14 DAY TRIAL // The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for January 2015 has been published by Valve and it looks like the Linux platform is holding steady, with a slight decrease that can be easily attributed to statistical error.
Valve pushes a survey every month to the Steam users, but only to a select few. If you agree with their request, you get to send your software and hardware configuration to them (anonymously we're told). All this data gets compiled and each month a report is published that shows all kinds of interesting details about the Steam community.
There is a single entry that really concerns Linux users and that is the OS part, where we can see how the various platforms are doing. You can compare the results with Windows and Mac OS X, but there are also details about the systems used within the Linux ecosystem. It's not the most accurate tool and it's difficult to know if it contains relevant data, but it falls in line with other sources that have numbers revealing the penetration of the Linux desktop.
Linux is not doing any worse or better
The Steam for Linux usage hasn't changed all that much in the past few months. After getting a slightly increasing trend for a few months, the latest numbers show a small increase, but it's so small it's hardly worth mentioning.
The first place is occupied by Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit with 0.39%, Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit takes the second place with 0.14%, and the third place is occupied by Linux 3.10 64-bit, which is just a general category for distros with that kernel (or at least that's what it looks like).
As you well know, there are a ton of other distros out there that can run Steam for Linux and they have different kernels. They are most likely not shown in the list. If we add the numbers together, it will give 0.83%, which is very different from the 1.09% provided by Valve.