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.
The big players are driving this trend. Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel, etc are making the old status quo too expensive and obnoxious.
Adoption typically takes an s-shaped or sigmoid curve. A slow start, rapid growth, and then stagnation.
I’m curious whether gamers are going to pull Linux desktop into the mainstream. Discord is a good example. For many years only gamers knew what it was, now most of the users on aren’t using it for gaming, and it has fundamentally changed the platform.
Luckily Linux is an open source system with tons of variety and tailor made environments for specific use cases whereas Discord is a for profit company that shoves unwanted features like Nitro down everyone’s throats for their endless revenue chasing. So if it takes off because of gamers, we’ll see lots of needed features and bugfixes.
I don’t think it can keep going at an exponential pace, but I think we can pass 5% in Q2 maybe Q3, especially with Steam Machine
Steam Machine would have helped, but now I’m pessimistic the price and availability will be decent because of the damn AI mania.
It must level off at some point, if anything for purely mathematical reasons. But the higher it gets before that happens the better.
The big players are driving this trend. Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel, etc are making the old status quo too expensive and obnoxious.
Adoption typically takes an s-shaped or sigmoid curve. A slow start, rapid growth, and then stagnation.
I’m curious whether gamers are going to pull Linux desktop into the mainstream. Discord is a good example. For many years only gamers knew what it was, now most of the users on aren’t using it for gaming, and it has fundamentally changed the platform.
Luckily Linux is an open source system with tons of variety and tailor made environments for specific use cases whereas Discord is a for profit company that shoves unwanted features like Nitro down everyone’s throats for their endless revenue chasing. So if it takes off because of gamers, we’ll see lots of needed features and bugfixes.
Wrong, we’re gonna blow right past the 100% marker and keep it going!! WOOOOO
🚀 800% here we goooo
To infinity and beyond!