Summary
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Linux on Steam reaches 5.33% in March 2026, indicating growing momentum for gaming on Linux.
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Linux’s share has almost doubled since December 2025, going from ~3% to 5.33% in three months.
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SteamOS, Arch, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu variants are the best options for Linux gaming; some distribution entries show strange ’64-bit’ labels.
Near the beginning of 2026, we begin to see signs that This year may be the year of games on Linux. Of course, the eternal search to find the year of the Linux period It may not come to an end this year (or five), but I’m pretty sure that at the very least, gamers will find the FOSS distros worth a try.
Well, it looks like Linux momentum is finally gaining traction. The distro has just reached a new market share record on Steam by reaching 5.33%, leaving macOS far behind in the distance.
Linux Steam market share exceeds 5% for the first time
Things are looking up for the FOSS world
How he saw it LinuxiacValve has released its statistics for March 2026. If you don’t know, the PC gaming giant collects data on what hardware and software people use on their gaming computers. It’s a good way for developers to see what people use to play and develop games that can take advantage of it.
For Linux gaming enthusiasts, however, the monthly report performs a second task: telling us how many players on Steam use an open source distribution. In December 2025, we were celebrating because Linux’s collective market share surpassed 3% for the first time. We are now breaking out the poppers for the second time because statistics from March 2026 show that Linux almost doubled its market share from December in the space of three months, with a share of 5.33%.
It’s worth noting that this is more than double the macOS ratio, which is 2.35%. And although Windows remains the dominant operating system in the gaming world, in March 2026 Microsoft’s operating system suffered a sharp decline, losing 4.28 percentage points during the month.
So what distros were people using to game on Linux? Well, we can open the Linux category and see what everyone was going on in the Linux Steam Statistics Pagebut there is a small problem. It looks like this month’s table is a little broken, because the third most used distribution category is called “0 64-bit” and the sixth is simply called “64-bit.” While we can’t say for sure what people are using with those potentially data-ruining quirks, we can at least see that SteamOS, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu are solid options for Steam players.
