this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Linux Gaming
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Steam decks have been out for years now, and even though they sold millions of copies they're not the majority of Linux machines, you can check the GPU
AMD Custom GPU 0405on the GPU field since that's the steam deck one, it's at 0.82% and had a 0.23% increase this month. So some of the increase in Linux came from it (around half), but there's still a lot of new Linux PC users.Also it's worth mentioning that every time that the Linux share has gone down it coincides with a spike in Chinese language usage.
I was digging around on the steam hardware survey and it does list steam deck separately if you tell the hardware survey to only show you Linux, and it is ~5.5x more popular that arch, and also reports that arch and Ubuntu are similar, leading me to believe the steam deck is fully excluded from the default combined view.
If you take that x5.5 and use it to extrapolate, steam decks should have about 0.82% market share
Which is exactly the same the GPU numbers show.
@Nibodhika @I_Has_A_Hat umm, what does the chinese language have to do with any of this, I wonder?
Because percentages don't tell you the whole picture, imagine you have a group of 100 people, with 2 of them being of a certain group, e.g. Linux users, also 20 of them are of a different group, e.g. Chinese speaking. In percentages that means 2% for one and 20% for the other group. If next month the 20% group increases to 33.3% and the other drops to 1.6% there are a couple of alternatives, but the simplest explanation is that 20 new people from the second group were added to the total, meaning that while the percentage decreased for the first group the total amount of people in it did not.
So, when you only have a percentage it's hard to know if the total number of people increased, decreased, or remained the same because you don't know if the total is the same. Since people don't just decide to switch to Chinese it's expected than when the amount of a language changes significantly that most likely means the total amount of people changed, and you can guess by how much, doing that calculation you can see that every time the Linux users decreased its likely the total number of users increased and the number of Linux users remained the same or even grew, just not by the same margin as the total amount of users did.