With the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2026 now live, we've seen a decrease compared with the all-time high from last month but still a good trend.
The overall operating system stats are now:
- Windows: 93.47%
- Linux: 4.52%
- macOS: 2.01%
We've done a little upgrade to our dedicated Steam Tracker page for the trends over time today. The old original trend line has been removed, and replaced with two trend lines: Linear and Exponential (so we satisfy everyone). They're also added as actual labelled data sets, so on the main page they can be individually toggled. Here's a snapshot:
According to the data these were the most popular Linux distributions for April 2026:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 23.05% -1.43%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 8.78% 0.00%
- CachyOS 64 bit 8.37% +8.37%
- Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 7.47% +0.57%
- 0 64 bit 5.94% -11.66%
- Bazzite 64 bit 4.74% +4.74%
- Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 4.16% +4.16%
- Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 3.58% 0.00%
- Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS 64 bit 2.36% +2.36%
- 64 bit 1.90% -6.11%
- Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) 64 bit 1.72% +1.72%
- Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit 1.53% -0.14%
- Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 1.51% -0.39%
- Fedora Linux 43 (Workstation Edition) 64 bit 1.43% +1.43%
- Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) 64 bit 1.40% +1.40%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 1.42% -0.03%
- Other 20.65% -4.99%
There's still a bit of weirdness going on, as two distributions show up that aren't actually named.
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. You can follow me personally on Mastodon [External Link].
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25 comments
Quoting: jjaksicSteam Survey is useless garbage. It's not humanly possible to do polling and statistics any worse than this. Please ignore it, it's just worthless random noise junk not worth anyone's 2 seconds of attention (except maybe to teach a toddler how not to do statistics).You always this cheery or is it your birthday which caused you to just glow with joy and spread some love?
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 3 May 2026 at 8:34 am UTC
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Quoting: PlayingOnLinuxphoneSince people don't trust me, I also draw some lines:It's following a sigmoidal pattern not a heaviside linear ... Heaviside linear is means to approximate a sigmoidal
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Everyone can extrapolate the line themselves.
It can only ever follow a sigmoidal and the is determining the steady state value (it won't be 100%... ) and the peak acceleration/adoption point.
I pasted a few sigmoidal fits for the last few updates and I expected a slight correction this month and it doesn't do anything to the general fit. 2030 for 10% is still on track.
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Quoting: Naib2030 for 10% is still on track.Great. When do we reach 105% then?
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Great, the exponential trend line follows the data a lot better. It's more representative than the linear one.
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I don't get the fuss about trend lines. The problem I have with that is that slapping a trend line on the data is assuming that there is one function driving the shape of the actual curve that stays more or less the same throughout. While I am not a statistics person at all, to me this screams "oversimplification". If you assume instead that there are several factors at play on how the Linux share develops, factors that may interact with one another, that become relevant and possibly irrelevant again at arbitrary points of time, I don't see how a simple trend line is supposed to appropriately model all of that.
I mean, do you plot a person's height from age 0 to 13 and then predict how tall they are when they reach age 90? So what are those of you expecting from a trend line to do for you? Predict how unknown future events impact the development? Because in all likelihood, there will be such events. Of course you can say, "If the Linux share develops like it has, X will happen in Y years", but what purpose does that serve?
I don't mean to rage bait anyone or discredit anyone's opinion on that matter, I'm honestly curious what you expect of a trend line to do for you. All I can see it doing for me is separating noise from the signal, but that isn't as easy as finding a curve that fits nicely, either. At least I don't expect it to be.
I mean, do you plot a person's height from age 0 to 13 and then predict how tall they are when they reach age 90? So what are those of you expecting from a trend line to do for you? Predict how unknown future events impact the development? Because in all likelihood, there will be such events. Of course you can say, "If the Linux share develops like it has, X will happen in Y years", but what purpose does that serve?
I don't mean to rage bait anyone or discredit anyone's opinion on that matter, I'm honestly curious what you expect of a trend line to do for you. All I can see it doing for me is separating noise from the signal, but that isn't as easy as finding a curve that fits nicely, either. At least I don't expect it to be.
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