“About linux distros: what are the most used in 2026 for users on their laptops/workstation, what share and why ? What's the trends (which is is gaining shares etc)?”
There is no census of desktop Linux, so this report keeps two lenses apart: the Stack Overflow 2025 survey of 49,000+ developers in 177 countries (shares of all respondents, multiple answers allowed — columns do not sum to 100%), and Valve's July 2026 Steam hardware survey of opt-in Linux gaming systems. 27 rows in all, shares in percent.
Left: developer workstations (share of all surveyed developers, 2025, with 2024→2025 change). Right: Linux systems on Steam (share of Linux Steam systems, July 2026, with month-on-month change). The two scales measure different populations — never add or compare across panels. Hover a bar for reasons and exact change.
Linux share of all Steam systems, September 2025 to July 2026. The March spike and April fallback show how volatile the opt-in survey is.
Stack Overflow 2025 counts usage among developers who answered; multiple operating systems could be selected, so shares are of all respondents and do not sum to 100%. They are not distro shares among Linux-only users, and non-developer laptops are unrepresented.
Valve's hardware survey is opt-in and covers gaming systems only. Monthly moves are noisy; the Ubuntu and Fedora Steam figures aggregate several listed versions. Neither lens is a universal market-share census — no such dataset exists.
| Lens | Period | Distribution | Share % | Change pt | Source |
|---|
Data: 27 rows collected 2026 from secondary write-ups of the Stack Overflow 2025 developer survey (49,000+ developers, 177 countries; multiple answers allowed) and Valve's Steam hardware survey (Linux systems, July 2026, plus the overall Linux time series Sep 2025–Jul 2026). share_pct is the plotted value; change is 2024→2025 in points for developer rows and month-on-month for Steam distro rows; blanks mean not comparable, not zero. Smaller Steam distros below Pop!_OS were not itemised in the source.