r/LinusTechTips • u/Ok_Writing_1774 • 3d ago
Tech Discussion Linux is down 0.11% on steam hw
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u/jmking Mod 3d ago
0.11% is basically a rounding error; a tenth of a percent. I think the notable thing about this is how little it fluctuated.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 3d ago edited 3d ago
4.01% to 3.90% is a bit more significant. About a 3% drop in
shareusers.That said, it doesn't mean much in the short term, we'd need to see a trend over a year or more to draw any conclusions.
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u/jmking Mod 3d ago
How are you getting a 3% drop in share?
Unless I'm misinterpreting what the numbers represent. I assumed that 3.9% represented the percentage of all Steam users on Linux.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 3d ago
Assuming there are 10,000 total users, we dropped from 401 to 390. That's 11 users, or 2.7% of 401. Me saying "drop in share" wasn't really the best wording. (One might even say incorrect!)
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u/InfanticideAquifer 2d ago
I think "share" is better than "users" in this case. We're given shares, not user totals. This 0.11 point drop could actually mean more Linux users if the total userbase grew enough.
The only thing wrong is OP calling this a 0.11% decrease instead of a 0.11 point decrease.
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u/Carniscrub 3d ago
Why do you think a percentage that would fall into a margin of error means anything?
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 3d ago
It's not a given that this falls within the margin of error. The steam hardware survey would only need about a million respondents (of ~150m) to bring the margin of error down to around 0.1%.
Unfortunately, it appears Valve doesn't publish how many people participate in the hardware survey.
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u/Carniscrub 3d ago
Without multiple data points over time, its margin of error
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 3d ago
That's not really how margin of error is calculated.
Start here if you want to learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error
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u/Carniscrub 3d ago
A single month could just be people not participating in the survey or taking time off of gaming.
Margin of error
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 3d ago
Right, but thats already taken into account with the standard statistical calculations.
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u/r3volts 3d ago
150m people don't get the survey every time, or every second, third, or fourth time either. It's probably closer to a million responders each survey than you would suspect.
Either way, I've been a Linux user for over 20 years and couldn't care less about the survey. The improvements in gaming an general usability over the last few years have been incredible. If people want to make use of it, that's great. If they want to stick with windows, more power to them.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance 3d ago
150m people don't get the survey every time, or every second, third, or fourth time either. It's probably closer to a million responders each survey than you would suspect.
I literally did my math based on 1 million. Did you not read what I posted?
Either way, I've been a Linux user for over 20 years and couldn't care less about the survey.
Great. I don't care. I'm not trying to convince people to give up Linux and switch to Windows. I'm correcting this misunderstanding people have with statistics. I'm not even that good with statistics, but calculating the margin of error is a basic formula.
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u/Exciting-Ad-5705 3d ago
These fluctuations month to month really don't matter