FirmDistributionSteam hardware survey for February 2026. What happened? Why did it lose such a big percentage?
store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
All of the results are very odd. If you look through the other categories, Simplified Chinese gained THIRTY percent, the Hard Drive categories also wildly changed, and 32 GB RAM jumped +18%. It seems to me like a bunch of Chinese systems just flooded the statistics.
They also had to correct their results last month for some reason. I think they are just having issues with their surveys rn. Also there were multiple 30+ minute steam network outages in Europe in the past few days. Europe is definitely the majority of linux steam users so that might be related.
The stats are a sample, there is inheritantly some level of error. Ignore the month to month changes, focus on the longer term trends.
Looking at the huge spike in Simplified Chinese number, it seems like yet another oversampling of Chinese computers. A more reliable metric is Linux share for computers with English as their language, currently at >8% for the first time.
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆Is it oversampling or just the fact there are a lot of users from China?