7 ms·

I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey sho

I've probably said this a bunch of times already, but based on my past experience, any analysis built on month-to-month changes in the Steam Hardware Survey should be taken with a very large grain of salt, if not considered outright useless for any serious conclusions. The clue is already in the article itself. The author notes that "part of the jump at least appears to be explained by Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers." If you actually think about what that implies, it raises more questions than answers. A 31.85% monthly drop is obviously not organic, so yes, it makes sense to call it a "correction." But then why was the previous month's data so far off in the first place? Is there something fundamentally flawed in the survey methodology, like sampling bias, non-uniform distribution, regional skew, or something else? And if this kind of correction happens this month, what's stopping it from happening in previous months? The reality is: it does happen all the time. You can usually spot at least one clearly unrealistic data point in almost every release. At that point, it's hard to argue there's any real value in trying to analyze these results in a rigorous way.

amarant 6mo ago
I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!
- malbs 6mo ago
  to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise. next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
  - amarant 6mo ago
    Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS
    - malbs 6mo ago
      I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
      - HDBaseT 6mo ago
        I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like: Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists. I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set. He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
      - mcv 6mo ago
        Doesn't Cachy support all of the DEs? Use it to try them all. (I don't know how CachyOS handles it; EndeavourOS lets you pick the DE on login.
        malbs 6mo ago
        yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  It has been achieved with WSL on Windows, and Virtualisation Framework on macOS. Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.
- BigJono 6mo ago
  Well, if it's any indication, my sister, who is very much not a tech person, randomly asked me to help her install Linux Mint a month ago, and has been using it successfully since without needing to ask for help once (at least not from me, I suspect ChatGPT is getting a workout). That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.
  - antihipocrat 6mo ago
    There's a tipping point and we may be getting close. A few of my friends' kids & nephews have recently switched. Now that Valve seems to have solved the gaming compatibility issue, what Windows only software is left for teenagers to use that OS?
    - majewsky 6mo ago
      Also, regardless of what you think of LLMs, it makes tech support for Linux a whole lot more accessible to the average person. There is going to be less of an expectation now that you need to have a Linux guru on speed dial for the occasional weird edge case situation.
  - ChoGGi 6mo ago
    > but if random normies start using it without fanfare From the normies I know, they only vaguely know what chatgpt is and sure don't use it.
- taskforcegemini 6mo ago
  a lot of people don't even have a computer and do everything on their phone. Given androids market share, one could argue Linux is already present on most desk tops and therefore has already won.
faangguyindia 6mo ago
This time it's different. Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch. everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns. Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast. using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.
- unixhero 6mo ago
  I have tried Arch btw
HDBaseT 6mo ago
The key word in the article is "again" 'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.' This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month. This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."
- BoredPositron 6mo ago
  It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.
  - braiamp 6mo ago
    It's about oversampling. Due how the survey is sent, a massive influx of machines coming online all at once will be more likely to trigger the survey. They know the general composition of their users, so they need the survey to be around the ballpark of that.
    - BoredPositron 6mo ago
      They are still only reporting the data they see. They are not correcting or manipulating the data like phoronix implies in their article.
- keyringlight 6mo ago
  The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.
HerbManic 6mo ago
Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months. Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.
- jstummbillig 6mo ago
  > Even if it wasn't for corrections > Loads of people This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
  > Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? Everyone who bought a gaming PC last year, only to be told it has to be scrapped now because Windows 11 doesn't like the colour of the power cable.
ThatPlayer 6mo ago
The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday. It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%
- hkmaxpro 6mo ago
  How does a Jan/Feb holiday affect this year’s March number (that was reported in early April)? I’m not talking about the Feb number that is reported in March.
  - jdiff 6mo ago
    A holiday that warps numbers in February will no longer be warping things in March.
  - ThatPlayer 6mo ago
    The number being discussed is not March alone, but the percent change. So March's number relative to February's number.
krs_ 6mo ago
Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
- Zhyl 6mo ago
  Yes, this is the key. You can account for anomalies such as Lunar New year, do rolling averages and other statistical modelling to show trends. Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.
zokier 6mo ago
Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&filters=deviceType%253DDesktop%252CbotClass%253DLikely_Human https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o... Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.
- helterskelter 6mo ago
  This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.
  - microcode 6mo ago
    If you spoof user agent, you will get more captchas because it won't match their other fingerprinting.
    - LtdJorge 6mo ago
      You also get more captchas because you are on Linux, I see the Cloudflare one on my computer everytime.
      - NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
        Used to be worse. Something happened in the last year and I'm seeing way way less random captchas for regular use from a residential IP. In '22-'24 it used to be extremely common, now it's an event when it happens. Also went from mint to plain ubuntu so that might have something to do with it?
        Aerroon 6mo ago
        It's a good thing too, because when I see the Cloudflare captcha I try it once and if that doesn't work then I just close the tab and add it to the list of non-functioning websites. Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.
Tade0 6mo ago
I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.
bilekas 6mo ago
Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased. Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever. The future is bright.
WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt Agreed. January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.
everdrive 6mo ago
Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.
nimbius 6mo ago
unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole. - Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library. - console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan. - steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.

amarant 6mo ago

I mean you make good points and all, but on the other hand I really want this to be the year of the Linux desktop, so I'm gonna go with the other interpretation anyway!

malbs 6mo ago
to give you a single data point, I've finally committed to linux on my desktop machine at home (I posted in another comment on this thread regarding my sim setup, thats another issue), but on the desktop machine, I installed steam, proton, downloaded a few games from my library, and they just worked on install, no stuffing around at all, no searching the web for fixes to get it going. It's probably been 6 years since I tried it, and last time I tried pretty much every game needed _something_) to be done to get it working. The level of technical knowledge required to get it going now is minimal, so maybe 2026 is the year of linux the one caveat was, ubuntu 24.04 LTS still didn't recognise my xbox wireless controller out of the box, and I needed to get xone and compile it and install the driver, a minor inconvenience, but something that would be beyond one of my daughtrs or wife. I've since moved back to debian though but already armed with that knowledge so it wasn't any kind of surprise. next step will be to migrate my work machine, but that one is more difficult because the primary dev is in Delphi, so it'll probably be a case of linux on the hardware, and virtualbox running a win10 VM to do compilations, the other parts of the job are basically all o/s independent python dev, so no problem there.. although I will miss toad for oracle.
- amarant 6mo ago
  Yeah I think for the not-so-tech-savvy gamer, there are better distros than Ubuntu. Ubuntu(and Debian) tend to lag behind the cutting edge a bit too. For such users I'd probably recommend fedora (or one of it's variants) or just straight up steamOS
  - malbs 6mo ago
    I tried cachy, but I decided I hate the kde plasma environment, I should have chosen some other window manager but wanted to try the recommended one there is also something to be said, negatively, for the number of distros now, cambrian explosion since the good old days of slack, deb, redhat, suse lol
    - HDBaseT 6mo ago
      I honestly believe one of the main, highly supported Distros like: Debian, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Nix, etc are all better choices than Catchy, Manjaro, Bazzite or whatever else niche distro exists. I commonly find myself running into weird issues that I would of never run into otherwise. Bazzite for example by default, opens Steam on boot. This caused my games drives to not be mapped in Steam. (I assume Steam somehow booted before my drives were properly mapped) I helped my friend for hours troubleshooting his fstab config, rebooting, etc, but then realized it was just a default that he never set. He quit Linux because of this (and some other minor gripes) and I don't think the gaming distros do much to properly help.
    - mcv 6mo ago
      Doesn't Cachy support all of the DEs? Use it to try them all. (I don't know how CachyOS handles it; EndeavourOS lets you pick the DE on login.
      - malbs 6mo ago
        yeah, on install you select a window manager, I didn't bother trying any others, just opted to go to Debian instead
pjmlp 6mo ago
It has been achieved with WSL on Windows, and Virtualisation Framework on macOS. Other than that, I am still waiting for when I can buy a Dell, Asus, HP laptop on Media Markt or FNAC, with GNU/Linux pre-installed having 100% of the hardware being supported.
BigJono 6mo ago
Well, if it's any indication, my sister, who is very much not a tech person, randomly asked me to help her install Linux Mint a month ago, and has been using it successfully since without needing to ask for help once (at least not from me, I suspect ChatGPT is getting a workout). That felt like an indicator to me. I only switched to Linux a year or two ago and haven't mentioned it to her once, so she got the idea from somewhere else, and had enough impetus from whatever she disliked about Windows to actually go through with the change. If I was in marketing at Microsoft I'd be shitting myself over that, assuming Windows even still fits into their long term plans somehow. It's one thing for 100,000 techies to preach Linux across the web, but if random normies start using it without fanfare, that's real change.
- antihipocrat 6mo ago
  There's a tipping point and we may be getting close. A few of my friends' kids & nephews have recently switched. Now that Valve seems to have solved the gaming compatibility issue, what Windows only software is left for teenagers to use that OS?
  - majewsky 6mo ago
    Also, regardless of what you think of LLMs, it makes tech support for Linux a whole lot more accessible to the average person. There is going to be less of an expectation now that you need to have a Linux guru on speed dial for the occasional weird edge case situation.
- ChoGGi 6mo ago
  > but if random normies start using it without fanfare From the normies I know, they only vaguely know what chatgpt is and sure don't use it.
taskforcegemini 6mo ago
a lot of people don't even have a computer and do everything on their phone. Given androids market share, one could argue Linux is already present on most desk tops and therefore has already won.

faangguyindia 6mo ago

This time it's different. Linux was already stable enough 10 years ago as daily driver, i used Arch. everything worked just fine, i remember only having issue with graphic drivers and glitches I never really wanted anything more from it but when i moved to Mac, i saw how it prevents me from opening apps i downloaded from trusted site and every now and then i need to set xattr to open the files, and go through bunch of lockdowns. Now freecad has improved so much, with all AI coding and all opensource will improve DRASTICALLY and very fast. using AI which stole everyone's code to develop OpenSource is morally right thing to do vs using it at private companies. It will attract more devs.

unixhero 6mo ago
I have tried Arch btw

HDBaseT 6mo ago

The key word in the article is "again" 'Valve correcting again the Steam China numbers.' This seemingly is a common problem with the Steam Hardware Report, with Chinese users being erroneously represented. It constantly gets fixed, although takes a bit. It could be the hardware surveys are sent out at a different time compared to the rest of the world, then combined in the following month. This is proven by "Ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February."

BoredPositron 6mo ago
It's because of the Chinese user influx during their holiday season. Valve is not correcting anything they are just showing the data. As usual, Phoronix is misinterpreting what they're looking at.
- braiamp 6mo ago
  It's about oversampling. Due how the survey is sent, a massive influx of machines coming online all at once will be more likely to trigger the survey. They know the general composition of their users, so they need the survey to be around the ballpark of that.
  - BoredPositron 6mo ago
    They are still only reporting the data they see. They are not correcting or manipulating the data like phoronix implies in their article.
keyringlight 6mo ago
The other aspect I find interesting is the February spike in win10 usage, presumably from Chinese users. Where will they migrate to over the coming years as support goes away. They seem to be both resisting win11 and resisting linux perhaps as either it's not suitable for the games (online?) they play or not great for Chinese users, or perhaps along with the nvidia spike because of getting more out of those GPUs on windows.

HerbManic 6mo ago

Even if it wasn't for corrections, one has to look at the longer trends and not just single months. Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? I say this as someone that been a Linux daily runner since about 2010.

jstummbillig 6mo ago
> Even if it wasn't for corrections > Loads of people This is all fine (and might even be true) but not having to fill in the gaps with anecdotal data and wishful thinking is precisely what good statistics are for. Bad statistics, on the other hand, make for a bad conversation starter because everyone is confused and it gets worse from there.
ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
> Loads of people switch to Linux but I do wonder how many are still there a year later? Everyone who bought a gaming PC last year, only to be told it has to be scrapped now because Windows 11 doesn't like the colour of the power cable.

ThatPlayer 6mo ago

The explanation I've heard is simply: Chinese New Years happened, which means a lot more Chinese gamers are online in February during the week long national holiday. It happened in last year's March stats too: https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250404061527/https://store.ste... -25%

hkmaxpro 6mo ago
How does a Jan/Feb holiday affect this year’s March number (that was reported in early April)? I’m not talking about the Feb number that is reported in March.
- jdiff 6mo ago
  A holiday that warps numbers in February will no longer be warping things in March.
- ThatPlayer 6mo ago
  The number being discussed is not March alone, but the percent change. So March's number relative to February's number.

krs_ 6mo ago

Overall agreed. I think a more interesting look at this is the tracker which GamingOnLinux keeps (not yet updated with the new numbers as of writing), where they also have one graph that shows usage among only English speaking users. Overall it is trending upwards, and English Linux Steam users are approaching 9%. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Zhyl 6mo ago
Yes, this is the key. You can account for anomalies such as Lunar New year, do rolling averages and other statistical modelling to show trends. Saying that one source of data should be discarded because it contains nuance is.. a take.

zokier 6mo ago

Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&filters=deviceType%253DDesktop%252CbotClass%253DLikely_Human https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o... Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.

helterskelter 6mo ago
This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.
- microcode 6mo ago
  If you spoof user agent, you will get more captchas because it won't match their other fingerprinting.
  - LtdJorge 6mo ago
    You also get more captchas because you are on Linux, I see the Cloudflare one on my computer everytime.
    - NitpickLawyer 6mo ago
      Used to be worse. Something happened in the last year and I'm seeing way way less random captchas for regular use from a residential IP. In '22-'24 it used to be extremely common, now it's an event when it happens. Also went from mint to plain ubuntu so that might have something to do with it?
      - Aerroon 6mo ago
        It's a good thing too, because when I see the Cloudflare captcha I try it once and if that doesn't work then I just close the tab and add it to the list of non-functioning websites. Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.

Tade0 6mo ago

I filled out the survey yesterday and it didn't notice my dGPU. No way to correct the entries as well.

bilekas 6mo ago

Agree the numbers are not set in stone, but there is absolutely no denying that the Linux userbase has increased. Proton's updates is a game changer, Windows 11's absolutely garbage buggy slop is frustrating more and more people. OS' like CachyOS and Bazzite etc making the transition far more approachable than ever. The future is bright.

WhyNotHugo 6mo ago

> any analysis built on month-to-month changes […] should be taken with a very large grain of salt Agreed. January and February are school vacations in South America. The whole month. Kids have a lot more free hours to tinker and play video games. That might not be the cause of the spike in this particular case, but there's probably dozens of similar random facts that can affect statistics on any month in unexpected ways.

everdrive 6mo ago

Really happy to see this kind of analysis on HN. The news you want to hear the most must also be looked at critically, and as much as I love Linux gaming we want to be sober in our expectations.

nimbius 6mo ago

unpopular opinion: this can be explained by the social and monetary economics of the gaming ecosystem as a whole. - Microsoft has worked tirelessly to make the windows compute experience an evermore intrusive and soul crushing experience for the average gamer. artificially outmoded hardware at a time of GPU scarcity means consumers cant comply with redmonds increasingly arbitrary hardware edicts even if they wanted to. at the same time, linux has become ever easier to install and use as an alternative. there is likely an inflection point for a lot of gamers that are just looking to access their library. - console gaming has become hideously overpriced. madatory tie-ins with playstation network, high costs for all consoles, and the potential for the console stocks to simply not be available at time of release make for a frictional and frustrating experience. Microslop is embracing the same playstation style enshittification that routinely brings sony to its knees. neither juggernaut seems genuinely interested in the end user with the exception of Nintendo, whos quality control issues and pricing as well with switch hardware make it a nonstarter for anyone but the most diehard zelda fan. - steam + linux offers a largely seamless experience for the casual gamer. steam sales are fun and engaging. the community is generally well rounded. gabe newell is generally well respected by gamers and visibly interested in gaming and the community. Valve has contributed significantly to Linux since their push to obliterate the Windows store and shows no sign of retreat anytime soon. Steam + Linux is free and works with your existing hardware in a time of high prices, inflation, and scarcity in the western world.