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PayPalValve released the statistics from the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for November 2025, which shows once again that Linux use is trending nicely upwards.
Slow and steady wins the race? Thanks in part due to all of Valve's work with SteamOS and Proton, and thanks to Microsoft forcing AI rubbish in Windows - more people are checking Linux out than ever before.
For November 2025 the overall operating system share is:
- Windows - 94.79%
- Linux - 3.20%
- macOS - 2.02%
Our dedicated Steam Tracker is up to date for the Linux overall trend, as well as our newer distribution chart as well. Here's a snapshot from it:
For the breakdown of popular Linux distributions on Steam here's November's details:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 26.42% -0.76%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 9.97% -0.35%
- Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 7.36% +0.71%
- CachyOS 64 bit 6.74% +0.73%
- Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.96% +1.67%
- Bazzite 64 bit 5.53% +1.29%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 4.29% -0.26%
- Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit 3.86% +0.16%
- EndeavourOS Linux 64 bit 2.10% -0.22%
- Linux Mint 22.1 64 bit 1.96% -0.60%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 1.90% -0.03%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 1.90% -0.14%
- Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) 64 bit 1.58% +1.58%
-
Other 20.43% +2.39%
It's not entirely clear what Valve uses to sort the Linux list, as distributions seem to randomly flick in and out of it each month. Would be nice if we could just get a full list each month. The order has been all messed up for a few months too across various parts of the survey, hopefully Valve will eventually fix that.
Be sure to click along to our Steam Tracker for a lot more info and interactive charts. We've been tracking this for years now so you don't have to.
Source: Valve
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
About the author - Liam Dawe
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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Quoting: GustyGhostQuoting: EikeDebian is back in town!
I'd been wondering how one of the most well established distros had even disappeared from the stats at all.
Debian was split in debian12 and debian13.
Similarly now Fefora "disappeared" because it is split in fedora 42 and 43.
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GustyGhost a day ago
Quoting: Purple Library Guywhile Desktop Linux accounts for all the Linux rise lately.
This is substantial. The stat translates into that share of users going out of their way to select and install an OS rather than to let somebody else do so for them.
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Just got the survey yesterday (for the first time in years I believe), +1 fedora user for december 
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Beta Version 22 hours ago
Quoting: CorbenTHREE POINT TWO PERCENT?! What the heck! ... Proton, Steam Deck, PC gaming handhelds showing Linux distros working better on them than WindowsOnly with AMD. With Nvidia it's a complete disaster. And Nvidia holds around 80-90% discrete GPU market share. You can't expect people to massively switch to Linux when it means losing up to 50% performance in DX12 games.
Quoting: GustyGhostQuoting: EikeDebian is back in town!
I'd been wondering how one of the most well established distros had even disappeared from the stats at all.
Because of the Cachy/Bazzite bots, which spread lies that you absolutely can not play games on Debian and Debian-based distros. On r/linux_gaming you can get downvoted for mentioning even PikaOS.
Last edited by Beta Version on 3 Dec 2025 at 2:26 am UTC
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Quoting: Beta VersionQuoting: CorbenTHREE POINT TWO PERCENT?! What the heck! ... Proton, Steam Deck, PC gaming handhelds showing Linux distros working better on them than WindowsOnly with AMD. With Nvidia it's a complete disaster. And Nvidia holds around 80-90% discrete GPU market share. You can't expect people to massively switch to Linux when it means losing up to 50% performance in DX12 games.
Is that still true, I see a lot of WINners(wordplay, I mean Windows users) complain about extra sucky NIVIDIA drivers and the other way around Linux has gotten a lot better NVIDIA support, since the AI boom.
[In 2022 Pcgamers stated a 10%-20% preformance loss in non-cpu bottlenecked systems, otherwise it was actually better.](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/DXVK)
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Beta Version 12 hours ago
Quoting: LoudTechieIs that still trueYes, that's still true.
https://youtu.be/fqIjUddUSo0?si=We_GE1-Eavr22OI-&t=386
https://youtu.be/ovOx4_8ajZ8?si=L45cXDFCPpKWpM5l&t=1207
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Philadelphus 1 hour ago
It's not entirely clear what Valve uses to sort the Linux list, as distributions seem to randomly flick in and out of it each month.Checking back for the past few months: it appears to be sorting distros by percentage, from most to least, then showing the top 13 or 14. If it just shows the top N results every month, then the natural variation in sampling would cause distros to jump in and out of the list depending on how well sampled they got each month.
For instance, Debian 12 (Bookworm) is 2.27% in April, 1.98% in June, 1.96% in July, then drops off the survey until this month where it reappears as Debian 13 (Trixie) at 1.58%. Obviously there's some noise in those numbers, but Trixie was released November 15 last year so I suspect this reflects an underlying trend of people slowly upgrading their systems over the intervening year*, causing the share of Bookworm to drop low enough for Debian to disappear from the list for a few months until Trixie had accumulated enough users for it to show up again. But it could also drop again next month if some other distro with a similar number of actual users gets better represented in the random sampling, who knows. That's my guess, anyway.
*I sat on the upgrade from 11 to 12 for almost a year because it came out right before I moved internationally, then my computer was in transit for 5 months (COVID…), then I just didn't have the brainspace for it for a while, so I get it.
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