A new Steam Hardware & Software Survey has been released for the month of September, and it looks like Linux is still getting more users, although it’s doing that in a much slower pace.
Up until six months ago, the Steam for Linux platform had about 1.2% of the entire Steam user base and it looked like it was stable. In just one month, that percentage dropped to 0.7, which is almost by half. There is no clear reason why that happened, but it did, and Steam for Linux has been playing catch up since then.
It’s not like half of the Steam for Linux base suddenly decided not to use Steam anymore, so the reason must have had something to do with the way Valve tallies the results from the Steam Hardware Survey. In fact, there are always a number of users who ask what this hardware survey is, and they are doing that because they’ve never received it.
Valve is polling Steam users with a series of questions that can either be answered or dismissed. If you accept, the tool that is embedded in the Steam application will collect some data about your system and send it back, anonymously. It’s understandable that some of the users being polled don’t want to send that data anywhere, but that number is not known.
In fact, very few things are known about the survey. We don’t know how many people take it, how many people dismiss it, how it is sent in the community by platform, and so on. There are quite a few mysteries that make this a rather unreliable tool.
Linux is climbing back up
And that after revolving around 0.7% for a couple of months and after it started going back up, although not at the rate that everyone was hoping for. As it stands right now, Linux is at 0.94%, with just a 0.02% increase over August. If we couple that with the fact that Steam now has more users than in August, then we can conclude it wasn’t a bad month. We can only hope that Linux will maintain its rising trend.
Via Softpedia