November is over which means a fresh Steam Hardware Survey, and it continues the trend we’ve been seeing with the Linux user share rising and now it’s bigger than ever.
At the end of November, Linux hit 1.44% on Steam against 2.45% on macOS and 96.11% on Windows. Going by our Steam Tracker, where we’ve been tracking the Linux user share for a few years, it has hit another all-time high. The usual caveat of course: tiny compared to Windows, but the trend towards Linux is clearer than ever.
This growth is easy to see is largely down to the Steam Deck, with SteamOS 3 being clearly the most popular way to play games on a Linux system now:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 25.77% + 0.79%.
- Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS 64 bit 10.89% – 1.38%.
- Arch Linux 64 bit 9.37% + 0.25%.
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 6.72% – 0.20%.
- Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.82% + 0.11%.
- Linux Mint 21 64 bit 3.90% + 3.90%.
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 3.71% + 3.71%.
- Other 33.81% – 7.18%.
Unsurprisingly, the Steam Deck is also the biggest device as a whole for Linux gaming with the AMD Custom GPU 0405 taking 25.77% + 0.76% with the next most popular being the AMD Radeon RX 480 3.75% – 0.15%. It’s also interesting to see that SteamOS and the Steam Deck GPU percentages match in the Linux data, along with it not showing up on the Windows data at all making Windows on Steam Deck a tiny minority.
Edit: as also pointed out rightly so in a comment, since the Deck GPU shows up now in the combined platform data for all of Steam (AMD Custom GPU 0405 0.37% + 0.05%), we can see that nearly all are on SteamOS.
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