Valve has published its Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2026, and the headline number for one corner of PC gaming is a good one: Linux now accounts for 3.95% of surveyed Steam users, up 0.90 percentage points on the month.
The operating system split
According to Valve's survey page, the October figures across all platforms are:
- Windows: 93.70%, down 1.33 points
- Linux: 3.95%, up 0.90 points
- macOS: 2.35%, up 0.43 points
Within Windows, Valve lists Windows 11 64-bit at 72.51% of all users (up 1.17 points) and Windows 10 64-bit at 21.11% (down 2.50 points). So Windows 10 keeps shrinking while Windows 11 gains, even in a month when Windows as a whole lost share.
GamingOnLinux, which tracks the survey every month, described the result as an uptick that puts the Linux share "back to nearly 4%".
Which Linux distributions lead
GamingOnLinux also broke down the Linux slice by distribution, as a share of Linux users rather than of Steam as a whole. CachyOS leads at 16.39%, ahead of SteamOS Holo at 13.89%, Arch Linux at 8.92%, Linux Mint 22.3 at 8.41%, a separate "SteamOS 64 bit" entry at 8.09% and Bazzite at 6.74%. Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS sits at 3.63%.
That second SteamOS line is new. Valve's own table shows "SteamOS 64 bit" at 0.32% of all users, with a change of +0.32 points, meaning it was not listed the month before. GamingOnLinux noted that SteamOS now shows up twice and suggested the non-Holo entry "might perhaps be the Steam Frame". Valve's page doesn't say what the new entry covers, so treat that as GamingOnLinux's guess rather than a confirmed explanation.
The Steam Frame shows up in VR
What the survey does show directly is Valve's Steam Frame in the VR headset chart. Valve lists the Valve Steam Frame at 4.13% of VR headsets surveyed, up 3.72 points. Meta's Quest 3 still leads at 27.27%, and Valve's older Index headset is at 9.90%, down 0.93 points.
GamingOnLinux's list of VR headsets puts the Steam Frame sixth, behind the Quest 3, Quest 2, Quest 3S, Valve Index and Pico 4, and ahead of the Oculus Rift S and PlayStation VR2.
A big language swing underneath
One more line on Valve's page is worth knowing before reading too much into any of this. The survey's language breakdown shows English at 39.04% of respondents, up 4.84 points, and Simplified Chinese at 21.98%, down 9.41 points. Valve says participation in the survey is optional and anonymous.
Elsewhere in the October data, Valve lists 16 GB as the most common amount of system RAM at 41.42% (up 3.60 points), while 32 GB fell 5.16 points to 37.06%. On graphics cards, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 is listed as the most popular at 3.62%.
Mason's take: A near-one-point jump for Linux is the kind of number that gets shared fast, and it is a real figure from Valve. But the same month saw Simplified Chinese drop by more than nine points among respondents, and the RAM chart moved by several points too. That looks to me like a month where the sample changed as much as the market did. The more interesting signal is quieter: the Steam Frame now registering on the VR chart, and a new SteamOS entry that nobody has explained yet. If Valve's own hardware keeps finding buyers, that is what will move Linux gaming over time, far more than any single survey month.
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