Windows lost more Steam, too

In case you were still thinking that Windows' 0.83% user market share drop in December was some sort of an error, Steam's Software Survey has corroborated the decline, putting Steam in sync with the overall OS market for a second straight month.

Click to enlarge.

Once again, MacOS (a.k.a. OS X) and Linux were the big gainers, with MacOS 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.10 both showing strong results; the newbie-friendly Linux Mint, a distro that doesn't even register among OS users in the broader marketplace, appears to have gained a significant share among Steam users. Weirdly, only Windows 7's 64-bit version lost Steam users, with Win7's 32-bit version gaining ground alongside all other Windows versions except XP; Win7 64-bit's decline was enough to put Windows in the red overall, though, with a 0.58% overall drop which is only slightly slower than the decline seen in the overall OS market.

In isolation, this sort of behaviour among Steam users could be interpreted as resulting from Valve's Steam Play/Proton initiative, but given that Windows' decline among Steam users is actually less than that seen in the larger OS market, it's difficult to describe this as anything other than just a part of the overall trend, with Windows-dependent PC gamers actually lagging slightly behind everyone else. Whether Steam Play/Proton changes those users' decision-making calculus in the coming months is, of course, anyone's guess. It does seem to be making it somewhat easier for gamers to join the shift away from Windows, though, meaning that Microsoft shouldn't be counting too hard on PC gamers to be a backstop against the overall loss of Windows users.

Probably not a good sign

If you're Microsoft, and still hoping that the world will flock to your flagship OS (which is totes going to happen any day now, folks, just keep waiting for it), then might not be a good sign for fairly pro-Windows sites like Betanews are advocating for Linux as an alternative, in stories with headlines like this one:

Yeah.... ouch.

Quoting from the article itself:

Linux Mint is a great operating system. For those that want an alternative to Windows 10, it is a wonderful choice for two specific reasons. For one, it has a superior user interface. Whether you opt for the Cinnamon desktop environment or instead choose Mate, you will have a more intuitive experience than the insanity that is Windows 10. Secondly and more importantly, however, you don't have to worry about a billion dollar company tracking all of your activity. While telemetry sometimes has its benefits, Microsoft seems to have forgotten that their operating system is a guest on your computer. Again, it is your computer -- not the Windows-maker's.

[...]

Are you ready to take back your computer and ditch Windows 10? Use the below links to download the ISO. While both Cinnamon and Mate are solid environments, the latter is the prettier of the two. I would only recommend Mate if your computer is very under-powered. With that said, if you are already running Windows 10, your computer should handle Cinnamon perfectly fine.

[...]

• Linux Mint Cinnamon (64-bit Download) (Release notes)
• Linux Mint Mate (64-bit Download) (Release notes)

Man, the telemetry business really isn't going away, is it? And it's really not helping Microsoft at all; every time I see telemetry mentioned, it's negatively. You'd almost think that Microsoft could do themselves a huge favour by making it possible to easily opt out of data collection, or something.

But I digress. Back to Linux Mint itself, the new "Sylvia" release of which comes with some solid-sounding features, like native Flatpak support (which simplifies software installation, allowing you to "install bleeding-edge applications even if their dependencies are not compatible with Linux Mint," according to Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint) and TimeShift (which simplifies system backups), and is available now.

Did I mention that it's free? Yeah, it's free.

Windows 7 is good until 2020, so there's no rush to switch operating systems, but if you were wondering if there were other viable options available besides Windows 10, the answer would seem to be a resounding yes... and sites like Betanews are giving them more attention and good press, something which may be only just beginning. NetMarketShare may have massaged their OS market share reports until the Linux Shift was invisible again, but that doesn't mean that a shift isn't happening, or that Windows 10's ascendancy is assured. I suspect that we're in for a couple of years of interesting developments on this front... stay tuned.