Linux use on Steam ends 2023 with a multi-year high (thanks Steam Deck)

Valve's latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out now for December 2023, and it shows that Linux and Steam Deck overall finished 2023 on a very positive note.

Something I continue showing over time on our Steam Tracker, we can see that December 2023 is the highest it's been in multiple years. Only just beating the previous high of July 2023 by 0.01%! This is all largely thanks to Valve's Steam Deck that ships with SteamOS Linux, and Proton that continues to help tens of thousands of games be playable on Linux systems.

Here's the December 2023 overall operating system results:

• Windows 96.40% -0.16%
• Linux 1.97% +0.06%
• OSX 1.63% +0.10%

And just on the Linux side the most popular Linux distributions for gaming on Steam are:

• SteamOS Holo 64 bit (Steam Deck) 40.53% -2.46%
• Arch Linux 64 bit 7.85% +0.04%
• Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS 64 bit 7.04% +0.37%
• Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.22% +5.22%
• Linux Mint 21.2 64 bit 4.70% +0.45%
• Manjaro Linux 64 bit 3.64% -0.15%
• Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 3.03% +0.35%
• Other 27.99% +1.51%

It's worth noting that the Steam Deck has been a top seller over the last few weeks too. For the week starting Tuesday, November 14th it went back to 1st place globally on Steam (in supported regions obviously) and remained number 1 until Tuesday, December 19th where it dropped to 2nd place and has remained 2nd the following week up until today. So clearly Valve are still shifting plenty of units.