Steam Deck already hits over 5% of Linux users on Steam

The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for May 2022, and while it sees a tiny drop in the overall Linux user share, we can see the Steam Deck rising up. As usual, our dedicated Steam Tracker has been updated for the latest figures, with a screenshot of the current status below for all to see:

Currently the overall Linux share is 1.12%. Still a pretty clear upwards trend, and drops in a couple months are to be expected as that's just how things go. No doubt it will bounce up again within a couple months. The interesting thing to see now though, is how the Steam Deck will affect it since Valve actually hooked up the survey in a recent Steam Deck update.

When filtering to just Linux, here's the current top:

• "Arch Linux" 64 bit 12.85% +0.53%
•  Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS 64 bit 11.75% -2.53%
•  "Manjaro Linux" 64 bit 11.09% -0.46%
•  Ubuntu 22.04 LTS 64 bit 8.04% +8.04%
•  Linux Mint 20.3 64 bit 5.97% -0.39%
•  "SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 5.23% +5.23%
•  Other 45.07% +6.46%

So it might look like Arch Linux is on top at a quick glance, but not quite, since you need to take into account the various versions of Ubuntu as people tend to stick to LTS releases for years. The real interesting thing to see though is SteamOS Holo, which is the Arch-based Steam Deck operating system already hitting well over 5% of Linux users on Steam. Not only that, the Steam Deck GPU "AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405" is shown as the second most popular already for just Linux systems on Steam.

Using May's 1.12% share, that puts Linux users at around ~1,478,400 estimated "monthly active users" based on the last time Valve gave out their user data. While you could say that to be around ~77,320 Steam Deck users, it doesn't really work like that, since it's usually an additional device but still fun to check.

Source