Initially Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey for December 2025 showed Linux at 3.19%, but they appear to have amended it with a nice boost for Linux.
If we all got together as a team and each put Linux and Steam on 5 old/cheap/e-waste/whatever PCs for the next survey we’d pump those numbers up to ~20% and freak Microsoft out.
I will be replacing windows on all five of my home computers with Linux
I’ll leave a couple as a dual boot, but the media server, laptop, primary desktop, and two media/‘console’ PCs (connected to TVs) will be swapped over. hopefully it will be easy to get the same setup on all of them and run reliably.
Just a suggestion but for the two htpcs I’d recommend using bazzite or steamos. Both are stable and hard to break and booting into a console likr interface is great. Use anything else for the rest of your machines. They lock both down a bit too much to be practical every day machines.
Having been daily driving Bazzite for a bit, as long as you’re willing to work with it it’s perfectly fine as a daily driver. Sure I’ve had to pop in to distro box a couple of times to run a specific utility that’s not in the immutable build but that’s just a couple of extra clicks plus I can pick whatever distro userland I want which is convenient for better compatibility with whatever GitHub script I’ve decided to blindly trust this week!
If we all got together as a team and each put Linux and Steam on 5 old/cheap/e-waste/whatever PCs for the next survey we’d pump those numbers up to ~20% and freak Microsoft out.
Does Microsoft care about steam numbers?
The way they’re going I don’t think they even care about windows numbers
I dunno, but they cared enough to get the Xbox team in to build a handheld friendly interface to compete with Steam OS.
I will be replacing windows on all five of my home computers with Linux
I’ll leave a couple as a dual boot, but the media server, laptop, primary desktop, and two media/‘console’ PCs (connected to TVs) will be swapped over. hopefully it will be easy to get the same setup on all of them and run reliably.
Just a suggestion but for the two htpcs I’d recommend using bazzite or steamos. Both are stable and hard to break and booting into a console likr interface is great. Use anything else for the rest of your machines. They lock both down a bit too much to be practical every day machines.
Having been daily driving Bazzite for a bit, as long as you’re willing to work with it it’s perfectly fine as a daily driver. Sure I’ve had to pop in to distro box a couple of times to run a specific utility that’s not in the immutable build but that’s just a couple of extra clicks plus I can pick whatever distro userland I want which is convenient for better compatibility with whatever GitHub script I’ve decided to blindly trust this week!
So just put steam on all those computers we’re already refurbishing into linux servers anyway?
Exactly.
Pump the those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
Hey i played on steam from at least 5 PCs last month. Doing my part.