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Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Nnnnah, the hardware survey is a wildly different number. That's what OS each account was using when they filled the survey.
This shows they have data on what OS each user is using at the time of running each game, on both a per-game and a per-hour basis and that they can tie all of it to each account across games and OSs. Which raises the question of why they run the hardware survey OS numbers in the first place, but I suppose if you're sharing the survey results you share the survey results, even if you have more accurate data on the same stats elsewhere.
That'd be a very interesting, very different stat, though, because it means they know what percentage of Windows/Linux users go back and forth, and CAN separate Linux usage from Deck from other OSs, which they very pointedly do not do on the survey, where SteamOS doesn't have its own entry. That's unsurprising but notable, along with the fact that they don't really report on their own hardware sales, either, despite being a main source of info about GPU and CPU vendors.
Steam OS is listed in the survey, it's 26% of Linux os use.
Tracking game use by device id isn't that crazy, the steam app should know what OS it's installed on.
Is it listed? Do you have a link to that? Checking the latest survey the Linux section shows
"Arch Linux" 64 bit 0.32% +0.01%
Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.24% +0.04%
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 0.14% 0.00%
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit 0.12% +0.01%
I don't see a SteamOS segment listed as a non-Linux OS anywhere, either. If they do provide the info I'd love to see it, but it doesn't seem to be shown at a glance in the OS Version category.
Tracking game use by device isn't any more or less "crazy" than anything else they store. It's just telemetry. It's noteworthy that they share it in the format that they share it.
It's only listed if you filter to Linux. It's called steamOS Holo 64 bit.
Oh, hey, it is. Why the hell would it work that way? It seems to be manually excluded from the unfiltered list despite being by far the biggest usage.
So the data exists but it's weirdly buried for no reason.
Still, thanks for the pointer. I genuinely didn't know they had it set up that way.
Could be weirdness, or oversight, or maybe optimistically trying to quietly encourage Linux usage outside of Steam Deck? Who knows.
I think they probably felt that having SteamOS perpetually be the holder for the "most popular" slot in the Linux category is not what the survey is for.
But then, they could have also finally provided a historical chart of OS usage, or a different category for SteamOS altogether.