The number of Linux users has been increasing steadily

Sep 9, 2015 09:50 GMT  ·  By

The Steam for Linux platform seems to be on an upward trend again, and it registered an increase in the number of users, for the month of August.

We've been following the evolution of Steam for Linux ever since it was released two and half years ago. For the most part, the number of users has been steadily increasing, but it capped off at about 1.2%. A few months back, it registered a sudden drop to 0.7%, and it's been struggling to recover since then.

It's not clear why that happened, but the most likely culprit is a change in the way Valve counts the Linux users. It's improbable that a few tens of thousands of Linux users have just stopped opening Steam from one month to another, so a modification to the algorithm seems more appropriate.

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns

Valve uses a very simple system when it counts how many users there are for every platform. Each month, a survey is present to some users, and it's their choice to send the results back, which are anonymous. The problem is that it's not really clear how many Linux users get this survey, how many answer it, if the same number of surveys is given to all platforms, and so on.

This makes the counting a little bit unreliable, but it might be correct for Steam. We just don't know. What we do know is that more Linux users have been flowing towards this platform, and it's once again getting closer to 1%.

As it stands right now, Ubuntu 15.04 64-bit is king of the hill with 0.17%, Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS 64-bit is in the second place, and the third place is occupied by Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS 64-bit. The entire platform now stands at 0.92%, which has a 0.07% increase since July.

If everything continues to move into this direction, we might get to see Steam for Linux moved past 1.0% in September.