TECH NEWS – Steam’s monthly hardware surveys do point to a trend, but not one dramatic enough to seriously unsettle Microsoft…

Although Microsoft claims it is actively working to win back user trust, plenty of PC gamers have already written Windows off. That has been helped by the fact that Linux, thanks to specialist distributions like Bazzite, has never been this good for gaming. Earlier Steam survey results, however, suggest that the big migration is still a long way off. A Reddit user named xVarrick compared the results of Steam’s March 2024, March 2025, and March 2026 hardware and software surveys. The resulting bar chart simplifies the data by grouping every operating system version and distribution into broader categories, but it still makes one thing very clear: the overwhelming majority of Steam users are still on Windows. In March 2026, 92.33% of Steam’s user base was using some version of Windows.

OS distribution in Steam from March 2024 to March 2026
byu/xVarrick inlinux_gaming

The overall Windows user base fell by 3.77% between March 2025 and March 2026. That is not exactly a dramatic collapse, while macOS users grew by 0.77%. Linux posted the biggest gain, climbing by 3% to reach a total share of 5.33%. According to SteamDB, Steam’s latest all-time peak concurrent user count was 42,686,616. So while 5.33% may not sound huge, even 5% of Steam’s total concurrent users still works out to roughly 2,134,330 players gaming on some kind of Linux distribution. It is probably no surprise that Steam’s latest survey shows SteamOS Holo 64-bit leading that category.

Windows 11 has been on the market for nearly five years, and for three of those it was never the number one operating system among Steam users. Based on survey data from October 2021 through July 2025, Windows 11 only overtook Windows 10 on Steam in October 2024. Official support for Windows 10 ended last October, unless you pay $30 for extended security updates or live in the European Economic Area, in which case those updates are free. So it is still interesting that 27.03% of Microsoft-affiliated gamers were using Windows 10 in March 2026. That group also showed a steep 14.57% drop compared with the previous month.

It is safe to say that many of those users likely upgraded to Windows 11, since that operating system saw a 13.09% increase. Still, the strict system requirements mean that many users on older Windows 10 machines will either have to figure out how to bypass those checks, with tools like Flyby11 or Rufus, or make the jump to Linux.

Source: PCGamer, SteamDB, Steam