Steam's latest Hardware Survey is out, shows Linux at 0.84%

The latest Steam Hardware Survey is now available and if you take it at face value it doesn't look so good for Linux. I am remaining positive as always about it. I'm not going to give it some sensationalist headline about it being terrible or anything like that, I will simply give you some thoughts on it.

First up, the facts:
Linux is currently at 0.84%, which doesn't sound like a lot and there is a drop over last months 0.90%.

Now, onto some thoughts:
The key thing to remember is Steam overall is always growing, so a lower overall percentage of Linux users doesn't necessarily mean there are less Linux users on Steam (it could actually be more, but dwarfed by also having even more Windows users on Steam). An older article from Cheese states this:

QuoteFirst up, it can be easy to miss that percentages are ratios. When looking at changes over time, an increase or decrease in percentages doesn't necessarily mean that there is a corresponding increase or decrease in the population represented by that percentage.

Before reading this next part, I should remind you this is an editorial. These are my personal thoughts on it and I could be wrong. I accept that, but I think it's interesting anyway.

You can make it appear by simply having different hardware or a different operating system. It seems to detect when you change things, as if it knows it needs to check on you again. This is by design of course, as the entire point of it is to show what people are currently using, so if you've changed something it wants to know about it and send it along. This is one reason why people keep saying they see it when they boot into Windows after not using it for a while, of course you will, that's a change in your setup. This is another reason why I dislike it, as that can create an unintentional bias in the results. This bias isn't against Linux though, as it would work the same the opposite way around of course. This is why I feel the results were actually a lot higher for Linux initially, as it did a survey for a big bunch of Windows/Mac users trying it and submitting it on Linux before moving back to Windows/Mac.

A good bit of reading was a recent editorial titled "A different approach to calculating the popularity of Linux gaming on Steam" which will help put your mind at ease.

I would also like to point out that I personally feel things are still looking good, as I wrote in a recent editorial.

Also remember, we have our own statistics page which is currently in BETA. Would love more feedback on that, seems people like it so far! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.