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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gradyvuckovic 2 Nov 2024
Fantastic.
Looking at the trend over time, it's clearly maintaining steady growth, so we're heading in the right direction, given enough time we might even see 3%.
Looking at the trend over time, it's clearly maintaining steady growth, so we're heading in the right direction, given enough time we might even see 3%.
8 Likes, Who?
3Clearly you're forgetting Valves threephobia...
Well, I wouldn't complain if we went straight to 4%
21 Likes, Who?
I wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?
3 Likes, Who?
I wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?
Yes, and I'm sure they do. Valve can track the number of hours you put into a game per platform. When you make a review about a particular game, if more than 50% of that time was played on a Steam Deck, Valve will tag your review to reflect that. Valve's telemetry is definitely detailed enough to tell us how many hours each day are spent on Linux. Right, Valve collects telemetry accounting for the number of hours played per game each week on the Steam Deck. Then Valve gives us a stats page for the most played games on the Steam Deck per week.
6 Likes, Who?
I wonder... couldn't Valve just collect the stats without the "survey prompt" to get saner results?
And I only received that prompt a couple months ago, despite being on Linux since last March.
1 Likes, Who?
Mountain Man 2 Nov 2024
It's the Summer of Lin-- no, wait, it's the Winter of Linux, baby!
4 Likes, Who?
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.
4 Likes, Who?
We got SteamOS 3 so I believe Valve is cured ;D3Clearly you're forgetting Valves threephobia...
8 Likes, Who?
Also very interesting that the "Language(Linux)" information seems to be wrong, with English sitting at 97.44% and Russian, German, Simplified Chinese all at >4% alone we have more than >100% of languages used on Linux.
I wonder if that is just an error on Valves side or maybe Valve is now counting all enabled languages for Linux systems (in that case values above 100% would obviously make sense).
!Steam Languages(Linux) adding up to >100% with English ~97% and Russian(~4%), German(4%), etc
Last edited by Lamdarer on 2 Nov 2024 at 3:05 pm UTC
I wonder if that is just an error on Valves side or maybe Valve is now counting all enabled languages for Linux systems (in that case values above 100% would obviously make sense).
!Steam Languages(Linux) adding up to >100% with English ~97% and Russian(~4%), German(4%), etc
Last edited by Lamdarer on 2 Nov 2024 at 3:05 pm UTC
3 Likes, Who?
Mountain Man 2 Nov 2024
Also very interesting that the "Language(Linux)" information seems to be wrong, with English sitting at 97.44% and Russian, German, Simplified Chinese all at >4% alone we have more than >100% of languages used on Linux.Does it count people who use more than one language when playing games?
I wonder if that is just an error on Valves side or maybe Valve is now counting all enabled languages for Linux systems (in that case values above 100% would obviously make sense).
!Steam Languages(Linux) adding up to >100% with English ~97% and Russian(~4%), German(4%), etc
0 Likes
A strange motable thing this month is:
"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 36.79% -2.41%
AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405 35.72% +9.76%
AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH) 19.40% +6.01%
Custom 0405 is the SD LCD and the other is SD OLED. So SD is actually at 55.12%. Now for the first time more than half of linux users. Not the 36.79% that Holo suggests.
It is not easy to guess why. The difference is too big to be hidden into other.
Actually something is very wrong with the GPUs. They add up to more than 100%.
Last edited by lucinos on 2 Nov 2024 at 4:08 pm UTC
"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 36.79% -2.41%
AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405 35.72% +9.76%
AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH) 19.40% +6.01%
Custom 0405 is the SD LCD and the other is SD OLED. So SD is actually at 55.12%. Now for the first time more than half of linux users. Not the 36.79% that Holo suggests.
It is not easy to guess why. The difference is too big to be hidden into other.
Actually something is very wrong with the GPUs. They add up to more than 100%.
Last edited by lucinos on 2 Nov 2024 at 4:08 pm UTC
2 Likes, Who?
A strange motable thing this month is:Argh. I don't expect statistics based on sampling to be a perfect representation of the territory, but it would be nice if they were internally consistent, like they at least represented a possible version of the territory.
"SteamOS Holo" 64 bit 36.79% -2.41%
AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405 35.72% +9.76%
AMD Radeon Graphics (RADV VANGOGH) 19.40% +6.01%
Custom 0405 is the SD LCD and the other is SD OLED. So SD is actually at 55.12%. Now for the first time more than half of linux users. Not the 36.79% that Holo suggests.
It is not easy to guess why. The difference is too big to be hidden into other.
Actually something is very wrong with the GPUs. They add up to more than 100%.
2 Likes, Who?
Actually something is very wrong with the GPUs. They add up to more than 100%.They've also all grown this month rather than some growing and some shrinking. Very peculiar.
2 Likes, Who?
Cyba.Cowboy 3 Nov 2024
And I only received that prompt a couple months ago, despite being on Linux since last March.
It's really sporadic how often it pops up, and is not reflective of Real World usage... I've been gaming under Linux-based operating systems for close to 20 years, and I could (quite literally!) count on one hand the amount of times I've seen the survey - what's worse is that most of the times I have seen the survey has been on a "fresh" system or after installing Steam for the first time!
4 Likes, Who?
I was shocked a few days ago when I got the survey for my Linux desktop and deck on the same day. I've only ever had one survey for my launch day deck and I have not gotten a single survey for my Linux desktop in 4-5 years (even after several reinstalls and hardware upgrades).
1 Likes, Who?
You're both forgetting hardware with dual graphics.Actually something is very wrong with the GPUs. They add up to more than 100%.Argh. I don't expect statistics based on sampling to be a perfect representation of the territory, but it would be nice if they were internally consistent, like they at least represented a possible version of the territory.
The percentages in that graphics mean "10% of sampled machines have this GPU model" which is related but not exactly the same as saying "10% of GPUs used in sampled machines are of this model"
As a simplistic illustration of this distinction, if 20% of machines have dual-graphics, the sum of each GPU's percentage is going to be 120%.
ps: In the real world there might not match perfectly, because there might be a couple multi-graphics machines with more that 2 GPUs, plus rounding errors.
0 Likes
The current perceived deceleration of growth might be noise (just looking at the graph we can clearly see the graph is quite noisy, especially with the quasi-periodic steam China windows growth spurs).very 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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Out of curiosity, what method did you use to fit that curve?
The graph fits well to a bi-linear (steam deck being the turning point between a previous trend and the current trend).
It might also fit well to an exponential... but only stock exchange economists still try to fit exponentials to product/market growth trends because being blind to market saturation, physical limits of the material world and etc is conducent to better stock trades...
And it might be (and this is my personal bet) a sigmoid but with a higher endpoint, distorted by the noise that's dragging stats down at the moment.
2 Likes, Who?
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