Speaking of Linux, this OS family’s slice of the Steam Software Survey pie sits at 3.20%, with a not all that impressive 0.15% overall gain compared to the previous month.
Not impressive when you (deliberately?) use the absolute increase over one single month to minimize how fast the Linux share appears to be growing. If you look at its increase over approximately the last 5 years, there’s a significant and strong growth trend. November 2020 to November 2025, that’s ((3.2% - 0.9%) / 0.9%), which equals a 255% increase over that time frame. Not only is that solid growth, but the graph shows that this growth seems to be accelerating. Source for the numbers: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
You did a pet peeve of mine….
255% growth is really easy when the numbers are so small.
I worked at a place once where they were celebrating a new product because “it had 100% growth!” and ragging on another because it only had 0.5% growth and was obviously dying off.
Thing was, the product with 100% growth went from something like 200 to 400 customers, so it was technically 100%, and the 0.5% one added 800 customers but already had something like 160,000 customers so 200 customers would have been a rounding error to it.
My point is, don’t just focus on the percentages when you’re dealing with such large disparities, it can be disingenuous.
2.3 percentage points of growth is not all that small when talking about steam’s user base I think. and his point about acceleration is interesting, we might still be in the early phases of an s-curve.
personally though, as a 20-year Linux user I’m already gobsmacked by the number of new users and mainstream discussion around linux. if we never crack 5% that will already be more users than I ever thought Linux would get
I hear what you’re saying and you got a point because doing only the kind of analysis I did can sometimes be misleading; however, I think looking at relative growth instead of absolute is more informative in this case because it better illustrates a growth trend. The number of Linux PCs running Steam more than tripled in 5 years. I think that that is worth highlighting and I wanted to point it out to balance what the article had to say about Linux growth, which I really thought was minimizing how remarkable that growth is.
If Linux adoption was something of a single season, some sort of growth Linux community had in the “early 2020” your argument would be valid: you had a steady growth on Linux’s own name:
if in the 2020 Linux were 2 and.. in 2025 were were 20 = you had a 900% growthbut this is not what is happening, Linux isn’t growing on its own number, but on the number of the global PC gaming growth. New desktop/gaming PC are sold by default with Windows: it mean people don’t “choose” Windows, they simply come with the stuff they bought. Windows 11 “growth” is mostly like that: it’s not about a growth of users that willingly are choosing Windows. The very slow pace of decline of Windows 10 tell also that people is unwilling to buy into Microsoft experience… even if they are basically forced to: they also cannot chose Windows 10.
On the other side, every newcomers Linux userbase is an active and willing-fully choice: the fact that “new Windows 11” (aka: default new PC) is not restricting the Linux userbase which, on the contrary, is keeping up with the pace (no, it’s not “thanks” to steam deck also: the SD’s gpu stopped it’s growth as you can see in the Steam HW survey). These are the key elements:
-- PC gaming is growing, -- PC prebuilt market is slowing down (thanks to the ugly Windows 11) -- Windows 10 decline very slow (looks like used market and DIY rigs still attract the old "not ugly/AI" Windows 11) -- Linux is keeping the pace even tho the "pushing" of SteamDeck came to end.
If they want me to run Windows 11 then drop the specs as I am not buying a new computer. This one will either run Windows 10 until I die or it will run linux until I die. I am not buying a new computer at my age.
That’s IMO a big part of what’s different between the 7 transition and this one. Last time Microsoft was going around upgrading people’s computers for them, and even if people didn’t want to jump to 10 right away, they allowed Win 7, 8, and 8.1 keys to activate it pretty much whenever. Now with their hardware requirement, they’re official line is telling people without TPM that their hardware is junk when they stop supporting Win 10. That drove people to look for the better alternative Microsoft won’t tell you about.
The TPM2 requirement is purely to drum up sales for hardware vendors and ensure that they keep bundling Windows with their machines.
Is there an official statement how long Steam will support and run on Windows 10?
I think they supported Windows 7 just until it became too much of a burden to do so. They dropped 7, 8, and 8.1 at the same time, January 1st 2024
They had to drop support because the chromium steam uses to display the store and many other things dropped support for those OS, so their hand was forced to fix security holes. I suspect a similar situation here - as long as the browser supports it, they will keep support for win10 alive.
They dropped 7, 8, and 8.1 at the same time, January 1st 2024
the actual ‘end of service’ dates for win7 (with the max 3 years esu) and 8/8.1 all occurred during the first half of 2023… so they gave a whole six months of extra life on those versions.
it’s very surprising to me that the end of win7 was so close to win10’s end lol
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It’s dead on my computers cos I dumped it for Linux
Well, if the alternative is the awful Windows 11, then no thanks.
Too bad I can’t use Linux, for many reasons.
I still see winXP on things every once in a while. 10 won’t be dead and buried for at least another decade, if not longer
