After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions.
Context is computers dual booting Windows and Ubuntu, so obviously consumer hardware and not servers and also not multiple containers on one device. There are millions of Steam Decks sold already and Steam Deck is consumer hardware which means that there are millions of individual devices running SteamOS.
servers running Ubuntu
Sure there are hardcore users that run dozens of containers simultaneously and Ubuntu is quite a popular choice among those. Completely different topic from the one I've replied to, though.
Steam numbers are completely meaningless. There’s absolutely no way SteamOS outnumbers Ubuntu even if we limit this comparison to desktop installs. Ubuntu’s been around for a very long time and many of its users wouldn’t show up on Steam because they don’t game.
If you look at just my household, Ubuntu and its derivatives outnumber SteamOS by a factor of 7:1, not even counting numerous VMs and containers, or 3:1 if you're just counting desktops, laptops and tablets. But if you look at my steam usage, Ubuntu hasn't shown up there in over a year.
I probably spend 10x as much time on Ubuntu machines as I spend on my Steam Deck, but the Steam hardware survey would never surface that fact, nor is it intended to.
Sure, but it's often a clearer way to explain why a statistic is misleading.
In this case, my anecdote shows an example of why the steam hardware survey is not, and was never intended to be, an accurate depiction of what distros people are using overall. Instead, it's a depiction of what distros people are using for Steam, which is the point of the statement above mine.
Using anecdote instead of statistical data is a bad idea. But so is ignoring anecdotes simply because they're anecdotes, as anecdotes are often one of the best ways to find limitations in statistical data.
You're being rightfully called out by multiple people for using bad statistics. That doesn't require better statistics to do any more than doubting Russell's teapot requires showing that it's actually a coffee pot.
Your position is based on a flawed understanding of one statistic. If Canonical released a hardware survey for snap, and it showed that 99% of the machines using snap were running Ubuntu, would that mean 99% of all Linux machines are running Ubuntu? No, it would mean that snap users are more likely to use Ubuntu while steam users are more likely to use SteamOS. You are seeing a very small piece of the overall picture and are making wild extrapolations from it.