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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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, @[email protected] 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
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.
Thought the same. I think it’s a pun. Could become a meme even. Just put “OpenBSD 0%” in any statistics report.
When your market share is a rounding error.
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.
It was nice that they included BSD
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.
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.
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.
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
It would be nice to know how well this data is correlated with actual people using Linux.
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.
Year of Luigi?
Honestly, at this point I don’t think Microsoft cares about Windows all that much. They make their money elsewhere, and even the control offered by owning the OS can’t be counted on, as the Internet Explorer wars showed.
At the same time, think about the weird coincidence that Windows 11 requires so much extra hardware firepower at the same time as said hardware firepower has become stupid expensive thanks to the same AI the company is pushing.
They made it unaffordable to run Windows 11, and that’s how we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
They made it unaffordable to run Windows 11, and that’s how we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
Of course. No matter how good not-windows-operating-system is, only people interested, capable and willing to make the switch will migrate on their own. Others will wait until it becomes unbearable to stay or for someone to do it for them (pre-installs when a new computer is bought)
They make their money elsewhere
They make a lot of money on Office365, which doesn’t work on Linux without WINE. With people switching to Linux, they’re going to start switching to LibreOffice and OpenOffice, killing one of MS’s cash cows.
Of course, I don’t expect C-suite execs to be capable of thinking that far ahead
Doesn’t the office suite still have web versions available? I had to use Windows & Office a few years back. I strongly disliked the weird animated cursor and didn’t bother to dive into the settings, so I switched to the web version. It should apparently have been “worse than the app”, but it didn’t have the horrible cursor and it worked on Linux with Firefox as well.
I’ve been saying this since the release of WSL, but Microsoft has everything to gain from switching to the Linux kernel. Even back then senior devs were being laid off, and quality kept backsliding.
Fiscally, why would they want to maintain a whole ass kernel and OS layer when they could probably get away with some sort of custom Atomic Fedora distro?
It’s only exacerbated by AI slop now. Their NT team will continue to shrink, and they’ll be left with no other options.
I’ve said before, I expect we’ll see a future Windows release that’s just a Linux distro with a heavily proprietary userland. The more they can foist off to other projects and foundations for free volunteer labor the less they have to do in-house which is of course expensive
They also gave up really quick on mandating Windows Server on Azure and are now mightily happy to offer the latest and greatest Linux versions. I think you are onto something there: if it weren’t for compatibility, it would be so much cheaper for Microsoft to just use the Linux kernel.
It would be so funny if they “outsource” their kernel to linux, because it would be cheaper… “Hey, hey, I’ve seen this one. I’ve seen this one. This is a classic!” ~Marty McFly
“The last capitalist will sell us the rope with which we hang him” ass energy
Right? Windows gives MS enormous market power beyond the desktop license revenue. At the same time there’s obvious cost savings to be had by outsourcing the OS. What is the capitalist to do facing this conradiction… 🤭
to be fair the internet explorer debacle is behind us, and we are way past the zeitgeist of holding them accountable for antitrust.
they can pump windows full of ads no problem and that should count to something but it’s never enough for them is it?
i think microsoft just doesn’t know what to do with windows and it shows (and it’s for the best, really)
