Linux surpassed MacOS in marketshare for the first ever time this month. Let’s go! :)
Could be a statistical margin of error.
Nah, the increase is 0.52%. Could be a little overblown? Yeah. Could be completely wrong? Very doubtful. Next month it will probably drop a little and keep climbing steadily but surely. But the fact that for this month Linux gamers are more than MacOS gamers for the first time is at the very least very impressive! :)
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.
woot
It might be that more Mac users are moving away from Steam as their gaming client - from my experience, it’s very glitchy, and hasn’t been properly updated in years
And isn’t there extremely limited support for M1 Mac on Steam? As Mac users upgrade their machines, they can’t continue to use Steam like they used to.
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)
Right, what I meant for limited support for M1 on Steam was that the library of games on Mac is essentially obsolete. And their toolkit requires intervention from developers in a way that Proton does not, I understand. Which means it costs money to continue supporting your customers who already paid you a long time ago. I don’t see the situation improving much.
The client on macos was buggy as hell, but after the UI refresh update a month or two back it’s fine again now
@ReverseModule Looks like the growth comes mostly from Windows (-0.56%) users switching to Linux (+0.52%). MacOS (+0.05%) users mostly seem just to upgrade MacOS and are mostly unaffected by the overall numbers. Inside of the Windows numbers, Windows 10 (-1.56%) users switching to either Windows 11 (+0.92%) or choosing an alternative platform (-0.56%). Numbers do not add up perfectly, because these statistics are estimation based on asking randomly a fraction of the user base.
Not to mention that steam is no longer the sole gaming platform on PC which makes statistic anomaly even higher. They just discounted the steam deck for the first time in it’s history. This small change could just be people who have windows machines booting up steam decks and getting the survey.
Steam Deck is very underrepresented in the hardware surveys, as the questionnaire can only show up in Desktop mode.
Not anymore. It’s possible to get the hardware survey in gaming mode on Deck for months now (I got it iirc).
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.
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.
From my understanding, which would be made clearer if Valve actually released information on their data collection for the survey, is that the device you submit the survey on is the one that counts. So dual-booting Linux and Windows isn’t accounted for. Whatever you do the survey on is the one that it records you as. The survey prompt does tell you all the data it’s sending including OS. You can’t modify it but you can read it.
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.
Absolutely agree. It’s hard to see Steam OS as a helpful metric for Linux desktop usage. The majority of Steam OS users will only use Linux on the deck and likely never even drop into desktop mode. I am curious how many people bought the dock and how many use it.
No wonder! I’ve lately noticed that some non-AAA games run way better on Linux than Windows on my computer (5950X, RTX3090). For some reason Barotrauma seems to lag heavily while playing on Windows but runs buttersmooth on Linux. Valheim has similar effect as well.
Also I have already decided that Win10 is going to be the last Windows version on my machine ever. Gaming on Linux has gotten so damn good over the last few years that I see no reason upgrading my Windows installation anymore.
I wish that would be the case for VR too. But with VR there is lots of stuff just not being supported unfortunately. If you have any Headset that basically isn’t the Index good luck using Linux. Also there are still Software issues with certain stuff there that won’t properly work or not at all. I once tried Linux but unfortunately ran into several issues which caused me going back to windows 11.
Nah, I have an index and was not able to get steam vr running. Its problems everywhere in VR on linux I guess.
Oh i expected the hardware that basically is made for the software to actually work with SteamVR always. Guess I’m wrong. But unfortunately proves my post more true.
