Linux runs on 3.95% of the PCs that answered the October edition of Valve's Steam Hardware & Software Survey, up 0.90 percentage points from 3.05% in September. That is still well short of the 5.33% record the survey showed in March 2026. Windows fell to 93.70%, macOS rose to 2.35%, and the GeForce RTX 3060 is once again the most common graphics card, in 3.62% of systems.
Linux isn't a single operating system but a family of versions, called distributions, each put together by a different project. CachyOS is the most common, on 0.65% of all surveyed systems, followed by SteamOS Holo, the operating system on Valve's Steam Deck handheld, at 0.55%. Arch Linux and Linux Mint come next, along with a new entry labeled "SteamOS 64 bit" at 0.32%. Valve's page doesn't say what that new line covers.
Why the numbers jump from month to month
Each month, Steam invites randomly selected users to take the survey. Taking part is optional and anonymous, as Valve explained when it expanded the survey in 2010. The company doesn't publish how many people respond or whether it weights results by country, so when the mix of respondents changes, every table can move with it.
September looks like one of those months. Users running Steam in Simplified Chinese made up 31.39% of the sample, a share that dropped to 21.98% in October. The RTX 5070 and 32GB of RAM took first place in September and slipped back to roughly their August levels in October, while Linux climbed back up from the 3.05% it had fallen to. Valve doesn't connect these shifts, but the overlap is a good reason to look at several months before calling anything a trend.
One in five surveyed PCs still runs Windows 10
Windows 11 gained 1.17 points to reach 72.51% of all respondents, while Windows 10 lost 2.50 points and now sits at 21.11%. Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, and in November Nvidia stops releasing Game Ready drivers for it. A driver is the software that lets Windows use the graphics card, and Game Ready releases add tuning for games that have just launched. Anyone still on Windows 10 with an Nvidia card will need Windows 11 to keep getting that tuning.
The RTX 3060 is back on top
The graphics card is the part that draws a game's images, and the RTX 3060 is a midrange model Nvidia released in 2021. It's back in first place because the RTX 5070, which led September with 5.86%, dropped to second at 3.56%. The laptop RTX 4060 (3.40%) and the desktop RTX 4060 (3.32%) round out the top four.
Video memory, or VRAM, sits on the graphics card itself and keeps textures and other game data close at hand. The most common amount is 8GB, in 26.92% of systems, with 16GB close behind at 26.35%. Eight gigabytes covers the basics at 1080p, or 1920 × 1080 pixels, which is still the main display resolution on half of all surveyed systems (50.23%). Higher resolutions and heavy texture packs call for more, as our guide to how much VRAM you need for gaming explains.
System RAM is the computer's general working memory, where the operating system and games hold whatever they're using at the moment. Here, 16GB is again the most common amount at 41.42%, ahead of 32GB at 37.06%. In September, 32GB had briefly moved into first place with 42.22%.
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