Steam On Linux Use Back Above 4% In July

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https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-July-2026

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“SteamOS Holo 64 bit” is down by -0.04%, so our growth this month isn’t coming from the Steam Machine. I guess they haven’t shipped many of them.

Our gains are mostly from Fedora, Ubuntu, and CachyOS. A small amount of growth from Bazzite and Mint. A tiny growth for Debian.

EDIT: They updated the page, SteamOS did have growth, just as much as CachyOS.

Also interesting that Linux gained in a month where Chinese gained, usually that hurts Linux’s numbers by a lot.

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I guess they haven’t shipped many of them.

It’s too early for those to really show up, I think.

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so our growth this month isn’t coming from the Steam Machine

I would guess it’s a lot of people finding out the price of the Steam Machine ($1049 with no controller is a lot!) and deciding instead to run Linux on a PC instead (either on an older/used machine or with new hardware that is cheaper + more performant than the Gabecube if you build it yourself)

Also interesting that Linux gained in a month where Chinese gained

Either that Linux gain was relatively high today, or perhaps more Chinese users are switching over to some form of Linux? I know Huawei can no longer sell laptops with Windows and are moving to HarmonyOS (which is based on its own thing apparently), but maybe some of the enterprise machines are using Linux, where they want to avoid rewriting preexisting software? Combination of both?

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Actually Simplified Chinese among Linux users went down from 1.47% to 1.38%

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

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I would guess it’s a lot of people finding out the price of the Steam Machine ($1049 with no controller is a lot!) and deciding instead to run Linux on a PC instead

If this were the case, then they’d be zipping through the waitlist. I’ve been waitlisted since release (with the small hope that prices come down by the time it’s my turn, otherwise I’ll most likely give up my spot lol) and I’ve seen no emails about it since then.

They have been selling them, but they are also struggling to get RAM allocation. My guess is that they are being held back by RAM (and possibly storage to a lesser extent) and aren’t able to make them fast enough to satisfy the current demand.

Many tech influencers have been advocating Linux due to how bad Windows is and how great Linux is at this point. I’d expect most growth to be coming from there.

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