https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607
Cloudflare stats also seem to support peaks of 15% usage but around 9-10% on average. In the United States alone, the market share for Linux is nearly 12% now for the whole month and Cloudflare stats suggest peaks of up to 25% (!) Linux desktop usage on certain days and times.
The trendline suggests this is just the start. When will companies realize they cannot ignore Linux anymore?
Ignoring that the default browsers on many distros are seen as bot traffic, filtering the alleged bot traffic on Linux still results in around 7% of overall traffic, up from 4ish a year ago. It also doesn’t explain the giant leaps in downloads on many distros that correlate with the spike. It’s possible some organization set up a ton of computers with openclaw and a wide variety of distros on it I guess to influence opinion 🤷♀️
Also extremely biased source
Yeah, I don’t think there’s any doubt tht Linux traffic is going up, just might not be as high as it initially looks.
womp
Did the part 🫡.
I got another email from MS recently saying: “We understand that moving to a new PC can take time. As part of our ongoing commitment to helping customers stay secure during the transition, the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) programme for personal devices is being provided an additional year.”
Oh do fuck off. I don’t need a new computer, and I certainly don’t need YOU.
I wish every proprietary operating system a swift “get fucked”
It would be nice to know how well this data is correlated with actual people using Linux.
It was nice that they included BSD
I feel very happy seeing Linux attracting people, even if they get back again to Windows or Mac.
So far it looks like it’s only one month on the chart with 10% for Linux, it could be a fluke. We’ll find out if it remains around 10% in the coming months.
Yeah, but what I mean is that even if it’s just a fluke, it’s still good that more of the “normie” desktop users are at least showing a bit of interest in it, even if they at the very end bounce back, the fact that they are showing signs of being tired of the dominant OS and willing to experiment is refreshing. I think that, for the sake of the Libre philosophy, FLOSS devs should try better to attract them more.
That means they could make fancy comparison trailers showcasing the slickest parts of Linux versus when other OSs try to do the same lol.
Also, notice one thing…along with windows, MacOS also lost share during the same time. People are fed up with Apple too!
You mean that OS X lost a lot of users to… macOS.
Yeah yeah😅
People should stop posting StatCounter, it’s so unreliable and noisy.
But I am surprised by the Cloudflare numbers, which are a lot more reliable, and still have Linux at ~5% worldwide, which is still higher than I thought! And even ~6.5% for the past two months, though I imagine that’s a seasonality effect - maybe Linux users in the northern hemisphere are more likely to use their computers at home during summer? :P
I’m part of those numbers. I’ve dabbled with linux back and forth my whole life. Last year I tried to make the permanent switch but I was heavy into CS2 at the time, and it stuttered badly om CachyOS, and I didn’t have the patience to look into it as I was playing with friends. I decided this summer vacation that “fuck it”, even if I have to drop CS2 I want to get away from Telemetrows. Made the switch a month ago and to my surprise CS2 works flawlessly together with everything else. If you’re on the fence, make the switch!
5% is realistic. Steam survey says 4% of their users are on Linux too. These two numbers approximately match
Yeah I know, I’d much sooner trust those numbers - but those are pretty good numbers! Desktop only of course, but still!
Year of Luigi?
It’s still going to be decades before Windows and iOS feel the pinch. This is a war of attririon. There is no quick victory here.
Fine by us!
What’s the difference between “OS X” and “macOS” on this chart?
Surely 20% of the market share isn’t Mac’s that are so old their OS is over 10 years old? I don’t know how else to interpret that…
So I can’t find a great answer, but as best I can tell StatCounter uses user agents to determine this data, the web browser being the most obvious source but not the only source.
The user agent for most web browsers on “macOS” the operating system generally report as “Mac OS X”. So other user agents, which report things like “Macintosh” but rarely actually “macOS”, are reported as “macOS”.
This also explains why “OS X” has a larger share than “macOS”. Web browsers on the macOS operating system are used more than “other”.
At first glance you’d think “OS X” and “macOS” should just be combined. But chances are if someone is using a web browser on macOS, they’re probably also using “other”.
Another problem is that we don’t know how StatCounter is handling duplicate/fake data. If I constantly hit refresh or send analytics from a single device, how is that counted? What if I send “OS X” and “macOS” data?
Luckily we also have the Cloudflare data, which shows Linux between 9% and 15%. So StatCounter using 10% is probably on the lower side, but within the margins.
Macs just work and the type to buy them aren’t going to replace them until they stop.
Plus most Mac users don’t do anything stressful, browsing and streaming which even most 15 year old machines will do fine at this point.
The type of person to buy a Mac replaces their devices constantly
Not the ones I know, but I don’t know anyone using them for content creation either, they may replace them more often.
is this due to the steam machine? i heard it’s linux based.
I have no idea what impact Valve has had, but SteamOS is indeed Arch Linux with Valve’s kernel, KDE Plasma desktop and a separate Gamescope session running a big picture mode like environment.
Probably not significantly? The Steam machine wasn’t very popular afaik, it’s a really bad time to be a company selling prebuilt PCs because pc part prices are insane right now.
But yes everything Valve does these days is Linux based. Their work on wine/Proton (which they did largely for steam deck support) is probably the biggest factor in people swapping over.
steam machine actually sold well. it’s on a waitlist now because of volume of sales despite the high price. i know on reddit there was a big storm about the price, but in the general population people i talked to were really excited about buying a steam machine. a lot of it is more about buying a luxury item, like how people want the latest iphone always when they’re expensive and androids are better. valve has that brand name and loyalty.
I’m one of em. Finally listened to the linux evangelists on here and put mint on my laptop a few months ago. I’m not a very technical person but installation was a piece of piss, and setting everything up was easy too. Didn’t have to use command line once. Feels like I’ve got my laptop back, was hardly using it before because windows 11 was such a fuckin pain in the arse.
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