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?
Linux desktops use spikes.
It was nice that they included BSD
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.
Yeah yeah😅
is this due to the steam machine? i heard it’s linux based.
Probably not significantly? The Steam machine wasn’t very popular afaik, it’s a really bad time to be a company selling prebuilt PCs because pc part prices are insane right now.
But yes everything Valve does these days is Linux based. Their work on wine/Proton (which they did largely for steam deck support) is probably the biggest factor in people swapping over.
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.
superscript
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?
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!
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.
What I find interesting is that windows traffic collapses at night and during weekends, linux is much more stable.
Probably because people have to Windows at work
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
Yeah how much is ai bots or other scrapers
This was my thought, too, especially with how stable Linux traffic is relative to other OSes.
It might just mean that more people are web scraping, and that web scraping is easier/cheaper on Linux.
The Steam numbers are more interesting to me, as a measure of consumer usage, since they should mostly represent people actually using their computer.
PornHUB puts out annual usage stats, too, but idk if they include OS. (When I used Reddit, their stats would come up on dataisbeautiful frequently enough to come to mind years later—they had some interesting stats, like average visit duration and that the most Republican states were the most likely to search for gay and incest porn, but I digress.). Would bots make up a high volume of traffic for them? I imagine not, since there’s little economic value in scraping it (to train LLMs, in particular — I think it would poison the training data rather dramatically!)
I suspect the data is tainted by scrapers claiming to be a Linux desktop because that doesn’t have the same fingerprinting systems.
That’s one of the industries Mozilla announced a while ago they’d go into.
Mozilla is getting into fingerprinting? Do you have a source or something more for me to search with?
Into providing web browsing to LLM agents as a service.
As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.
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.
Yeah I thought FreeBSD was the most popular BSD on desktop…
When your market share is a rounding error.
It’s just you, @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org 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
Thought the same. I think it’s a pun. Could become a meme even. Just put “OpenBSD 0%” in any statistics report.
How do you like openBSD?
Copying from a reply to another comment:
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.
If you’re interested in it, just try it out in a VM.
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.
