Linux reaches new peak of 2.69% in Steam Hardware & Software Survey: May 2025

Yay!

Man, if only Linux would be adopted by the masses for gaming...

Android uses the Linux kernel but none of the familiar "Linux" stack: GNU, X or Wayland, GTK or Qt, GNOME or KDE or other DEs, PulseAudio or PipeWire, APT or YUM or other package managers, and many others that define the Linux experience. Google could replace the Linux kernel with something else tomorrow without touching the rest of Android and most users won't tell, and many apps will run as-is.
- Google tried that once, they developed Fuchsia with the intention of replacing Android and ChromeOS and realized the investment to develop a replacement is not worth it and decided to layoff all the secondary development team to find the budget for the AI people that they pay to not work in competitors.
  Hoping for the AI bubble to burst any time now. I'm fucking tired of the management stuffing AI everywhere. Heck even the CEO now outsources Slack replies from ChatGPT.
- Isn't that why pedants call it "GNU/Linux" for those? Lol. (I was being facetious btw, I would marry GNU/Linux if I could.)
Yeah, it is the most popular consumer OS
Then VR games will work at better than min specs. Trying hard to get off windows, mostly there. Except when streaming VR games, Kubuntu is my daily driver. All my flat games (like 8 of them) work flawlessly now that cloud is syncing. Just need drivers for one device and software for another but may just have to deal with the loss of a left hand kb, and 2 buttons on trackball.
I did get some useful looking apps recommended not long ago, not 1 will compile on my os and I am way to tired at the end of the work day to read read and read some more(I used to do more complex stuff 20 yrs ago but, well, I forgot most of what I knew. Why is "make" looking to github instead of the directory I am in?
Proton is is coming along great, I used to support Cedega to play win games before.
- I would be shocked if Linux VR support isn't massively improved prior to Valve releasing the Deckard.
- You have vr games working on linux? Im surprised

I've not heard of CachyOS, but to capture 2.54% of the steam linux market feels significant. It jumped right past other established Arch-based distros like Endeavor and Manjaro.

A lot of gamers want better performance, so a performance oriented distro with gaming quality of life features fills that gap. And ultimately there are a lot of YouTube channels promoting it and it kind of turned into a cool distro to use. This might explain the phenomenon.
- Is Nobara still a thing? That was the gaming distro a couple years back, last I checked.
I've been using it for a while now, and it's genuinely so good. Before this I was using EndeavourOS which was also a great distro, but I realized that I was basically putting in work to do things CachyOS does out of the box, so I switched and it's been great.
- What kind of out of the box things?
they offer some optimisations to the kernel and the packages that are supposed to yield a tiny bit better performance.
an incredibly small thing that rubs me the wrong way more than it probably should about their setup is that they set Plasma animation speeds to much higher values than the stock Plasma desktop uses. sure, it could be just a part of their customisation tweaks the same way using fish as the default shell is, but it feels like a cheap trick to reel in the "I installed it on my desktop and it's soooo much snappier" review kind of people. like, if your work is as good as you claim, you shouldn't need to artificially make the improvements seem bigger than they really are.
- I'm not familiar with it, but I think that that could be a reasonable UI tweak. I disable virtually all animation in software where possible because I want it to be as responsive as possible and don't care about the animation. Simply reducing the time in animation is a middle ground---one still gets animations, but cuts out some of the time.
- I set plasma animations to instant every arch install anyway so personally I don’t care 😎 thanks for asking
- If it feels snappier, it is snappier.
  It's like saying it's cheating to use instanced rendering to display millions of asteroids when it's not even real draw calls
I started using linux full time about a year ago. I started with Arch, but moved to Cachy really quickly when I discovered it. All of the advantages of Arch, but repos optimised for modern hardware, and a whole heap of useful pre-configured tools, like Wine/Proton, fish, snapper etc. Arch is a bare bones, pick and configure your own setup rolling release distro. Cachy is a pre-optimised, rolling release distro with lots of useful stuff right out of the box.
I use the cachyos kernel on an otherwise plain arch setup. I don't game much, but I tried it out and just stuck with it.
It has a dedicated steam deck ISO, is the most well put together preset up arch distro there is for gamers. Period, there are no real good faith arguments here. It's like if someone took an endevour install and spent over 50 hours doing nothing but making every possiable part of it as easy as possible for gamers to just play games.
Its what Bazzite is functionally a knock off of. Anyone whos using Bazzite is litterally using an objectively worse option then cachy is their first and only goal is gaming. Which is bazzites entire gimmick basically.
- I agreed with everything in your first paragraph but your second one just seems like needless 'holier than though' drivel. Bazzite has it's own unique pros, and both are great options for gamers.* However, when it comes to having a OEM-like experience on a Legion Go under Linux, Bazzite, Nobara or Chimera are a better fit. That's my usecase and why I chose Bazzite, I wanted a Steam Deck experience with a better screen and more powerful chip. It was also well before SteamOS had any support for other devices.
- Yeah, that's not Bazzite's "only gimmick"
- How's Cachy for NVIDIA support?

Phone is Android, PC is now Linux Mint, for gaming I use a Steam deck, and my NAS is now TrueNAS.

Tumbleweed users RISE UP!

I'm doing my part
- There are dozens of us, dozens!
I'm even running it on my Steam Deck.
<3
I'm on Slowroll though.
- We'll count you next month. 😉
T U M B L E W E E D Master Race
I’m here, and I’m proud! :-]

Debian, stable as usual.

debian is bestian

🙋🏼‍♂️ new to Linux gaming.

Same. Sadly I did not have my new baby during the last hardware survey.

Nearly a third are coming from the Steam Deck and other Steam OS handhelds. Impressive.

Doing my part

"There's dozens of us! Dozens!"

Awesome. Will be interesting to see the November December numbers with unpaid Win10 support ending.

My prediction: Ten percent increase for Windows 11 with 25 percent still on 10 and barely an increase for Linux.
I hope I'm wrong.
- I don’t know. Most of the increase above appears to be win 10 users. Win 10 lost 1.09% and the percentage gain was close to evenly split between linux and win11 with a little going to MacOS.
  I could see a bunch of people paying $15 to keep win 10 going , but not that much.

I use Debian. Does this mean I'm in the top 0.05% of Steam users?

yes

More like 2.nice%

Huh. The Year of the Linux Handheld.

The Year of the Linux Handheld on the Desktop

Where are all the Ubuntu Core 22 installs coming from? Is there some large device or distro that uses it?

AFAIK, this corresponds to the snap package of Steam.
I feel like Ubuntu has the greatest exposure among non-Linux folks. It's the only OS any place I've ever worked used on WSL back when I was still on windows. Probably a lot of corporate nerds want to stick to what's comfortable?
I have no idea if that's the reason, but Ubuntu and Mint are the only two distros I've tried for basically that reason. Heard good things about PopOS. Might try it some time if I wind up with an extra computer.
- Regular Ubuntu I get; it's specifically the separation in the list between core and the standard 24.04 distro that I don't get. I can't imagine that droves of nerds are installing straight Ubuntu Core unprompted. I'd absolutely buy though that some distro or some handheld is based on one.
- I think PopOS was made especially for the System76 hardware, no? While it can still work on other hardware, System76 hardware is the one it was meant for.
  Honestly, Ubuntu is great. It's not bleeding edge where you can encounter yet unfixed bugs or other problems, and it's not old enough that you can run into problems where the software is so old it doesn't support the latest gaming stuff. It has great support from the community, it's widespread, and comes with tons of quality of life things like tools to install 3rd party drivers, like graphical drivers for NVidia. Why change?
TF2 bots
Yeah I was asking myself the same question. But it looks like they've started doing an Ubuntu Core setup for the Steam Deck.
what if it's dedicated game servers?

I'm somewhat surprised there isn't a Fedora there, it's a pretty great and up-to-date distro. And pretty popular.

I'm also surprised Flatpak isn't higher!

Fedora or Bazzite (Fedora-based) are my top recommendations for new Linux users. I’m constantly surprised at Mint’s general popularity, especially for gaming. Even openSUSE Tumbleweed is a better option when it comes to gaming.
- Wanted to try bazzite but on my 13 year old cpu and mobo it wouldn't boot. Mint ran perfectly.
- I’m not a new Linux user but am a new Linux gamer. I landed on endeavorOS a few months ago and like it enough I converted my other two desktops over. Whether it’s just dumb luck or not it has been noticeably more snappy on all three of the workstations I put it on than anything else I was using. It’s honestly kind of eerie, after putting my work laptop (windows11) away for the day and jumping on one of my systems they are so responsive now that sometimes it feels like it’s predicting what I want to do before I do it.
- There's a reason it's not up there and cachy is, bazzite is in basically just a worse version of what cachy is setting out to do.
Also surprised about that. I use Nobara and that too is based Off Fedora.
- Yeah, it seems there's something going on with what's listed here. It doesn't match any other measurement.

Not sure wtf those 97% are thinking

They did not use their brains enough.
Just use linux, it can do literally everything (via VMs) windows can; but better, faster and more customizable.
- Just use linux, it can do literally everything (via VMs) linux can
  Hmm, Linux is better than Linux? What a world!

More people should use EndeavourOS. It's fantastic for gaming.

Cachy is just endeavour but with like 20 hours + of all the extra stuff you do after an install already done if you are only focused on gaming.
Endeavour is fantastic but it's a general purpose project. Cachy IS first and foremost gamer/performance focused.
So if you love endeavour but want to only game then cachy saves endless time and effort and for new users or gamers wanting to be lazy it's just a no brainer to go cachy
- I’ve already used Cachy, but went back to Endeavour. I found Cachy’s “optimizations” to be a bit janky. At the time they enabled some items for ntsync that were clearly not ready for primetime.
  Performance-wise, I compared the two head to head and found Cachy and Endeavor to be equally performant for gaming. Cachy just didn’t offer anything for me that Endeavor didn’t already do.
  On top of this, I found Cachy’s packages to lag a bit behind the Arch and Endeavor repos, particularly in the Cachy-extras repository, and it ended up causing me issues with things I used from the AUR due to packaging conflicts (the old Manjaro type crap).
  Cachy isn’t for me, though I get why people like it.
- And if you like Manjaro your better off using another Distro in my opinion
I mean, that's basically the same as Arch.
- Yeah, just much easier to install, which is what I want from it, I never got the argument that by installing arch manually you "learn" what's on your pc, idgaf, even as a software developer let alone a normie, I want a working system, that just works
personally any Arch based distro is not great for beginners its alright for intermediate Linux users and great for advanced Linux users
but Arch based distros are the best for gaming cause newest packages and its quite easy to get game packages (especially when you put repos like Chaotic-AUR
It is. The switch last year, coming from windows, was a bit rough but that's also partly due to the nvidia drivers. They got way better in the mean time. And then it's just learning how things work and how to troubleshoot if I do something stupid.
I've been thinking of switching back to Arch. Currently using Nobara, and its moved to rolling release anyway.

I love to see it.

Each time I see posts like this, I hope to see adobe announce they are making linux versions of their software. Whether you like it or not, a lot of people do not switch because of adobe.

Can't you run it through Proton or Wine tricks at this point?
- Nope, it will install but then say dlls are missing even though they are there.

o7 linux mint since april

i use mint btw
- the memes flow even trough the lowliest of Tuxii
Mint is pretty much the best distro. It’s what I recommend to everyone.

God I wish someone would port AHK to linux. I literally depend on it to make software accessible.

I wonder if it works on WINE i never tried it
AutoKey might be what you are looking for
- It works for the most basic scripts but unfortunately its features pale in comparison
Same here, for some reason my covid hobby was learning a new keyboard layout and while I now prefer using Dvorak, my attempts at remapping key bindings like cut/copy/paste on linux has has been unreliable at best, and then switching between Dvorak and QWERTY for games that don't support layout-agnostic controls usually doesn't even register (at least on the steam deck it doesn't seem to)
- have you tried keyd? I only use it for a few very simple remaps, but it's got tons of nooks and crannies to lose yourself in.
  https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

bazzite bitches

No thanks. I'd like to keep full control over my operating system and only accidentally ruin it every few years.
- This is a nonsense talking point, what exactly can't you do with root access on bazzite that you can do on a non-immutable?
  the answer: nothing
- 15 years ago installed Ubuntu to run as a server and had to reinstall and config everything like 10 times to get it to work and since then have been very vary of Linux but had to return since said installation broke like 2 years ago, installed Mint and my eyes opened how easy everything is now compared to then. I got tired of Microsoft bullshit so I switched to bazzite about 2 months ago and I have no problems. There have been a couple of times that it said "you can do this but it is probably not a good idea" but otherwise everything just works. I appreciate this because from my earliest experiences with Linux I wasn't happy. I use my computer for gaming and web stuff and that's pretty much it. What do you guys who feel you can't do what you want really do with your computer?
- You still have full control. It’s just that you need to use ostree to create layers since the underlying system is immutable. It’s a different way of thinking about Linux, but means you can easily roll-back when you break something.
- Lol someone hasn't actually worked with immutable distros. What precisely can't be layered on bazzite with rpm-ostree?

where is fedora?

Definitely surprised to see it's such a low percentage that it was swept under the Other category.
- Same, i see this Distro recommended everywhere alongside Linux Mint,Ubuntu Spins and Arch.
In other

I bet that most of the steam flatpaks are on the Debian distros, specifically Mint. So if it wasn't for steamos, Mint would probably be the first on the list.

Ubuntu has snap.

Debian is understandable since its packages are frozen for 2 Years

Why are some in quotes?

$ cat /etc/os-release NAME="Arch Linux" PRETTY_NAME="Arch Linux" (...)
Because this is how distributions declare their names
Because that's people not using Arch Linux but "Arch Linux".
- I use (pause) "Arch" btw.
Just a guess, maybe those don't have explicitly set distribution names and are basically named by Valve themselves.

Interesting to see that Arch Linux ishe most popular, even more so than endeavorOS which is way easier to install. I know Ubuntu isn't the hotness anymore but I figured mint would have jiat replaced it at the top. Apparently not. Then again power user who insults their own operating system but is also a game her might select for more advanced Linux users. Otherwise they might just dual boot or are the likes users who run it on a spare laptop.

I've been in Ubuntu user since I was 13 and I still am on my primary desktop but my old desktop which is now a utility server for me is running endeavor

For gaming purposes endevour is a terrible choice when cachy is a thing. Not that endevour is bad, its just cachy just pre does literally everything you would have to do AFTER an endevour install. Along with they have a ISO that is for the steamdeck.
Arch is also just objectively better then every other option again if your goal is first and foremost gaming. Because it has by far and away the best support for new hardware and nearly every third party community tool for every game ever is on the AUR and every gaming community with modders ONLY support arch basically because of it.
Again not because other options are bad, but this is teh steam report. Its gamers. So the best option FOR gaming is going to be on top. Thats arch, steamOS is arch, cachy is arch, and gamers with good hardware will graviate to arch because its the only way to have a painless and easy first time install for new hardware or to use teh community tools they got use to on windows.
Debian/Ubuntu and the others in that family all tend to have problems for gamers, fedora is a nightmare for new users. So they almost always end up just on cachy, or endevour/arch. Mostly cachy tho, as its canabalized most of manjaros gamers as the easy to install preset up distro.
- Arch is also just objectively better then every other option again if your goal is first and foremost gaming. Because it has by far and away the best support for new hardware and nearly every third party community tool for every game ever is on the AUR and every gaming community with modders ONLY support arch basically because of it.
  EndeavourOS uses Arch's repos first and foremost, with additional stuff from their own repos on top of that, so it gets both the new hardware support you're praising, as well as AUR, and on top of that it's easier to install and maintain.
Pretty much the original comment that was here was wrong in every conceivable way, which I noticed after posting it. So I'll just post this instead.

Yeah arch! We are legion!

I take it, you use arch?
- BTW

I’ll just sit quietly over here with my Fedora machines…

Slide over a bit, I'll join you.....

I finally made the switch recently. Been dual booting for a while. I use arch on my laptop for fun and Linux Mint Debian Edition on my desktop for stability.

I hope you enjoy your time here in Linux land.
- Thanks. I've been running Linux servers for over 5 years and a few Linux laptops for 2-3 years. I just never moved my gaming PC over. I was like the third wave of Steam Deck owners. That proved to me that gaming on Linux is possible now. I just give up on any game that has kernel level anti-cheat for now. But, the amount of cheaters pulled me from most of those games a while ago...

I am one of the 0.05% on Debian. I feel special.

Same

2.nice

I'm just glad that I'm not the only one running steam on Debian.

I'm sorry for your drivers
- It's okay, it's AMD, so it mostly works. I had trouble with my Bluetooth, but then remembered that I don't really care enough to fix it.

#YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

One day it will reach 5%.

Nice, I'm part of that .05% Debian 12 crowd.

We’re doing our part!

Signed out of windows and into Mint when steam went to ask this time, the last 2 I said "sure" while playing cod on windows so it wasn't tracking me

So I'm now doing my part

Odd that SteamOS only show up in the Linux only view.

This is great news. Gives me hope that one day, I'll be able to play all of my games on Linux.

Nice.

I run Mint Cinnamon on a machine in my room for media. But also run a Jellyfin server off a pop_os server. My partner has a laptop that she updated to Win 11 that has had Audio issues ever since. When I boot to a live disk (linux), no issues. I've tried so many fixes for her system and it appears her step mother is having the same issue on another Win 11 machine. I've been trying to find a way to ensure she can run all the games she likes on an OS without being a headache. The Sims (probably 2,3,4). Stardew Valley, and such. Steam I have had luck with, but The Sims seems to come from an EA app which I believe I can run through Lutris. I have been hesitant to move that laptop because I want to be sure all of her games will end up working without hours of configuration that may break when she mods something in the game and needs a reinstall of the game itself. Has anyone had any luck with the EA app? I figure if she's paid for the licenses, I would rather use them than torrenting it all.

Mint Cinnamon was what I figured I'd use for that laptop, but if someone has a better suggestion I'd like to hear it

I wonder where my Steam on Fedora 42 KDE lands

Now I wish we could permanently move from Android for all Android devices to something like lineage.

There are phone vendors like murena (not a manufacturer i think) who have some privacy OS preinstalled so you dont have a rooted phone that gets blocked for "privacy concerns"
If you are unsure if the apps you need work you can install waydroid on linux

I'm one of those I got a steam hardware survey for the first time in a long time.... Been on mint for awhile now

We still have a long way to go but we've already come so far!

How do you use steam on Ubuntu core?

Its because the Snap version of Steam Displays itself as Ubuntu Core to the Steam Client
You install a snap or something idk
- Well, and I hadn't thought of this, but maybe Ubuntu core is used to run game servers.

The irony is that you have to thank Microsoft for it.

IMO, mainly Valve.

Excellent stuff.

For all the valve bootlickers here: while it is good that they are now supporting linux remember that if the shares still look favorable to windows it's thanks to company like valve who for decades promoted proprietary software.

I'd guess that desktop Linux users are statistically using their PC in summer more than the normal PC user (using windows).

What? I can definitely say that that's true for literally all of my friends and especially me.

once during summer i just stuck my pc out the window in a screened off porch, shoved the cables through the window, boom... no more heat :3