Linux user share on Steam continues rising — highest for years again

Valve has put out their usual monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey and it's looking like good news for Linux and Steam Deck once again.

We've seen the user share rise up to 1.23%, making it the highest point in multiple years (again). If we use Valve's last monthly active user count, that points the monthly active Linux user count somewhere around 1,623,600. See more on our Steam Tracker. Linux has remained at 1% or above for at least a full year now too.

According to the survey when filtering just to Linux, here are the most popular distributions:

• Arch Linux 64 bit 13.87% +2.45%
• Manjaro Linux 64 bit 11.40% +1.29%
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 64 bit 9.78% -0.12%
• Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS 64 bit 9.28% -0.45%
• SteamOS Holo 64 bit 7.60% +0.02%
• Linux Mint 20.3 64 bit 6.29% -0.16%
• Freedesktop.org 21.08.14 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.29% -0.76%
• Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 4.90% +0.11%
• Other 31.60% -2.36%

So we're seeing Valve's SteamOS now make up 7.6% of the Linux gaming audience on Steam, which is a pretty good early showing for the Steam Deck. In terms of hardware, on the Linux side the Steam Deck appears to be the most popular device as it's now top of the list of GPUs used too.