The Steam Hardware and Software Survey for March 2026 puts Steam on Linux at 5.33% market share, an all-time high that crosses the 5% threshold for the first time and more than doubles the macOS figure of 2.35%. The 3.1 percentage point spike in a single month pushed Windows down 4.28% to 92.33%.
The jump stands out against recent trends. Steam on Linux ended 2025 at around 3.5%, dipped in January, and fell to 2.23% in February 2026. Even those lower figures represented real progress from the roughly 1% share Linux held in March 2021, before the Steam Deck launched and Valve began investing heavily in Proton compatibility.
Part of the March surge appears to stem from Valve correcting its Steam China data. Simplified Chinese language use dropped 31.85% month over month while English use climbed 16.82% to 39.09%, pointing to a methodological adjustment rather than a sudden wave of new Linux converts. Within the Linux install base, roughly a quarter of players are running SteamOS, and AMD CPUs account for just under 70% of Linux hardware, a share driven by the Steam Deck's custom AMD APU and AMD's open-source GPU driver stack.
