Historical March Towards Steam User Statistics for Linux
November 2025 was a record-setting month for Linux in the games industry. For the first time, the share of open-source operating systems on Steam has reached a considerable 3.2%. Certainly, the figure has now gone even more upwards, by 0.15% in that month alone.
A Growing Decade of Linux Adoption
Recent statistics show a phenomenon of slowly rising Linux adoption among gamers over the years. Ten years ago, the platform share merely stood at 0.98%. In November 2023, it had grown to around 1.91%, which progressed to around 2.03% last year. The jump to hit 3.2% indicates a quickening pace of attention towards the platform.
Top Linux Distributions on Steam
SteamOS has long held the crown of being the most popular distribution and has greatly contributed to the success of the platform. Arch Linux and Linux Mint are the favoured desktop choices. The distribution breakdown is as follows:
- SteamOS 26.42%
- Arch Linux 9.97%
- Linux Mint 22.2 7.36%
- CachyOS 64 bit 6.74%
- Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak) 5.96%
- Bazzite 5.53%
- Ubuntu Core 22 4.29%
- Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 3.86%
- EndeavourOS Linux 2.10%
- Linux Mint 22.1 1.96%
- Pop_OS 22.04 LTS 1.9%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 1.9%
- Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) 1.58%
The other 20.43% of the user base is divided among several other distributions.
