Linux back at 4.04% on the Desktop. Windows went below 73%

gs.statcounter.com Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats

This graph shows the market share of desktop operating systems worldwide based on over 5 billion monthly page views.

It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.

84 comments

In all seriousness, I think government bodies switching to Linux (UK's, China's, some Indian states') attributes the most to this.
- Even if that's the case, it's telling of Linux' maturity.
  
  Oh absolutely!
- No I think it's the Steam Deck. It's like half of all actively used Linux machines.
  
  Half of the Linux machines on Steam, not the entirety of Linux.
  
  But that's not really a Desktop is it? If we'd count mobile device we'd also have to include Android and then the situation would look completely different.
  
  Source? Last I checked, the Steam Deck was very much in the minority even when narrowed down to just desktop Linux.
  
  no, the statistics are based on browser agents, very few steam deck users browse the Internet on their devices. it's also only half the Linux devices on steam, not of all Linux desktops
  
  In Steam maybe. But this is StatCounter which is website visits. I doubt many Deck users are browsing the web.
  
  Oh that is a good point, why didn't I think of that!
- I'm fairly sure it's deficiencies in StatCounter's measurement that's accounting for it. Statistical noise, basically.
- China is actually down. India is high but not increasing

The youtuber matt from thelinuxcast sucks.
I am regular user, i don't code for living and my job is not tech related. I wanted to try linux and many of you guys supported and now I'm using Linux since 2 weeks its linux mint. That matt guy was so against linux mint that i thought it was shit too. But when i installed and started using it. It has been a smooth journey. Many people in linux community were helpful. But people like matt really make it for us regular guys scared to use linux. I really hope many good linux user help regular people switch to linux and increase this number.
- I get what you mean. I see a decent chunk of often more tech-proficient Linux users putting down Linux Mint, and it saddens me because even though I don't use Mint anymore, it was still the first distro I properly daily-drove and I still consider it an amazing system for people who are new to Linux.
  I'm very glad you've been having a good experience with Mint!
  
  I don't get them putting Mint down either, and I've built multiple Gentoo systems... I don't need an easy distro but still use Mint and like it for what it brings (basically, it's Green Ubuntu, what Ubuntu was supposed to be before they lost their way)
- I assume the problem is hardware. Matt's hardware didn't work well with LM, therefore Matt thinks LM sucks.. I do wish there was better hardware support but it's the reason apple went with 1 product = 1 OS = 1 general set of hardware. Sure not every iPhone has the same hardware, but that's why they have the model numbers, and it's so much easier to test 200 model mixes than 2,000,000 (Android). Windows gets all the debug info sent directly to them like the others but they also have a huge stack of hardware they can use or they can buy it to test.
  
  Did Matt try putting the regular build on a newish machine? That's what I did with my current and was struggling until I put the latest kernel on it, should have gone with Edge, but had little trouble after)
- This is an interesting post. I know the YouTuber you are talking about. I do not really like him but I would have considered him harmless. It is interesting to get your take.
  Mint is great and quite popular. So, if you are going to make a YouTube video saying otherwise, I guess you have to go out of your way to come up with reasons why. I am sure that makes it sound worse than it is. Something to think about.
  I have distro preferences too but most of the differences really only make a difference to those already using Linux. It is a bit like arguing about Ford vs Chevy in front of people that have never seen a car ( or truck ). In the grand scheme, they are both amazing and mostly the same thing. To listen to a fan though, one is God’s gift and the other is trash. Same with Linux distros.

I switched to librewolf so I will now show up as windows
- After seeing Garuda Linux set my user agent to Windows, I set my Windows install user agent to Linux.
  Seeing Twitch.tv login break after changing my user agent was hilarious
- I unspoofed Librewolf back to Firefox + Linux. That way I'm not contributing to Chrome and Windows market share and perceived dominance. Plus the more people don't spoof, the less of a need there will be to actually spoof at all as the Linux market share increases.
  
  The problem is that websites sometimes change there behavior.
- Same, there must be a percent or so of Windows actually being Linux instead.
- Yeah me too, safety in numbers. Maybe if Linux desktop gets bigger than Windows they'll swap it around 👨‍💻

Fwiw, my blog's statistics say Linux is around 10% and I know a lot of browsers identify themselves as running on Windows when they're not, so I wonder how it's measured.
- What's is the main topic of your blog?
  
  Travel, nothing tech related
- I would wager thats your audiences bias showing up. If you did that measurement in lemmy users, you would get likely 90% Linux users.
- We should do a poll, who uses Linux?
  
  Seems like you will get a biased sample here...

I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time. I remember when it was predicted to hit that in 2010, obviously it didn't happen. Of course for me personally, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2007 when I was finally able to use it as my main OS at home, I tried it before many times since 2003.
not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren't considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
- I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time.
  Do we really want that?
  We have it pretty good right now. I would actually say we're living in a golden age of desktop Linux: there's constant innovation, good support, you get to do pretty much everything you need, while flying under the radar.
  Linux has won the majority of the industry (servers, mobile etc.) so it's not like it has anything left to prove.
  If it starts getting noticeable on the desktop I fear we're just gonna get negative attention. Users who take and not contribute, because Windows had taught them to be entitled. Unwanted attention from Microsoft, who I bet are not going to be doing nice things once they start getting paranoid about it.
  I really don't think that large companies like Adobe will care about Linux even at 10% and even if they did, they are a super toxic company nowadays, the least we get to interact with them the better.
  
  Do we really want that?
  As long as competition and choice continues to be the mantra of the Linux desktop, then yes, I'd love to see more and more people using it.
  We have it pretty good right now. I would actually say we’re living in a golden age of desktop Linux: there’s constant innovation, good support, you get to do pretty much everything you need, while flying under the radar.
  Very true.
  Unwanted attention from Microsoft, who I bet are not going to be doing nice things once they start getting paranoid about it.
  I mean, Ballmer called Linux a cancer pretty early on, so that ship sailed a long time ago.
  I really don’t think that large companies like Adobe will care about Linux
  Once they start losing large sums of money due to people switching and finding viable alternatives, they certainly will care. Right now Adobe has one main thing going for them -- apathy and muscle memory of the aging demographic of their users. That will eventually change.
  the least we get to interact with them the better.
  Absolutely. I used to be an Adobe fan, back when Kevin Lynch was a part of it, and I was a Flex developer. Then Jobs wrote his thing about Flash, and a year later, not a month after Jobs's death, Adobe dumps Flex -- and literally overnight my position changed from Flex to HTML5 and Java.
- not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren't considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
  Does that mean you don't count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn't use any GNU stuff.
  You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.
  
  Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting...
  Perhaps the definition isn't good enough or accurate. What would you call a system that perhaps uses Darwin kernel or Hurd plus GNU user land, or any combo of.

Man i hope linux becomes more popular
- I see multiple posts on reddit everyday asking for advice for migrating to linux. I think linux userbase is increasing a lot since Window's questionable recall announcement.
  
  And the valve steamdeck But some people install windows on it which defeats it's linux purpose

404: Not found

OK, who did you guys bully over basic tech support questions?

uMatrix prevents me from loading this statcounter website. :-( Can't lookup how they measure things. In the comments people assume the stats would be counted by just looking up the user agent, which is a naive approach. I don't think agencies dedicated to stats are doing it this simple. They have way more possibilities to track and to look what browser you are using. The stats are more accurate than you probably think. They do not need to know the exact version of browser you are using, just which type and maybe what operating system you are on.
If a script for Windows does not work on Linux and fails, then they know you are not on Windows in example.
- Why are you still using uMatrix in 2024? Wasn't it discontinued 3 years ago or smth?
  
  It's still useful with all its functionality. Even if it does not get updates, it still blocks most stuff and I can enable or block stuff too. Plus the blocklists it uses are still updated, as they act independently from the main addon. There is no better alternative in my opinion. I use uMatrix + uBlock Origin.

Where do they get data from?
- From cookies.
  
  What kind? Personally I wouldn't trust any kind with raisin.
- They get the data from user-agent strings, so it may not be 100% accurate
  
  User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just "Linux x86_64": https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/
  User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They've been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

Question: Why is BSD so low? (And why/what is unknown?)
- The BSDs got screwed over by a lawsuit in the 90s that made a lot of people hesitant to use them (coincidentally leading to the creation of the Linux kernel). Inertia carried it from there and Linux ended up getting more hardware and software support, which is the primary reason that people pick Linux over the BSDs now.
- Less hardware support than Linux without enough substantially better about it to make it anyone's clear preference. Which isn't to say it doesn't have advantages over Linux. Just that the average BSD user is going to be able to easily swallow their pride and run Linux if things went wrong with a BSD install (trust me, I've literally done this, these people do exist)
- There really isn't a compelling argument for BSD other than interest and hobby. It doesn't have the industrial use case Linux has.

If only linux gaming and thermal became more and more robust, in few year I will switch too with pleasure. Adobe suite can still be a problem but not for me anymore at least.

84 comments