Looking at the huge spike in Simplified Chinese number, it seems like yet another oversampling of Chinese computers. A more reliable metric is Linux share for computers with English as their language, currently at >8% for the first time.
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Is it oversampling or just the fact there are a lot of users from China?
No idea, fair point. I remember they definitely oversampled some months ago, and corrected the numbers after publication, but I don't know if that's the case here.
It's due to how Valve conducts these surveys. Rather than pulling from the entire user pool at once, they rotate between different chunks of the userbase every month.
You'll notice this if you look at the system language stats, The Chinese speaking population jumps and falls by a rather large percent every month.
This also could explain why Windows 10 had another jump in users this month, From what I hear internet cafes are still a popular way to game in China. and I doubt many of these places have updated all their machines to Windows 11 yet.
I'm no survey expert, but why doesn't Valve get a mixed distribution from all countries?
No clue, Think it's one of those 'Worked well enough in the past' things they just never bothered to re-work.
I personally wish they would update it to be more globally accurate but it's Valve so.
Data has value and this data is particularly valuable to Valve and its competitors. So Valve share the raw data which has gross numbers but they don't share the useful data. The useful data is the processed data - the corrected and weighted data based on the other information Valve has about its users and install base. That way can weight this months survey responses to expected proportions of the whole user base and see actual user wide figures and trends.
What Valve shares is akin to a polling company sharing the raw data from the people who completed a polling survey. It's relatively meaningless and even misleading until they correct the data to weight it to make it representative of the whole population.
So this month there were 1.15% fewer linux users in the survey pool, not 1.15% fewer linux users overall. They will correct the data to see an actual proportion of Linux users. For example: they have data on every use of Proton and every install of Linux versions of software; and how many times each user installs a game (occasional vs heavy users). They don't share that but they can use that to help correct the data and get much more accurate picture - one they don't share as it gives them a commercial advantage.
GamingOnLinux updated their Steam Tracker with February's data: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Linux, English Only went from January's 7.59% to 8.27%. There's a huge influx of Chinese users in this month's data.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
All of the results are very odd. If you look through the other categories, Simplified Chinese gained THIRTY percent, the Hard Drive categories also wildly changed, and 32 GB RAM jumped +18%. It seems to me like a bunch of Chinese systems just flooded the statistics.
Whenever I point out the language of linux users being almost exclusively English I get a lot of comments about how that's racist or something.
Linux is almost all english, a bit of german, a tiny bit of russian, and an extreme minority of other languages. When you filter by english/linux you see a ton more higher end hardware than global results that include countless not-wealthy nations with household incomes under 10k/year, which is most of the world.
They also had to correct their results last month for some reason. I think they are just having issues with their surveys rn. Also there were multiple 30+ minute steam network outages in Europe in the past few days. Europe is definitely the majority of linux steam users so that might be related.
could have something to do with the odd, and massive, influx of new win10 users?
Given the roughly similarly sized drop in Win11 users. I chose to believe that the Win10 jump is from people nopeing out of the Win11 slop.
The stats are a sample, there is inheritantly some level of error. Ignore the month to month changes, focus on the longer term trends.
The Linux Mint upgrade is recent and folks migrated from 22.2 to 22.3 You can see it right in the stats. Don't know about Ubuntu.
I suppose it makes sense for Ubuntu to slowly go down as the bad news about Snaps and the great news about Linux Mint spreads.
Edit: But if we trust the data, I guess the real great news is Arch, btw. Haha!
I'm no statistician but this seems within margin of error to me.
Maybe something to do with work? Afaik by February, most companies are back in action, and so maybe people are forced to switch back to Windows to do their jobs, including in some cases in their gaming rigs due to lack of work-exclusive machines.
Also the possibilities others already mentioned here sound as valid, and I second that months may have big fluctuations, but that may not relate to the growth tendency. And iirc GamingOnLinux has a graph on the growth tendency based on Valve's hardware surveys, though I don't have the link with me.