Information on Linux market share on Steam
 

This is just information for the community.
I collected some information from steam hardware survey last year.

On Monday, Jan 06, 2020
Windows = 96.86%
Mac OSX = 2.47%
Linux = 0.67%

but if we compare just Windows and Linux
Windows = 99.31%
Linux = 0.69%

On Thursday, Jan 28, 2021
Windows = 96.41%
Mac OSX = 2.82%
Linux = 0.78%

but if we compare just Windows and Linux
Windows = 99.20%
Linux = 0.80%

~~~~vmelkon

Are you trying to imply that because Windows market share dropped relative to 2020 people are moving to Linux?
If so, I doubt that's the case - at least on any significant #'s.
As OS X gained 0.35% market share, I'd say it's more likely the bulk of gamers who left Windows and continued to game on Steam went there. But that being said, I think these changes are just normal market fluctuations. I don't think it's fair to draw any conclusions based on this.
Be that as it may, even though I'm not a gamer person, I'm glad to see the # of Linux users gaming via Steam increasing. Gives me hope for a future where games aren't tied to OS's, but that's very hard to do across the board so I doubt we'll ever see that.

Yes.

Also, last time I did not put the OSX vs Linux numbers

On Monday, Jan 06, 2020
Windows = 96.86%
Mac OSX = 2.47%
Linux = 0.67%

but if we compare just Mac OSX and Linux
Mac OSX = 78.66%
Linux = 21.34%

On Thursday, Jan 28, 2021
Windows = 96.41%
Mac OSX = 2.82%
Linux = 0.78%

but if we compare just Mac OSX and Linux
Mac OSX = 78.33%
Linux = 21.67%

AS YOU can see, 0.33% more people prefer Linux over OSX, in a relative way.
Perhaps that represents 100,000 users.

~~~~vmelkon

This is just one of a couple assertions you've made that lack foundation. The results do not mean what you think they mean because your assertion assumes a few things which you quite simply don't know.

Most importantly, it assumes that these 2 OS's are directly competing, and one person would only leave 1 for the other. It also assumes that newcomers would come to both systems to game at an equal rate. None of those are valid assumptions. The holes in this just become more plentiful as you dig deeper (eg. Linux is more accessible than OS X), but this alone invalidates it. You can't illustrate preference in this at all.

Unfortunately, I cannot offer the level of certainty that you seek.
It is possible that some people have a dualboot setup, or multiple PCs (including Macs.)
It is possible that they have 1 account on one PC and another account on another.

There was a page discussing this and how a while back Steam changed the way they were counting and suddenly, the number of Win 7 PC went up.

There is this
This one talks about concurrent gamers. It can exceed 25 million.
https://store.steampowered.com/stats/


This one mentions 33 million daily active players and
67 million monthly active players.
So, it looks like they aren’t showing us the number of accounts in their database however, this means that small percentage changes, even 0.01% represent huge number of players.
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-...-sales-region/

~~~vmelkon

Yeah, I'm guessing they're changing the data somehow and who knows how that affects the end result. Especially if like you said they changed the way they're counting. Yeah, .01% is a large amount for sure. We can't really tell from this data what it means for gaming in Linux, but I think either way the % that the Linux community does have is still very pleasant to see. It's nice that Steam is willing to cater to Linux, despite being a small portion of their user base, and it's also nice that some game companies are developing games for Linux, despite their audience being almost entirely Windows based. Massive hats off to all those people not leaving our community for dead.