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?
As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.
It’s just you, @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org and some of the other !unix_surrealists
sweet, there’s 3 of us now!
there are (not even) dozens of us!
It’s a small club, and you ain’t in it!
– George Carlin
When your market share is a rounding error.
Thought the same. I think it’s a pun. Could become a meme even. Just put “OpenBSD 0%” in any statistics report.
How do you like openBSD?
Copying from a reply to another comment:
I picked OpenBSD over other non-Linuxes because of its focus on security. Also I think the pufferfish is cute. It wasn’t that deep of a decision for that particular laptop. I do find it quite an enjoyable OS to use, and I have anecdotally had fewer problems with it than with Linuxes, I suspect because their whole security focus also means fewer bugs.
If you’re interested in it, just try it out in a VM.
I’m curious as to why you chose OpenBSD over other FOSS OSes
BSD is interesting. So it’s always worth giving it a try. It certainly won’t be as comfortable or convenient as Linux though. So exploring it on a side machine (or a secondary partition) is probably better.
Yeah I thought FreeBSD was the most popular BSD on desktop…
Maybe some AI crawlers started to honestly report Linux instead of Windows as they possibly did before? Otherwise such a quick spike is hard to explain (unbelievable). Or did I miss any big news lately?
//I’m on Linux in the last 15 years and I don’t even care that much about what unrelated to me people use, although I always do help fellow Linux-ers when I encounter them in the wild.
ive noticed lots of videos on youtube of people switching to linux.
honestly, i think the Linus Tech Tips linux challenge videos gave many people confidence to take the leap, along with people’s general distain for win11, and probably also the work Valve’s been doing on proton and the “release” of the steam machine is driving all this.
it really feels like adoption has spiked.
I feel like I heard of more people switching after the Steam Deck, and then more after the forced expansion of copilot in Windows.
I haven’t heard much of ltt other than him trying Linux and not liking it. Kind of been more on the negative side until the Steam Machine. His attempts just seemed to end in disasters.
If youtubers are pointed to I think pewdiepie is the one with way more Linux influence given his bigger reach and going all in on it a long time ago as opposed to a recent stint of saying something good about it in passing due to the steam machine.
LTT did another Linux challenge recently, and this time their verdict was that they‘d all be staying on Linux for their personal PCs (with FakeLinus dual booting Windows, because he needs software there for his job). They did also say that most of their videos will still show Windows, as that is still the primary target of the manufacturers that send them the press kits.
What distro did Linus use that changed his mind? I remember him using I think CachyOS, and then other people saying that may have led to him encountering the problems he did.
The recent Hardware Haven video I think was better that the LTT videos. That dude does a great job presenting some pros and cons and is much more level headed in his approach.
But I agree that the big names in YT is doing a good thing showing people it’s not too hard to switch, Especially if you have a spare SSD so you can keep your Windows install just in case.
I’ve noticed some pretty big spikes in download stats for certain distros like CachyOS and Bazzite, too. I’ve seen a lot of stories of people churning through Linux in the past and recently coming back to it because the software has matured so much and Windows and OSX are enshittifying.
I think datacenter use may be part of it- usage peaks at the middle of the working day and the highest peaks are on Monday. Its also possible a lot of companies related to AI swapped to Linux distros on workforce computers to reduce headaches in managing AI workloads. There is something that happened July 1st-6th that caused the trendline to accelerate.
Apparently Windows 11 sent out an EOL notice for October 2026 recently too. https://www.tech2geek.net/windows-11-24h2-support-ends-on-october-13-2026-heres-how-to-stay-protected/
windows 11 eol
What? How can Windows 11 already be EOL? And just in a few months!?
Is there just not going to be any Windows anymore? Or are they planning a surprise release of Windows 12 (AI prompt only edition) within the next month or two?
It’s not, the article is about update 24H2 of Windows 11. If you install updates you already have a newer version installed.
because the software has matured so much and Windows and OSX are enshittifying.
Honestly, this is the reason I like Linux so much better.
Corpo OSes tend to get worse with every update. But Linux gets better with every update.
I don’t think Ai companies / crawlers are honest, so I would rule that out. And its not like a single big event happened over time, but many and people slowly catching up now. In example the big PewDiePie video is just 1 year old, lot of other “smaller” channels like Linus Tech Tips and many other even smaller channels talk about their experience switching to Linux, how to switch, what it offers and why Windows sucks. Valve with their ongoing support and development of Steam operating system and hardware sending shockwaves of news throughout the entire industry. Then there are governments and companies in the world who suddenly switch lot of machines at the same time.
There is so much going on in small steps, then together it makes a single huge step. Or there is just an error in the graph and I made myself a monkey with this speech. Both possible realities are fun.
yea a lot of them do report linux, if they report an os at all. however, in a survey of “desktop” visitors, one would expect visits determined to not be ‘interactively human’ to be omitted entirely from the counts.
Most of my friends have either switched to linux or have said they will have to in the future
Its impressive how good microsoft is at getting people not want to use their os
This was my thought. How much of this is lightweight crawlers to support AI. Nothing good ever happens for good reasons
Fingers crossed for a Century of M$ Humiliation
Way back in 2010 I made a prediction to my best friend using Windows: In 10 years we will have reached 10% market share. The catch with this prediction is, it was purely a wish without ANY understanding of the market whatsoever. Obviously 10 years passed and in 2020 I was wrong. We got COVID instead… Buuuuuut… only 6 years later we have already reached 10%!
Besides all the efforts that are going in into the Linux operating systems and eco system, we got two major companies supporting Linux with a huge impact: Valve, with all their gaming related efforts and Microsoft, with their free advertisement through Windows 11. Thank you to both companies and all other parties involved making this possible!
With that said, I make a new prediction: 10 years later, we (Linux) reach 20% market share AND OS X+macOS together reach 42%! Yes I even make a prediction for Apple. Also why is even macOS and OS X not a single graph, while everything Linux related is and even all Windows versions are a single graph? That makes the Apple line smaller than it is.
Also macOS and iOS are basically the same OS under the hood at this point. They’re closer than many Linux distros are to each other
Honestly, at this point I don’t think Microsoft cares about Windows all that much. They make their money elsewhere, and even the control offered by owning the OS can’t be counted on, as the Internet Explorer wars showed.
At the same time, think about the weird coincidence that Windows 11 requires so much extra hardware firepower at the same time as said hardware firepower has become stupid expensive thanks to the same AI the company is pushing.
They made it unaffordable to run Windows 11, and that’s how we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
I’ve been saying this since the release of WSL, but Microsoft has everything to gain from switching to the Linux kernel. Even back then senior devs were being laid off, and quality kept backsliding.
Fiscally, why would they want to maintain a whole ass kernel and OS layer when they could probably get away with some sort of custom Atomic Fedora distro?
It’s only exacerbated by AI slop now. Their NT team will continue to shrink, and they’ll be left with no other options.
They also gave up really quick on mandating Windows Server on Azure and are now mightily happy to offer the latest and greatest Linux versions. I think you are onto something there: if it weren’t for compatibility, it would be so much cheaper for Microsoft to just use the Linux kernel.
I seriously predict them contributing to wine, or at least making their own fork. Because their strategy is almost completely OS agnostic at this point. Even offering Dot Net Core on Linux natively.
How easy would it be for them? “Hey Copilot, convert these NT calls to Linux Calls” and your done.
It would be so funny if they “outsource” their kernel to linux, because it would be cheaper… “Hey, hey, I’ve seen this one. I’ve seen this one. This is a classic!” ~Marty McFly
deleted by creator
To be fair they released 11 before the latest price surges, might have been during the graphics cards price hikes though, can’t remember when that happened.
Very true, but they also caused some of the price hikes with their Copilot push, no?
“The last capitalist will sell us the rope with which we hang him” ass energy
They made it unaffordable to run Windows 11, and that’s how we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
Of course. No matter how good not-windows-operating-system is, only people interested, capable and willing to make the switch will migrate on their own. Others will wait until it becomes unbearable to stay
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
I suspect the data is tainted by scrapers claiming to be a Linux desktop because that doesn’t have the same fingerprinting systems.
Yeah how much is ai bots or other scrapers
This was my thought, too, especially with how stable Linux traffic is relative to other OSes.
It might just mean that more people are web scraping, and that web scraping is easier/cheaper on Linux.
The Steam numbers are more interesting to me, as a measure of consumer usage, since they should mostly represent people actually using their computer.
PornHUB puts out annual usage stats, too, but idk if they include OS. (When I used Reddit, their stats would come up on dataisbeautiful frequently enough to come to mind years later—they had some interesting stats, like average visit duration and that the most Republican states were the most likely to search for gay and incest porn, but I digress.). Would bots make up a high volume of traffic for them? I imagine not, since there’s little economic value in scraping it (to train LLMs, in particular — I think it would poison the training data rather dramatically!)
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
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!
Microsoft legit single-handedly bringing about the Year of Linux with how they’re turning W11 into categorical dogshit lmfao 🤣
I can’t believe they somehow made an OS worse than Vista, and they’re just doubling down!?!?
The difference is Vista was accidentally shitty. Windows 11 is shitty on purpose to maximize profitability. Destroying their future for short term gains. Like so many companies.
Right? I remember vista, and good god was it bad. In fact, I was finishing college and looking for a job back around when W7 was coming out, and I remember specifically asking the interview what had happened with the quality on Vista compared to XP. Turns out the outsourced ALL of their SQA from Redmond to contractors in India. Nowadays, they don’t even have that excuse - it’s dogshit by design these days.
Windows 11 was categorical dogshit at launch, people just seem to accept it when Microsoft shits out garbage.
There was some good stuff back in the 10 insider previews but by launch 10 was also trash. Genuinely when has windows been good after 7?
Weird that Apple has renamed OS X to Mac OS, my first thought opening the link to statcounter was NO WAY 8+% use an OS that was discontinued 25 years ago.
WTF Apple?
Opening Wikipedia it says Mac OS was introduced in 2001!?!?!!??
WTF? That’s the year it was discontinued!!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS
macOS (previously OS X and originally Mac OS X
Mac OS X succeeded the classic Mac OS, the primary Macintosh operating system from 1984 to 2001.
For fucks sake! No it’s not “classic Mac OS”, it’s Mac OS. It was never named classic. Just because Apple fucks up doesn’t change the name of the original Mac OS.
And no OS X did not maintain the same version number for decades. It was introduced as OS X 1.0, 10 is not a version number, it’s part of the name like with OS/2 where the number is also not a version number but is part of the name, and describes something completely different, namely that it was meant as the default OS for IBM PS/2 computers.Sorry for the rant, but the stupidity of Apple removing the X from the name and not distinguishing properly between the original Mac OS and the new macOS is just such a piss poor decision IMO.
For instance Mac OS does not have multitasking! But macOS does.I have to disagree on side details: OS X did have version numbers starting with 10. I used it between Panther and Yosemite and I can remember Tiger being called version 10.4; it was literally printed on the installation disc.
Yes, that means “Mac OS X 10.0” had two tens right after one another. Apple aren’t Microsoft silly when it comes to names but they can be silly.
Also, it wasn’t introduced as OS X. It was “Mac OS X” until 10.7, then “OS X” until 10.11, and “macOS” since then.
deleted by creator
I think its intended to line up with the iOS and iPadOS naming scheme. They pooped out an update earlier this year to bring all three OS’s up to the same version number as well.
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.
putting osx and macos on separate lines was dumb af. the ‘drop’ of osx over the last ~ 18 months is entirely offset by the debut (and thus, an ‘increase’ from zero) of the name change to macos. it’s a wash there.
linux gains are almost entirely windows’ loss, but whether it’s a legitimate trend or not will take time to determine.
Really wish I had my own computer instead of just my work one so I could get running on a proper OS instead of Windows
Stop using your work computer for non work related things. They are spying on you at worst, or can take it away without any warning or letting you backup files at best.
Used laptops on ebay are still decently cheap if price is the issue, lots of stuff in the $50-100 range
Used corpo PCs can be found inexpensively as well, if portability isn’t needed. Craigslist can be a good source depending on your area
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.
Im waiting to see how big corpos will ruin Linux.
By first putting age verification in systemd.
It will be like Android. You have to use their app store to install new programs.
You are right, they justo can copy what they already did in mobile.
Well android is Linux. That is exactly how Google twisted it to be their own walled garden. And as you can see they are raising the walls and requiring IDs to continue to be a part of it.
Funnily enough, android being its own ecosystem that happens to use the Linux kernel has led to quite a few improvements over the years in the kernel. Better scheduling, new filesystem drivers (exfat for example) better power management, etc. plus you can use some Linuxy utilities and tricks on Android because it’s ultimately just a Linux distro
Why is that funny?
