Valve released its monthly Steam Hardware Survey for July, and the biggest surprise came from the Linux gaming crowd. Apart from showing the usual Nvidia and Intel dominance of GPUs and CPU usage among Steam users, there weren't many new takeaways from the latest report, except that Linux games surged to 1% in July, a first in years.

The fact that it coincided with the release of the Linux-powered Steam Deck certainly cannot be ignored. It looks like gamers will be starting to explore whether the Steam libraries can actually be played on Valve's new handheld gaming PC when it launches in December.

Proton is still impressive as it was Proton's first outing of Windows games back in 2018, a compatibility layer that allows it to run on Linux, a compatibility layer that allows it to run on a native Linux connection. points or struggled to deliver a gaming experience as compelling as playing games on a Windows operating system. We did not find evidence of a 2% increase in ourselves, which could mean that it decreased very quickly.

Steam Deck runs on the Linux-based operating system that became available within a few months as some of them are preparing for the portable game console by controlling this operating system, which may explain the steady increase in the Linux gaming market share.

It is worth noting that SteamOS 3.0, which Deck will be running on, is based on the Arch Linux distribution and has not seen any movement in terms of market share growth. The distribution that seems responsible is Ubuntu 21.04, which saw a 0.06% gain. However, it still makes sense in this context, given that Ubuntu is generally considered the most accessible version of Linux for the folk jumper from Windows.

As Steam Decks begins to fall into the hands of gamers running Steam OS, we expect Linux market share to increase further, especially if the pre-order rush is any indication.