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Valve amended the Steam survey for December 2025 - Linux actually hit another all-time high
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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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In a constrained environment it will function more like a sigmoid curve. This looks like evidence that we're approaching the linear slope in the middle.
That doesn't actually make much sense for Linux adoption stats though
As linux gets bigger, more people will hear about it and consider it, there will be more pressure for Linux support, generally more focus on Linux
It seems like it will indeed be roughly exponential, until it levels out sigmoidly near 100%.
You just described Sigmoid curves, roughly speaking. The only issue is your incorrect use of "exponential".
The idea is that it's not exponential for two main reasons:
Exponential growth is used colloquially for any situation where there's an upward curve to the trend; in calculus terms, the second derivative is positive. But there are a lot of functions with that property, and exponential functions are only 1 type. Sure, it's a common one, but so is parabolic, cubic, and other polynomial functions; a variety of trigonometric functions (over certain domains, like sine from -1 to 0); rational functions (again, over certain domains), etc.
Sigmoid curves (colloquially known as S-curves) are very common in any situation where there's both a contagion factor (like popularity, word of mouth, network effects, etc.) and a limit on growth or maximum carrying capacity. The later is always the case when your function maps to percentages of a population since it caps at 100%.
Is there a predictable difference between an exponential growth curve and a sigmoid curve before the linear growth section? Like I suppose you'd be able to measure the dropoff in acceleration as velocity reaches its peak, but given that this is also a random sample, sample noise would make that impossible to determine in real time.
I mean, it's a % of people who use x chart, so the only way it won't be sigmoid eventually is if it drops off as something else replaces it, but I don't think looking at the chart will help predict where the chart is going any more than how well that works with stock prices.
No, it's just a really commonly encountered curve for growth within a constrained environment. Fitting the curve could only predict where it is going with a probabilistic model anyways - it can't predict the future.