I'm doing my part! (I use arch btw, among others)
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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I wonder if people who use Linux also decline doing the hardware survey more often than Windows users, skewing the numbers even more?
I suspect it's actually the opposite. Linux users want more and better Linux support, so they want to show that it's being used.
I think it compensates cause you have many I use arch btw people.
Should arch users not count for some reason or am I missing something?
There is a stereotype about Arch users using every opportunity they can to mention they use arch. He is implying they would be more likely to accept the hardware survey for this reason
Oh yeah lol
I assume the person you replied to was insinuating Arch users are probably more likely to do the survey because they are vocal about sharing their choice of OS
Nobody skews numbers more than Microsoft so more power to the Linux users.
I do! I mainly use Linux but if the survey pops up when I’m on Windows I always decline it.
I've stopped booting into my Windows partition roughly a year ago. I don't play games with kernel level anticheat and the rest works for me. Even VR. Even on NVIDIA.
Note that the jump isn't quite as big as this would suggest. There were a large number of Chinese users for Chinese New Year. It is no longer Chinese New Year. In the previous month Chinese users were overrepresented, and in the current month Chinese users are ... I don't know.
Also, link for the hardware survey. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Also doing my part. Fuck Microsoft. It would have been a harder choice if Windows was, like, fast, stable, and efficient. But it's not. It's jank and AI slop. Fuck them.
Though I'll say that after I finally switched (as win 10 end of life loomed and win 11 looked worse even before copilot was integrated into everything), I regretted waiting so long. Just going through the install process without the whole "oh and of course you want these other things shoved down your throat, either now or later" and not needing to immediately dig through the settings because a design philosophy was "the user is stupid and needs to be protected from their own mistakes" and their other design philosophies for their UIs seem to be drawn weekly from a hat.
Seems like it wasn't long ago they broke 4% seems to be growing very quickly
I'm doing my part! Switched from Windows 11 to Linux (Fedora KDE) earlier this month and I'm never looking back. Peace out, Jabronies. And by Jabronies, I mean the windows dev team. And also their leadership. Why was I looking at spinning loading circles in the start menu? Are they permanently high over there? How much crack did they get with breakfast?
I am surprised that Debian didn't make the list under "Linux". It's all Arch, Ubuntu, and Mint. Everything I run here is Debian and MX.
Ok, but, hear me out, Mint and Ubuntu are down stream of Debian. Like, realistically, you can build any distro using the package manager it’s built on.
Debian is highly problematic for gaming. It can do it, and depending on games you play and the hardware you could never see a single issue. But back ported updates and the general lag time makes even mint and Ubuntu have frequent problems or poor support for new releases.
So it's highly unsurprising that it doesn't show up in a survey focused in gamers.
I did the bingo game for this year and one of my bets was 6% share until end of the year :) looks like I am winning boys!
I'm proud to represent part of the 5%.
That's one in nineteen people btw! Nothing to scoff at! :D
Do you mean 1:19? Or that the actual value is 5.26%, which would give 1/19 instead of 1/20?
The percent value is about 5.3%, which is a tad better than 1 out of every 19 (1/19).
1/20 = 5%.
1/19 = 5.26%
1/18 = 5.56%
How much of that is from Steam Decks?
About a quarter of it I think. But the Steam Deck population is not growing as quickly as the rest of Linux
Ever on, indeed.
What next, demolishing the 6% barrier? "Linux desktop usage on the rise according to one specific metric" is a perfectly snappy title.