Linux’s brief stay above 5% on Steam is over. After making history in March by reaching a record 5.33% share in Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software Survey, the open-source operating system has now dropped back to 3.99% in the May 2026 results.
Although 3.99% is still a strong figure by Linux gaming standards, the trend indicates a decline. The March result appears to have been a temporary spike rather than a new stable baseline. Linux first surpassed the 3% mark on Steam in late 2025, then rose sharply to 5.33% in March 2026. Two months later, however, this milestone was lost.
Valve’s latest figures indicate that Windows continues to dominate the Steam gaming platform, increasing to 93.85%, a rise of 0.38 percentage points.
macOS also had a slight increase, reaching 2.16%, up 0.15 percentage points. In contrast, Linux declined to 3.99%, a decrease of 0.53 percentage points from April, which is especially significant when compared to the record high in March. At that time, Linux accounted for 5.33%, showing a loss of 1.34 percentage points over two months.
Regarding the breakdown by distros, in the May survey, Arch remains the leader at 0.35%, followed by Linux Mint 22.3 at 0.31%, Ubuntu Core 24 at 0.14%, and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS at 0.11%. Other distributions, including Nobara, Debian, EndeavourOS, Fedora, and Manjaro, each account for less than 0.1%.
Survey volatility is the most plausible explanation, rather than a sudden mass migration away from Linux. Valve’s Steam survey is both optional and anonymous, which means that monthly results are influenced by the specific sample of users who participate.
Steam Deck and SteamOS may also add to these trends. Valve’s handheld device has significantly increased the visibility of Linux gaming, and its Arch-based SteamOS environment has promoted Linux as a viable gaming platform.
If SteamOS systems were overrepresented in the March survey sample, or if Valve’s classification of Linux systems changed between survey periods, this could account for the temporary increase above 5% followed by a decline below 4%.
Another likely factor is the atypical magnitude of the March result compared to Linux’s historical growth pattern. Linux required several years to increase from 1% to 2% on Steam and only surpassed 3% in 2025.
The rapid rise from just above 2% to 5.33% in March 2026 was much more abrupt than previous trends. With that said, the May 3.99% result corresponds more closely to the long-term growth path, although it remains significantly higher than most of Linux’s historical share on Steam.
At the same time, Linux continues to outperform macOS on Steam and remains well above the 1–2% range that marked much of its history.
For additional details, see Valve’s Steam Hardware and Software Survey for May 2026.
Falling hard might be a bit of a hard statement.
Those Steam numbers must be looked at with some distance. The curve is still in line with previous progress being made, especially if you use a median that removes extreme values.
I wouldn’t present this with such alarmism. It’s still on an upward curve when smoothed.