I believe Steam hasn't collected this information in a long time, and in my opinion it should stay that way.
Steam collects this information on windows. I am not particularly interested in knowing what other users have installed.
Then Valve should remove the "installed software" string from system information
How about making it opt-in? I'd find that interesting - You'd be able to see that X percent didn't want to say anything, Y percent that have Open Office, Z percent that have Firefox etc.
Closing as the installed software section was removed from the system information.
Nothing extracted yet.
If you're planning to include installed software in Linux's future section of hwsurvey,
then give distributors a way to report installed software by the API to Steam.
Linux has several types of package managers. You can only implement APT support if you wanna, but there are also RPM/YUM, Portage and Packman. So there must be a way to get that info not on Ubuntu only.