Valve amended the Steam survey for December 2025 - Linux actually hit another all-time high

5/7 trend, a perfect score. 🐧

Wow, that's a huge difference. It seems that Linux is gaining momentum!

MS doing the linux community the best favor ever!

This is getting freaky. I expect progress to be spiky--a zig or two up, then a zag down, but overall the zigs bigger. This is crazy . . . the progress since September is about equal to our whole share at a low point a few years ago!

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThis is getting freaky. I expect progress to be spiky--a zig or two up, then a zag down, but overall the zigs bigger. This is crazy . . . the progress since September is about equal to our whole share at a low point a few years ago!

What about +147% since last February?
(I know it was a dip, but still)

Thanks Valve for helping Linux grow.
Also thanks Microslop for always striving to make Windows worse.

Last edited by Sakuretsu on 6 Jan 2026 at 4:10 pm UTC

Time to switch to an exponential trend line!

Those are lovely numbers! 😃

I'd love to appreciate these small victories for Linux, but together with the RAM crisis and the news lately, all I can see here is the gruesome death of consumer PC hardware. It's like partying on top of a sinking ship.
This will likely force people who want to play games to be part of a closed garden like game consoles, or to pay for remote applications/machines. It really feels like we are going back to the remote terminal days, as ironic as that is.

Quoting: EssojeI'd love to appreciate these small victories for Linux, but together with the RAM crisis and the news lately, all I can see here is the gruesome death of consumer PC hardware.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. The AI bubble is getting rickety . . . and when it pops, it will probably take a whole lot else with it, including crypto. At that point all the computer stuff will get cheap again. With the massive recession nobody will have any money so we still won't be able to afford it, but it will be cheap.

Holy moly I have no words

1. this is looking a lot like an exponential growth not a linear growth trend that was slow before the Deck then faster after the Deck

2. the percentage of linux machines with Deck-exclusive GPUs is now smaller (iirc it reached ~50% for a while) so linux growth is now driven by actual linux distros installed on PCs, laptops, etc, not a niche console that happens to have linux in it but you might never realize it, if seen as just a console

3. the Desktop/Laptop market is pretty saturated, definitely slowed growth and maaaaybe shrunk a little but is not as likely to shrink to oblivion as to contract and stagnate... also mobile games aren't as convergent to Steam games as console games are, so the risk of people giving up on Steam in favour of Google Play Games is pretty slim and wouldn't happen quietly and overnight... heck, even if Android for Desktops appears and Google Play starts selling games that work both on Android mobiles, Android TV and Android PCs, it would need *a lot* of muscle to move every conceivable game and PC gamers into its ecossystem

4. meanwhile Valve gave gamers plenty of reasons to move from consoles to Steam (and keeps giving more)

5. eyes peeled for signs of Valve's total userbase growth, which traditionally is very high (and might have slowed a bit but still be growing)

6. Windows users with old hardware being locked out of Win11 while Win10 goes EOL would maybe push people into upgrading hardware, but those same prohibitive RAM prices might make them more prone to try linux for free on their current hardware

7. there is just way more talk about linux now, that even aloof gamers have a fair chance of hearing about linux from their non-linux-niche gaming streamers

8. there is now comparable (or better overall) polish in the linux side (including for games) so first contact might bring people in more than scare them away

9. Valve is banging the drums of shiny new VR + Console that's actually PC + Controller and at its heart the new team is all based on SteamOS

I feel that the GabeCube *ahem* Steam Machine will be DOA due to anti cheat, I hope to be proven wrong but Windows on ARM laptops being frequently returned item on Amazon doesn't give me confidence, those laptops' game compatibility issues are not that different from ours... the advantage Deck had was being a handheld so who cares if an fps doesn't work.

I've been using Linux on and off for 19 years. Primarily for curiosity and the last decade for the Emulation side of things. My 2020 Gaming PC still recently ran on Windows 10 for convenience. I then the purchased a Legion GO S (SteamOS) and it proved incredible. So I was looking for a brand new rig to install CachyOS on. Now the RAM crisis has hit, I can't afford a new build so I stripped Windows on my current rig and went to CachyOS anyway. I wish I'd done this sooner, especially since I don't do multiplayer gaming. I don't think I realised how good Linux Gaming has gotten.

Quoting: Marlockthe percentage of linux machines with Deck-exclusive GPUs is now smaller (iirc it reached ~50% for a while) so linux growth is now driven by actual linux distros installed on PCs, laptops, etc, not a niche console that happens to have linux in it but you might never realize it, if seen as just a console

In case you'd like a graph:

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: EssojeI'd love to appreciate these small victories for Linux, but together with the RAM crisis and the news lately, all I can see here is the gruesome death of consumer PC hardware.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. The AI bubble is getting rickety . . . and when it pops, it will probably take a whole lot else with it, including crypto. At that point all the computer stuff will get cheap again. With the massive recession nobody will have any money so we still won't be able to afford it, but it will be cheap.

Crypto already popped this's its stable state: infinite rug pulls.
Yes, individual coins sometimes go up and sometimes down. If it was stable it would be unsuited for rug pool scams and illegal trade.
Nobody is buying large amounts of mining hardware anymore, because scamming poor smugs out of their money is more profitable.
Crypto won't die. It fulfills some pretty important functions for those in power. Criminals and intelligence agencies profit at the cost of law enforcement. Members of volatile state managed economies have a relative "safe haven" for their assets(remember after the rug pull many crypto assets have an acceptably stable price development).

AI replaced it and instead of attracting wealth from the powerful who have to hide their faces in fear, it spoke to a higher class, which knows it's above the law and thus doesn't have to hide anymore. They buy the same things in the same order.
CPUS->GPUS->ASICS->RAM->Customers.
There is one difference this time the start wasn't open source, so they managed to get themselves trapped in a vendor lock in.
Tip if you have an ancient computer science problem you think you can make less hard with unending amounts of computational resources, just follow the playbook and get rich.

Edit:
Might I suggest software proving(by exhaustion).

Last edited by LoudTechie on 6 Jan 2026 at 10:19 pm UTC

Quoting: pbWow, that's a huge difference. It seems that Linux is gaining momentum!

Just a few more decades and we'll finally eclipse Windows!

I'm doing my part!

Quoting: Saracen26I've been using Linux on and off for 19 years. Primarily for curiosity and the last decade for the Emulation side of things. My 2020 Gaming PC still recently ran on Windows 10 for convenience. I then the purchased a Legion GO S (SteamOS) and it proved incredible. So I was looking for a brand new rig to install CachyOS on. Now the RAM crisis has hit, I can't afford a new build so I stripped Windows on my current rig and went to CachyOS anyway. I wish I'd done this sooner, especially since I don't do multiplayer gaming. I don't think I realised how good Linux Gaming has gotten.

As you, so nicely display. It's easy to know Linux without knowing the quality of Linux gaming.
They're two very, very different worlds.
Linux is mostly driven by chip strength and price in the sense that every new use case for computers uses Linux by default and places new strains on vendors to support it and that computational potential is directly related to chip power.
Linux gaming is not driven by new potential, discoveries and/or research, but market politics. The fear of others drives one to free software, since if everybody is super(user) nobody is.

Valve sacrifices games for API and market access certainty.
Microsoft sacrifices customers to get stronger IP(Intellectual Property) guarantees in the wider sense.
Apple knows that anti-trust concerns only stop Microsoft from retracting killer app access as long Linux stays insignificant, so they backed the Wine project. Even fear for Linux can drive one to contribute to it, since open source lifts all boats.
Microsoft multiple times tried to sacrifice the game market to rid themselves of Intel's hold on their business.

Yet NVIDIA improves Linux not out of fear, but reward through the AI bubble.
Google throws considerable weight behind it, because of Android.
Printer vendors introduced wireless printing for mobile.
Most virus scanner support comes from the cloud.

The best example are though containerized packages(such as snap, Flatpak, etc.).
The Cloud drove demand for binary formats(packages) and saw the value of a standard(appimage), mobile drove containerization, but mostly after a direct compile and fear for sketchy games and production software drove Canonical to Snap, but nobody trusted it, which drove the community to Flatpak, which does the same, but federalized.
This's where we're now.
The next step would probably be government pressure on repos, which would drive it to decentralization(think torrenting, but with peerage based trust metrics).

Last edited by LoudTechie on 7 Jan 2026 at 7:50 am UTC

Quoting: JarmerMS doing the linux community the best favor ever!

they said they love linux , looks like they meant it