Steam shows growing Linux popularity and RTX 5070 overtaking its predecessor
Steam’s November 2025 Hardware and Software Survey shows Linux hitting a new all time high on the platform, reaching 3.20% of all users. Windows still dominates with close to 95% share, but the small slice of Linux is growing faster than any other OS, helped by the Steam Deck, Proton and a steady flow of gaming oriented distributions like Bazzite and ChimeraOS. The timing also lines up with the end of support for Windows 10 and the push toward Windows 11, which many users see as a step backward due to stricter hardware requirements.
The long term trend matters more than the single month jump. Linux sat around 1% for years, climbed to roughly 1.9% in 2023, passed 2% in 2024 and now reaches 3.2%, up 0.15 points month over month and around 1.2 points year over year. Valve’s own SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck remains the main Linux variant in the survey, while Arch based and Ubuntu based distros, along with Bazzite and others, take most of the rest. On the Linux side, AMD CPUs power close to 70% of systems due to the Steam Deck APU design, a clear contrast with Windows where AMD is below 50%.
Source: Steam
CPU data for the full survey also shows AMD gaining ground under Windows. AMD processors now make up around 43 to 44% of Steam gaming systems, with Intel at about 56 to 57%, and Intel’s share has been slowly shrinking month after month. At the same time, the share of PCs with at least eight physical cores grew by more than one percentage point in a single month, suggesting that many upgrades now land in mid range and high core count territory, where AMD has a strong presence on desktop and in handhelds.
Source: Steam
On the GPU side, NVIDIA still dominates the survey with roughly three quarters of all cards, but the mix inside that share is changing. The GeForce RTX 5070 is now the most popular Blackwell GPU on Steam , sitting at around 2.23% share and already edging past the RTX 4070, which has dropped to roughly 2.16%.
RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti are also climbing, while the RTX 4060 Laptop GPU remains the single most common GPU in the database. VRAM numbers back the shift toward newer cards: 8 GB is still the most common capacity, yet its share is slipping as 12 GB and 16 GB models grow, with a small but visible rise in 32 GB cards driven by the RTX 5090.
AMD RDNA 4 products are still hard to spot as separate entries in Valve’s public breakdown, even nine months after launch, which raises questions about either Valve’s detection logic or actual shipment volumes of those GPUs.
Source: Steam , Phoronix , Wccftech
