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?
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.
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.
I wish every proprietary operating system a swift “get fucked”
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.
Did the part 🫡.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I’m curious as to why you chose OpenBSD over other FOSS OSes
I didn’t—I like to pick up old second-hand laptops that are selling for cheap and tinker with them (install different OSes, coreboot them, etc). One of the machines I regularly use is OpenBSD, but it’s not my sole OS. My gaming machine is Linux—afaik you’re gonna have a tough time trying to play AAA games on any other (FOSS) OS, but I’ve not tried, because the laptop I run OpenBSD on is an old underpowered Thinkpad anyway.
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.
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…
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.
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😅
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.
Year of Luigi?
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.
I‘d have to rewatch the video, but he used Pop!_OS (with COSMIC) at first, and iirc he switched midway because it was so broken. Elijah used Bazzite, and Luke used CachyOS.
thats totally fair. im just noting what ive seen. feels like we’re hitting a tipping point tho. i dont expect a majority any time soon, but i think we could be pushing 20/30℅ before too long
ive been using linux since the 90s, and its finally at the point where the only thing holding it back is specific proprietary software that people think they need, or maybe properly need. i struggled like hell trying to run software i needed in college around 2007 for my math classes.
if we get enough of a market share, there will be more motivation to port to linux. not that that means itll happen
I think people making I can make a better steam machine content might have also helped too.
Microsoft helped the most though with Windows 11 forcing tpm requirements, disliked UI changes, copilot, and increasing hardware costs.
Among non gamers I think the buy non US alternatives helped get those that would normally not give more niche tech stuff a try to also join in. Such as guides people would share with alternatives to emails, software, phones, messengers, and OS.
Many different motivating factors now from boycotts, global relations, affordability, and increased accessibility of Linux than in the past pushing some people that wouldn’t have changed if life were not as eventful as it has been the last couple of years.
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, maybe Kimi K3 news and market shocks? But it should be noted Bazzite and CachyOS use peaked around this time as well.
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/
Steam Machine also came out and sold around 20k machines in the USA. I also wouldn’t discount how good LLMs are at guiding people through “complicated” things like swapping to Linux. GPT for example suggests moving to Linux on first prompt after asking how to fix the windows 11 eol message. Seems like a perfect storm that led to a ton of people swapping to Linux for a wide variety of reasons.
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.
Then there are governments and companies in the world who suddenly switch lot of machines at the same time.
Yep. Both Germany and France’ governments are actively switching to Linux and open software as a matter of policy
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
June 2026 had unknown at 20% but they removed it in favor of BSD
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.
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
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
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!)
I suspect the data is tainted by scrapers claiming to be a Linux desktop because that doesn’t have the same fingerprinting systems.
That’s one of the industries Mozilla announced a while ago they’d go into.
Mozilla is getting into fingerprinting? Do you have a source or something more for me to search with?
Into providing web browsing to LLM agents as a service.
