Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
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One could argue that the Steam Hardware Survey being opt-in means that it's likely to overestimate the power of Steam users' computers, since people with fancy rigs are far more likely to want to brag about it.
Perhaps, but a couple years ago when I still had a GTX 1050 I was happy to participate in the survey to show that a lot of gamers didn't have fancy RTX cards. I suspect there is a lot more low-end hardware on the survey than high-end.
My 960 using ass participated just a few months ago.
GTX 770 here!
I'm just assuming but my assumption is that from the people that are active steam users, the ones that opt in on the survey are in general more involved in gaming than those who don't, and if they are more involved, the chances that they invest more in gaming than those less involved are high, and part of that investment is the rig.
So, 3 assumptions there, but they make perfect sense to me. If those are actually true, then the survey has a overrepresentation of extra involved gamers, and those have an overrepresentation of better rigs. Thus the survey has a survivorship bias into better rigs, not worse.
If their conclusion is that, even with that bias, 70% don't have that good rigs, I'd say that their conclusion is sound.
Mind you, I'm not saying that people who do the survey have good rigs, I'm saying that the amount of people that have good rigs compared to those that don't is probably higher in percentage in the survey due to above.
I use it to show off me playing on Gentoo.
My first reaction to reading that line was that Linux numbers are likely inflated by sampling bias.
My other systems are SteamOS or Mint.
It's not like I'm dual booting Windows.
On the other hand, I suspect that some people with high-end PC specs might be more on the "privacy inclined" side of the spectrum, and might prefer not to share data on principle.
Though, if I were to guess, yours is probably the larger influence.
While it is opt-in, it requires almost no user input other than agreeing. Everything is automated and takes just a few seconds.
I'm willing to bet the number of people that opt out is so small that it is statistically irrelevant.