I’m not seeing anyone comment on the last paragraph of the article, so I’ll paste it here.

With the SteamOS / Steam Deck monthly numbers not showing any magnificent gains, I am curious over this 0.5% increase for Linux gaming overall and whether it’s genuine.

The likely explanation is when looking at the demographics and seeing Steam by Chinese users dropping 3.4% while the English usage picked up by 3.4%. Chinese gamers and reporting differences there have previously vastly swayed Steam statistics in prior months.

So this might just be a maths artifact.