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.
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.