The latest Steam Survey had a huge surge of Simplified Chinese

We did have a previous shonky month where you gave up waiting and put the data on your tracker as the best option, and Valve finally got round to publishing the correct data after something like three weeks.

My own participation got messed up by a bug triggered by whatever Steam uses to do a hardware survey - that bug causes a complete amdgpu reset (probably not on all GPUs, but at least a few).

I am unsure how common that bug is, but if a percentage of Linux users are affected, it could lead to some skewing as well.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9267

"Quite a stark drop, since Linux isn't particularly popular in Asia and again, "
or maybe it is popular on asia, but not on cybercafes?
by popular i mean as much as it is elsewhere, arround 1%...


anyway, where is the GPU data on the survey? to be more specific the model used on steamdeck...


Last edited by elmapul on 13 April 2023 at 2:17 pm UTC

Quoting: elmapulanyway, where is the GPU data on the survey? to be more specific the model used on steamdeck...

As expected, a drop as well:
AMD AMD Custom GPU 0405 0.18% -0.09%
It's not like the Chinese would install Windows 10 on their masses of new Steam Decks...

Given that Steam proper is blocked in mainland China, but AIUI many people there still use it because the local version of Steam has very few games, here's some hypotheses:

1. Steam proper got temporarily un-blocked by the Great Firewall for whatever reason, and all the people with Steam installed were able to connect for a short time.

2. Some very popular game was released/updated on Steam, so a lot of Chinese people risked using a VPN to connect and download it.

3. Some game was released on Steam which was interpreted to be critical of the CCP, so a bunch of fake accounts got created to review-bomb and report the game for "hate speech". (As has happened before)

4. Valve accidentally mixed in the stats from the PRC Steam version with the main Steam stats (again?)

I have some theories and opinions on why Linux isn't particular popular in non-English speaking countries.

It's because, in my opinion, the experience for Non-English speaking users on Linux isn't particularly great.

Aside from often lackluster translations available for software on Linux, and the OSes themselves, and even the distro websites, or OS manuals, the bigger issue is that the UX on Linux is still not quite at the point where someone could sit down at a Linux OS desktop PC and figure out every issue through navigating a GUI alone. It's not that completely self explanatory. It's still necessary to go online for help, and often the answers will be on Reddit, or Github, or some online forum, etc, and all of it in English.

And it's often the case that there's no where to go online to ask for help because most of the Linux communities are English-only. Either through enforced rules forbidding people from using languages other than English or simply because no one in the communities happens to speak a language other than English, or at least few enough speak non-English languages to make finding help online basically a non-starter.

I just don't think multilanguage support on Linux seems to be a particularly high priority and so it's not surprising to me at all that the userbase numbers in non-English speaking countries is so low.

English is spoken by less than 1 in 5 people on the planet, as long as multilanguage support on Linux remains lackluster, I think that's going to keep holding back growth in non-English markets.

Maybe we should stop using only percentage numbers as a measure for Linux adoption and also start using estimated absolute numbers (by multiplying the percentage of Linux users with the estimated total number of Steam accounts). It would be more inaccurate (since we are also using estimated numbers of the total number of Steam accounts), but it could give us a better understanding of speed of adoption (the percentage of the total might decline, but we still might get a higher increment of people using Linux in that month).

Quoting: gradyvuckovicIt's because, in my opinion, the experience for Non-English speaking users on Linux isn't particularly great.

That's definitely an issue that will never get resolved unless someone took a humongous amount of cash into their hands and just made it happen.

Even when restricting it to Latin alphabet languages, you can get distros themselves with pretty good language support in some languages (German for sure, probably French, not sure about Spanish) - but as you said, as soon as you leave the confines of the distro interface, it's English or bust.
There is no "Microsoft help"-equivalent that would offer support for basically every question in basically every language - yes, I know those pages are crap, but at least they exist.
Or an automatically translated StackOverflow (and likes) that would be search-indexed for helping non-English speakers.

In my own experience, support is especially terrible for Chinese.
For a while I tried learning it and the hoops I had to jump through just to get keyboard support for Pinyin was absolutely crazy. Meanwhile on Windows, you can just go to languages, install Simplified/Traditional Chinese and you're done.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 13 April 2023 at 2:43 pm UTC

Quoting: gradyvuckovicI have some theories and opinions on why Linux isn't particular popular in non-English speaking countries.

It's because, in my opinion, the experience for Non-English speaking users on Linux isn't particularly great.

Aside from often lackluster translations available for software on Linux, and the OSes themselves, and even the distro websites, or OS manuals, the bigger issue is that the UX on Linux is still not quite at the point where someone could sit down at a Linux OS desktop PC and figure out every issue through navigating a GUI alone. It's not that completely self explanatory. It's still necessary to go online for help, and often the answers will be on Reddit, or Github, or some online forum, etc, and all of it in English.

And it's often the case that there's no where to go online to ask for help because most of the Linux communities are English-only. Either through enforced rules forbidding people from using languages other than English or simply because no one in the communities happens to speak a language other than English, or at least few enough speak non-English languages to make finding help online basically a non-starter.

I just don't think multilanguage support on Linux seems to be a particularly high priority and so it's not surprising to me at all that the userbase numbers in non-English speaking countries is so low.

English is spoken by less than 1 in 5 people on the planet, as long as multilanguage support on Linux remains lackluster, I think that's going to keep holding back growth in non-English markets.

To be fair Linux is rather popular in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia and Ukraine. There's a fairly large community in those countries that use Linux, they even have their own distros optimized for their language. I think this stems from the "hacker culture" from the early 2000's and the pirated games you could get in flea markets at the time. As far as I'm aware, asia never had that to the same extent and was more console focused in general, hence why no interest in linux there.

Many Eastern European distros have patched language support (for example Ark on KDE does not show proper cyrillic names) and they have browsers (like Yandex Browser) that automatically translates all english text to Russian/translates english videos to Russian in realtime. Until this happens for Chinese language, it likely won't pickup popularity.


Last edited by MercifulBoss on 13 April 2023 at 2:43 pm UTC

Quoting: MercifulBossand they have browsers (like Yandex Browser) that automatically translates all english text to Russian

Chromium can translate web pages as a whole. This is one of the reasons why I keep it around.