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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
apple naming schemes are getting almost as bad as AMD’s
Further down the Wikipedia the most recent rebrand from OS X to macOS was in 2016.
Still, seems fishy to me that 20% of the market share would be running a 10 year old OS…
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.
Microsoft legit single-handedly bringing about the Year of Linux with how they’re turning W11 into categorical dogshit lmfao 🤣
I can’t believe they somehow made an OS worse than Vista, and they’re just doubling down!?!?
The difference is Vista was accidentally shitty. Windows 11 is shitty on purpose to maximize profitability. Destroying their future for short term gains. Like so many companies.
Right? I remember vista, and good god was it bad. In fact, I was finishing college and looking for a job back around when W7 was coming out, and I remember specifically asking the interview what had happened with the quality on Vista compared to XP. Turns out the outsourced ALL of their SQA from Redmond to contractors in India. Nowadays, they don’t even have that excuse - it’s dogshit by design these days.
Windows 11 was categorical dogshit at launch, people just seem to accept it when Microsoft shits out garbage.
There was some good stuff back in the 10 insider previews but by launch 10 was also trash. Genuinely when has windows been good after 7?
This is truely the year of the Linux desktop.
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY (im still stuck on windows 11 because of CAD)
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
Here I thought I blocked telemetry.
Which is why they knew you were running Linux. lol
When doing a browser check I usually get something along the lines of “browser information held back”, this almost certainly means you’re using Firefox.
Im waiting to see how big corpos will ruin Linux.
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.
Year of Luigi?