This is the first month in a long time that sees an increase

Oct 2, 2014 16:59 GMT  ·  By

The new Steam Hardware Survey released by Valve shows a small increase in the number of Linux users and it might have something to do with a big game launch that happened this month.

Steam Hardware Survey is a tool used by Valve to gauge some details about the computers and habits of Steam users. It sounds simple enough, but how is this achieved? Every month, Valve randomly sends users a survey, which is built in the Steam client. This only happens when starting the Steam application.

Now, if you receive the Steam survey when you use Linux, the details you send back will include the operating system. The percentage of Linux users has remained pretty much the same in the past few months, although it had a downwards trend. We now take a look at the month of September and we'll try to figure out why there's an increase, all of a sudden.

Linux is gaining new users

It's hard to determine whether the Steam Hardware Survey is actually accurate. There are a lot of unknowns with this method of gathering data. For example, we don't know how many people receive the survey every month, we don't know how many users have dual boot and are using Linux and another OS, we don't know how many people answer it, and we don't know if the surveys are sent proportionally for each platform.

In any case, the Steam for Linux use doesn't seem to be very different from other numbers that we can find on the Internet regarding the adoption of the Linux desktop. In most cases, Linux occupies between 1-2% of the market share, so the newly reported 1.16% for Steam seems to be just right.

Interestingly enough, the new numbers published in the Steam Hardware Survey for September show a 0.10% increase since last month, but that's actually more than you would imagine. We also have to take into account that the number of Steam users also increases each month, so a 0.10% increase in the user base is actually more than it seems.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS leads the charge

As it was to be expected, Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit takes the first place, with 0.51%, Linux Mint 17 Qiana 64-bit is second with 0.11%, and the third place is occupied by many distros sharing the same kernel, 3.10, with 0.09%.

It remains to be seen if this trend continues next month. Linux users just received a great game in September, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and this might have had a great impact on the current adoption trend.