1w ago

Dominant US-made desktop operating system Windows is falling in use. Libre and kind-of-global Linux is mostly growing, albeit slowly.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/technology/p/461117/windows-marketshare-since-2010

Windows Marketshare since 2010
for your enjoyment
source https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200910-202511

Technology @lemmy.world

Windows Marketshare since 2010

455 90

26 comments

What is "unknown"? And why is it higher then linux?
- If you're not using "unknown" os, what are you even doing with your life.
  
  My guess is its a catch-all for any OS they couldn't identify.. So some of that could be Windows or Linux with agents or scripts disable. I also didn't see Android broken out as a separate category while iOS is, so that could be in there too.
- "Unknown" is browsers blocking trackers from identifying them. So mostly Linux and some people running Firefox with blockers on other systems.
  "Windows" is Windows users and also many Linux users who changed their bowser's user agent to circumvent sites that sabotage browsers on Linux for no reason.
  "ChromeOS" is -again- Linux as it's based on open ChromiumOS which is derived from Gentoo. (And Google is planning to switch to Android soon... which is again running on top of Linux.)
  
  Old unsupported versions of Windows (and sometimes Windows Server?) may also be included in "unknown".
- AFAIK they're using the browser agent to identify the os. Maybe that obscures the os in some cases
  
  That would make sense. Its a bit sad though... would be interesting to have "real" numbers...
- This is taken from trackers, so blocking trackers renders your os as Unknown.
- I really don't know. Neither the stats collector. That's the point.
- Misconfigured systems/browsers or misconfigured web crawlers.
  
  For those statistic they use trackers so a tracker blocker such as uBlock origin will "confuse" the tracker
- Based on the fact that it rises while Linux tails off, I'm guessing that it's something in Linux land breaking StatCounter's collection method. Maybe something like flatpacks and snaps not allowing the underlying OS to be detected properly.
  
  StatCounter determines OS with a tracker installed on many popular websites.
  Could be flatpaks, could be ublock.

I would think the real growing user base are mobile/phone users (aka Google/Android and Apple/IOS). Windows is dropping because for many people a computer is overkill and all they need is their phone... and Microsoft failed to enter that market.
What I would consider good news is if we were to notice a third mobile OS to get a significant share of users.
- This graph is about desktop OSs only. So Windows is dropping in proportion to other desktop systems.
  
  So then what desktop is iOS on?
  
  I love that for them.

Open source has no country. I said as much when Russian developers were getting kicked off of Github, and I'll say it again when people are scraping Windows off their hard drives.
If you're worried about shit like the NSA compromising Debian's random number generator - they don't care about borders, either.

@kubofhromoslav @buyfromeu
👍
m

26 comments