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.
I honestly didn’t even know you could run Steam on Linux conveniently other than maybe on a custom distribution like what the Steam Deck uses. Even when you somehow get it to run, you still need to check through multiple configurations, even going on pages like protondb to determine if a game runs and if yes, what extra configs are required. Once a game actually runs, it’s more like “it is emulated to run” which is not quite the same as running natively on hardware. Old games will probably not run and new games require third party patches or having to miss out on media playback for cutscenes, muted gameplay sections or outright unable to pass through certain portions of the game.
Especially considering how Microsoft has absolutely wrecked performance on Win11, in many cases a game layered through Proton actually runs better.
Many of the games I play also actually have a Linux native version you are downloading.
As for tinkering with extra settings, there is only one game I play at the moment which I had to do something other than default, and that was Helldivers (since you need to use the version of Proton that works with Anti-cheat). So I would recommend giving it another go if you haven’t scoped it out recently because it’s come a long way in about a year.
Have you tried in the last year or so? If your distro supports your GPU, you literally just go to steam, down load the launcher, download a game and play. Proton/Wine has come a long way in the last few years. Little tinkering is needed for 90+% of games these days.
I use Nobara and WINE 11
Works flawlessly
Runs better than Windows honestly. Better frame rate, faster loading, WINE 11 handles the backend for EXE apps.
No problems here whatsoever.
A hard fall sensationalist title for sure.
Yes, its a pain in the ass to install windows games on Linux, while childs in Windows are click to play roblox from the Microsoft store. Also, most of Linux gamers arent into games 24/7 bc we are OLD.
SteamOS will show the truth in a couple months.
Lmao it’s not 2008 anymore bud, installing games on Cachy, Bazzsite, or Garuda dr420 is just as simple as installing on Windows. Performance is much better as well. Maybe hip forward to this decade before typing nonsense.
Two of the biggest games ever made are on windows until tom Clancys rainbow 6 siege and league of legends solve the security ring 0 access or emulation of such software. This trend will probably continue. Even fortnite I believe, won’t allow it. So yeah it’s actually an understandable figure for online gaming.
Why would you want half your processing power being used when idle, I moved to Linux a little while back and don’t think I go back to windows. Not unless they can sort there shit out. Even using there home buttons is a bloody joke. I have had not problems using garuda linux when gaming and would tell most to go have a look!
Bull crap. My Windows 11 PC when idle stays around 2-3%, and that’s because of programs I have installed (like Rainmeter, which BTW, has no Linux equivalent) doing things in the background.
What do you mean nothing that compares to rainmeter? There’s like 100 different ways lol
My dude, you have to install additional software to make it run correctly by turning a bunch of stuff off. My Linux runs with minimal resources by default without turning off 30 things, because I would have to decide to install those things on purpose.
Now let’s compare apples to apples. Installing Linux as a base OS uses very minimal resources for the end user unless they do something on purpose to use those resources, whereas you have to install the OS and then use third party tools to turn stuff off that makes your OS run like trash. Imagine thinking these are comparable.
Some months the steam survey fires up on my 2017 skylake Chromebook. Other times it fires up on my bc250, sometimes my framework laptop. I don’t think they’re particularly accurate given how many people have a gaming rig and a laptop, and it just depends what computer they’re on when the survey triggers
Linux and an arc GPU. As two changes to my most recent survey
I’m doing my part
this article was sponsored by Microsoft. Who loves Linux as a cancer.
Or maybe it’s that people are finding out that Linux is a poor substitute for Windows on the desktop rather than the panacea that its proponents make it out to be.
This isn’t 2005. The Steam Deck and 95% of the Internet and most of the infrastructure the world runs on is Linux. Every week I see Microsoft straight up announcing to the world “hey we made a giant mistake please don’t install updates oh sorry they’re forced”. The *ONLY* reason Windows is still dominant in the desktop market is because it *COMES ON THE COMPUTER WHEN YOU GET IT.* Part of your money you pay for the computer goes straight to Microsoft for the Windows license whether you use it or not. I can’t even find a popular large manufacturer that offers the option to not pay money to Microsoft. Dell and IBM may have options for Linux but they aren’t cheaper, they don’t give you a discount for having a free OS
….
So I’m not sure why you think it is more popular because it is actually, technically better, when it is pretty easy to prove on an objective level that Linux is easier to use and has fewer bugs and technical hangups these days. Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot on a weekly basis.
I don’t know why Linux fans refuse to admit Windows is more popular and better. Windows runs everything, and Linux constantly has compatibility problems.
I’m gaming on Linux because when I attempted to install Windows 11, it couldn’t find any drivers and then committed suicide. Turns out Microsoft had broken their installed the week of release, go figure.
So I installed Linux to diagnose the problem, only to discover that steam proton runs my favorite games better than they run on Windows.
The only inconvenience I’ve run into is that occasionally popular multiplayer games require (for “anti cheat” software) a level of access that Linux seems quite firmly unwilling to give them.
😆😆😆 You should see what my CPU and GPU looks like idle on Linux to pc. Maybe it is! But that only because people are lazy!
Believe me, no, it isn’t. 🙂
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.
Maybe Bobby was just “letting off Steam”? 🙂