Steam Linux Share Falls to 3.05% as CachyOS Overtakes SteamOS in September Survey

Valve's September 2026 Steam Hardware & Software Survey puts Linux at 3.05% of surveyed systems, down 0.85 percentage point from August. Windows rises to 95.03%, while macOS falls to 1.92%. The move is large enough to attract attention, but it should not be read as a direct count of Linux gamers leaving Steam.

Valve describes the survey as optional and anonymous. It reports the composition of participating systems rather than an absolute installed-base count, so a monthly percentage can move because the mix of respondents changed as well as because underlying platform use changed.

The same survey shows Simplified Chinese jumping 7.42 percentage points to 31.39% of the sample. Phoronix and GamingOnLinux both note that unusually large increases in Simplified Chinese participation have coincided with lower reported Linux shares in previous Steam survey snapshots.

That correlation does not prove the entire 0.85-point Linux decline is sampling noise, and Valve does not publish enough information here to convert the survey into a precise platform-population estimate. The defensible conclusion is narrower: September's headline share fell sharply, while the simultaneous respondent-mix change makes a one-month trend claim unusually weak.

The more unusual result appears after filtering Valve's survey to Linux systems. CachyOS reaches 18.12% of the Linux sample, up 2.65 percentage points, while SteamOS Holo falls 3.70 points to 17.37%. Arch Linux is third at 10.67%, followed by Linux Mint 22.3 at 8.74% and Bazzite at 6.97%.

These are shares within the surveyed Linux subset, not shares of all Steam systems. Valve's combined-platform table, for example, reports CachyOS at 0.55% and SteamOS Holo at 0.53% of the overall sample. Keeping those denominators separate matters when comparing distro popularity with Steam's total operating-system split.

September therefore produces two useful observations without supporting a dramatic market-share narrative. Linux represents a smaller fraction of Valve's survey than it did in August, and CachyOS has become the largest named Linux distribution in the current sample. Neither result establishes an equivalent change in the absolute number of Linux players.

The next surveys will be more informative than extrapolating from this single month. If the respondent language mix normalizes while Linux remains near 3%, the decline will look more durable; if the share rebounds alongside another composition shift, September will look more like one of Steam's historically volatile survey months.