A new Steam Hardware Survey for April is out

May 3, 2015 16:32 GMT  ·  By

A new Steam Hardware Survey has been released for the month of April, and it doesn't bring good news for Linux users. This is probably one of the worst months for the Linux platform in a long time.

Linux users have been watching the numbers in the Steam Hardware Survey since the Steam client was released for the open source platform. For the most part, the number of Linux users has been increasing steadily, with very few exceptions. In fact, it's been holding steady at about 1.1% or 1.2% for the past year, and there was no sign that it was going through any major changes.

Valve publishes a hardware survey every month and one of the numbers recorded is the percentage regarding the OS usage. The problem is that not all Steam users receive this survey, and we don't know how many users take it. The uncertainty regarding the way this survey is taken makes it harder to put any kind of stock in the numbers provided, although just the sheer size of the user base makes it an ideal tool.

The number of Linux users is decreasing

The latest numbers place Linux at 0.94%, which is at 0.11 less than the previous month. It's the first time in many months that Linux drops below 1.0%. The reasons for this massive drop are not clear, especially since we’ve just reported that the Steam for Linux library has just passed an important milestone, 1100 games.

Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS 64-bit takes the first place with 0.28%; Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit goes on the second with 0.12%, and the third place is occupied by Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64-bit, with 0.09%. All the recorded Linux distros are going down, which is also bad news in itself.

It remains to be seen if this trend will continue in the coming months or if it was just a temporary problem.