Five percent sounds small until you remember that Linux has spent most of its gaming life stuck below 2%. The March Steam Hardware Survey just changed that conversation.
According to the latest figures from Valve, Linux jumped from 2.13% in February to 5.33% in March. That puts it comfortably ahead of macOS, which sits at 2.35%, though Windows still commands the vast majority at 92.33% across all versions.
What's actually driving the Linux surge
Here's the thing: SteamOS 3, the operating system powering the Steam Deck, is built on Arch Linux. That likely explains why Arch Linux tops the Linux breakdown at 0.34%, with Linux Mint 22.3 close behind at 0.27%. As Steam Deck adoption has grown and more players run SteamOS on custom hardware builds, those installs are showing up in the survey numbers.
The broader context matters too. Windows 10 dropped sharply in the March data, falling by roughly 15%, while Windows 11 climbed by over 10%. Players are moving, and not all of them are landing on Microsoft's latest. The frustration with Windows quality, between forced updates, Copilot integration, and the looming end-of-support deadline for Windows 10, has pushed a meaningful slice of the Steam playerbase toward Linux as a genuine daily driver.
Microsoft appears to have noticed. Recent messaging from the company has focused on fixing core Windows functionality rather than adding features, including reported work on removing the mandatory online account requirement for new Windows 11 installs.
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Steam Hardware Survey results come with Valve's own caveats about accuracy. The Linux figure likely reflects a real upward trend, but the exact percentage should be treated as directional rather than precise.
The RTX 5070's February anomaly, explained
The GPU side of the March survey is equally telling, just in the opposite direction. Back in February, the Nvidia RTX 5070 made a suspicious leap from 2.87% of Steam gamers in January all the way to 9.42%, briefly making it the most popular GPU on the platform. That number raised eyebrows immediately given the card had only launched in February and supply was limited.
March's data confirms what most observers suspected: it was a data anomaly. The RTX 5070 has reverted to exactly 2.87%, placing it 5th overall. You can check the full RTX 5070 specs and release context to understand just how unlikely a 9.42% install base would have been for a brand-new card at launch pricing.
With the 5070 back in its lane, the Nvidia RTX 3060 reclaims its expected top spot, though it dipped slightly from 4.6% in February to 4.1% in March.
AMD's RDNA 4 is barely registering
The survey also offers a sobering look at AMD's newest hardware. The RX 9070 just scraped into the top 100 at 99th place. The RX 9060 doesn't appear at all. Even accounting for AMD Radeon cards being grouped under the generic "AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics" label, that combined entry only amounts to 2.4% of gamers, sitting at number nine in the rankings.
For a generation of cards that launched with genuine competitive ambitions against Nvidia's 50-series, the survey numbers suggest RDNA 4 adoption is moving slowly. Whether that reflects pricing, availability, or simply the inertia of a playerbase that upgraded during the GPU shortage years is harder to say from survey data alone.
The key here is that Steam Hardware Survey snapshots are imperfect instruments. Valve has acknowledged data accuracy issues before, including a past incident where VRAM figures for certain GPUs were reported incorrectly. But directional trends, Linux growing, Windows 10 shrinking, and AMD struggling to gain ground against entrenched Nvidia cards, tend to hold up across multiple months of data.
For players considering a switch away from Windows, the Linux momentum is real and the Steam Deck's Proton compatibility layer has done more for Linux gaming than anything in the past decade. The March numbers are the clearest signal yet that the migration is accelerating. Keep an eye on the April survey to see whether the Linux figure holds above 5% or retreats toward its February baseline. Make sure to check out more:
