It’s not just a percentage thing. 1 person yesterday to 2 people today is a 100% increase. Not much of a surge, at least in terms of news worthiness. Going from 6% to 10% sounds more news worthy than going from 1% to 2% despite the latter being a much larger percentage increase.
I used to keep a windows drive to run steam. But it honestly sees very little use nowadays.
Mostly I boot it every few months to see what shenanigans Microsoft has pulled with windows. Other than that, it's just sitting there. Everything I play runs in Linux.
Doesn't it show +0.05% Arch? I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch. So if 0.15% is a blend of Arch and SteamOS-Arch, it seems to be growing in quite a few ways.
These commercial, proprietary games are one of the things that pushes forward the capabilities of personal computers. They are unreasonable, unoptimized resource-hogs. If a Linux system is as capable of running them as a proprietary OS (that has a deck stacked in it's favor), it means they lose one another advantage over Linux. And it also means that your hardware now is more productive at less bs tasks, especially consumer-grade nvidia cards, who are better supported now than years ago.
If you are a Linux user and like commercial games, you probably would prefer them to work on Linux.
“Market share” on Linux aligns the vested interest of game makers and Linux game players. If the company thinks it can make money, it will do more to allow games to run, or at least do less to stop them.
There's high potential overlap between the profile of a PC gamer (who is often also a PC builder and general computing DIY hobbyist) and an OS like Linux that extends your tinkering ability massively on the software side.
PC/laptop users are a shrinking demographic nowadays thanks to the advent of mobile devices, but they're a high quality demographic made up of professionals and hobbyists with above average computer savvy. So lots of companies are trying to appeal to them because the choices they make in software and hardware can translate into many other IT fields.