This graph shows the market share of desktop operating systems worldwide based on over 5 billion monthly page views.
It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.
no, the statistics are based on browser agents, very few steam deck users browse the Internet on their devices. it's also only half the Linux devices on steam, not of all Linux desktops
But that's not really a Desktop is it? If we'd count mobile device we'd also have to include Android and then the situation would look completely different.
Connect the Steam Deck to a compatible dock and you can quite easily use it as a desktop. At the end of the day, it's still an x64 based PC that's just handheld.
I'm not sure that's really a good argument. I can connect an android smartphone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and call it Desktop. It's also just an arm64 or x64 based PC just handheld.
A Desktop PC IMHO is a device that is used for everyday "office" work and neither android smartphones nor steamdecks are that - but laptops for example are (IMHO)
It is. I use it as such regularly. Keyboard+mouse+screen = browsing firefox as usual. Works quite well. Libreoffice, okular, signal desktop... I've used worse computers in recent years, steamdeck desktop experience is better than many 4 to 5 year old cheap laptops with win10 or win11.
It's probably even higher than that. These stats are mostly based on website visits I believe. And many Linux users are also privacy-minded and might spoof their OS in the browser. I bet a large portion of the Unknown is actually Linux too.
It's hard to tell, as there are so many things that influence it. A huge factor is selection bias, as only a small number of website embed StatCounter, and that's very likely to not be a representative sample. I'd bet that the influence of that is magnitudes larger than of user agent spoofing.