Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey

By Liam Dawe - 2 November 2024 at 9:35 am UTC

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%

See more on the Steam survey.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Misc, Steam, Survey, Survey Results, Valve

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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25 comments

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Geppeto35 Nov 4

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Quoting: Naibvery nice... but :( starting to get enough points to fit to a sigmoid... if that inflection point is correct, are we looking at like 3% as the settling point
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Nice, you are at the "logistic" stage. What's next?

Last edited by Geppeto35 on 4 November 2024 at 8:29 am UTC

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sarmad Nov 4

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Quoting: _wojtekI 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.

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Naib Nov 4

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Quoting: Geppeto35Nice, 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...

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Purple Library Guy Nov 5

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Quoting: Naib
Quoting: Geppeto35Nice, 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.

Nonsense. I believe we can reach 150%, 200%, even 300% . . . just like the amount of effort sports people can give!

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_wojtek Nov 8

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Quoting: sarmad
Quoting: _wojtekI 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?

Quoting: CatKiller
Quoting: _wojtekI 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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