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PayPalThe Steam Hardware & Software Survey for February 2026 is live and it's looking a bit odd, with a huge swing towards Simplified Chinese.
As usual when this happens, the Linux share drops as well and one of the biggest drops we've seen in a single month. It's entirely likely that Valve will do some sort of correction here as they've done before. But for now the data shows:
- Windows 96.61% +1.99%
- Linux 2.23% -1.15%
- macOS 1.16% -0.85%
For languages English is now at 22.27% (-14.74%) with Simplified Chinese at 54.60% (+30.74%). For a single month, something about this doesn't seem quite right. Especially with Windows 10 64 bit seeing +12.46%.
The usual snapshot from our dedicated Steam Tracker page:
For just Linux, the popular distributions listed are:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 23.83% +23.83%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 9.07% +9.07%
- CachyOS 64 bit 8.59% +8.59%
- Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 6.62% +4.29%
- Bazzite 64 bit 5.79% +5.79%
- Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.26% -1.08%
- Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 3.82% -0.10%
- Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit 2.83% -0.94%
- Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 2.59% -3.98%
- Other 31.58% +16.20%
I'll be keeping an eye on it to see if Valve tweak anything.
Source: Valve
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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fenglengshun 5 hours ago
Liam Dawe 5 hours ago
Quoting: fenglengshunChinese New Year, as usual.We do usually see a drop every February, but nothing like this, it's usually quite minor.
mr-victory 4 hours ago
Quoting: vic-bayWhy doesn't Steam just collect hardware data automatically, are there any legal issues with it? I'd like to see smooth statistics without sampling swings every month.This is not really a problem of sampling swing, it's chinese new year. Every year, there are massive rush of work in China / southeast asia until mid jan, then relax time starts, and people suddenly play many more games, with many probably only playing at this time. This culminates with chinese new year's golden week. Since Linux is not used much for Gaming there, you automatically see a huge drop at that point. So factually, during that period, there are way more Chinese players, and they factually use windows more than they use Linux.
It's true that a yearly or at least quarterly average would give a broader picture though.
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