Latest Steam Hardware Survey Shows A Spike In 16 GB System RAM Share; Linux Surpasses 5% Share For The First Time

Unusual activity in Steam hardware surveys, possibly due to the arrest of a user in China for using a VPN.

Steam regularly surveys users' hardware and software environments and publishes the results monthly. The results for March 2026 showed significant changes. Steam Hardware & Software Survey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined The top result of Steam's survey is the OS market share. The number on the far right is the month-on-month change, and it appears that Windows 11 has incr…

Latest Steam Hardware Survey Shows A Spike In 16 GB System RAM Share; Linux Surpasses 5% Share For The First Time

Several things have changed, and there have been some major fluctuations on both the hardware and OS levels. Steam Hardware Survey March 2026 Reveals Linux Suddenly Spiked to Over 5%; 16 GB System RAM is Now More Popular Than 32 GB The Steam Hardware Survey data for March 2026 is out, and there have been major changes in shares on both hardware and OS levels. The last survey showed a huge spike in shares for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs…

Linux Crosses the 5% Threshold on Steam — And This Time, It Might Actually Matter

For years, Linux gaming was a punchline. A hobby for tinkerers, not a platform for serious play. That’s changing — and the numbers finally back it up. Valve’s monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey for June 2025 shows Linux surpassing 5% of all Steam users for the first time. The figure — modest by any conventional measure — represents a psychological milestone for a platform that spent the better part of a decade hovering between 1% and 2%. I…

Linux Continues to Make History, Hitting 5% Usage on Steam

Linux continues its rise on Steam, reaching for the first time a record 5% share in Valve’s March 2026 Hardware and Software Survey.

Steam on Linux Surpasses 5% Market Share in the Latest Survey Update

As we enter a new month, Steam's Hardware and Software Survey data has been processed, providing us with a clearer view of the overall gaming market that uses Steam platform. Today, the most notable change in the Steam Survey is the increase in Linux gamers, who have moved from their historically low single-digit market share to mid-single digits. As of March, Linux-based operating systems were running Steam on 5.33% of all polled systems. This …

Linux use hits an all-time-high on Steam, passing 5% user share

Linux use amongst Steam users had hit an all-time-high, with 5% of Steam users using the OS. Take that Windows!