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?
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
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.
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!
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
June 2026 had unknown at 20% but they removed it in favor of BSD
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.
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 wish every proprietary operating system a swift “get fucked”
Way back in 2010 I made a prediction to my best friend using Windows: In 10 years we will have reached 10% market share. The catch with this prediction is, it was purely a wish without ANY understanding of the market whatsoever. Obviously 10 years passed and in 2020 I was wrong. We got COVID instead… Buuuuuut… only 6 years later we have already reached 10%!
Besides all the efforts that are going in into the Linux operating systems and eco system, we got two major companies supporting Linux with a huge impact: Valve, with all their gaming related efforts and Microsoft, with their free advertisement through Windows 11. Thank you to both companies and all other parties involved making this possible!
With that said, I make a new prediction: 10 years later, we (Linux) reach 20% market share AND OS X+macOS together reach 42%! Yes I even make a prediction for Apple. Also why is even macOS and OS X not a single graph, while everything Linux related is and even all Windows versions are a single graph? That makes the Apple line smaller than it is.
Also macOS and iOS are basically the same OS under the hood at this point. They’re closer than many Linux distros are to each other
Weird that Apple has renamed OS X to Mac OS, my first thought opening the link to statcounter was NO WAY 8+% use an OS that was discontinued 25 years ago.
WTF Apple?
Opening Wikipedia it says Mac OS was introduced in 2001!?!?!!??
WTF? That’s the year it was discontinued!!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS
macOS (previously OS X and originally Mac OS X
Mac OS X succeeded the classic Mac OS, the primary Macintosh operating system from 1984 to 2001.
For fucks sake! No it’s not “classic Mac OS”, it’s Mac OS. It was never named classic. Just because Apple fucks up doesn’t change the name of the original Mac OS.
And no OS X did not maintain the same version number for decades. It was introduced as OS X 1.0, 10 is not a version number, it’s part of the name like with OS/2 where the number is also not a version number but is part of the name, and describes something completely different, namely that it was meant as the default OS for IBM PS/2 computers.Sorry for the rant, but the stupidity of Apple removing the X from the name and not distinguishing properly between the original Mac OS and the new macOS is just such a piss poor decision IMO.
For instance Mac OS does not have multitasking! But macOS does.I think its intended to line up with the iOS and iPadOS naming scheme. They pooped out an update earlier this year to bring all three OS’s up to the same version number as well.
I have to disagree on side details: OS X did have version numbers starting with 10. I used it between Panther and Yosemite and I can remember Tiger being called version 10.4; it was literally printed on the installation disc.
Yes, that means “Mac OS X 10.0” had two tens right after one another. Apple aren’t Microsoft silly when it comes to names but they can be silly.
Also, it wasn’t introduced as OS X. It was “Mac OS X” until 10.7, then “OS X” until 10.11, and “macOS” since then.
True, but the X is not part of the version number, it’s part of the name. The name of the OS was OS 10. Where the X is meant to be pronounced 10.
The version number comes after. Obviously OS/2 also had version numbers, but the 2 was not part of the version number.
apple naming schemes are getting almost as bad as AMD’s
It doesn’t say it was named Classic Mac OS. It says “succeeded the classic Mac OS”. That does not imply they named it “classic” anything. The word “the” being present actually explicitly means Apple did not name it “classic”.
And I’m going to need a source on it being OS X 1.0. I lived through it and my memory as well as everything else says it was 10.0, 10.1, 10.2 etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS
The first version of Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server 1.0,
Yes, that means Mac OS X Server was the first OS to use the Max OS X branding. It does not mean that Mac OS X (non-server) ever was 1.0.
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.
Year of Luigi?
Did the part 🫡.
This is truely the year of the Linux desktop.
Also, notice one thing…along with windows, MacOS also lost share during the same time. People are fed up with Apple too!
