After sliding from a record 5.33% in March to just under 4% by late spring, Linux's share of Valve's monthly hardware survey has stabilized. The July 2026 figures put the platform at 4.01%, a modest rebound following declines through April (4.52%), May (3.99%), and June. The three-month downtrend that followed March's peak appears to have bottomed out.
The exact size of July's gain is hard to pin down. Valve originally reported Linux at 3.69% for June, which would make July a 0.32 percentage point jump, but the June figure appears to have been quietly revised upward after publication, shrinking the month-over-month change to just 0.02%. Silent retroactive adjustments to Steam Survey data are not unusual, but they make precise trend tracking difficult.
Buried in the July breakdown is a detail worth watching: SteamOS Holo, the Arch-based operating system Valve built for the Steam Deck, now powers roughly 22% of all Linux gaming systems on Steam. That share reflects both the Steam Deck's continued popularity and the early shipments of the Steam Machine, Valve's living-room console running the same SteamOS stack. With two shipping hardware products driving SteamOS adoption, Valve's Linux gaming footprint is now broader than the handheld alone, even if the overall percentage has cooled from its spring highs.
