Reporting every bit of noise in this statistic is kinda boring?
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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To be fair, the spike up in the noise in march was reported widely. Now the "correction" can be as well IMO. But oh well, lets hope there is a tleasr a larger trend to Linux
I'm doing my part 🙂
Sorry. My fault. I've been working too much to play games.
I wonder what the sampling/reporting issue is? Why Chinese specifically? Are there droves of Chinese gamers flip-flopping between Linux and Windows? That doesn't seem likely.
I think it's that Chinese gamers are much more likely to use Windows and that sampling is random so whenever too many Chinese computers are selected on sampling the Linux share decreases
F*ck that's on me. I took a break from gaming to focus on other projects + the occasional GBA SP.
Sorry dudes forgot to fill in my survey
The Year of Linux is, when China bans Windows.
Happening now actually, according to this
Not exactly what I meant. They ban for the government, similar to what is happening in Europe. It won't have any effect on gamers, as no one is forced to give up Windows (other than the government bodies themselves).
I am pretty sure they banned gaming at work a long time ago.
I'm talking about banning Windows for any citizen.
I've actually been surprised that they haven't already
I am surprised that any nation would adopt a closed source product from abroad when it could build its own, especially given Linux. In a world like this, choosing that path seems genuinely diabolical.
Nations where using Windows for years when Linux came out. And it took at least two decades for Linux to be a viable option for governments, because they are dependent on Windows and didn't have much experience in Linux. But the "turns have tabled", finally. The world woke up.
It's extremely hard to believe that someone that has had a taste of Linux would switch back to Windows, if this is what the stats imply, which I'm not sure. I would need to be paid thousands to willingly use Windows again.
The stats imply there were more chinese users surveyed this month and chinese steam users don't use linux much
Sampling variation/statistical noise, probably. I wouldn't read too far into it.
I mean the stats very clearly are useless this month for Linux usage as they are all months that have this simplified Chinese spike.
I still don't get why I can't opt in to participate in the survey every month, I've only been asked twice in the last three years on Arch
Because thats not how good stats works. They want random samples to draw actual stats from.
Volunteering ruins the point.
Yeah, you have a point, but still, twice in three years? I don't know how representative it really is, ESPECIALLY when you see 50-100% ups and downs in the Linux user base. 5 to 3 percent and back cannot be the actual stat, that has to be unreliable selection of users.
steam has at least 130 million monthly active users
a margin of error of 1% (resulting in a range of 3–5%) is very, very good
They could just pull the stats from every system
privacy issue
censuses only have marginally better results than random sampling
Probably. But it'd 50x the cost of the tool. And for only marginally better results.
Would pushing a request through steam to participate in the survey realistically increase cost?
It's disappointing how weak minded people are.