Linux users more than doubled in March 2026 Steam Hardware Survey

Is it finally time for the Year of the Linux Desktop? Well, likely not, but that isn’t stopping the rising tide of Linux users, as shown by the latest edition of the monthly Steam Hardware Survey.

In the March 2026 Steam Hardware Survey, Linux users more than doubled as Valve recorded a 3.1% gain in Linux user share, bringing the total to 5.33%. While that might not seem like a huge amount, when you consider the sheer number of gamers out there using Steam, a 5% user base is a not insignificant amount; it even dwarfs the Mac users on Steam, which recorded just 2.35%.

Valve themselves are big supporters of the open source operating system of course. Their Steam Deck gaming handheld console runs their SteamOS, their own Linux-based operating system, and even before that their work on the Proton compatibility layer let many Linux gamers run Windows games without much tinkering needed by users.

Digging further into the data, we see that unsurprisingly AMD graphics cards dominate the list of GPUs. The most common ones are the integrated graphics found in the Steam Deck’s APU. Four core CPUs also make up the biggest chunk of Linux processors; again, unsurprising as the Steam Deck’s APU has four Zen 2 cores alongside its 8 RDNA 2 compute units. Curiously, despite the Steam Deck featuring an 800p display, that only makes up 14.58% of Linux users, with 1080p displays making up over a third of the samples.

Other curious information gleaned from the March 2026 Steam Hardware Survey is that AMD continues to chip away at Intel, at least among PC gamers; it now boasts a 45.02% share, compared to Intel’s 54.98%. NVIDIA however maintains its stronghold in the PC gaming scene, with a 72.83% share; the most popular graphics card meanwhile is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.

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