14 DAY TRIAL // The Linux market share in Steam has dropped significantly for a second month in a row, and it's enough for us to ask ourselves whether something else weird might be going on.
The month of April saw one of the biggest declines in Linux usage for Steam, and the number dropped under 1% after a very long time. The community was hoping to see it rise again for May, but the trend seems to be continuing and Linux has just hit a new low.
The reasons for the sudden drop in Linux use are not evident, and the numbers are different enough to think that something else might be going on, most likely with the way Valve is gathering the data or in the way it is processed.
If we ignore the percent for a moment, it's easy to see some of the issues. We don't know how many people get the survey each month, we don't know if the survey is presented in representative proportions on each platform or if they are sent randomly, we don't know how many people respond, and so on.
Linux numbers are dropping. Or are they?
And then, this is just math. The current Linux market share is 0.88%, and there is a 0.8% decrease from the previous month. If we take 0.88% as the total number of people who use Linux and we take into consideration that the total number of Steam users has increased much more than the rate of growth for the Linux platform, we should see a drop.
On the other hand, it's quite possible that the Linux users are really dropping dramatically, and there is no good explanation for it. Maybe Valve knows more, but they have never shared this kind of info with the rest of the world.
You can check the rest of the data from the Steam Hardware Survey on the official website.