That 3% jump seems almost too big for me to believe. With the seemingly annual increase of Chinese users in February, which is then corrected in March (which we can see this time), I’d probably wait another month or two if more stats get adjusted or if Linux stays at over 5%.
Comment on Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 22 hours ago
What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:
| OS | Total % of Players | Monthly Change |
|---|---|---|
| Windows (Total) | 92.33% | -4.28% |
| Windows 11 64 bit | 66.85% | +10.57% |
| Windows 10 64 bit | 25.36% | -14.89% |
| Linux (Total) | 5.33% | +3.10% |
| Arch Linux 64 bit | 0.34% | +0.15% |
| Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit | 0.27% | +0.13% |
| Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit | 0.14% | +0.06% |
| Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit | 0.07% | +0.02% |
| Ubuntu 25.10 64 bit | 0.06% | +0.06% |
| Manjaro Linux 64 bit | 0.06% | +0.06% |
From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.
Poopfeast420@lemmy.zip 18 hours ago
Folstar@lemmus.org 10 hours ago
I would be more suspicious of starting the year at 3.5% and dipping to 2.23% in Feb. If we ignore that oddity it makes for a less exciting headline, but jumping from 3.5% to 5.33% in the months after Microslop canned Win10 and slopped up Win11 tracks.
Poopfeast420@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
The drop last month was because Chinese users increased by 30% (which were removed or whatever this month).
So even if you’re going to be pedantic and ignore the whole of February and just go from the January stats to March directly, 3.5% to 5.3% is a massive jump that doesn’t make sense. Why suddenly this month? Why not last year when W10 support ended?
One possible explanation is that maybe the old 3% Linux base was wrong and now something has been accounted for or has been corrected, so in reality it has been around 5% for a while, which is now shown correctly. That’s why I’m saying I’m gonna wait a bit to take these stats at face value.
BreakerSwitch@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
iirc, the steam survey data isn’t always well distributed, and so it isn’t the most reliable. Sometimes most of the surveyed are in China and the swings are more relevant to usage there, and then when the next survey comes out the shift is more based on demographic than broad trends. That being said, we will been seeing consistent growth on linux usage across the board for months so I don’t think this is a fluke
Poopfeast420@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Sure, but there are so many Steam users every month, that even if only 1% or 0.1% of people get the survey, that’s still a ton of people (over 40M concurrent, estimated 130M+ users every month)
Also, have the Linux users increased by over 50% month-to-month? The jump from ~3% at the start of the year to over 5% is huge.
It’s possible there was something wrong with the data before and the 3% wasn’t accurate or there’s something wrong now and the 5% is not correct. That’s all I’m saying.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 11 hours ago
Last month had Chinese New Year in it, and apparently China isn’t big on Linux
Poopfeast420@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Yeah, but it’s not like it was at almost 5% in January.
As I wrote in another comment, if you ignore February completely, ~3% to ~5% in a month or two is gigantic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it drops back down again next month, but maybe it stays at 5% because the old data was faulty.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 8 hours ago
Folstar@lemmus.org 10 hours ago
I hope you are correct. If we extrapolate out, Linux could easily approach 10% as more people leave Win10 and split. There may even be a positive feedback loop where people leaving Win10 (and frustrated Win11 users) see that Linux is completely viable for gaming.
cybervseas@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
In lifetime customer value it’s billions
NateNate60@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
The majority of people will ignore advertisements. Usually less than 10% of people will respond to advertisements and an even small percentage will buy something. Out of 742,000 advertisement impressions, they’d be lucky to get 1,000 sales.
cabbage@piefed.social 17 hours ago
My impression is that Microsoft won’t care all that much. They are primarily a cloud service provider at this point, and while they will try to squeeze Windows users for as much money and information as possible before it goes down for good they have no real interest in keeping on developing Windows. It’s just not where the real money is at.
It doesn’t make sense outside the world of capitalism, but we see again and again that big tech companies are happy to kill even profitable services if they are not their most profitable services. Microsoft’s revenue these days comes from selling cloud office solutions to (seemingly) every company on the planet. Even their own cloud runs on Linux, meaning that Microsoft themselves makes more money off Linux than Windows these days.
Windows is now in the extraction phase of enshittification, and Microsoft will profit as much as they can from it while they still have market power while spending minimal resources developing the product. Windows has effectively been declared dead already, and remains as a sofware zombie just like Facebook. Windows 12 is not going to be an improvement upon 11; it’ll be another fuck you to the customers, and the beatings will continue until customers leave for good and Microsoft are finally relieved of their side gig of making an operative system.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 9 hours ago
I think we’re both right in a way. They won’t care about Windows specifically, but Windows to them isn’t the product anymore. It’s the entrypoint for users to Microsoft services, which is why they advertise so much in Windows now for OneDrive, Office, Copilot. You’re essentially already in their store just by using Windows. So the real loss isn’t that people aren’t using Windows, it’s that people are cancelling OneDrive and Office subscriptions. That is what is going to be noticed.
cabbage@piefed.social 5 hours ago
Yes, absolutely. They are digging their grave with their transition to being an AI company and it will absolutely catch up with them eventually.