Linux shoots back up the Steam Survey for March 2025 with Simplified Chinese dropping
Linux shoots back up the Steam Survey for March 2025 with Simplified Chinese dropping
Valve have released the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for March 2025, and as expected with the Simplified Chinese language dropping the Linux stats have shot back up.
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as expected with the Simplified Chinese language dropping the Linux stats have shot back up.
Am I an idiot? I don't understand what this means. Why would they drop Chinese from their languages? And why would dropping Chinese make people switch to Linux?
I think it is because it is not total number of Linux users, but the proportional number of Linux users compared to windows and Mac users. So the group of users who use the Simplified Chinese language must have had a lot more windows users in comparison to Linux users, and when it was dropped the proportion of Linux users rose even though the total users went down.
That's basically it. The part I don't understand is why Chinese would gravitate towards Windows while their government sees it as a US intelligence tool. I hear that most of them pirate it too.
Maybe the Steam Deck isn't readily available on the Chinese market.
Because a lot of them are into games that require anti-cheat and there are also a lot more internet cafes, so more windows.
Mac went up almost the same amount, too. If I’m reading the article correctly.
There was a sudden unexplained jump in the number of simplified Chinese users counted in the previous survey, few of whom run linux apparently. It was probably some kind of error because their number has now gone back down. People expected it because that's not the first time it happened.
Could it be correlated to Chinese New Year? I could see a ton of people in China suddenly playing and then not playing if most people get time off at the same time.
Does it happen every year around this time?
Alternative perspective, it could be related to the Great Firewall of a China, perhaps they made some rule adjustments and data came through that doesn't normally come through.
They don't drop Chinese from the random sampling. The random sampling is back to normal averages.See here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/#languagesanchor Also, English only Linux use is relatively the same based on the random sampling, see here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/#engsplitanchor
I read it as "dropping" as in "being released" .
Edit: English is funny sometimes
"We dropped a new update and the player base dropped so we decided to drop the whole thing and revert to the last drop."
It’s dropping as in “experiencing a fall in numbers” (back to normal levels) not as in “removing from support” nor as in “delivered to the world”
They may have removed it from the reporting or corrected for some previous change in reporting methodology.