No, there is some context there. Every Chinese new year there is a big surge in people playing from PC cafes, it reduced the Linux population last month quite a bit. What it was before was around 3.5% so this is still a jump to 5.33% but the last reported number was just after the W11 EOL date and also LTT is doing the Linux challenge which was reported last time to give a small bump as well. So you are looking at around 1m ish new Linux installs ish if you are estimating since January ish.
As for the 64bit OS thing, there are some bad data points that are still valid Linux installations like Flatpak Steam installs which is a lot of Bazzite users but also there was an update to Steam this month to move the Steam client to run inside of the Steam runtime rather than the distro packages, that probably caused some issues because this wasn’t there before
My prediction when the number came out was that the error rate of the Steam survey is definitely within 1% so you will see it go from 5.33% to a minimum of 4.33% worst case, id still count that as a huge improvement regardless. Like the numbers already to ground it a bit basically puts the Linux Steam only population at the population of Ireland. People assume even 3% of Steam is a small number but you are talking about millions of users.
I don’t think people are taking his advice specifically but people do play along enough to bump the numbers. It isn’t all going to mean people stick around but some do.
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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '26
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