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PayPalAfter rubbing away the sleep from my eyes in disbelief, Valve have updated the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for March 2026 showing explosive Linux growth.
For the first time, Linux has smashed through 5% hitting yet another all-time high. Showing that all of Valve's work to improve Linux gaming thanks to Proton, SteamOS and the Steam Deck have certainly turned some heads. This is after last month saw a downwards swing due to a rise in Simplified Chinese so this may be things going back to where they would be normally.
The overall numbers for March 2026:
- Windows 92.33% -4.28%
- macOS 2.35% +1.19%
- Linux 5.33% +3.10%
And the usual snapshot from our dedicated Steam Tracker trends page:
One thing that is a bit odd though, is when you filter the survey just for Linux it shows this as the top Linux distributions for March 2026:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 24.48% +0.65%
- 0 64 bit 17.60% +17.60%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 8.78% -0.29%
- 64 bit 8.01% +8.01%
- Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 6.90% +0.28%
- Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 3.58% -0.24%
- Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 1.90% -0.69%
- Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit 1.67% +1.67%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 1.45% +1.45%
- Other 25.64% -5.94%
Two unnamed distributions, both with quite high percentages. So we may end up seeing some corrections this month. Hopefully just to fix the naming, but we've seen Valve correct the actual numbers before so I'll keep an eye on it.
Hopefully hardware like the upcoming Steam Machine will push Linux past 10%, then we might finally see some of those games blocked by anti-cheat start working.
Source: Valve
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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PlayingOnLinuxphone 5 hours ago
Quoting: elmapulnon gaming pcs dont matter for the gaming market.It matters, because someone working with Linux is more likely to adopt Linux on private PC, too. And someone who already owns a Linux PC is more likely to try out games on Linux instead of dual-booting all the day along. It also matters, because it shows the trend is not just gamers, but an overall success, which leads companies to bring their software to Linux at some point, which leads other gamers to switch, too. I am working with Unreal Engine and can use it on Linux on the same machine I am playing. A friend is creating music on his gaming machine and since his software does not run on Linux he is not switching (but would like). Everything is somehow connected.
not everyone knows about stuff like heroic/lutris and thoses dont support all windows stores just the most popular ones.Not everyone has to know it. It is enough if some people do it this way. Btw I don't care about "store support", I just want to install and config games easily and never touch these "launcher" to launch a game. I want to launch games as quick as starting a program and launchers as Steam/heroic/slopris/bottles/... are just bloatware that slows down my game-start (if I would use them this way).
not to mention if an console took 30 years to reach 6.5 millions of users, it wont be seeing as an success, but its good in an specific meassure: trendMore like around 600% increase in 5 years - from 0.9% to above 5.3% and it seems to accelerate. Some businesses wasting millions for over 10 years before they start to earn money. And they would also call it huge success.
Quoting: JohnLambrechtsis the year of linux desktop here?The year of Linux was 2025, because it became a talking point outside the Linux bubble and because it reached over 2.5%-3% for gaming, which is required to bring a political movement to their success. It was also the year of Win10 EOL. 2026 was always just meant to continue the breakthrough success and every further year just builds on top of 2025.
All different devices but all Linux
I remember when Linux was 1% on desktop in general, 0.01% for gaming. In those days Mac was generally described as 5%. So, we're (in theory) now at the point Mac was when it was the competitor to Windows. That should be enough for a bit of hardware support, eh?
11% for English speaking . . . that's insane. But, once again says to me that something needs to be done about China not doing Linux.
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