would know how to operate it if it was their first time.
looks like valve and the other companies need to step up their game, puting an product at an store is not enough, sure many people know what windows is and what it does, but they cant know how powerfull an device gonna be to play an game with an good performance just looking at specs and the desktop enviroment that is awful to navigate on this device.
and steam deck being in sleep mode, sigh.
2 Likes
Patreon
PayPal
How to set, change and reset your SteamOS / Steam Deck desktop sudo password
How to set up Decky Loader on Steam Deck / SteamOS for easy plugins
See more from me