Valve Adds Specific Linux Distro Breakdown to Hardware Survey

When we took a look at Steam’s updated hardware survey earlier this month, we noted that Linux Mint received a small mention – something that didn’t happen the month prior. But, a problem became obvious: there was a rather large number (1%+) of “Other” OSes, which many presumed were the multitude of other distros that either had such a small piece of the pie and didn’t deserve a mention, or simply couldn’t be deciphered by Valve. Well, we now have an answer.

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but Valve recently updated its hardware survey to explode the “Other” result, and boy – did it ever increase the size of the list. Now, we see mentions of Fedora, Debian, Gentoo, Elementary, Arch, Chakra, Zorin, Sabayon and Majaro. The largest non-Ubuntu distro is Linux Mint 14 64-bit, with a 0.17% share. Past that, Arch sits at 0.05%.

Overall, these percentages are small, but what it does show is that there is genuine interest from Linux gamers that desperately want to run Steam on their distro of choice. While I’m very happy that Steam for Linux is a reality, I haven’t really dealt with it too much since its launch simply because it’s not native to my distro. Sure – you can usually work-around an issue, but that’s hardly my idea of a good time.

It’ll be interesting to see the hardware survey update next month and see where many of these alternative distros stand.