3% of Steam Users Play on Linux, a Third of Them on SteamOS

Steam is by far the most popular game distribution platform for the PC platform, and its hardware and software surveys provide a pulse of the PC gaming market. The platform's latest monthly snapshot shows Steam on Linux exceeding 3% of all Steam sessions. What's more, one-third of these Linux users play on Valve's own SteamOS platform, which is a specialized PC Linux distribution for gaming. 3.05% of all active Steam users are playing on Linux with Steam for Linux as the DRM platform.

This is a 33% year-on-year growth from October 2024, when Linux made up 2% of all active Steam users. With this, Steam on Linux has surpassed Steam on macOS, which held 2.11% of the active users. Windows continues to be the dominant OS for PC gaming, with a 94.84% stranglehold. Within Windows, the latest Windows 11 gained 3% market share at the expense of Windows 10. Windows 11 holds 63.57% of the market, compared to 31.14% held by Windows 10.