CachyOS has claimed the top spot among Linux distributions on Steam, jumping 2.65 percentage points in September to capture 18.12% of the Linux gaming population, according to the latest Steam Survey. That edges out SteamOS Holo at 17.37%, a notable milestone for the Arch-based distro that has built its reputation on aggressive kernel tuning, the BORE scheduler, and out-of-the-box gaming optimizations. CachyOS ships with performance-oriented defaults that rival what Valve does with its own operating system, and the community has clearly noticed.
The broader Linux numbers on Steam tell a different story. Overall Linux share dropped 0.85 points to 3.05%, continuing a slide from an all-time high of roughly 5.33% in March. The decline correlates with a familiar pattern: Simplified Chinese usage spiked 7.42% month over month, climbing to 31.39% of the total Steam population. These periodic surges in Chinese-language respondents tend to inflate the Windows share and compress everyone else proportionally, and many in the community treat the swings as a sampling artifact rather than a real shift in platform adoption. macOS sits at 1.92%, with Windows accounting for 95%.
Within the Linux segment, AMD CPUs continue to dominate, holding share in the high-60% range. The Steam Deck and the newer Steam Machine both run AMD APUs, which anchors a large portion of that figure, but AMD's longstanding commitment to open-source GPU and CPU drivers through the Mesa and kernel AMDGPU stack has made the platform a natural fit for enthusiasts building their own Linux gaming rigs as well. The full September 2026 dataset is available on Steam's hardware survey page.
