Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time
www.gamingonlinux.com
After rubbing away the sleep from my eyes in disbelief, Valve have updated the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for March 2026 showing explosive Linux growth.

Important to note that the results are a bit weird though for the last couple months.

In December, after Win10 EoL, linux achieved a record 3.58% of Steam users. However there was a massive drop in February, down to 2.23% of users on Linux. This was accompanied by a massive spike in Chinese steam accounts (english users dropped from 36% of user accounts in the survey to 22%, while Chinese user accounts jumped from 24% of users to 54% of users). I’m guessing it was a bunch of chinese bot accounts. (edit: as pointed out in the comments, this was probably due to chinese new year. Lots of chinese people hitting gaming cafes).

Now for March, Linux jumped back from 2.23% of users to 5.33% of steam users surveyed. Leading the charge are two unidentified distros 0 64-bit (+17.6%) and 64-bit (+8%).

The unknown distros being responsible for the massive gain is very suspicious, so we’ll have to see if that part ends up being correct or not. On the other hand, the surge of chinese accounts that seemingly pushed down linux’s percentages last month are now gone, with chinese accounts dropping from 54% of users to 23%.

So ultimately we’ll need to wait and see if valve clarifies what “0 64-bit linux” and “64-bit linux” are, or wait until next month to see how things change.

  • TwiddleTwaddle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    52·
    1 day ago

    The surge of Chinese accounts logging in during February is because of Chinese New Year, not bots. Most Chinese people get like two weeks off work for the holiday, so the number of Chinese people playing at gaming cafes (which are exclusively windows) spikes like that every year.

    • punkfungus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      23 hours ago

      I’m curious if the particular setup they have at those cafes results in their PCs being surveyed repeatedly, which might help explain why they have an outsized effect on the dataset. Because I can’t see 75% of all 5070s in existence actually belonging only to Chinese gaming cafes.

      • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzOPMEnglish
        2·
        6 hours ago

        My understanding is common practice is for people to log onto the gaming cafe computers with their own account, and then log out of steam when they’re done. So the same computer may have a bunch of different steam accounts log in and get surveyed on the same day.