Linux Gaming Crosses 5% on the Steam Hardware Survey

For the first time since Valve started publishing the Steam Hardware Survey, Linux now accounts for over 5% of all active Steam machines.

The April 2026 update put the Linux share at 5.16%, up from 3.4% a year ago. Steam Deck devices contribute roughly half of that figure, but desktop Linux installs grew at a faster rate than the Deck did over the past 12 months — a quiet shift the headline numbers obscure.

The driver story is partly Proton, which now runs over 95% of the Steam top 1000 without per-game tweaks. The other half is anti-cheat. Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye both rolled out updated Linux compatibility passes in Q1, and the gap on supported titles is genuinely shrinking.

For developers, the 5% threshold matters because it crosses the threshold where major engines and middleware vendors start treating Linux as a tier-one platform internally. Unreal’s 5.5 Linux toolchain notes from earlier this month already reflect that reality.