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?
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!
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!
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.
I wish every proprietary operating system a swift “get fucked”
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.
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.
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.
womp
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.
Year of Luigi?
Look out for any Linux dip in figures, as some people give up trying to use Linux, and move away again. If they hit a tricky problem, and go online for help, some will just scare them away with an over techy response. And they will share their horror story, keeping more people away from Linux.
It was nice that they included BSD
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!
Did the part 🫡.
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😅
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY (im still stuck on windows 11 because of CAD)
FreeCAD has become quite usable over the past couple of years, and it keeps getting better with every update. I know you maybe don’t get to choose which CAD program you use since you’re a student, but thought I’d put it out there. I’ve been really enjoying it so far.
I generally use the weekly development releases for fun. So many improvements are coming. They are focusing on speed of redraw right now.
And if you don’t like the UI, check out either Open light/dark or Northern Lights.
It still can be a pain at times (complex chamfers and fillets dont have particularly rugged calcs), but yeah it’s gotten better over the years
You might be interested in Winboat if that’s the only thing keeping you
I looked at Winboat’s website, and it seems really interesting but as an engineering student idk if it’s a good idea to take the risk of running a WIP software to access it. Plus, when I tried installing Linux last time (mint) it caused my trackpad, keyboard backlight, power mode options, and gpu/screen drivers to break (couldn’t run hdr, resolution locked to 1080p60, games only ran with integrated graphics). I know I can fix a good chunk of this is stuff on my own with downloading the right drivers/programs and enough time, but I don’t really want to spend any time doing that (and risk doing it incorrectly) since all my school work is on here
Some of that may have been fixed since last time you tried. Like, stuff is moving really fast right now. A lot of things that used to be stand alone fixes have been upstreamed.
Debian derived distros tend to move a lot slower (for the sake of iron clad stability), so even if something was fixed a year ago it might not be fixed in Mint, Ubuntu or the like.
Arch based distros like catchy will show what’s working right now.
Again, like, it still might not be to a point where you feel comfortable with it as a daily driver, but it’s still worth checking on from time to time, just to see if the issues you had have been fixed.
Good point. I’ve been eyeing Fedora KDE for the next distro I want to try out, and I’ve heard that’s among the most up-to-date distros that’s not straight-up rolling release
what gpu does it use? bazzite has a wizard for downloading isos that trivializes the whole driver problem
It’s a Legion Pro 5 with RTX 4070
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.
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?
You are right, they just can copy what they already did in mobile.
I started using Linux in 1998. It’s not ruined yet and Red Hat,and SUSE, Canonical have been around the entire time. Companies can ruin dislros but not the code behind it.
Yep. Mandrake is the example of that.
