Linux gaming surges in popularity – is this the Steam Deck effect?

techradar.com:

Linux gaming has witnessed an impressive uptick in popularity among Steam gamers, going by the latest hardware survey from Valve’s gaming platform.

The hardware survey for April 2022 shows that the amount of gamers using Linux has increased to 1.14%, which is still a modest percentage, but it’s up quite strongly on the previous month when Linux sat at exactly 1.0%.

While an increase of 0.14% means very little for Windows, it’s actually a big leap for Linux, and in fact represents the second-highest level of adoption the alternative platform has witnessed in recent times, going by Valve’s figures.

What was the best month ever for Linux, you may well wonder? That’d be November 2021 when Steam’s hardware survey reported an adoption level of 1.16%, as Gaming on Linux, which reported on this, pointed out. Interestingly, that adoption percentage had climbed to that peak quite speedily since July 2021, when the Steam Deck was first announced, but since hitting that high, the percentage has drifted slowly downward to 1% in March 2022.

So what’s quite remarkable here is that we’ve seen a large spike, relatively speaking, with a jump from 1% to 1.14% – the biggest leap in recent times in the space of just a month.

As mentioned, while these are relatively small percentages of the overall Steam gaming landscape, this still looks like a promisingly large leap for Linux in April 2022. Is this a reflection of the popularity of the Steam Deck, then, helping to drive gamers to test the waters of Linux?

We believe so, although it doesn’t mean that a load of Steam Deck owners are suddenly showing up in Valve’s survey. There are a lot of Steam Decks out there now, of course – as many as Valve can possibly make and ship, though it’s not clear what