The latest Steam Hardware Survey for December has been published and it confirms the rising trend of the Linux platform. It's not something out of the ordinary, but it's slowly moving in the right direction.

Ever since the release of Steam for Linux, the online community has been hoping that the platform would really take off. That has happened, but not in the way people believed it will. The number of Linux games has increased tremendously, but the number of Linux players is not really budging. The good thing is that for the past few months the changes have been positive and the platform is slowly gaining more users and supporters.

As usual, we need to point out that the Steam Hardware Survey is not a very precise tool for several reasons. We don't know how many users get the survey every month, we don't know how many answer back, we don't know if the percentages from previous surveys are taken into account when sending the next batch, and these are just a few of them. The only real figure that we can count on is the one from the previous month, from Steam.

Small increase actually means more than you think

The difference from November is rather small, of only 0.03%, but we have to look at the whole picture. The number of Steam users is rising every month, so the actual increase in Linux users is bigger than you might think. If we also take into consideration that the Steam digital distribution platform usually has a 30% increase in users each year, then we can look at those percentages from a different perspective.

As it was to be expected, the first place is occupied by Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64-bit, followed by Ubuntu 14.10 64-bit, Linux 3.10 64-bit (distros using that kernel and others), Linux Mint 17 Qiana 64-bit, Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 32-bit, and Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64-bit.

These numbers will only change dramatically after the launch of the Steam Machines, the console / PC hybrid powered by SteamOS, a Linux distro, but that launch still has an undetermined date.

I think steam is going to have a large effect on windows to linux ratio. Steam has been "encouraging" companies to make games that work on both Linux and Windows. I use Ubuntu (might siwtch to Mint) about 95% of the time and am switching all of my computers to it slowly.

I'm not saying anything is "wrong" with Windows, but everything being so open and customizatable on Linux is amazing. It is also a lot more efficient (less crap you don't need).

Anyways I'm excited about Steam Console and what it will mean for Linux. Maybe Nvidia Graphics Card Drivers will improve because of it.