14 DAY TRIAL // A new Steam Hardware Survey has been made available, for the month of April, and the results are a little surprising because of the newly-released Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
Every month, Valve publishes a comprehensive hardware and software survey that shows various aspects of the PCs running the Steam client. It covers a large array of domains and most of them are about the hardware, but the Linux users are more concerned about what the OS section of the survey says.
A couple of months ago Valve chose to change the structure of the survey a little bit in an effort to make it more comprehensible. Before the change, there was a category of operating systems that was simply called Others. Most of the OSes in that category were Linux ones, usually smaller distros with fewer users, but the entries would be folded in the rest or discarded altogether.
The Steam Hardware Survey is now big enough to be used as a rather accurate portrayal of the market share for various operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The Steam platform has millions of players, but it's impossible to know how many of those players get the survey and on which platform.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey, the Linux platform has been holding steady at about 1.2%, but the numbers have refused to increase in the past few months, even if there were quite a few discount sessions.
Something bigger happened in April, which it turns out it had quite an effect on the numbers in the Steam Hardware Survey. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) was released and it entered straight in the second place, with 0.22%.
It's very likely that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is in first place since it arrived on April 17, which is past the first half of the month.
Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit – 0.25% Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit – 0.22% Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS 64 bit – 0.12% Linux Mint 16 Petra 64 bit – 0.09% Ubuntu 13.10 – 0.05%
Besides the new entry in the list, all the other Linux distros registered smaller losses.
Still, there are very few variations from one month to another, which is actually somewhat of a letdown for the Linux users, who have been hoping that Steam would make a bigger impact. It will be interesting to see what will happen in the next few months, if Ubuntu 14.04 LTS climbs even more.
The percentages might change after the release of the Steam Machines, the PC / console hybrid expected to arrive later this year. The new hardware designed by Valve will run SteamOS, which is a Debian-based distribution.