The Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out for October 2024, and the Linux user share has gone back up again to exactly 2%.
Overall:
- Windows: 96.61% -0.23%
- Linux 2.00% +0.13%
- macOS: 1.39% +0.10%
Quite likely we're seeing the drop of Windows because the English language share overall went up by 8.09%, with Simplified Chinese dropping by 1%. We generally see the Linux share drop when Simplified Chinese on Steam rises, which it had done for two months in a row. So this seems like things going back to a more normal position.
All of the data can be seen on our dedicated Steam Tracker.
On the Linux side here's the most used distributions:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit (Steam Deck) 36.79% -2.41%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 9.54% +0.88%
- Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.16% +0.13%
- Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS 64 bit 5.10% +1.07%
- Linux Mint 22 64 bit 3.96% +0.23%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 3.33% +0.29%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit (Steam Snap) 3.06% -0.24%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.92% +2.92%
- Linux Mint 21.3 64 bit 2.89% +0.17%
- Other 27.43% -1.84%
Update: 2/12/2024 - Valve seemed to have adjusted the numbers after publishing, going by the Internet Archive here's what they put later:
- SteamOS Holo 64 bit 36.91% -2.29%
- Arch Linux 64 bit 8.86% +0.20%
- Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.29% +0.26%
- Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS 64 bit 4.80% +0.77%
- Linux Mint 22 64 bit 4.24% +0.51%
- Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 3.78% +0.48%
- Manjaro Linux 64 bit 3.03% -0.01%
- Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 2.73% +2.73%
- Linux Mint 21.3 64 bit 2.56% -0.16%
- Other 26.80% -2.47%
See more on the Steam survey.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?
No, because of regulations. You can't just collect a bunch of info about a user's machine and send it over without consent. The survey is not just about knowing which OS people game on. The survey is targetted at game developers, and devs want to know more than just what OS the user is running; they need to know OS, CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, controller, keyboard, language, screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, etc.
3 Likes, Who?
Nice, you are at the "logistic" stage. What's next?Well thats the "fun part"... keep watching... The profile can only ever be sigmoid since it will plateaux. Hopefully the noise is masking where the true inflection point is...
0 Likes
Nonsense. I believe we can reach 150%, 200%, even 300% . . . just like the amount of effort sports people can give!Nice, you are at the "logistic" stage. What's next?Well thats the "fun part"... keep watching... The profile can only ever be sigmoid since it will plateaux.
1 Likes, Who?
I wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?
No, because of regulations. You can't just collect a bunch of info about a user's machine and send it over without consent. The survey is not just about knowing which OS people game on. The survey is targetted at game developers, and devs want to know more than just what OS the user is running; they need to know OS, CPU, GPU, RAM, VRAM, controller, keyboard, language, screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, etc.
Erm... could you cite exact regulation that forbids that?
I wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?
They're collecting information about their users and publishing it for any third party that wants to use it for any reason. Whether or not permission is strictly legally required for that, it's better to err on the side of getting the permission than not.
They likely also have very detailed moment-to-moment internal data about exactly who's using their network & services, but they aren't sharing that.
And this contradicts what @sarmad said. So if it's regulation they couldn't/shouldn't collect any data (GDPR and whatnot). If they do collect it then they could share statistics...
IMHO GDPR would not apply in this instance as those are not PII. What's more, anonymized stats wouldn't violate that either.
There could also be, quite popular, toggle "allow telemetry" and they could share data in the form: "those are the (detailed) stats from the people with enabled telemetry and this population is x percent of the thotal user base"
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