Valve's June Steam Survey marks a third straight monthly decline for Linux, which sits at 3.69% after reaching an all-time high of 5.33% in March. The 0.3-point drop from May's 3.99% is the smallest of the three monthly dips, but Linux has still shed nearly two-thirds of its March gains. Windows climbed 0.25 points to 94.1%, and macOS edged up to 2.21%.
The slide coincides with a regional shift in Steam's user base. Simplified Chinese users surged 2.34 points to 24.19% of all survey respondents in June, a pattern that has historically compressed Linux's percentage share as large influxes of predominantly Windows users enter the sample. SteamOS continues to account for roughly 23% of all Linux gamers, keeping the Steam Deck as the single largest driver of Linux adoption on the platform. AMD CPUs power just under 67% of Linux gaming systems, reflecting both Valve's AMD-based hardware and the broader popularity of AMD among Linux enthusiasts for its open-source driver support.
The survey numbers are declining against a backdrop of steady infrastructure investment. Proton 11 Beta shipped in April built on Wine 11 with NTSync for lower-overhead synchronization, and Valve recently added FSR 4 to Proton Experimental, bringing AMD's latest upscaling technology to GPUs older than RDNA 4. SteamOS 3.8 has also expanded hardware support beyond the Deck to other AMD-powered handhelds and desktops.
