Just had the Steam Survey pop up and so as always decided to participate and quickly look at some of the stats. I was honestly a bit surprised to see Windows 11 drop by 10.43% in February. Year of Linux Desktop now lol?
You must log in or register to comment.
Does anybody have a year-over-year comparison instead of month-to-month?
Diving deeper, it seems like Windows was over-represented last month due to the Chinese New Year.
Still pretty fucking amazing that one out of every twenty Steam gamers uses Linux.
Whats the relation to the chinese new year?
A lot of Chinese gamers have free time and go play games in shops that use Windows PCs.
The Steam Deck is pretty good and that helps a lot.
febuary is the odd month in steam hardware year because theres usually a heavy spike of chinese pc gamers playing in cafes due to free time from CNY, so whatever is in those cafe pcs are over represented in the statistics for febuary
Ah see these are the kind of interesting data points I love lol. I always find it insane to think that the CNY period can impact so many areas on opposite ends of the scale. Like tourism and gaming for example
In this case, I wonder how the year-over-year comparison looks as opposed to month-to-month.
When is this from? The current stats are quite different.
February, before it was switched over, same as OP. Note also that your screenshot doesn’t match the -10% on Win11 that got OP to make the post in the first place.
Ah, ok.
I recently completely switched to Bazzite (after being unable to run Forza Horizon 4 Ultimate that I paid for on Win10), and I’ve honestly been shocked that everything has just… worked. Obviously GamePass is out, but all my “Windows only” Steam/GoG games run at a buttery smooth 120fps, and it’s been awesome knowing I now maintain 0% Windows OS installs on my local stack.
Chinese +30%, it’s likely just new users with older OSes (Windows 10?)
If you expand the header, windows overall gained 1.99%.
Ah my bad, didn’t realise I could expand that, never really participated in the survey before.
I find that quote interesting that W10 had a bump, like I get W11 is a bit of a piece of hot garbage, but running an unsupported OS over that? Or am I mistaken here too about W10 being end of life?
Lots of people don’t give a flying fuck about running unsupported OS’s on their machines if it still does everything you want, security tends to be an afterthought.
Though this is windows we’re talking about so security wasn’t ever really a forethought in the development process of it so I can’t really blame the users.
Technically we are still getting security updates for another year provided you jump through some onedrive backup loophole.
I will re-examine how lazy I am vs the difficulty of Linux in 11 months time.
I’m an idiot and Mint has been a piece of cake, even installing it, even with an NVIDIA graphics card and gaming. My biggest regret is not doing it sooner.
Caveat: I don’t rely on Adobe products, YMMV depending on your exact needs. But I don’t even have Wine installed because I just haven’t needed it.
Have you heard of WinBoat?
It runs a Windows VM in the background and then connects to it using remote desktop.
Give it a try now. There’s loads of user friendly distro choices now.
There is extended support for a year. Even without an MS account and for several more years if you use massgrave. There are also ltsc (iot) versions which will be supported until up to 2032.
Ah okay thats fair. Are these extended supports easy for the average user to access? Or is it more of a ‘if you know what you’re doing’ type thing?
i dont remember the details of the official way since i switched to linux before that. but for the unofficial massgrave stuff you need to be somewhat of a nerd i guess.
Where are you seeing that? I see Windows 11 gained, but Windows lost 4.28% overall.
This was from the February survey that op was referencing.
You should try refreshing and taking another look. Chinese dropped by 31%, and Linux share is now showing north of 5%.
Wow! 5.33% for Linux in March 2026: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
Holy shit! That’s fucking amazing!
Finally, The Year Of Linux.
The month of the Linux desktop 🤣😂🤣
As it was foretold
I find the RTX 5070 being the top GPU… surprising.
A lot of people make their decision by “What’s the best new Nvidia card I can afford?” and nothing more complicated. Once they have to start comparing chips across different companies or even different generations, it’s more thinking than they want to do.
I mean it’s weird that any current gen card is the most common. Most people can’t (and probably shouldn’t) upgrade every generation.
Same, especially in this market
