Without the Steam Deck there’d be 27% fewer Linux users. So while that would indeed mean Linux wouldn’t yet be 3% of the total Steam userbase, I think you will find that 27% is not the majority.
GamingOnLinux aggregates this data in a nicer way and as you can see there, the total Linux market share has gone from <1% five years ago to the 3% it is now. If that increase was mainly thanks to the Steam Deck, it would have to make up more like 75% of the Linux userbase rather than only 27%.
Instead, as others have pointed out, SteamOS’s share has actually gone down rather than up, which is a natural consequence of the Steam Deck being relatively old now so fewer are being sold.
I think I first played this in like 2005 or something. I was underage and didn’t have banking credentials yet, so I bought the licence by mailing a letter full of coins to the author. Back then a lifetime licence was a few dozen euros, but I bought the major version licence for like 15€. That version received updates for a couple of years, from what I remember. I never bought the lifetime licence, but re-bought a major version licence twice and then bought the game again when it launched on Steam. In the end buying the lifetime licence would’ve been cheaper, heh, but I don’t mind supporting the developers.
I still keep coming back to it every few years. There are other games in the same genre or very adjacent to it that are better as games – Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the first to come to mind – but there are some things about URW that no other game really does, notably the whole realistic iron age survival thing (it’s a different genre altogether with less nuanced survival gameplay, but another iron age favourite of mine is Vintage Story, which is basically a Minecraft mod spun off into its own game).
The animal AI in particular is really good. The way you hunt in this game is a pretty good representation of cursorial hunting, which is basically just running after the animals until they tire – something humans are good at thanks to bipedalism. You only rarely manage to take down larger animal like elks (moose in American; the game calls them by their European name) in one strike, which means that you have to wound them and then jog after them until they collapse from exhaustion and blood loss. Or you can dig trap pits in chokepoints and corral them into them, another real hunting strategy used in iron age Finland. The tracking in the game is also very involved. You do it by following tracks displayed on the ground rather than a compass arrow, and you often have to track animals for very long distances and they will try to lose you by moving erratically.
Damn, now I kind of want to go back and play the game again.
That’s not true. You can see on Steam Hardware Survey what OS people are running, and SteamOS only makes up 27% of Linux users on Steam, so the vast majority are on regular PCs.