14 DAY TRIAL // A new Steam Hardware survey has been published for the month of August and things don't look too bright for the Linux platform, although this might be just a statistical issue.
Every month, Valve releases the results of the Steam Hardware Survey and publishes details about what's being used right now, mostly in terms of hardware. There is also an OS category and this is where you can find details about the rate of adoption for various distros.
Right from the start, you will notice that there is a 0.05% drop since last month. This might not be a problem in itself because it's a really small percentage, but the Linux share of the pie has been dropping steadily, in small increments for quite some time.
Some of you might be tempted to think that the Linux platform is losing ground, but you are forgetting something. Steam is getting more users every month and the drop in the percentages only means that the rate of Linux adoption is just smaller than the rate of people who are just starting to use Linux.
Also, this survey can't be considered a really good information source for one major reason. We don't know anything about it. We don't know the response rate, we don't know how many people are polled, we don't know if the polling is done based on some numbers. Basically, this might look like a useful tool, but it might be not so useful after all.
On the other hand, the 1.06% that's being shown on the Steam Hardware Survey is not very far off from the 1.2% that's being speculated for the entire Linux market share.
Here are the numbers for August, and you can see that they have been greatly influenced by the release of Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, which is now the undisputed king of this ranking. In fact, it's been pretty much like this ever since the release of Steam for Linux and there is little chance that it will change anytime soon.
Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit at 0.43% with +0.37% increase Linux Mint 17 Qiana 64-bit at 0.10% with +0.01% increase Linux 3.10 64-bit at 0.08% with a -0.01% decrease Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 32-bit at 0.06%, with a +0.06% increase Ubuntu 14.04 LTS-64 bit at 0.06% with a -0.33% decrease
If you don’t have the client, you can download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia. This is not the actual application, but a small tool provided by Valve that downloads the software and takes care of any dependencies.