Linux user share on Steam breaks 2% thanks to Steam Deck

Good news! I'm still wondering what's up with the increasingly strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 June 2024 at 6:04 pm UTC

Good news! I'm still wondering what's up with the increasingly strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Speculating here, but it could be because of some governments moving away from using Windows for their administration. These Linux PCs would be seen on on web, but not on Steam.

It's interesting to see the superposition of the slow growth of the Linux Desktop marketshare (1% at Steam Deck release, now 1.2 -1.3%) and the more rapid growth of steam deck (roughly half of Linux marketshare on steam).

the biggest console sold arround 157~160 millions of units, we have something like 1.8 billions of desktop pcs, so even in the best case scenario (if steamdeck sold as much as ps2 wich was the most sold console ever) we would be seeing 10% of marketshare at the best case scenario.

that is... if we ignore other factors like people who play both on their pc and their decks, but keep windows on their pcs (so they count for both sides) or people who heard about linux thanks to the deck and decided to try on their pc.

Good news! I'm still wondering what's up with the increasingly strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Do you wonder about the difference between Mac's 14.9% on browser stats and 1.5% on Steam stats? It's the same thing.

Good news! I'm still wondering what's up with the increasingly strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Do you wonder about the difference between Mac's 14.9% on browser stats and 1.5% on Steam stats? It's the same thing.

Yeah, I think it's this exactly. People have just been conditioned to use Windows or a console for gaming. If you do play games on Linux or Mac, you are conditioned to play games from a select group of games. At least up until recently with Proton and Linux.

strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Mostly it is that Steam is also growing (and this is in places with small linux usage). You have to grow as fast just to stand still in relative terms. One way to see linux growth somehow clean (not completely of course but this is at least much better) of that effect is looking the English only percentages. Gaming on linux actually does that! Go to Sections->Steam Tracker and the last diagram is this. Linux has reached 5.29% in English.


Last edited by lucinos on 3 June 2024 at 8:51 am UTC

Good news! I'm still wondering what's up with the increasingly strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Do you wonder about the difference between Mac's 14.9% on browser stats and 1.5% on Steam stats? It's the same thing.

Yes and no. The difference, sure, at any particular snapshot in time. But that's not what I was wondering about. Linux's 4% on the web was 2% not so long ago--the Linux desktop web share has apparently doubled, while its Steam share has inched upwards, I dunno, maybe 10%. This during a time when using the Linux desktop to game has rapidly gotten more workable, so if anything I would have expected the ratio to shrink, not grow. Still seems odd to me.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 3 June 2024 at 9:22 am UTC

strong difference between the apparent growth speed of desktop Linux on the web (as noted here ), and the relatively slow growth of desktop Linux on Steam.

Mostly it is that Steam is also growing (and this is in places with small linux usage). You have to grow as fast just to stand still in relative terms. One way to see linux growth somehow clean (not completely of course but this is at least much better) of that effect is looking the English only percentages. Gaming on linux actually does that! Go to Sections->Steam Tracker and the last diagram is this. Linux has reached 5.29% in English.

No, that's a misunderstanding. Steam is growing, yes. Absent any other factors, that growth would not change the percentages. If the general population of computer users that join Steam, causing it to grow, include the same percentages of different OS users that they did in the past, the joiners would join in the same percentages, leaving the percentage of Steam users with various OSes unchanged.

The English percentage should also be irrelevant, since the web use stats giving 4% are drawn from a big worldwide sample of websites.

It’s still sooo small ! And mainly because of a "not really Linux PC" device. But alright, it’s better than previous 1%, and less than the next step.

Yes and no. The difference, sure, at any particular snapshot in time. But that's not what I was wondering about. Linux's 4% on the web was 2% not so long ago--the Linux desktop web share has apparently doubled, while its Steam share has inched upwards, I dunno, maybe 10%. This during a time when using the Linux desktop to game has rapidly gotten more workable, so if anything I would have expected the ratio to shrink, not grow. Still seems odd to me.

Since September 2018 (the start of the GOL data) Linux in the web browser has grown from 1.68% to 3.77%, while Linux on Steam has grown from 0.78% to 2.32%. There just hasn't been the meteoric rise that you're imagining. Linux usage on the desktop has just had slow, steady, boring growth whichever way you measure. With slightly faster growth for gaming specifically once a high-profile company releases a high-profile gaming device with Linux pre-installed.

It's all nice and good but far from the tipping point.

Does anyone have some kind of research/analisys that tries to identify the % at which point the "network effect" will trigger?

It's all nice and good but far from the tipping point.

Does anyone have some kind of research/analisys that tries to identify the % at which point the "network effect" will trigger?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230204153910if_/https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2202/1446-9022.1256/html
This paper answers your question for a simplified model, but it's complex enough that I can't do the math.

Yes and no. The difference, sure, at any particular snapshot in time. But that's not what I was wondering about. Linux's 4% on the web was 2% not so long ago--the Linux desktop web share has apparently doubled, while its Steam share has inched upwards, I dunno, maybe 10%. This during a time when using the Linux desktop to game has rapidly gotten more workable, so if anything I would have expected the ratio to shrink, not grow. Still seems odd to me.

Since September 2018 (the start of the GOL data) Linux in the web browser has grown from 1.68% to 3.77%, while Linux on Steam has grown from 0.78% to 2.32%.

Yesyes, but most of the Linux on Steam growth has been on the Deck, which is probably not used to browse the web very much. Desktop Linux growth on Steam has been much lower, although I'd forgotten we were ever quite as low as 0.78%.

Let's see, desktop Linux, based on the "SteamOS" distro being at 45% of the total, would now be at 1.25%. Well, that's not as out of line as I was thinking; let's see, 1.25/0.78 = Desktop Linux on Steam has grown to 1.6 times its 2018 level, while the "on the web" share has grown to 2.25 times its 2018 level. It's not an exact match, but that's not really a surprise; I was thinking in terms of the web share more than doubling while desktop on Steam went from around 1 to around 1.2, so this is not nearly as big a discrepancy. I mostly withdraw my point. I still would have figured that the rise of Proton would have seen growth in Linux used for gaming happen faster than growth in Linux used for other things, not slower.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 4 June 2024 at 2:48 pm UTC

Here's hoping for 50% in 2025!

Seriously though, the tomfoolery that Windows 11 gets up to may just force a bunch of folks to say "Screw it!".

I mean, they're having to jump through more hoops to get older programs working than I had to with WINE on Maverick Meerkat circa 2010! (If you're wondering, Civ4 was the first game I ever installed via WINE; it was relatively painless, even back then.)

Including using WINE's own libraries compiled for Win32/Wow64! I ran afoul of this very thing when I had to replace my sister's dead laptop hybrid HDD and decided to upgrade it to something reasonably modern from Windows 8.1. (She's decidedly anti-Linux.)

I haven't even used Windows since 7 in 2016. Nice to know I have absolutely nothing to regret about that.

It's all nice and good but far from the tipping point.

Does anyone have some kind of research/analisys that tries to identify the % at which point the "network effect" will trigger?

So it's not a scientific analysis, but we were chatting about it on the Discord this morning.

and we got to

Thinking about the dynamics of that bump in the Steam Machines era, Mac was ~3.5% and Liam says Linux was briefly ~2% because of the Tux giveaway, so let's say ~5% combined. Avoiding single-platform traps and having an OpenGL render path got you both, essentially (with it actually being harder then than now), and Steam Machines meant that multiplatform was The Future.
Mac no longer uses the same rendering API as Linux, and its gaming market share has collapsed, so we'd need to be able to do it solo for Linux/Vulkan. So ~5% with publicly-known scope for big future growth seems like it might capture that similar ~40% motivation.
If Sony and/or Nintendo also embraced the use of Vulkan, that would increase the size of the target relative to the work done.

I am about to try POP OS
But when STEAM HOLO will be available for regular PC's?

I am about to try POP OS
But when STEAM HOLO will be available for regular PC's?

Don't wait for it.

Well with Recall im sure that will increase quickly. Its interesting that devs still make mac ports before linux native ports though and says they make more money on mac when there are more gamers on linux.

To Mac users it makes sense to spend 10$ on an emulator and 200$ on a set of headphones and they let apple manage their system settings.

`Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit` is probably the snap version of Steam - is the the default packaging on Ubuntu 24.04?
Ah, Ubuntu changed the default package type found in software centre to be snap, and Steam snap is out of beta.

A bit late on this, but it is indeed the Snap package confirmed by Canonical.

Thats clearly in the emergence stage of a sigmoid...
is the RAW data somewhere... I use to keep up but forgot...