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.
The trendline suggests this is just the start.
Linux desktop use spikes to over 10% in North America for the first time. There is also a corresponding drop in Windows and OSX use.
31 Comments
drcobaltjedi@programming.dev · 42 pts · 20d
Oh shit, is this it? Is this actually the year of the Linux desktop?
OwOarchist@pawb.social · 24 pts · 19d
The year you install Linux on your desktop is the year of the Linux desktop. It's different for everybody.
Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org · 19 pts · 20d
I think so! It just took Windows shooting itself in the foot to do it.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 26 pts · 20d
Honestly I think the cost of new hardware is at least as big a factor. Linux makes what is old new again, Windows says fuck you, buy more.
OwOarchist@pawb.social · 8 pts · 19d
(And also the new hardware is 10x more expensive because our AI division already bought it all. But fuck you, buy more anyway.)
zo0@programming.dev · 6 pts · 19d
And it only took 728472994881 bullets!
halcyoncmdr@piefed.social · 2 pts · 19d
Don't discount indirect thing like Sony announcing plans to abandon discs on the Playstation right as the Steam Machine launches with Linux and wide game compatibility via Proton. Even at its inflated price due to the Rampocalypse, it's selling out constantly. It's a perfect storm right now.
Ooops@feddit.org · 2 pts · 19d
Seriously... there will never be a wide-spread year of the Linux desktop. Because that would require lobbying and investments to get devices with pre-installed Linux by default to the clueless majority that doesn't actually know what an OS is anyway.
And once a Linux distro goes commercial to fill that requirement it is incentivised to implement all the usual crap and enshittification that are missing in Linux normally.
potatopotato@sh.itjust.works · 21 pts · 20d
This graphic: fuck BSD in particular
Eldritch@piefed.world · 9 pts · 20d
BSD has been a victim of many things including its own license. I don't intentionally run any systems with BSD currently. But it definitely doesn't get the love it should. Again part of that is down to the license lol. But there are plenty of appliances silently running it without people ever knowing.
If it hadn't been for those lawsuits in the late 80s early 90s over the validity of the Berkeley software distribution even existing. Linux probably would have stayed a hobby project. And everyone would be running a flavor of BSD now. But between that, the gpl, and linux. They never really got the chance.
Eric@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 19d
Well, Netcraft just confirmed it
artyom@piefed.social · 16 pts · 20d
There's no way that's accurate, right?
Manticore@lemmy.nz · 11 pts · 20d
Quite likely. Many Linux distros aren't visible because they hide their telemetry, and would be marked as 'unknown' - or they spoof Windows or Mac for compatibility reasons. It'd be impossible to get an accurate read on how many computers run Linux, but it'll be higher than the number that report it.
artyom@piefed.social · 7 pts · 20d
AFAIK they get their data through crowd-sourced browser header data. And I really doubt any significant number of people are manipulating that.
cecilkorik@piefed.ca · 7 pts · 19d
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg has over a million users on Chrome alone. It's possibly more common than you think.
nyan@lemmy.cafe · 3 pts · 19d
"Looking at browser headers" usually means they're parsing the User-Agent string, which all kind of people (and bots) spoof for all kinds of reasons. There even used to (and might still) be a Firefox extension that would generate random ones.
OwOarchist@pawb.social · 2 pts · 19d
There's also a question of where they're measuring this.
You can't intercept and inspect the browser telemetry of every web request on the entire internet, that's just not possible. So they must only have access to the data from requests from a specific set of websites.
Are those websites a representative sample of all web traffic, or are some of those websites more or less likely to have Linux users than the average website?
And it seems to be counting per request. Do Linux users visit these websites more often or less often than average? Do they spend more time there and view more pages, or less time and less pages?
A truly unbiased OS survey is basically impossible. At least, hopefully, they're using the same measurement data over and over again through time, so maybe the trends in the data are still meaningful.
Ooops@feddit.org · 2 pts · 19d
None of those graph ever are. Because Linux users are more prone to tinkering, keeping stuff private and blocking a lot of bullshit scripting, there is big dark area of Linux systems listing themselves as something else (usually Windows because of those asshole websites not playing well with Linux by design without an actual valid reason other than "we don't like Linux").
(PS: For the same reason a lot of sites believe I'm using Chrome. I don't but I know they like to fuck with me when they see that Firefox user agent.)
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev · 14 pts · 19d
IIRC this was debunked some time ago, it's related to a change in OSX/MacOS that's causing Apple devices to show up as Linux.
ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 19d
This makes more sense, that graph doesn't pass the sniff test. I'd be looking for some other explanation than suddenly Linux use spiked almost 3X.
Ooops@feddit.org · 1 pts · 19d
Thing is you can often debunk any of these graphs for the same reason. Just a minority of Linux systems actually show up as Linux as the users are usually more inclined to block a lot of stuff for privacy reasons, then often also changing the user agent most tests fall back to.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 20d
In this context what is the difference between macOS and OS X? I can’t help but feel that is like listing Windows 10 separately.
homes@piefed.world · 7 pts · 19d
Speaking for myself, I suppose, I had a server running a much older version of Mac OS X (10.15) simply because I couldn’t update it beyond a certain point. Only recently did I finally install Fedora on it. Technically, I would be listed on this statistic as moving away from OS X to Linux. But such a huge market share for OS X vs macOS? That doesn’t make sense.
That leads me to believe it’s a matter of web browser reporting, and some report macOS as either “macOS” or “Mac OS X” depending on the browser, but they really mean the same thing.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 19d
I was kinda wondering if X was representative of 10.x releases but then it didn’t make sense to me for it to be so much higher than the newer OSs either.
homes@piefed.world · 4 pts · 19d
That’s what I thought at first, too, but i remembered that these statistics are typically gathered via browser machine id reporting, so…
Safari probably reports as “macOS“ and I bet Firefox and chrome report as “Mac OS X“
EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app · 12 pts · 20d
I'm so excited now that I have time again to start tinkering with Linux ✌️
eah@programming.dev · 9 pts · 19d
The spike likely represents Statcounter being too slow to adjust their methods of filtering out bot page views after some brand new web scrapers appeared on the scene hoovering up all the data for AI training. 10% linux market share would be a cosmic event. You would hear about it in mainstream media if it were really happening.
Edit: I forgot about popular youtube channel Linus Tech Tips' recent videos in which they gave linux their highest praise yet. One was published in mid June, another in mid July, and their most recent and most favorable to linux was published on July 22 ("My Experience Using the Steam Machine as a Desktop PC"). There have also been videos on the Framework laptops. Vibes tell me that there's a trend of more people using mobile over desktop, so I would expect a higher proportion of desktop users to be the gamer or technically inclined type, enough to be influenced by LTT and give linux a shot, compared to 10 years ago.
Here's the data for the last 4 months.
The data looks noisy. You would expect the lines to have consistent, regular annual patterns. You can see that with Chrome OS which seems to have a dip in the middle of the year corresponding to when schools are out for summer vacation, and if you scan upward, it appears Windows has a corresponding hump at that time. But there are still unexplained extreme swings. The lines look smooth up until 2012/2013. Maybe Statcounter doesn't have as many members/page views as it once did, leading to higher variance. We could see that if we had absolute numbers, but we only have percentages. That's probably affected by the advent of the LLMs. Nobody's going to the web anymore to find information.
SalmonTractor@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 19d
Announcing Linux growth wouldn't be in the best interest of US mainstream media's billionaire owners so it would go unreported. Can't increase Apple and Microsoft stocks if the word gets out people are freeing themselves. US journalism has effectively died.
Marthirial@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 19d
It may not look like a big deal but it wasn't too long ago Windows was like 95% of the OS market.
FedX@quokk.au · 4 pts · 19d
Next year, I'm telling you, it's going to be the year of the BSD desktop.
onlinepersona@programming.dev · 4 pts · 19d
The MKBHD effect?