SteamOS falls to lowest adoption level in years

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for May just dropped, and when it comes to operating systems, no surprises here: Windows is still on top. Windows 11 keeps climbing, like we mentioned before, and it's now at 58.3% among Steam gamers. Meanwhile, Windows 10 continues its slide, dropping to 37%.

Beyond the Microsoft giant, we’ve got the smaller players. macOS still makes up a small slice of the total Steam user base, but within that group, Apple Silicon chips (listed as "VirtualApple") completely dominate at 81.69%. MacBook Pros are the go-to choice for many, showing up in 25.52% of all Mac systems.

On the other hand, Steam on Linux is looking pretty healthy overall. It jumped to a cool 2.69% this month, a very nice 0.42% rise from April 2025. To put that into perspective, Linux was sitting at a mere 1.47% back in May 2023.

Here's where things get weird, especially if you are a big Steam Deck fan. Valve's own SteamOS, specifically the "SteamOS Holo" 64-bit version that powers the Deck, has taken a significant nosedive within that growing Linux user base. It is now down to just 30.95% of all Linux systems on Steam. That's a noticeable drop from 33.78% in April 2025, and a massive fall from its peak of 45.34% in May 2024, which was just a year ago.

Valve doesn't let users view past survey data, but thankfully, we have the Wayback Machine to track these things over time. This current figure is shaping up to be the lowest in two years for SteamOS, getting uncomfortably close to the 21.05% it saw back in February 2023.

While SteamOS falters, other distributions are seeing some gains among Linux gamers on Steam. Arch Linux, for example, now accounts for 10.09%, and Linux Mint 22.1 has climbed to 7.76%. It is also worth noting that when it comes to processors, while the general PC segment shows Intel as the lead (59.69% in the main survey), among Linux gamers on Steam, AMD dominates at 68.77%. For more detailed information, you can check out the full survey here.