After 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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You can also find comments for this article on social media: 
Quoting: GustyGhostForecasting a drop back to the high 3~% range next month. This kind of sudden change certainly looks anomalous along the greater trend. Glad to be a part of this growth though. 🐧You were wrong. Only a drop to 4.53% occured.
Quoting: GoEsrYou can't really compare a console with a set launch date, a marketing campaign and explicit game releases tied to that campaign to linux distros just continuing to exist.im not comparing in that sense, what im saying is, it dont matter how much we think 6,5 millions of people mater for the market, it doesnt.
PC has like 1 billion of users, yet most of then dont play games on it, and the ones who do spend less money in games than people playing on consoles anyway, wich spend less money than people playing on mobile.
it dont matter how we try to frame it, we arent so hard to ignore as we think we are.
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