Steam on Linux use has hit an all-time high! With the Steam Survey results for October 2025 coming out this evening, Steam on Linux has finally cracked the 3% threshold! A few months back Steam on Linux was close to 3% before stumbling a bit but now it’s above that elusive threshold. The only time Steam on Linux use was close to the 3% mark was when Steam on Linux initially debuted a decade ago and at that time the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than it is today. Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve’s Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well, these October numbers are the best yet.
Long story short, thanks to the ongoing success of Valve’s Steam Deck and other handhelds plus Steam Play (Proton) working out so well
… plus people get more and more fed up with Windows.
People can get fed up all they want, if there’s no alternative (wine/proton) then there’s not a whole lot most people can do besides suck it up
And? The opposite is also true: If people are happy with Windows, then it does not matter how good the alternative is.
While true, there is an alternative. Your comment is moot.
I know this is a tiny percentage overall, but it’s a very substantial boost to the Linux percent, perhaps correlating with Win10 losing free security updates, and a minority of savvy gamers swapping to Linux. (Myself included, so obviously bias to my statement)
It’s easy to forget what these “tiny” percents represent but steam has 132 million monthly active users, 3 percent of that means that we now have over 3 million linux players.
I have been noticing a boost in people using Linux with gaming. There’s a lot of benefits. Most of the time Linux is better at battery and performance than the alteratives.
In addition, windows 11 is pretty unstable right now. Even the task manager has bugs haha.
Did they add AI to the task manager too?
Instead of closing out, task manager creates another instance of itself.
Its hilarious.
Interesting to see that the KDE version of Fedora is more popular than the Gnome one, considering how long Gnome was the main DE there.
I’m doing my part!
That’s interesting, because according to statcounter, linux usage actually went down last month, but I guess most browsers on linux will block those stats scripts
I’m willing to bet decent money that there is overlap between users that always participate in the steam hardware survey and users who have permanently installed uBlock Origin and don’t save cookies.
Linux stats on statcounter was growing a lot, up to almost 5%, then reduced quickly back to less than 3%. Maybe the new users learned to install privacy tools?
