The results of a new Steam survey are in

Mar 6, 2015 15:38 GMT  ·  By

The latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey for February 2015 shows a swift and noticeable decline in the number of Linux users, which somehow contrary to the general trend from the past few months.

The Steam Linux adoption has been increasing steadily in the past few months, albeit with baby steps. It's been quite a while since the last time Linux took a dive, but it looks like we're now in a downhill slope. It's difficult to explain why this is happening, especially since we know that the Steam survey is not exactly the most precise tool available.

It's important to underline all the problems inherent with these numbers and the way they are obtained. That's the first issue. We don't know how much of the user base is interrogated, how many refuse to take it, if it goes to various platforms in equal numbers, and so on. Without this date it's hard to determine just how accurate the polling is, not even from one month to another.

The holiday season might be an important driver

The rate of Linux adoption increased slightly during the holiday season, as it was to be expected, but now it's getting down again and that might be a factor as well. If we'll see significant modifications in the rate of adoption for the Linux platform in March, it means that the current massive SteamOS sale is really having an impact.

The first place is occupied by Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit with 0.30% (0.9% drop), Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit takes the second place with 0.14% (holding still), and the third place is occupied by Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64-bit.

Unfortunately, there is no mention of other distros and we can't know just how many people with Arch Linux are using Steam. The Steam Machines will arrive in November, so until then we will have to see if Linux actually takes off or it will hold steady at around 1% for the foreseeable future.