14 DAY TRIAL // A new Steam Hardware & Software Survey has been released by Valve for the month of May, and the Linux OS sections has seen some changes, but not all of them are good.
Valve releases various statistics about the Steam users from all over the world on a monthly basis and publishes them in a comprehensive manner. The Linux part of that survey is of interest because it highlights the trend of the open source platform.
This method can't really be considered statistically valid for a number of reasons. For one, we don't know how many Steam users get to answer the survey, we don't know how many of the Steam users are cross-platform, and so on.
This means that whatever percentages we see in the survey might not reflect the reality because we can't know the margin of error. With this out of the way, we can get down to business and see how Linux is doing.
First of all, the usage of the Linux platform seems to have dropped a little, with 0.13%, and it now rests at 1.13%. These are not exactly stellar numbers and it's hard to understand why there are so few Linux users of Steam, or at least why so few are reported.
The biggest change in the survey is the accession of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, which was launched back in April. Since then, many users have made the jump to the new version. This distribution is now the number one OS used on the Linux platform and it looks like that it's here to stay.
This is what the percentages look like, but you will notice that if you add all the numbers you will not get the 1.13% that is being shown for the total.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit 0.43% Linux 3.10 64-bit 0.09% Linux Mint 16 Petra 64-bit 0.08% Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS 64-bit 0.08% Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit 0.07% Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 32-bit 0.07%
There are quite a few Linux distributions that are not shown in this simple survey. There used to be a time when there was also an Others category, but that is no longer displayed. If you happen to have an operating system like Debian, for example, you won't see your OS.
Also, it would be interesting to know if SteamOS is reported as Linux in the statistics or if it has its own category. More importantly, will SteamOS be able to take down Ubuntu anytime soon?