It’s honestly more laughable when the entire “surge” increase comes from steam decks. Everyone knows Linux thrives in a locked-down environment that is created specifically for the hardware it’s shipped with. It’s why Android works so well. Linux PC Desktop is where things still need to be proven to work with any configuration, with all the applications, and user needs.
Yes, it’s encapsulated. You have to explicitly go into desktop mode to even install stuff. When you do install stuff from the repos it goes away next update to ensure a sane environment. You have to install stuff from flatpack to keep it. There are ways around it but there are also ways to root your Android phone. It’s about equal in usage.
From the article: 42.99%. So almost half of the Linux users are steam decks. This means Linux Desktop numbers are shrinking, not growing. It would put Linux Desktops at 0.8%.
Yeah, that’s a good point. The steam survey for OSes has always been relatively poor quality and untrackable. Ideally, they’d either put the resources into making it transparent and clear or stop it to not spread false data.
GamingOnLinux does a good job of tracking the data separated to just the English language, which shows how much effect China has on the survey as well as a decent approximation of the rest of the audience’s Linux usage, which is closer to 4% these days, post-Steam-Deck.
Steam Decks would still be at least 42% of Linux users though, it just depends on scale. I don’t understand why the Linux community wants to cut out Chinese users just because they are from China.
They’re good outliers to cut out from a sample set. If you want to use the survey as a developer to determine what your audience looks like, how much merit is there in factoring in a player base that mostly only plays Dota 2 and PUBG for major patches or something? And don’t forget that the other way to look at that sample set is that for every Steam Deck customer out in the wild, you can double it to find how many Linux users there are, which is a number in the millions.
It’s honestly more laughable when the entire “surge” increase comes from steam decks. Everyone knows Linux thrives in a locked-down environment that is created specifically for the hardware it’s shipped with. It’s why Android works so well. Linux PC Desktop is where things still need to be proven to work with any configuration, with all the applications, and user needs.
Which is why it’s so awesome that most of Steam Deck is actually fairly open, or at least as open as running steam on desktop Linux anyway.
The Steam Deck is a locked down environment?
Yes, it’s encapsulated. You have to explicitly go into desktop mode to even install stuff. When you do install stuff from the repos it goes away next update to ensure a sane environment. You have to install stuff from flatpack to keep it. There are ways around it but there are also ways to root your Android phone. It’s about equal in usage.
Fair point, I hadn’t even considered that. I wonder what percentage of these Linux users are in fact Steam Decks.
From the article: 42.99%. So almost half of the Linux users are steam decks. This means Linux Desktop numbers are shrinking, not growing. It would put Linux Desktops at 0.8%.
Any surge also has more to do what China did or did not do that month than how many Steam Decks they sold.
Yeah, that’s a good point. The steam survey for OSes has always been relatively poor quality and untrackable. Ideally, they’d either put the resources into making it transparent and clear or stop it to not spread false data.
GamingOnLinux does a good job of tracking the data separated to just the English language, which shows how much effect China has on the survey as well as a decent approximation of the rest of the audience’s Linux usage, which is closer to 4% these days, post-Steam-Deck.
Steam Decks would still be at least 42% of Linux users though, it just depends on scale. I don’t understand why the Linux community wants to cut out Chinese users just because they are from China.
They’re good outliers to cut out from a sample set. If you want to use the survey as a developer to determine what your audience looks like, how much merit is there in factoring in a player base that mostly only plays Dota 2 and PUBG for major patches or something? And don’t forget that the other way to look at that sample set is that for every Steam Deck customer out in the wild, you can double it to find how many Linux users there are, which is a number in the millions.