Linux user share on Steam continues the slow climb, SteamOS rises

Steam Deck raw numbers has doubled during the last month, very impressive

Interestingly, if you filter to Windows, the Steam Deck GPU doesn't even show up

An other way to look it is
total deck users: ~0.17%
linux deck users: ~1.27*0.1372 = 0.174%

So we can't actually measure windows deck users (total-linux) but this is a good thing, it means windows deck users are too few.

Steam Deck raw numbers has doubled during the last month, very impressive

hard to feel special these days. :D

I really hope they continue to ramp up. Amazing times ahead.

Oh wow, they now show flatpak runtime users too? :D

Oh wow, they now show flatpak runtime users too? :D

They did for a while, just flatpak doesn't always make it to the top few.

I think Ubuntu should be combined as so "Ubuntu 22.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS" on the list.

It shows that Ubuntu is still the most popular one LTS's combined. I mean Ubuntu is Ubuntu. The combined share for Ubuntu is 15,26 %.

I would like to make a suggestion for the steam traker. I think the regression does not make sense anymore since the paradigm has changed. I would like to see another regression and another line starting with the release of the steam deck

I'm not surprised that the Steam Deck is taking over. I didn't play anything on the desktop computer till I got mine. :-D

One day we no longer have to indicate the 64 bit....

Just looked at the full stats and windows lost .8% while OSX upped .76. We got .04...

Kind of crazy that OSX gaming is still growing faster then us, while Apple is doing more harm then good to gaming on their platform.

This looks a bit strange. If you look the combined stats, then Arch Linux is the most used and SteamOS is nowhere to be seen. When you check Linux only then SteamOS is taking the first spot.
I wonder why is that?

Just looked at the full stats and windows lost .8% while OSX upped .76. We got .04...

Kind of crazy that OSX gaming is still growing faster then us, while Apple is doing more harm then good to gaming on their platform.

Looking at the change of just one month is pointless, Valve's data is too inaccurate for that. Case in point: there was an uncommon spike in Russian language users last month and most of the Linux gain this month comes from the reverse of that spike, Linux only gained 0.01% points for English language users. MacOS lost about half of their user base in the last two years, so this is hardly a trend.

Interesting. Is their any site to watch these trends? Don't feel like manually doing that :D

In my steam account, the delivery month changes to September.

I can not wait to see him

I don't think I've gotten the survey on my Steam Deck yet, but I have gotten it on my PC, where I'm using the Flatpak runtime.

And speaking of the Flatpak runtime, the freedesktop SDK recently updated to 22.08 so the Steam Flatpak now has access to Mesa 22.

I also wanted to ask for a piece-wise linear fitting, where the slope is changed since steam deck. It's clealy changed the speed of adoption.

And it doesn't count the Steam Deck users that don't really use the desktop client (like I do)... These won't get the survey because Gamemode/Gamescope doesn't trigger it, from what I read. So, the Steam Deck market share is probably higher than that.

Edit: Thinking about it, if you are on Windows and use Steam BPM... You won't get the survey either. The results are probably wrong from the start, on both sides of the fence.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 2 September 2022 at 2:27 pm UTC

Considering SteamOS 3.0 is a relatively new and young 'distro', to already be shooting up the charts like this is very impressive. From what I've seen, gamers love it, both existing and brand new Linux users, it's convincing many of them that Linux is ready to go on their desktops.

When Valve is ready to release SteamOS 3.0 as a regular distro OS, it's going to be a very popular option I believe and we'll probably see quite a few people put it on their laptops or desktops. But I imagine Valve is probably waiting for a number of reasons. Hardware support might be one of them. They could be working with some third parties on that.

If Valve keeps at it, SteamOS could have a very long and successful future.

These won't get the survey because Gamemode/Gamescope doesn't trigger it, from what I read.

You can still receive survey on game mode.

Okay, well this puts my mind at ease, then! :-)

In comments on previous articles, I had speculated worriedly that the number of Windows installs seemed to have been dramatically more numerous than I had hoped going in, fearing, of course, that the more Windows installs we had on Steam Deck (even in dual-boot situations), the more undercut and muted the potential impact that the Steam Deck would have on propelling the Linux gaming scene could have.

I am quite happy to know that those fears seem to be quite well unfounded thus far, and that it is truly a very, very small number of people putting Windows on their devices. Others had speculated that the idea that it was more runaway was simply the "loud minority on social media" effect at play - and that theory seems to have been borne out!

I stand happily corrected! :-)

Cheers!🍻

I think Ubuntu should be combined as so "Ubuntu 22.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS" on the list.

It shows that Ubuntu is still the most popular one LTS's combined. I mean Ubuntu is Ubuntu. The combined share for Ubuntu is 15,26 %.

The survey just looks at the LSB name, so that part's not going to change. The interpretation is a different matter, of course. Ubuntu is the most popular distro for Linux Steam users, just as it was last month when people thought that Arch was on top; the split numbers are just an artifact of Ubuntu's release schedule. However, at the rate that Steam Decks have been shipping - and so SteamOS usage has been growing - it seems likely that SteamOS will genuinely be the most-used Linux distro on Steam next month or maybe the month after.