Re: Remember when setting up a Windows PC didn’t feel like harassment?

On 1/13/26 14:46, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

On Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:32:41 -0500, -hh wrote:
 

... their actual complaint ... is that they find Apple hardware too
expensive for their personal budget.

 Not the only ones. If you take Steam usage as a proxy for market
share, then macOS has long been left in the dust by Linux.

Steam isn't required to run Microsoft Office, Adobe, etc.
Effectively, Steam is a platform for PC based gaming.  For all of those PCs which aren't used for games, Steam's OS shares are irrelevant.
Since most businesses don't install games on their PCs, that's ignoring a pretty big percentage of the PC market ... by a 2023 estimate, that's ignoring ~80% of the installed base.

<https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/valve-amended-the-steam-survey-for-december-2025-linux-actually-hit-another-all-time-high/>
 People make jokes about “the year of the Linux desktop”. But judging
from these figures, “the year of Macintosh” was over a long time ago
...

But effectively only for the market sub-segment of PC based gaming, not of the PC markets overall.
Reportedly, there's ~132M active Steam customers, which is roughly 7% of the ~2B active PC users.
With reportedly ~100M active Mac users, and 2.18% of them on Steam per your cite, this suggests ~2.9M active Mac+Steam users, which is ~3% of the Mac users.
Similarly for Linux, its reportedly 56M-72M, so the 3.58% Steam share is ~4.7M Linux+Steam users, which is (4.7/72) to (4.7/56) = 6.5% - 8.4% of the Linux users base.
That's a larger percentage of the Linux base vs Mac, but that's probably more aligned to other demographic differences...I'd be inclined to look at the demographics of age on game use vs OS use for an explanation.
-hh