Neowin

Last month, Valve's monthly hardware survey of its Steam users for December 2012 showed that the percentage of its Windows 8 owners was just behind those who used Windows Vista. This week, Valve updated its hardware survey numbers for the month of January 2013, and as expected the results showed Windows 8 overtaking Windows Vista, while also getting closer to Windows XP's numbers.

The stats on the hardware survey page shows that the percentage of Windows 8 owners (combining 32-bit and 64-bit SKUs) is now at 8.76 percent, well above the 6.93 percent of Windows 8 users that Steam recorded in December 2012. Windows Vista users of Steam in January (again combining 32-bit and 64-bit) totaled a mere 6.02 percent. Only 0.72 percent of Steam users are using the 32-bit version of Windows 8, compared to 8.04 percent of Windows 8 64-bit users.

Windows 7 users of Steam represent 69.73 percent of all Steam owners, down from 70.47 percent from the month before. Windows XP is still being used by 10.05 percent of Steam owners. and if the growth of Windows 8 continues on Steam it should be close to, or overtake, Windows XP next month.

The combined number of Mac Steam owners is currently at 3.56 percent. After making its debut on the Steam hardware survey in December, the total number of Ubuntu users on Steam in January stands at just 1.12 percent.

Lolol. Good news. Can't stand Windows 8.

It's not so bad. I'm using it temporarily and it uses way less resources but you really only notice it on lower end machines.

I'll skip Win8 and wait for Win9, unless I buy a Surface tablet or phone.

Just got Windows 8 with media center for free a few hours before the $39.99 sale ended.

Damn fine operating system.

My Sony Vaio XL1 is like a new machine.

oxymoron? why would you want these excellent adoption rates if you hate Windows 8?

regardless I don't like the start menu much but apart from that win 8 is a decent improvement over 7 and is now my main gaming machine.

It's actually decent, at least once you killed of anything that was changed from Windows 7 (kill the Metro UI and add the startmenu via external programs). Once you did it is actually ~33% faster than Windows 7 (at least for me) and takes up less resources. If MS hadn't felt the need to push Metro on desktop PC's (whoever did this should be fired) it would actually be an excellent OS.

I just don't understand why they're pushing Windows 8 on the PC. I think it's a great tablet OS, but it is NOT meant for PCs, and it shows. They should just keep it on their tablets and a keep doing what theyre doing with Windows 7...

It's definitely the OS to get if you have a touch screen monitor, but otherwise there's little reason to upgrade over Windows 7.

That said I'm still excited over the Windows 8 Pro version Surface tablet.

Still on XP here. And, if i were to change, it would be to Windows 7, not 8. As a few people here said, it's interface is great as a tablet OS, but not as a desktop OS.