There are two new entries for most popular operating systems listed for Linux Only. This coinsides with the 5% breakthrough of total Steam population (finally). But I wonder if this is an error (or April Fool’s Day joke?). The two entries are just named 64 bit and 0 64 bit and its puzzling, as they have a huge percentage.
Does anyone have a clue what this is or could be?
Maybe related to Flatpak?
Flatpak and CachOS is my guess yep
If we consider it to be a bug and that those are false reports, then the actual number of Linux users would be 5.33 * (1-0.23) = 4.1%.
IMO that seems like a more reasonable number than 5.33. 5.33 is a crazy jump month-over-month, even factoring in Chinese New Years (February results)
Best guess is they are labeling 32 bit as 0 64 bit since 32 bit pads 0s for the 64 bit bus on 64 bit systems. Literally a guess though. To me it doesn’t make sense either.
But what is it referring to? I mean even if you were right about 32-bit, what is it?
Windows NT 3.1 was one of the first 32bit OS’s.
It’s the memory address space for the hardware - 32bit can work with 2^32 memory addresses (bytes) while 64bit can work with 2^64 memory addresses. In terms of what that means for your gaming PC, it basically means a 32bit app can work with up to ~4GB of RAM (2^32 = 4,294,967,296) and 64bit can work with up to 18EB (2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616).
What it means for the survey? No idea, but if I had to guess - it’s either emulation of a 32bit OS or app (like a VM or something)… or a large group of people desperately need to upgrade from Win NT lol
