Linux gaming on Steam closed May 2026 at 3.99% of the platform's user base, down from the recent peak but still nearly double the share that macOS commands at 2.16%. Valve published the May Steam Hardware & Software Survey overnight after a brief outage that had been throwing an "Oops, sorry!" error on the survey page since the evening of the 1st.
The May figure represents a pullback from March's 5.33% high and April's 4.52%, but it sits comfortably above the sub-2% range Linux occupied for years before Proton matured and the Steam Deck shipped. The current numbers reflect a platform that has structurally moved up a tier rather than spiking on a single release window.
SteamOS continues to account for just under a quarter of Linux gamers on Steam, with the remaining three quarters spread across desktop distributions running Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, and their derivatives. That split underscores how much of the Linux gaming surface area still depends on community work around Proton, Mesa, and the kernel's amdgpu driver rather than Valve's own immutable image.
AMD's share among Linux gamers continues to hover just under 70% of CPU use, a figure shaped heavily by the Steam Deck's custom Zen 2 APU and by the practical reality that AMD's fully open-source graphics stack remains the path of least resistance on Linux. NVIDIA's open kernel modules and the in-progress NVK Vulkan driver have narrowed the gap on the GPU side, but for CPU-plus-integrated-graphics builds the AMD pipeline still sets the default.
For context on the dip, Steam survey results are notoriously sensitive to which users get polled in a given month, and a single quarter of Chinese internet cafe responses can swing the Windows-versus-Linux ratio by a full percentage point. The trend line over the past year matters more than any single month, and that line still points up.
