Remember folks, it doesn't matter if the overall Linux percentage drops right now. There's a lot of room for errors, we have tons of games to come, and Linux is still awesome.
Why shouldn't I be worried?
It’s a percentage from a survey, and Steam's overall user base is increasing massively all the time. This means that even with lower percentages, our overall user count is actually higher. To make that clear: Linux is growing all the time, but so is Mac and Windows.
We have no idea how they are sampling their data, and to state this again, it’s a survey. It’s not a hard statistic to be thrown around to claim Linux gaming is dying, it’s really not.
The numbers
Total: 0.88% -0.06%
Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS 64 bit 0.26% -0.02%
Ubuntu 15.04 64 bit 0.14% +0.14%
Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64 bit 0.09% 0.00%
Linux 64 bit 0.05% +0.05%
See the survey results here.
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
There is a good chance that Steam Boxes will out-perform competing consoles in the long run, because open source, with a strong company like Valve to invest in it, has been a winning combination in field after field where performance matters more than marketing.
Example 1: supercomputers
* 1998 was first time Linux computer was ranked #1
* starting with 2004 Linux computers have completely owned #1 rank
* over 90% of the current top 500 computers run Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
Example 2: stock markets
* London stock exchange is built on Linux
* Tokyo stock exchange is built on Linux
* New York stock exchange is built on Linux
Example 3: leading internet companies
Think of the companies handling the most traffic in the world - places like twitter, facebook, google, amazon. They built their empires on a foundation of open source + custom internal code.
Unless something unexpectedly bad happens to Valve, there is no reason they can not turn SteamOS into something very successful like Google has done with android and ChromeOS. It just takes time.
While waiting for that to happen, try not to stress too much over little ups-and-downs in percentages, and how accurate the surveys are.
Example 1: supercomputers
* 1998 was first time Linux computer was ranked #1
* starting with 2004 Linux computers have completely owned #1 rank
* over 90% of the current top 500 computers run Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
Example 2: stock markets
* London stock exchange is built on Linux
* Tokyo stock exchange is built on Linux
* New York stock exchange is built on Linux
Example 3: leading internet companies
Think of the companies handling the most traffic in the world - places like twitter, facebook, google, amazon. They built their empires on a foundation of open source + custom internal code.
Unless something unexpectedly bad happens to Valve, there is no reason they can not turn SteamOS into something very successful like Google has done with android and ChromeOS. It just takes time.
While waiting for that to happen, try not to stress too much over little ups-and-downs in percentages, and how accurate the surveys are.
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Steam has a customer base of at least 100 million, which, multiplied by 0.0088 (0.88%) is still 880,000 Linux users, which (IMHO) is a boatload of people, in fact quite a few boatloads. Let's give thanks for small favors; Steam shows, to my eyes, no reason at all to abandon SteamOS, and, if a game will run on SteamOS, it'll probably run on any other distro.
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