Steam Hardware & Software Survey - Go Linux! :)

Agreed. I have a deck and I'm now definitely gonna switch my main pc from Win10 to Linux. Steam deck desktop mode helped show me I could be comfortable using it, and the deck in general showed the gaming support is there nowadays.

I now see no reason to not put Linux on my desktop. Just deciding on which distros to check out. Probably mint. Maybe garuda...

It's showing people Linux is acceptable as a handheld os. Which the world already knew with Android. Linux as a desktop is another story. Steam deck has desktop mode but I highly doubt the percentage of those who use it as a desktop is high. I wonder how many bought the dock.

Might become a problem if Microsoft starts making all their games windows store exclusives. Doesn't seem to be their strategy right now, but it's always a danger.

Nah, I have an index and was not able to get steam vr running. Its problems everywhere in VR on linux I guess.

Steam Deck is very underrepresented in the hardware surveys, as the questionnaire can only show up in Desktop mode.

That's a good point. There are a heck of a lot of people primarily on game pass, now, especially.

I also wonder if they account for people who dual-boot Linux and Windows, and who game only on Windows or who use both depending on the game.

Does a steam deck owner with a Windows desktop gaming PC turn up twice in these numbers, in both the Linux and the Windows users count, do you think? Because then the Linux number would go up 1 without the Windows number going down.

Edit: aside from this, SteamOS and desktop Linux distros aren't necessarily comparable enough to be throwing together in the same category. A lot of the things that make SteamOS a smart choice for the deck, where they can control and optimize for the hardware, don't apply to desktops the same way.

Valve isn't showing us their methodology (sample size, sample selection mechanism, rate at which people decline the surveys, how the hardware information is gathered by steam once the survey is agreed to, etc), so it's hard to say whether or not a 0.52% increase is accurate, or whether would meet the p-value test of being less than 5% likely to be the result of chance.

Statistically speaking, sometimes if you flip a coin ten times, it'll land as heads ten times in a row, even though every flip could go either way. Based on that particular sample of 10 coin flips, it'd look like the chance of a coin landing heads up is 100% - obviously not the case in reality. Another time, you might flip a coin ten times and get ten tails, seemingly the exact opposite and equally dramatically wrong result. Larger sample sizes reduce the risk of such a coincidence occurring across the entire sample, and P-values are helpful for checking the likelihood of whether a fluke such as this may have affected the result of a study.

Even when studies and surveys do have p < .05 (aka, the likelihood that the result is purely caused by chance is less than 5%, aka statistically significant), there's still that up-to-5% chance that the result is just random luck affecting the sample. And p-values don't account for things like sample bias or other methodological errors, like if valve were preferentially serving the survey to more Linux users than Valve users, or if Linux users are just more likely to respond to the steam survey (because they want that Linux number to go up so Linux gets more support) than Windows users, and that kind of thing. Or for p-hacking shenanigans.

All that said, a small increase makes sense intuitively if it's including the steam deck, and especially considering the unpopularity of Windows 11, and especially since I'm given to understand the Linux numbers have been slowly increasing for a while? But even so, the point I'm making here is I don't think we know enough to definitively say that it's not just luck.

My anecdotal experience is that Apple silicon support is not usually a major problem. Plenty of stuff seems to be fine through Rosetta. The worse case is 32 bit only games which are unsupported in modern macos versions regardless of CPU arch.

You can use the client just fine. It's just some games that won't work. We'll see what GamePortingToolkit makes in term of difference. Heroic Games Launcher has apparently made it fairly simple to add it on Mac ala Proton. (I haven't had time to dig into it yet, so I'm just going from what I read in updates/release notes)

Oh cool, I haven't used it in a while. Good to know!

It's randomly picked users which has been shown that it's not so random and that at one point Linux users weren't being asked as often as Windows users. So without methodology and insight, it's hard to have trust in the survey system.

I believe they pick users at random. You can't even update your submitted data from X times ago after an upgrade.