I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with.
Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
palata · 1h ago
I agree with your points, except this:
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
zozbot234 · 1h ago
Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense, pretty much every downstream kernel has millions of lines of patched code that will never make it upstream in their current form. Of course, that's no different from mostly any other "Linux" embedded device, but it's very different indeed from what's standard on desktop systems.
palata · 1h ago
I would still count it as the Linux kernel. They don't change the syscall API, it's really mostly at the BSP level, right?
Said differently: if manufacturers cared to mainstream their changes, they could. And we would all be better for it.
fsflover · 1h ago
> I would still count it as the Linux kernel.
This may be technically true, except it has no single meaningful implication, like no Linux software works there.
jchw · 15m ago
That's not even true. You can use typical Linux software inside of a chroot, like with Termux.
MYEUHD · 27m ago
Checkout https://postmarketos.org
Those vendor provided kernel trees let you run a real Linux distribution on your phone.
zozbot234 · 17m ago
PostmarketOS doesn't use downstream kernel trees because those are useless for anything that's not AOSP-based (unless you use terrible hacks like libhybris) and are often not upgradable to newer versions. They rely on "close-to-mainline" kernels that are much closer to real Linux.
MatthewPhillips · 1h ago
I think this really undervalues what Linux provides. The Android software is Linux software.
fsflover · 1h ago
It's completely incompatible, so in practice it's a different OS. Doesn't mean it's not valuable.
jraph · 1h ago
You are talking about the OS while the person you are discussing with is speaking about the kernel.
The Linux kernel has its own merits outside standard Linux userspace.
I agree, saying that the fact standard Linux distros and Android share the same kernel has no single meaningful implication really undervalues the Linux kernel.
I also agree that it's important to keep in mind the two OSes are mostly incompatible.
The two OSes sharing the kernel have practical implications, including (theoretically) seeing improvements coming from Android dev in the kernel that can benefit standard linux distros, and things like Termux or Waydroid.
fsflover · 32m ago
So when somebody says "Linux reaches X market share", are they talking about the kernel? Why does it even matter how much the kernel is used? Would you count WSL?
jraph · 27m ago
I'm not sure why you are asking me all this, this is beside my points.
> So
I reject the link here.
> when somebody says "Linux reaches X market share", are they talking about the kernel?
Likely not.
> Why does it even matter how much the kernel is used?
Why not? Depends what's your concern.
> Would you count WSL?
Depends what you want to evaluate.
fsflover · 25m ago
> Depends what you want to evaluate.
This is exactly my question. You said the discussion's about the kernel. Why do you want to evaluate its usage? Which conclusions are you going to draw?
Because when talking about the OS, you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
jraph · 20m ago
> Why do you want to evaluate its usage?
I never implied this. This subthread is about countering your affirmation that Android being based on the linux kernel has no single meaningful implication. It's not anymore about evaluating usage and counting stuff.
This all started with a commenter writing "Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense", which is wrong, or at least highly misleading and confusing (I do agree with this commenter about the fact that we are talking about forks that don't upstream their shit, which does have severe implications). You could say that Android systems usually don't run mainline Linux kernel.
> you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
I wish! And I wouldn't generally include Android in the free software family, few people run Replicant or some Android flavor without the Google services, let alone without proprietary blobs. (I would count blob-free Android)
vkazanov · 59m ago
In practice Linux is a family of different OSes. Sometimes POSIX-centric, sometimes not.
What do you even count as "an OS"? Linux + gnu userland + Gnome? Or is it KDE? Embedded Linux? Does ChromeOS count? LG's WebOS?
oblio · 36m ago
Desktop Linux has a clear scope, and we all know. We can act like we don't, but we do.
Can I install LibreOffice on Android? Gnome, KDE, Xfce? Which percentage of packages in the Debian repos can I use on Android?
vkazanov · 24m ago
Linux is a kernel, that's it. There is an organisation maintaining it, and also the trademark.
There is also a major family of OSes building on the kernel + gnu userspace, which you probably call "desktop linux".
In my house there are dozens of devices running linux the kernel: routers, a tv set, washing machines, NAS, printers, etc. Some have the full gnu posix-like stack, others are very barebones.
Then, there's is a bunch of android devices running the kernel as well.
What's wrong with all of these? At what point should i draw a line?
palata · 18m ago
To me, Desktop Linux is the Linux I run on my work computer: the one that has a screen, a keyboard and a mouse. It is based on Linux (obviously), the GNU userland to some extent, and then it has a graphical environment (usually based on Xorg or Wayland).
This is different from embedded Linux or Linux on a server. And this is different from Linux-the-kernel (which runs on Android).
vkazanov · 10m ago
Well, you came up with a rather vague definition. Xorg OR wayland. Gtk or qt? Which set of tools do you expect to be available?
All of that is just too nebulous. Linux is something that runs the kernel, that's about it.
I mean, I've been using linux for all of my life, servers, at home, for work, embedded dev, corporate environment, as a manager and as a dev, etc.
What I see is that linux as already everywhere. Desktop space is the only OS market where non-linux OSes are in the majority, and maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.
hagbard_c · 1h ago
Try Termux and you'll be surprised how much 'Linux' software runs fine on Android, this includes things made to run under X11 etc.
thesuperbigfrog · 25m ago
Termux turns my Android phone into a programmable pocket computer.
What's your point? This mess is caused by Google policies, not technical considerations. You can still install Termux from F-Droid.
We can argue about Android being a horrible OS for all sorts of reasons but that's a separate discussion.
fsflover · 8m ago
Touché.
palata · 1h ago
No software compiled for arm will run on x86. No software depending on Qt will run without Qt, even if you have GTK.
Doesn't mean they don't run the same kernel, does it?
fsflover · 1h ago
You can recompile software for a different architecture relatively easily. You can't easily rewrite GNU/Linux software to run on Android.
palata · 1h ago
And you can't easily rewrite Qt software to use GTK. Still they both run on Linux.
msgodel · 40m ago
You probably could if Android weren't intentionally constrained by Google to prevent it. That's what fsflover is trying to point out: Android is more of a television firmware than an OS and counting it like a PC OS makes very little sense because you can't use it like one.
EDIT: I think you still don't understand. It doesn't matter what hardware Android runs on it's written to be appliance firmware. Even if you put it on a laptop it just turns the laptop into what is essentially a television.
palata · 26m ago
So I was saying that Android runs the Linux kernel, period.
But now that you say it, Android is very much a full OS. It's not a Linux Desktop, but it is a full OS. And televisions running Android are called "smart TVs", precisely because they run a full OS instead of a minimal firmware like they used to.
Google is working on bringing Android to the Desktop, and Samsung already does it. As in: you plug your smartphone into a docking station and it is suddenly a Desktop computer.
assbuttbuttass · 1h ago
You can run Linux software on Android via termux, or the amazing UserLAnd app even lets you install an entire distro userland with several choices (Debian, Arch, etc)
No comments yet
cherryteastain · 11m ago
Android is Linux
Android is not GNU/Linux.
Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly. There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
throwaway0665 · 3m ago
The article talks about browsers that use Linux in the user agent. This includes Alpine Linux - which is not GNU/Linux. It also splits out Chrome OS which is pretty much GNU/Linux.
jraph · 5m ago
> There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
Well… :-)
With you in spirit, but to add to the mess, one could argue Alpine (and Postmarket OS) is a standard Linux distro, but non GNU.
"GNU/" cannot be used for clarifying things anymore.
kube-system · 1h ago
> The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different.
Linux is a kernel.
jraph · 55m ago
Seeing how the Linux name is used in practice, it's useful to clarify.
palata · 1h ago
Which is exactly why people here talk about "Linux Desktop". Linux is a kernel, Linux Desktop is some flavour of a full OS made to run on a PC, as opposed to e.g. embedded Linux or a Linux server.
Not sure what your point is?
anthk · 1h ago
There are no 'Linux desktops'.
tuna74 · 1h ago
Yeah, but ChromeOS is just as much "Desktop Linux" as Fedora Workstation.
danieldk · 52m ago
I think that's pretty pedantic. When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.
Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call it Linux.
Even Wikipedia says: Linux (/ˈlɪnʊks/ LIN-uuks[15]) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.
palata · 15m ago
> When most people here say 'Linux Desktop', they mean the Linux kernel, GNU(-ish) userland, Wayland/X11, and some desktop like GNOME, KDE or Mate.
This. It actually surprises me that it's apparently not entirely clear for everybody.
9rx · 48m ago
But with respect to "Linux on the Desktop" in the context of marketshare, the interest is in seeing how far Linux has gone, not how far software running on Linux has gone.
The only reason "ChromeOS" isn't considered Linux in this dataset is because Chrome has a flag that removes Linux from the user-agent on certain systems. If we were talking about Linux on the desktop casually, or were compiling a dataset through some other means where the kernel is a known quantity, we'd most certainly include said systems.
sneak · 1h ago
A distinction without a difference. The point of this subthread is that the term Linux is overloaded to mean two things: a kernel and also an OS that has certain assumptions (usually glibc and some unix userspace stuff).
The point being that “Linux Desktop” means something more than “runs the Linux kernel”.
rhabarba · 36m ago
There is not even one common "the Linux kernel".
paulcole · 45m ago
If your belief is that Steam Deck is Linux Desktop then you need to count Switch/PS5/Xbox as desktops as well and take those into account with the OS percentages.
IsTom · 40m ago
Steam Deck has (accessible in menu by default) desktop mode that is just KDE with desktop icons and everything.
nerdjon · 1h ago
Admittedly yeah SteamOS does walk that line, and I guess technically given that I think these numbers are based on browser data it would only be capturing the people that actually go into desktop mode (maybe?).
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
palata · 1h ago
Even in the "normal mode", I would argue that it is still Linux Desktop. A Linux Desktop init system, with a Linux Desktop userspace, with a Linux Desktop libc, with the Linux Desktop security model, a Linux Desktop package manager, a Linux Desktop compositor (it uses something based on Wayland, right?), etc.
If you open a terminal (or SSH into it), you're on Linux. It's very, very different on Android.
> how many of the people using a Steam Deck [...] care that it is Linux
Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
nialv7 · 1h ago
I think it might be good to stand back a bit and think through what we are actually excited for. Because:
1. if someone uses Linux Desktop without caring about that it is Linux, why is that different from them using Windows?
2. why do we say SteamOS count as Linux Desktop but Android doesn't? is it really because how much of it is "Linux"?
For me, I think what matters to me is who has control over it. SteamOS is based on Arch, so the community has a say over where it will go, and Valve will have to work with the community. Android/Windows are fully controlled Google/Microsoft, doesn't matter that Android is Open Source.
vladvasiliu · 8m ago
As a user, what usually matters to me is what software I'm able to run on it. So even if people don't actually care about the OS itself, they will care that X runs on it but Y doesn't, which, given enough users, may push X to support that OS.
I actually daily drive Linux (Arch) because Windows is a PITA I'm not willing to put up with. But there are things I use which still don't run on Linux (Photoshop and Lightroom), so I'm actually thinking of getting a Mac again instead of having a second PC / dual boot, even though I know that can also be irritating (though less so than Windows).
"Who controls the OS" isn't that important to me. What matters is that it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do with as little friction as possible. I know Linux being free means I can go and hack on it however I like. But I also have to contend with reality: I can't reasonably think that I (personnally) am going to hack on the kernel or on some desktop environment in any meaningful measure, so I still have to put up with whatever other people figure is best.
But if there are enough people like me, including those who don't actually care about what OS they're running, maybe the apps I want to run will adopt Linux. But that only matters because, as it turns out, it's the OS which I find the less irritating to use. If tomorrow Windows 12 finally became sane, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I'm not married to Linux.
palata · 7m ago
If someone runs Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it still means that they use software that runs on Linux. Say if governments move to some Linux distro, they will need an office suite, and they may pay for its development.
If someone runs SteamOS, it means that they play games on Linux. So it becomes interesting for game devs to test for Linux. And then if someone runs SteamOS, instead of a dual boot with Windows maybe they just go to the Desktop mode. Which means that instead of Microsoft Office, they use something that runs on Linux, etc.
This is good for the Linux ecosystem. And the reason I like the Linux ecosystem is because, as you say, it's not fully controlled by TooBigTech.
nerdjon · 1h ago
It is an interesting distinction, unlike Android I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.
From my understanding Xbox is running a version of Windows on their consoles (not talking about the new handhelds) tailor made for Xbox. But I would not call that adding to the Windows marketshare.
iOS and iPadOS were started with versions of OSX and then modified (and clearly share some pieces) but we would not call either of those as contributing to Mac's marketshare.
Obviously yes neither of those let you go into the traditional Mac or Windows desktop unlike SteamOS. But how the users perceive it is still important.
> Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
The problem is this works the other way also. If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Put another way, if Valve decided (not saying they would, just asking a hypothetical) to either write their own OS or switch the underlying OS to Windows but kept the look of SteamOS as it behaved now and performance was the same. Would most users of the Steam Deck know or care?
Personally I think for claims about the "linux desktop" to really matter, there has to be a conscious desire and care that it is Linux or it could disappear.
palata · 1h ago
> I do admit that SteamOS is obviously contributing to Linux Desktop market share. I just think it is a complicated situation.
Agreed. And IMO, the thing is that you can benefit from the work made on SteamOS on any Linux Desktop. By making most games run on SteamOS, Valve contributed to make Gentoo a better platform for gaming.
> If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Sure. But what I see is really the other side: if SteamOS is relevant, then game devs will have an incentive to support SteamOS, which gives the opportunity for gamers to move to SteamOS. Now they are on Linux, so they can start using software that runs on Linux.
necovek · 1h ago
I would agree on most points regarding SteamOS except for package manager: there are really two on the system — base one and Steam itself.
Users generally only care about the latter.
cma · 2m ago
I think it is fixed now, but for a while you couldn't even use the touchpads on the desktop without steam running.
nemomarx · 17m ago
At least some of the dedicated ones also want to run epic games or others through heroic, but that's only a little more Linux on top of steam yeah
palata · 1h ago
Linux Desktop routinely has multiple package managers (for the better or worse): be it flatpak, pip, npm, nix... but it's still Linux Desktop. Just like you don't need to have the same libc to be a Linux Desktop.
tuna74 · 1h ago
There is no "Desktop Linux init system" etc. There are init systems built for/on Linux.
acdha · 1h ago
One way to think about it is what APIs application developers are using. If most of the code running on a Steam Deck is Windows code running under a compatibility layer, it probably doesn’t help the larger Linux community in the same way that, say, iOS popularity has helped ensure that many libraries have excellent macOS support.
anonymous_sorry · 1h ago
> But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux
If Linux adoption is to increase significantly (and I guess I'm of the opinion that would be a positive thing), then at some point that can only be done by acquiring users who don't care particularly deeply or understand much about their OS. That is, the vast majority of people. And that's probably not going to happen by converting that demographic to true believers.
Some of those people might decide they want to dig deeper later, and that's great. Most won't and that's fine too.
It would be a bit asymmetrical to restrict the definition of "Linux user" to folk who really care what Linux is or know their way around coreutils.
stackbutterflow · 1h ago
Think about it from a brand perspective. If you were microsoft and some flavor of windows were running on people's phone and game station, would you claim this market share? I'm sure they would.
Fokamul · 44m ago
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
---
My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care.
But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-)
Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something.
That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash.
I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
jabroni_salad · 4m ago
(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
xaitv · 31m ago
Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Fokamul · 4m ago
Yes, top of the list, it shows :)
Latops, desktops now it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though.
Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
adamc · 1h ago
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes.
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
dmd · 49m ago
Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.
danieldk · 44m ago
Wow, isn't that painful without a big screen and keyboard? [1] Most primary schools here (NL) use Chromebooks or Windows laptops. High schools sometimes have a BYOD, but you certainly have to bring a laptop.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
dmd · 18m ago
To you or me, yes. And I would say “oh they just don’t know what they’re missing” but they all have laptops and chromebooks but prefer to use their phones.
chrisweekly · 34m ago
Interesting.
I'm also in MA, and my daughters (like all their classmates) mostly use the chromebooks issued by their public high school. They strongly prefer their macbooks tho. Granted, we live in an affluent town. But I thought the chromebooks were a statewide thing.
eitally · 19m ago
I'm in San Jose and it's school-issued Chromebooks here, too, though many students have their own [superior] laptop they are able to use. In the case of my household, my son has a Thinkpad X1 Carbon and my daughter has a Pixelbook Go, I use a MacBook Pro M1 and my wife uses an old Pixelbook or an old iPad with a Magic Keyboard. Everyone's pretty much chained to their phones but recognize a real keyboard and bigger screen are beneficial for certain tasks (like writing, or Khan Academy, or even consuming media).
dmd · 19m ago
We’re also in a quite affluent town, and yes everyone does have chromebooks. But they’re considered uncool to use.
virgildotcodes · 46m ago
This is incredible, wow.
FirmwareBurner · 43m ago
How do you write long school papers on the phone's tiny screen and keyboard?
bryanlarsen · 14m ago
ChatGPT?
eqvinox · 30m ago
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
nerdjon · 21m ago
The article is specifically claiming a shift and growth. But if all that really changed was an increase in percentage due to less devices overall there really isnt much of a shift or growth.
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
zeroc8 · 1h ago
The truth is, it doesn't really matter.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
ryandv · 1h ago
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
> One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media
The key addition obviously being “for me.”
For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media.
I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard.
I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
ryandv · 37m ago
> I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
I'm sure that as a woman, you are entitled to your assumptions.
JohnFen · 39m ago
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
chrisweekly · 38m ago
FWIW, this is my experience too. I'm 50yo, live in the Boston area.
TuringTest · 28m ago
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
So, the true meaning of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" was that in the end there would only be a single unit left?
dfxm12 · 37m ago
Yeah, are there any big box retailers selling machines with Linux installed as an option? Maybe the numbers are small enough for hobbyists to make a dent, but until you see Linux machines in best buy, etc., this is probably due more to people dumping their personal windows machine in favor of a using their work laptop or iPad almost exclusively.
itsoktocry · 56m ago
>everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
nobodyandproud · 36m ago
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.
My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.
oblio · 33m ago
That's a tiny minority of PC users, though.
nobodyandproud · 26m ago
It’s not 50% territory; but it’s enough to push it up from 1-2% to 5%.
There’s interest in LLM and GenAI beyond regular tinkerers; local NSFW image generator models are apparently a thing.
api · 37m ago
Tablets and phones have replaced PCs for casual use and content consumption. If you want to make anything beyond posts and videos you usually need a PC.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
leereeves · 1h ago
How many of the Linux desktops counted here are Steam Decks?
The stats come from website trackers - do people browse the web on Steam Decks?
theandrewbailey · 3h ago
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Due to licensing costs and our certifications, we can't sell anything with Windows. My coworkers install Ubuntu, but I install Linux Mint. We don't have any clue if people keep using Linux or install Windows, but it's cool to think we're helping to move this needle.
I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines? A new machine for an enterprise or gamer will probably retain windows because it's needed but people not using their computers for more than surfing will be happy enough.
On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most lay-people, my ex and her parents don't have computers anymore and my daughter hardly uses her either.
Those that actually need computers such as developers are more prone to use Linux anyhow (especially when Microsoft is pushing annoying features such as forced reboots for those dropping their computers anyhow onto powerusers).
WJW · 2h ago
Anecdotal evidence, but Steams' Proton compatibility layer that lets you run Windows-only games on Linux works really really well. I haven't had to log into years and years by now.
alias_neo · 1h ago
I've been gaming on Linux for about a decade now full time, and somewhat before that too. I don't have a single Windows machine any more. My laptops are running Arch, my wife's personal Laptop runs Mint, her work machine is Windows because it has to, my work machine is Ubuntu, and my 5yo plays Minecraft on an Arch + Gnome laptop.
7-8 years ago it was pretty frustrating to spend £4k+ on a gaming rig to be unable to play a bunch of titles but I will not use Windows, I just accepted it.
Fast forward to today, and I'm playing Helldivers 2, with its anti-cheat and everything online with my nephew who's on Windows and getting far, far better performance (granted my PC is also more powerful). I can play the modern DOOM games with better performance than if I was running Windows on the same hardware.
My point is, Linux gaming is only getting better, I now also own a ROG Ally which I "flashed" (installed the same way you would any other Linux distro) with Bazzite straight out of the box without even booting Windows and I can play the single-player games I like to while travelling, or can have a quick game of Helldivers with my nephew if I'm not near my PC but have a stable connection. When I need/want to I can plug it into a monitor/kb/mouse with a single cable and have a full desktop with HDR, VRR etc.
fmbb · 2h ago
Same. Finally no reason to boot Windows on any machine.
latexr · 2h ago
I’ve been wanting to do this for years on an old (and severely underpowered) MacBook Pro which I use with Windows exclusively for Games.
Do you have any recommendation for an extremely lightweight Linus distro which installs and runs Steam fine? It would be used exclusively for that, so it shouldn’t run a ton of background stuff.
tomrod · 1h ago
Depends on your view of lightweight, but probably XFCE Ubuntu (Xubuntu) will serve you great. Full featured without a ton of bloat, historically.
latexr · 1h ago
> Depends on your view of lightweight
Basically, what I care is that as I’m running the game, the system is consuming as few resources as possible. It’s an outdated machine, so every bit matters.
> probably XFCE Ubuntu (Xubuntu)
Thank you. Will check it out.
delecti · 1h ago
Check out Bazzite. It started as a way to approximate SteamOS for general hardware.
Or if you have an AMD GPU, you could even try SteamOS itself, though it's intended for handhelds.
latexr · 51m ago
I thought about SteamOS but didn’t seem viable for that Mac.
Bazzite looks to be the next best thing. Probably what I’m looking for. Thank you.
theandrewbailey · 33m ago
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
exiguus · 1h ago
Actually, as a long time Linux Desktop user, i have at least 4, refurbished bought Notebooks in my place yet. Beside the 4, another 3 new new bought Notebooks.
The reason why I buy refurbished is, that my use-cases don't need the newest hardware and for a long time, older hardware was more compatible with Linux and BSD for me. Also, you get for a small price, high quality hardware.
If you now ask yourself, why that many notebooks? Notebooks are like handbags. They have to match the occasion.
sevensor · 26m ago
Agreed! Old laptops are more than powerful enough for Linux, and I like having purpose-oriented computers. The hobby programming computer doesn’t have games on it and is at any rate too weak to run them. The music laptop has every flac I ever ripped from a CD, and precious little disk space for anything else. And so on.
tempfile · 1h ago
I am the same. I decided a few years ago that I really really like the thinkpad t450, and have gradually bought 5 of them online for a total cost of about 300 USD. I may never need to buy a laptop ever again.
exiguus · 39m ago
Yes, over the past 15 years I bought at least a dozen used thinkpads of the X series (x201, x220, x230 and x1). Most of them are now with other family members and friends (they are now also Linux Desktop user). And I still use 3 of them. One daily, the other weekly, and the 3rd for conferences. Beside that, I am also a fan of the T and yet of the P series. And I have a small collection of thinkpads with the big blue logo from the A and R series, but that's mostly just for fun.
tossandthrow · 2h ago
My intuition is that most people, unless they have specific needs, just keep it.
Most people likely don't have an opinion besides being able to browse the web and will not even be aware that they are not using Windows.
So this is great work! Keep it up!
sevensor · 31m ago
The link is appreciated! I like the selection of ruggedized laptops.
shaunpud · 2h ago
I thought the Windows license was burned into the BIOS, so a reinstall would pick it up automatically?
ergsef · 2h ago
I worked selling refurb computers and this wasn't the case from Windows 95 - XP. The rise of TPMs and EFI is after that time so it's possible some newer system provides a way of tying licenses to computers, but it's not BIOS.
jve · 2h ago
Well, it's been 2 decades so things do have changed.
It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers. But transferable licenses still exist, and enterprise volume licenses are yet a different beast, so it all depends on what Windows license the PC was originally sold with, if any.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
>It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers.
Wrong. IT IS 100% stored in the UEFI firmware, specifically ACPI tables, MSDM field. Only if that exists, it is then verified on-line for activation to make sure the license is genuine and matches the device ID you're referring to for witch the license was sold(typically for OEM) or if it's portable.[1]
On linux you should be retrieve the license via something like:
The biggest issue right now is really the upcoming EOL of Windows 10. Most of these machines will be old enough (pre Intel 8th gen or Zen 2) that they won't be officially supported by Windows 11.
theandrewbailey · 1h ago
I make a note of both in listings where that is applicable.
theandrewbailey · 1h ago
On most machines we sell that's probably the case. I don't know of anything that stops me from linking people to the official Windows installation media on Microsoft's site, so I do that even on the listing.
mr_toad · 2h ago
It’s in the ACPI tables, in ACPI Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), not the BIOS. An home user might be able to active it, but the repair shop probably can’t legally.
aquova · 2h ago
That might be even worse then, you'd be reselling a machine which was licensed under the previous owner's Windows key
art0rz · 2h ago
How is that worse when the key is bound to the hardware and non-transferable anyway?
master-lincoln · 2h ago
why would it be non-transferable?
mr_toad · 2h ago
OEM licenses are legally (and practically) tied to the machine. There’s no way to transfer it.
The statscounter data is not reliable, and it is just embarrassing how often these posts make it to the HN frontpage.
You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months. The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of these numbers?
danso · 41m ago
Mentioned this in another comment [0], but analytics.usa.gov has the % of visitors on Linux operating systems at 5.7% in 2025, up from 4.5% in 2024. Of course "visitors to U.S. government websites" is not fully representative of all U.S. computer users, but it's worth noting.
Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.
1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.
2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.
3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.
This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
supriyo-biswas · 1h ago
Additionally, with the number of people who use ad blockers on Linux and given that statcounter mostly uses 3rd party JS tags, I highly doubt these numbers are correct.
There's a discussion in a peer thread about how people never notice its Linux and keep using their refurbished machines as-is. This too, is surprising to me, as my own experience as well as the ones I've heard in person from IT folks and IT-related forums online, people immediately notice that the UI looks different and panic as to how to achieve their current tasks. I'm skeptical of that entire thread too.
In general, I just wonder how much of any popular forum is just people LARPing. I do wish that it didn't occur here, though it's undoubtedly difficult to moderate.
ryukoposting · 1h ago
> people immediately notice that the UI looks different and immediately panic as to how to achieve their current tasks
This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.
I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.
Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
elsjaako · 2h ago
Note that OS X goes down for the same period. I believe Apple is calling it MacOS now.
So that looks like it might be some change in how Apple computers are reporting their OS.
jsnell · 1h ago
Indeed, OS X goes down, and obviously none of us actually believe that. But not only does Statcounter report that clearly faulty number, but they have yet to fix the problem.
This happens all the time. When their numbers are clearly wrong, they don't care about the numbers enough to fix even the glaring problems, their sample is unsound, and their methodology is unpublished, why exactly are we supposed to give any of their numbers any credence?
What you've written is the first I've heard of a recent change to the Safari on OS X user-agent string, and I see no indication of it in my access logs. What's it supposed to be now? It seems a bit unlikely, and given Safari never ran on classic Mac OS, it seems like a company that's supposed to specialize in analytics should be able to handle it...
IshKebab · 1h ago
I don't understand why Statcounter reports them separately though. They're just two different versions of the same OS, and those are grouped for other OSes in this chart. Makes no sense.
zozbot234 · 2h ago
"mac OS" not "MacOS". MacOS is for the older pre-OS X versions.
antipurist · 2h ago
It's "macOS" [1] if you really want to be pedantic. However, it's still "Intel Mac OS X" in Safari UA even on M1 MacBook, so why Statcounter data includes both OS X and macOS remains a mystery.
"macOS" not "mac OS", to align with "iOS", "iPadOS", "watchOS" and "tvOS".
arp242 · 1h ago
> the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months
I'm not sure what's up with listing both "OS X" and "macOS", but I'm quite confident it's not classic Mac OS.
speedgoose · 28m ago
Can you even have a successful TLS handshake with Mac OS 9 ?
oefrha · 1h ago
Pretty sure OS X and macOS should be combined, not doing that feels like amateur hour, very puzzling. But even with that in mind, you see wild ups and downs as large as 3.5% a month from 10/24 to 11/24 to 12/24 to 01/25 and there’s no way in hell actual deployments are fluctuating like that. Error bars like that make a number of 5% pretty meaningless, however feel-good it is.
Also, for people unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem: the OS X => macOS rebranding happened back in 2016, IIRC the Safari user agent never ever included macOS (Safari on M4 Macs running latest macOS 15.5 reports itself as “Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7” in its UA), so absolutely no idea where they’re getting this new “macOS” category. Maybe they publish technical details of their methodology somewhere? I can’t bother to check.
necovek · 1h ago
Don't confuse percentage points with percents.
25%+-3.5% means it's 5%+-0.7% for proportional error bars. They don't have to be linear, true, but they are certainly not 5% +- 3.5% either.
necovek · 1h ago
The article claims this is due to Apple rebranding OS X back to MacOS with newer releases.
Are you disputing that? Or did you miss that in the article?
jama211 · 1h ago
That’s not classic macOS… that’s modern macOS, as in post OS X dude
danso · 44m ago
For another anecdata point, https://analytics.usa.gov tracks user device demographics to all visitors of U.S. government websites. Which of course might skew in ways different than the general U.S. population. But checking out the numbers right now for Linux users:
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
JadoJodo · 38m ago
I am in this category, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the market for OS's:
I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).
Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).
I think it comes down to the following wishes:
A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.
B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.
C. I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.
queuebert · 5m ago
Anecdotally, I have two gaming desktops for my kids in the same place, side by side. They don't know much about computers, but they greatly prefer to use the Linux one and only use the Windows one when forced to, like because Microsoft bought Minecraft and only puts out Education Edition for Windows. They seem to navigate Ubuntu much easier than Windows, and that machine gives them less trouble and is snappier.
palata · 1h ago
I think that there are multiple things at play:
1. The statistics only show Desktop usage relative to each other. But I could totally imagine that macOS "loses" users to iPadOS. Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general (I see more and more people who don't actually have a personal computer anymore).
2. Valve (and others, surely) is doing an incredible job with video games on Linux. 20 years ago, I needed a dual boot just to play games. I dropped Windows when I stopped playing, and I started playing again thanks to the Steam Deck. I am convinced that many people today "need" an OS on which they can play video games, except that today they have a choice (thanks to Valve and others).
3. Privacy. I think it's becoming a lot more important outside the US (it's actually now a national security concern there), but I'm convinced that people are slowly learning about that. TooBigTech pushing to train their AIs with everything the users do surely has an impact on that.
kattagarian · 1h ago
> Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general
But this is desktop only. If someone stop using windows completely, it won't show a decrease in windows usage. This will basically only show when people switch from desktop OS.
smcameron · 1h ago
You sure about that math? If there are 2 linux users and 8 windows users, then that's 20% linux, 80% windows. If one windows user quits using computers, then that's 2 linux users (out of 9 total) and 7 windows users (out of 9 total), or 22% linux and 77% windows users.
strangescript · 7m ago
I feel like this is more about Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.
I no longer have a windows machine. If I can't get a game to run on Linux then I don't bother with it. I played Clair Obscur start, to finish, in Mint on a 3090 with zero issues. I just forced it to load in steam since linux isn't officially supported.
BLKNSLVR · 22m ago
I had a Teams meeting for an outside of work topic this morning. Since all my personal machines are Linux based I was kinda happy I had my work laptop available with Windows and Teams installed.
Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
After rebooting twice and only five minutes before the meeting started I reverted to my Linux desktop, opened the email with the link to the Teams meeting and was a minute early using the web version of Teams.
Phew, saved by Linux.
Kudos to Microsoft for making Teams web version operating system and browser agnostic. But fuck what they've done with Windows updates. Numerous coworkers also saying their computers decided to reboot of their own volition the last couple of days in order to install updates.
Maybe it's a worthwhile trade off for security, but I'm glad I had an alternative option this morning.
I'm the five-odd years since switching to Linux exclusive at home, my decision is only ever reconfirmed as correct.
(I'm a reformed gamer from a long while ago, but the very few games I do play I have gotten to work on Linux).
queuebert · 10m ago
This is a very common workflow for me, except I was using Teams on a Mac. And thanks to some update there are now two non-working versions of Teams installed ("Teams" and "Teams new" or some equally tacky naming). Luckily I have a Linux laptop next to it that can run it in-browser.
I would love to know what Microsoft thinks the purpose of the standalone app is, when it is both slower and less reliable.
oblio · 17m ago
Do you use your Windows laptop daily?
osigurdson · 1h ago
After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.
kovac · 44m ago
Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.
PhilippGille · 31m ago
There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close
Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.
I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.
andyferris · 2h ago
I have to ask - what OS do AI-training web scrapers tend to report? (A mixture? One with > 5% linux market share? Sorry, being a sceptic, otherwise I think this is fantastic news if accurately measured).
da_chicken · 2h ago
Most of these types of surveys do their best to filter out robots.
With over 50% of Internet traffic being robots, the results really don't make any sense at all if you don't.
hollerith · 2h ago
Good question. Most of these headlines about Linux market share ("mind share"?) are completely uninformative about how widespread the use of Linux is in reality.
12 years ago or so, a similar headline appeared, then someone explained that the Chinese government had recently cracked down on Windows pirating (to appease the Americans) with the result that some PC vendors had stopped including (pirated copies of) Windows with the computers they sell (shipping some Linux distro instead of course) but since pirated Windows install media was still widely available, there quickly grew a cultural practice in which the consumer installs Windows (or gets his more technically-inclined cousin to do it for him) as soon as he gets his new PC home. But the headline reported on a statistic that did not catch this cultural practice because it counted only the OSes on computers when they were sold (i.e., "OS shipments").
cowboylowrez · 2h ago
I wonder if they used firefox to download internet explorer?
I tend to think that they mostly should be using their own user agent, and if not be desguised as the most common ones to avoid being detected too easily. Web scaping probably has been mostly running under Linux before the age of AI anyway. I'm not in the field, so if anyone more trustworthy info on that...
eloisant · 2h ago
Yes they run Linux, but they either have their own user agent (not included in the stats) or are spoofing a real world web browser... In which case they might be spoofing Chrome on Windows even if they run on Linux.
Either way I don't think the 5% are impacted by scraping bots.
triknomeister · 2h ago
Anything that's automated today is linux. So, I'll assume almost 99.99%, or may be BSD in some cases.
input_sh · 1h ago
Any scraper out there that doesn't want to identify itself as such is very likely to spoof the most commonly used OS + browser combo (Chrome + Windows), regardless of what it's actually running on.
baal80spam · 2h ago
So basically the 5% number is pulled out of thin air.
donatj · 1h ago
Windows 11 not working on otherwise perfectly good PCs I imagine is at least a small part of it. I've got an 8-core Ryzen system I think from 2016 that's still very powerful and more than good enough for my needs, but Microsoft is insisting I "throw it away and buy a new one", in this economy no less!
I also think a number of influencers like PewDiePie moving to Linux has to have moved the needle at least a little as well.
jwrallie · 30m ago
For me it was Windows 11 not supporting hardware. I moved to Fedora in the beginning of this year for work (while using it at home for quite a while).
After seeing SharePoint.exe using 1GB and 100% of the CPU today for over 12 hours I’m seriously considering removing my VM (that I only boot for MS Office). Edge even greeted me with a message that I have access to Copilot Vision that can now see everything I browse when I right clicked the process and clicked on search!
dosinga · 2h ago
If you zoom out to say the last 10 years you can see that those graphs go up and down like crazy. The error bars on these numbers must be huge.
ahartmetz · 2h ago
Yeah. A critical mass is needed and we seem to be there, but keeping it a system for "power users and up" (and for total laypeople but managed by others) is also desirable.
mark-r · 1h ago
A year ago I decided to upgrade my 10 year old motherboard and get something faster. I was hoping my existing Windows 7 SSD would boot up, but alas it would get to the coalescing window display and crash. I never figured out why.
My choices were to spend $200 on a new version of Windows that was worse than the one I lost, or switch to Linux. Guess which I did?
QuadrupleA · 5m ago
Recently moved to Arch Linux after 25+ years on Windows. It was a LOT of work (my whole career is on the computer and I have a lot of custom scripts and tools), but I'm so happy with the result.
No more hundreds of background processes sapping my battery life and performance.
No more blatantly manipulative ads every time Windows updates, about how I won't be "safe" unless I sign up for OneDrive, switch to Edge, and subscribe to Office Live Dynamics Pro Limited 365, because now word processing and spreadsheets are a subscription for some fucking reason.
No more 3 different generations of UI styles sloppily bolted together (though Linux desktop styling can be plenty sloppy).
No more news feeds in my start menu and task bar filled with the outrage and statistically improbable evil human acts of the day, no doubt with MS ads, alongside prods to install Candy Crush and other crap.
No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.
No more needing to sign in to a FUCKING CLOUD ACCOUNT to use my own computer.
No more stupid crap like copilot, sucking screenshots and forwarding them to MS and OpenAI, and other sparkly AI icons on every damn thing.
Haven't booted Windows in a month or two. So happy to have switched - my computer belongs to me again, for the first time in a long while
ensocode · 12m ago
Regarding Steam: Some people used to avoid Linux because of gaming, but that’s changed quite a bit. With Proton and native support for many titles, the barrier to switching is much lower now.
Great news anyway :)
I've used all three OS's for many years and I really just.. don't care which one I'm on anymore. They all do the same thing. Currently on windows 11 after ~5 years of debian gnome and its fine. Enjoyable even, especially with WSL. GUI software support is much better here
ryandv · 2h ago
Based on the history of the tech industry, Linux adoption should be kept at this level and advanced no further. This is already the sweet spot for the "year of the Linux desktop," which should be celebrated by experts, technical users, and the sufficiently motivated.
Once the unwashed masses start coming in, the software and its interaction patterns pander to the lowest common denominator and the quality of the medium degrades.
palata · 2h ago
I understand your point, and I genuinely hate when people try to put pressure on distros to essentially look more like Windows.
On the other hand, I think it's great when companies or government try to move to Linux (if you're not a US company or the US government, it makes total sense to try not to depend on US software so much).
But I want to believe that there is space for everybody. I wouldn't use Mint myself, but I convinced a couple friends to use it and it works really well! EU governments moving to european distros like Suse and the likes is great. And I will stay closer to "more advanced" distros like Gentoo or Alpine.
The beauty of Linux is that there is not one Linux; it's about freedom of choice. Because many people move from Windows to Mint doesn't have to mean that it's hurting Gentoo, I think? Hopefully.
lvass · 1h ago
How exactly is Linux becoming popular going to make my EXWM setup suck? To be fair, if it does get a large market share, some company is probably going to take MS's role and make a distro that sucks but many people use. But that shouldn't be an issue to existing users unless they take over something like a major DE and you insist on using that for some reason. For IT people, having the possibility of running a decent shell and sshd in most desktops would be terrific.
palata · 1h ago
> some company is probably going to take MS's role and make a distro that sucks but many people use
You mean other than Ubuntu and the likes?
chii · 2h ago
> the quality of the medium degrades.
not necessarily. There's room to have the mass market make breakthroughs in laymen software for linux if there's sufficient demand.
And having the mass market lowest common denominator doesnt remove the good stuff - they still exist and you could still choose to use them. This is esp. true for linux, where as you'd have fewer choice/customizability for windows as it's close sourced.
bboygravity · 2h ago
So is this the reasoning to keep Linux as hard to use as possible?
* just open the terminal and type this magic spell to make x work *
DaSHacka · 2h ago
I'd imagine they would say: "if you find that difficult, then yes"
redeeman · 1h ago
kinda like when people write to eachother, just open up your whatsapp, and type in a magic spell to let your friends know they are invited to dinner tonight..
bitmasher9 · 2h ago
In some ways we are already seeing this. Have you ever opened a GitHub repository and the only installation/build instructions are for the AUR. I seem to run into this pretty frequently while looking at small projects.
palata · 2h ago
What bothers me is when projects have a hard dependency on something like systemd or even Ubuntu, because most of the time it is not necessary and it means I can't use it.
But other than that, as long as I can compile the project from source (and if it's done properly I don't need instructions for that), I'm fine.
I would assume that a repo providing instructions for the AUR is already better than one assuming that "Linux == Ubuntu", because the developer knows at least one distro that is not Ubuntu :-).
megous · 2h ago
Linux based distributions solve this by not being a monoculture, no?
Pandering to the masses would be in the form of specific desktop environment, and maybe specific distribution integrating it well with all kinds of desktop software.
Nothing would change for the existing users of obscure software, hackishly stitched together.
bitmasher9 · 2h ago
Not at all. All Linux distributions essentially run the same software with different packages and configuration files. There are a few either/or choices they make, but it’s mostly overlap with very little disro specific software.
If Linux software starts widely adapting more dark patterns it will probably impact users across all distributions.
ekunazanu · 4m ago
> If Linux software starts widely adapting more dark patterns it will probably impact users across all distributions
What is preventing people from just creating a fork?
palata · 2h ago
I share that concern, but again: if more people move to Linux, maybe (?) more people will become advanced Linux user and maybe (?) it will bring more activity into advanced distros.
Not that I believe it will necessarily be good, but I'm not sure it will necessarily be bad. Could go both ways, IMO.
tiborsaas · 2h ago
"oh no, the peasants are using MY operating system, this can't be good"
palata · 2h ago
I think it's more "they will give less control in order to please the peasants, and as a result I will lose control".
And I agree with that concern, though my hope is that we can make it easier for the peasants without sacrificing control for the nerds (trying to find a word that would work with "peasant" in this context :D).
Zambyte · 1h ago
I disagree with the concern, because obviously making Free Software easier for non-technically inclined people to use does not make the software harder for technically inclined people to use. This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.
HKH2 · 1h ago
If they take out options, then you might have to maintain a fork or write a plugin to keep them.
Zambyte · 1h ago
And thus, nothing was lost except the superiority complex :)
palata · 1h ago
Yeah, I think I agree with you after all. As long as it's open source, it's okay.
Barrin92 · 1h ago
> This is strictly an issue for proprietary software.
it really isn't, as Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world. Linux isn't developed by Bob the free software enthusiast, take a look at the code contributions to the kernel.
Overall I'm also in favour of driving linux adoption because it's still a better world but the idea that this has no spill over effect on anyone else is wrong. It's a fiction to think that Linux, just like a browser is anything but a collective project with most development driven by very few organizations who also have commercial or proprietary interests.
Zambyte · 29m ago
> Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world.
There are lots of Chromium forks. I don't really see how this contradicts my point.
HKH2 · 1h ago
Gnome has sacrificed a lot of control.
palata · 1h ago
i3wm and sway haven't :-).
My point being that it's okay for some projects to sacrifice control, as long as others don't. I can't tell Ubuntu how they should make their distro; what I can do is choose Gentoo (or anything in between).
HKH2 · 57m ago
Gnome can do whatever they like with their own project, but fragmentation is the biggest problem with Linux.
fsflover · 2h ago
Just switch to Qubes OS, and you're special again. (Worked for me.)
fsflover · 2h ago
You're probably talking about enshittification [0], which typically affects centralized for-profit entities, not community-based free software projects.
I play all my video games on linux - heros of the storm, sc2, warcraft 2, counter strike... very stable much nicer then what i remember from windoze...
intellectronica · 44m ago
Very cool! If you extrapolate the current trend by 2073 Linux will dominate the desktop market.
oblio · 25m ago
And the desktop market will have 4 users in total.
exiguus · 1h ago
My perspective is that the Steam Deck significantly contributes to this increase.
Additionally, a smaller factor could be the growing trend of Dev and Op professionals moving from Macs to Linux. And the trend before, to move from Windows to Mac's because they are cheaper to administrate. This shift is supported by manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo, who are providing more devices with Linux pre-installed, aligning well with the supply chain requirements of IT departments.
Also, at least for me, it's hard to envision vendors specialising in Linux desktop hardware, such as Tuxedo, Framework, and System76, experiencing a surge in their market shares. I am very curious to see their numbers and the kind of people and companies that buy this products.
mousethatroared · 1h ago
For me, Linux became a viable desktop OS when Steve Jobs killed flash and browsers could render any page independently of the OS.
Then Office 365 came around and I could do quick work w/out a windows machine.
umanwizard · 1h ago
FWIW you could install Flash on Linux. It was sometimes a pain but it did work.
gethly · 17m ago
Windows 11 and Steam OS are starting to make impact. I am sticking to Windows 10 until is stops working but I think Linux might be finally in my future.
beebmam · 22m ago
I have a great computer, but it isn't compatible with Windows 11, so now I'm using Ubuntu on it. It's not ideal, but at least it's not a brick. I hate the requirements for Windows 11.
ivanjermakov · 19m ago
Microsoft is the biggest contributor to the Linux desktop market share.
sschueller · 54m ago
I hope we get to a point where enough "professionals" are using it to force companies like Acrobat to offer Linux versions of their software (cough Fusion 360). It is the only thing keeping me from completely ditching my windows VM. Using CAD in a virtulabox VM is torture. FreeCAD is sadly not a viable replacement (maybe in the future but a lot of work is needed). I was able to switch to other tools for other things like KiCAD for PCB work, Blender and DaVinci Resolve also work great.
I wanted a gaming PC forever but I just couldn’t stomach Windows. I had a great experience with the Steam Deck in the past 2 years so I built a Bazzite desktop. I am having a lot of fun.
globalise83 · 53m ago
My suspicion is that many folks are converting their old MacBooks etc which no longer have support to keep running Linux. I have about 4 such machines of different brands lying about the house, some over 10 years old and they run just fine despite their antiquated hardware.
schmudde · 1h ago
The web browser app paradigm changed everything. The Windows API isn't nearly as important as it once was.
rhabarba · 39m ago
Then again, using Linux has no obvious advantage anymore, as you don't "own" most software you're running anyway.
k_bx · 59m ago
I remember when it was absolutely crucial for your desktop/laptop to be able to do everything and Linux was a no go for people. Today you can live off your phone and be OK, so Linux actually makes much more sense. Camera/audio doesn't work well? No worries, just call via phone.
globalise83 · 52m ago
Also, 99% of all day to day apps now run in the browser, so having MS Word on your machine is not so important.
k_bx · 16m ago
Yeah, the only thing I'd love to see is "open with gdocs" to be somehow integrated similar to desktop experience. Having to drag and drop every time, creating new file, is really stupid.
Zigurd · 1h ago
The posts on this thread arguing that Android is not a real Linux should take a look at the increasingly blurred lines between MacOS and iPadOS. Android tablets are on a similar trajectory. ChromeOS Flex pretty much is a desktop Linux distro with an Android runtime.
Some people will find the idea of elements of a mobile OS on their desktop attractive. Other people will find it less unattractive than buying a new PC to run Windows 11.
oblio · 19m ago
I've been using Android tablets for a long time. They're way behind iPads in terms of apps available for them, and for them to be usable as main computers for anyone half technical they'd basically needs access to all the Linux desktop software, which they don't have access to.
The simple example would be LibreOffice.
LongjumpingCat · 1h ago
Interesting milestone, 5% might not sound huge but for desktop Linux in the US it signals a real shift. Part of this comes from more polished distros lowering the barrier for non-technical users, and part is probably a pushback against aggressive telemetry and forced updates in mainstream OSes.
Also worth noting: if you count Chrome OS under the Linux kernel umbrella, the footprint is even bigger. It shows that open-source roots can quietly gain ground, even if the branding isn’t “Linux” front and center.
arrty88 · 50m ago
Are people just running headless / full chrome on *nix from data centers to scrape webpages for AI and data mining? Did the article mention anything about checking IP address?
This is really cool. I had no idea this had happened.
Thirty years ago Bill was writing angry memos about the rise of Linux and how Microsoft had to stop free software.
Workaccount2 · 1h ago
Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal. No faster way to scare off users than give them a CLI heavy OS and have the trip over the very first copy+paste command they try to run (once they figure out the circa ~1982 cursor)
I really cannot say enough about the total fumble of Linux distros in an age when people are more desperate than ever to leave Windows.
Gormo · 1h ago
> Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
Why is 5% a magic number? Why not 4% or 6% or 10%?
> You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal.
Try Shift+Ins. CLI and GUI conventions have always been different, and the sort of users who work in the terminal are the ones who know the difference. Overloading Ctrl+V, and breaking applications that run in the terminal, just to make two completely different paradigms use the same hotkeys seems a bit ridiculous to me.
BTW, this applies across OSes, and isn't specific to Linux.
umanwizard · 1h ago
It’s not a “fumble”, because “Linux” is not a company trying to sell as many units as possible.
As you said, it works for the people who make it. Why does it need to do anything else? Linux desktop conquering the world is just an old Slashdot trope, it’s not something anyone is actually working to achieve in real life.
palata · 1h ago
> Linux will be stuck in the 5% range as long as people who love Linux are the ones making Linux.
This makes no sense. There are so many different ways to use Linux, there is not a single profile of "people who love Linux".
c0balt · 1h ago
> You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal
The more poignant issues might be that there's inconsistencies around UI here. Some terminals allow that directly (Kitty), others require Ctrl+shift+v (Gnome shell, iirc Powershell and Konsole).
To be fair, the best non-windows OS likely is MacOS. It has software support for a lot of commercial prosumer stuff, e. G., Adobe, and has a convenient and stable 3rd Party offering for Windows VMs (Parallels).
As a Linux user it seems like there is a lot to learn in regard to UI consistency from both though (maybe less from Windows). Gnome and KDE are probably moving in the right direction here but it is still a bit off sometimes.
cjfd · 1h ago
I think it is very unfortunate that Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V works for some programs in Linux. This makes the environment inconsistent. These programs should be adapted to the environment they are in and only support selecting using left mouse button highlight followed by middle mouse button press.
dmantis · 1h ago
You can't do ctrl-c and ctrl-v in MacOS too, that's doesn't break their marketshare.
atemerev · 1h ago
Ctrl-C means something different in the terminal. Always has been. And if it doesn't make sense to use Ctrl-C, there is no sense in Ctrl-V either.
pjc50 · 1h ago
Windows lets you Ctrl-V while still mapping Ctrl-C to break.
resource_waste · 1h ago
I imagine you have only used Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
Fedora is a different level completely. With Fedora, I remember installing nvidia drivers via terminal, and that was essentially it.
Sometimes I open up ports for my kid doing minecraft, but that was it. Its not like when you use Ubuntu or Mint and you need to manually update something just to get Netflix to work on Chromium.
Fedora is so good, I won't call it linux. Linux has the Debian/Ubuntu baggage. Fedora stands alone. Its easier to use than Windows, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Windows 11 has ads, unresponsive search, UI/theme issues that make it impossible to read text, it has fake paths to files. Fedora just works.
umanwizard · 1h ago
Fedora is actually older than Ubuntu. And FWIW you still can’t paste with C-v in the terminal.
resource_waste · 1h ago
When we say outdated, we mean the version of the kernel and other software. Not the first time it came out.
When referring to the terminal, these are 1 time events every 12 months. Its not really a huge deal on Fedora because you basically don't need the terminal. On Ubuntu, its a much bigger deal given how many things are broken and need to be repaired.
wolfi1 · 1h ago
And it could get into double digits, now Win 10 is phased out. Let's face it, if you are just a regular user of a Personal Computer, you don't need Windows anymore
jasoneckert · 1h ago
This begs the question: At what threshold would we consider it 'the year of Linux on the desktop'?
5% seems too low. Would it be 30%? Or 51%?
Answering that question in the public sphere may quell many of the "Is ___ going to the year of the Linux desktop?" posts we get each year.
fh973 · 1h ago
I think the year of Linux on the desktop will actually be the year of Chromium on Linux on the desktop (instead of Chrome on Windows), ie. is it really the Linux on the desktop if the only application you run is the browser for SaaS anyway?
giantg2 · 37m ago
That's enough that we could form a 3rd political party.
lvl155 · 2h ago
I think adoption has to do with the fact that desktop environment efforts are divided across so many distros.
Gormo · 1h ago
What do you mean by that? DEs development is separate from distros. Distros often select a particular DE to be their default, but "desktop environment efforts" aren't really something the distros do.
resource_waste · 1h ago
I might be a bit contrarian on this.
I think the biggest obstacle in the Linux world is people knee jerk recommending Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
If people rallied around the current SOTA, Fedora, we would've hit 5% a few years ago.
The variety of distros cause people to get confused, and go with the most heavily marketed distros, Ubuntu flavors. Just because Ubuntu gave away free CDs 20 years ago, doesnt make them good. It makes them good at marketing.
People confuse Fedora with Arch, which is terrible. People confuse Ubuntu with 'stable like a table', instead of 'outdated stable'.
We almost need a reduction in favored distros. Out with the complexity: Fedora for desktop. It has all the DEs too.
Gormo · 35m ago
Fundamentally, Linux is Linux. Differences between distros are vastly overstated, and they mostly amount to different default selections and configurations of the same underlying components.
Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.
Symmetry · 2h ago
That's twice the number Valve reports for Steam users which includes a lot of Steam Decks that come with Linux installed, so it seems high, I would have guessed somewhere in the 1 to 2 percent range. In some countries you have mass Linux deployments to schools or government IT systems that could give you a number like this but I'm not sure what could be driving it in the US.
fghjl · 2h ago
I assume the problems still are that (1) no Desktop Linux is at the level of macOS or Windows, and (2) the only one close is still RedHat, but most want Debian-based or something else.
MacOS is the best model for a successful desktop Linux to use. Trim down the kernel/drivers to just what runs on that spec hardware, only support that spec hardware, focus effort on the OS and ecosystem, keep it stable, make upgrades trivial, and give it freedom to run other software, terminal apps, etc. And most of all- focus resources on these efforts and charge a lot of money for it!
bitmasher9 · 2h ago
I’d argue desktop Linux passed “the level of windows” sometime around Windows 8 or KDE5.
I have way more stability issues and complicated upgrades on Windows.
redeeman · 1h ago
in 2003 it was WAY easier to install linux than windows. You had to mess with floppys for sata drivers and shit to install windows.
and KDE was always ATLEAST as easy as windows, arguably more. At this time lots of older crappy hardware people had also only had win98 drivers, giving people immense problems. It mostly worked better on linux. This still goes today.
blashyrk · 1h ago
Macos window/desktop management is also stuck in 2001 with "magic gestures" tacked on. For someone who hates using these gestures especially when connected to an actually good kb/m, the base desktop experience is horrible. The dock is completely useless, the various cmd+tab or cmd+` shortcuts are unwieldy, Spotlight is growing increasingly worse year after year.
Rectangle/tiling window managers on top is the only way to make it workable.
Apart from wm, the existence of application notarization is a downright insult (though Windows is also guilty of this with smartscreen but to a much lesser extent).
Apple's "pay us 100 bucks a year or we'll tell your users that your program is malware" is just another step in the inevitable game of locking down macos and turning it into a mobile-like hellscape
huh___ · 1h ago
What gestures are you talking about? I think you can turn those off, and I’d be surprised if there isn’t a way to turn off the rest with a 3rd party or custom tool.
Application notarization isn’t a problem anymore- you just have a single accept dialog. That problem that made you do a trick to get past it was only a problem years ago, due to whomever the moron was that thought that was a good idea. The current way is acceptable.
I install homebrew and random apps with no problems.
theowhfbfn · 2h ago
Is SteamOS included? I am not really surprised. Linux is quite often only usable option, now when Win 10 is not really supported.
koakuma-chan · 2h ago
Why not use Win 11?
malfist · 2h ago
Because it's actively user hostile? Microsoft shoving their spyware and unwelcome AI into it regardless of consent
dmantis · 1h ago
1. Ads
2. Built-in cloud AI spyware / Copilot
3. Millions of abandoned laptops that had been made 4-5+ years ago.
Basically electronic and ecological waste: machines from 10 years ago work perfectly fine if you change thermal paste and don't hit them too much. Even if you don't care about the planet, you might care about your wallet though.
lvass · 2h ago
For video games as of today, SteamOS presents double digit performance gains on average over Windows, running Windows games on Steam Deck and similar platforms.
goob_nl · 1h ago
Yay PewDiePie
rhabarba · 43m ago
Role models for computer use in my generation: RMS, Bjarne Stroustrup, Doug McIlroy.
Role models for computer use today: “PewDiePie”.
This is why we can't have nice things.
deadbabe · 20m ago
There’s no reliable way to collect this data. Linux “desktops” could just be bots.
Shorel · 1h ago
This is huge =)
I remember the days when we were under 1%.
Congratulations to all involved on making this true.
rhabarba · 41m ago
I genuinely wonder why it is considered "huge". Does it really matter how many % desktop usage one of the several dozens desktop operating systems has?
oceanhaiyang · 1h ago
Thanks to Linux I’m still rocking a surface pro 3. Will never look back
kristianpaul · 1h ago
Wasnt this what Mac looked 15y ago?
pessimizer · 2h ago
Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox. I never would have imagined history would turn out like this. Firefox had the easy job and desktop Linux had the hard one.
This will lead to a virtuous circle for Linux unless someone does something; privacy issues are leading people to the OSes where you get to freely choose your level of privacy. Anybody have any more weird old unix patents to throw at them and slow it down?
edit: maybe the way to stop Linux is heat up the war against all general purpose computing. Linux could be used to run unauthorized AI.
Shorel · 42m ago
> Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox.
This means many Linux users install an alternative browser, not to use Firefox. That's funny, but so true.
goku12 · 2h ago
I came to say this as well. The market share of Linux in the US is 5.03%, while the same for Firefox is 4.23%! [1]
It's not an apples to apples comparison. But the userbase is largely the same, and it's easier to switch a browser than it's to switch an OS. So it does have a significance.
Is this because Linux became so good or because Windows 11 is so terrible?
I guess a bit of both.
CuriouslyC · 1h ago
Pretty sure it's because Windows has gotten worse. I ditched windows recently because it was flagging bit torrent software as malware and deleting it (utorrent, qbittorrent, deluge, all directly from official sources), and when I tried to turn the setting off in the control panel it wouldn't allow me to. A few minutes later it popped up an advertising notification for a F2P windows store game.
Linux hasn't necessarily gotten better, sadly. My install was unusable due to video issues, I had to boot a recover console to fix it. I also had to fix some issues with X desktop effects glitching after waking from suspend, making the desktop environment nearly unusable. Otherwise, Linux performs a lot better on my system than Windows.
IshKebab · 1h ago
Windows 11 is great if you install the IoT LTSC version. Better than Windows 10.
I’ve said for over a decade that Linux can win a huge chunk of the desktop if it just stays as good as it is and waits. Meanwhile Microsoft keeps making Windows suck more.
Apple could do the same to some extent if they cut their prices some.
bikamonki · 1h ago
Been there since 0.5% :)
jarredkenny · 2h ago
is this the year of the linux desktop?
No comments yet
renegat0x0 · 47m ago
I do self hosting at home. Some of my friends are too. I own several SBCs. I wonder if the number of computers per tech makes a difference.
pipeline_peak · 11m ago
> The Steam Deck has been a game-changer
Then is this really an increase in Linux "desktop" market share? I'm aware that it's Arch based and can surely run as a desktop but I see it's contribution no different than if they included ChromeOS or Android with the 5% of Linux. A targeted platform more intended for the purpose of gaming.
Desktop Linux's biggest obstacles have always been hardware/software compatibility, and user friendliness for average users. If they're going to list "Windows Woes", then how much of this increase is actually happening on the REAL forefront of Desktop Linux: Ubuntu, Mint and so forth?
iLoveOncall · 2h ago
I don't believe this number for even a second.
Fade_Dance · 2h ago
I have literally never seen a Linux desktop in the wild. Speaking as a "normal" person who occasionally builds PCs for friends, fixes family computers, etc.
I have an old ThinkPad with Linux, but agreed, no way this can be true.
pawelduda · 2h ago
I installed Ubuntu on my parents' PC back in 2014. Never had to reinstall, only had to upgrade to LTS every few years. The only problems I encountered were with nvidia drivers on update that had to be dealt with but nothing too insane. It's been used almost daily, only migrated to SSD at one point to speed it up. 18~ years old machine.
ahartmetz · 2h ago
I'm not particularly surprised anymore to see Linux on people's laptops in public, usually while travelling (you don't usually see people using laptops in public much otherwise). That is mostly in Germany where I live. Linux is, of course, also very common in universities.
Fade_Dance · 2h ago
The article is on the US statistic though. If it was a global statistic it wouldn't surprise me at all.
When it comes to laptops, we have a lot of MacBooks out there, and an endless Sea of $400 low quality Lenovos and HPs eternally marching to the garbage bins.
Ultimately my observation is just anecdotal, but I have built a lot of computers for people worked on a lot of family PCS, etc, and have never once worked with a Linux system in that context in 25 years of doing that stuff. I'm not interacting with a tech oriented crowd though (obviously those people would be chatting about tech instead and I would never be touching their system). Perhaps the tech oriented crowd is big enough to hit 5%, or perhaps Linux gaming is moving the needle, but I can't imagine 1 in 20 system is Linux in the US. I just can't.
Zigurd · 1h ago
20 years ago my kids were getting hand-me-down work laptops with Linux installed on them. Apart from their peers thinking that they must be in some kind of cult, it did the job of keeping them much safer from malware.
Linux has been very usable for a long time. Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative. That's not going to move the needle in corporate IT but it's enough for a couple percentage points of the installed base.
CalRobert · 2h ago
My wife works at a Dutch company where they all run Ubuntu (mostly because they’re frugal)
fsflover · 2h ago
I installed Linux for my non-technial relatives and they happily browse the web and use LibreOffice.
sylware · 3h ago
I still wonder how they can know that reliably.
elf/linux distros are hardly pre-installed on PCs and forced upon users.
yjftsjthsd-h · 1h ago
> I still wonder how they can know that reliably.
I think the general conclusion is that they don't know it reliably; notice the other comments in this thread pointing out that the numbers jump up and down more or less every time they're measured.
ssgodderidge · 2h ago
Looks like they track site traffic. [1]
> Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every page view referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data to get our Global Stats information.
>According to the latest StatCounter Global Stats for June 2025, Linux now holds 5.03% of the desktop operating system market share in the United United States of America. This is fantastic news!
ghc · 2h ago
That...does not answer his query.
rhabarba · 45m ago
Still looking forward to the year of the Plan 9 desktop. I'm helping!
Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
Said differently: if manufacturers cared to mainstream their changes, they could. And we would all be better for it.
This may be technically true, except it has no single meaningful implication, like no Linux software works there.
The Linux kernel has its own merits outside standard Linux userspace.
I agree, saying that the fact standard Linux distros and Android share the same kernel has no single meaningful implication really undervalues the Linux kernel.
I also agree that it's important to keep in mind the two OSes are mostly incompatible.
The two OSes sharing the kernel have practical implications, including (theoretically) seeing improvements coming from Android dev in the kernel that can benefit standard linux distros, and things like Termux or Waydroid.
> So
I reject the link here.
> when somebody says "Linux reaches X market share", are they talking about the kernel?
Likely not.
> Why does it even matter how much the kernel is used?
Why not? Depends what's your concern.
> Would you count WSL?
Depends what you want to evaluate.
This is exactly my question. You said the discussion's about the kernel. Why do you want to evaluate its usage? Which conclusions are you going to draw?
Because when talking about the OS, you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
I never implied this. This subthread is about countering your affirmation that Android being based on the linux kernel has no single meaningful implication. It's not anymore about evaluating usage and counting stuff.
This all started with a commenter writing "Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense", which is wrong, or at least highly misleading and confusing (I do agree with this commenter about the fact that we are talking about forks that don't upstream their shit, which does have severe implications). You could say that Android systems usually don't run mainline Linux kernel.
> you can conclude that Windows and MacOS start falling behind the free software.
I wish! And I wouldn't generally include Android in the free software family, few people run Replicant or some Android flavor without the Google services, let alone without proprietary blobs. (I would count blob-free Android)
What do you even count as "an OS"? Linux + gnu userland + Gnome? Or is it KDE? Embedded Linux? Does ChromeOS count? LG's WebOS?
Can I install LibreOffice on Android? Gnome, KDE, Xfce? Which percentage of packages in the Debian repos can I use on Android?
There is also a major family of OSes building on the kernel + gnu userspace, which you probably call "desktop linux".
In my house there are dozens of devices running linux the kernel: routers, a tv set, washing machines, NAS, printers, etc. Some have the full gnu posix-like stack, others are very barebones.
Then, there's is a bunch of android devices running the kernel as well.
What's wrong with all of these? At what point should i draw a line?
This is different from embedded Linux or Linux on a server. And this is different from Linux-the-kernel (which runs on Android).
All of that is just too nebulous. Linux is something that runs the kernel, that's about it.
I mean, I've been using linux for all of my life, servers, at home, for work, embedded dev, corporate environment, as a manager and as a dev, etc.
What I see is that linux as already everywhere. Desktop space is the only OS market where non-linux OSes are in the majority, and maybe this is why people are so excited about these pointless numbers.
https://termux.dev/en/
Please give it a try and if you find it useful, donate.
We can argue about Android being a horrible OS for all sorts of reasons but that's a separate discussion.
Doesn't mean they don't run the same kernel, does it?
EDIT: I think you still don't understand. It doesn't matter what hardware Android runs on it's written to be appliance firmware. Even if you put it on a laptop it just turns the laptop into what is essentially a television.
But now that you say it, Android is very much a full OS. It's not a Linux Desktop, but it is a full OS. And televisions running Android are called "smart TVs", precisely because they run a full OS instead of a minimal firmware like they used to.
Google is working on bringing Android to the Desktop, and Samsung already does it. As in: you plug your smartphone into a docking station and it is suddenly a Desktop computer.
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Android is not GNU/Linux.
Article talks about GNU/Linux clearly. There is a point to the whole "I'd like to interject for a moment..." copypasta and Android's situation is the clearest illustration of it.
Well… :-)
With you in spirit, but to add to the mess, one could argue Alpine (and Postmarket OS) is a standard Linux distro, but non GNU.
"GNU/" cannot be used for clarifying things anymore.
Linux is a kernel.
Not sure what your point is?
Though, I guess outside tech circles, people will just talk about Linux as the whole desktop OS. E.g. our municipality was promoting installing a Linux distribution to save Windows laptops after the Windows 10 apocalypse, and they just call it Linux.
Even Wikipedia says: Linux (/ˈlɪnʊks/ LIN-uuks[15]) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds.
This. It actually surprises me that it's apparently not entirely clear for everybody.
The only reason "ChromeOS" isn't considered Linux in this dataset is because Chrome has a flag that removes Linux from the user-agent on certain systems. If we were talking about Linux on the desktop casually, or were compiling a dataset through some other means where the kernel is a known quantity, we'd most certainly include said systems.
The point being that “Linux Desktop” means something more than “runs the Linux kernel”.
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
If you open a terminal (or SSH into it), you're on Linux. It's very, very different on Android.
> how many of the people using a Steam Deck [...] care that it is Linux
Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
1. if someone uses Linux Desktop without caring about that it is Linux, why is that different from them using Windows? 2. why do we say SteamOS count as Linux Desktop but Android doesn't? is it really because how much of it is "Linux"?
For me, I think what matters to me is who has control over it. SteamOS is based on Arch, so the community has a say over where it will go, and Valve will have to work with the community. Android/Windows are fully controlled Google/Microsoft, doesn't matter that Android is Open Source.
I actually daily drive Linux (Arch) because Windows is a PITA I'm not willing to put up with. But there are things I use which still don't run on Linux (Photoshop and Lightroom), so I'm actually thinking of getting a Mac again instead of having a second PC / dual boot, even though I know that can also be irritating (though less so than Windows).
"Who controls the OS" isn't that important to me. What matters is that it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do with as little friction as possible. I know Linux being free means I can go and hack on it however I like. But I also have to contend with reality: I can't reasonably think that I (personnally) am going to hack on the kernel or on some desktop environment in any meaningful measure, so I still have to put up with whatever other people figure is best.
But if there are enough people like me, including those who don't actually care about what OS they're running, maybe the apps I want to run will adopt Linux. But that only matters because, as it turns out, it's the OS which I find the less irritating to use. If tomorrow Windows 12 finally became sane, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I'm not married to Linux.
If someone runs SteamOS, it means that they play games on Linux. So it becomes interesting for game devs to test for Linux. And then if someone runs SteamOS, instead of a dual boot with Windows maybe they just go to the Desktop mode. Which means that instead of Microsoft Office, they use something that runs on Linux, etc.
This is good for the Linux ecosystem. And the reason I like the Linux ecosystem is because, as you say, it's not fully controlled by TooBigTech.
From my understanding Xbox is running a version of Windows on their consoles (not talking about the new handhelds) tailor made for Xbox. But I would not call that adding to the Windows marketshare.
iOS and iPadOS were started with versions of OSX and then modified (and clearly share some pieces) but we would not call either of those as contributing to Mac's marketshare.
Obviously yes neither of those let you go into the traditional Mac or Windows desktop unlike SteamOS. But how the users perceive it is still important.
> Probably most don't. But that's a goal. If corporate employees could use a Linux Desktop without caring that it is Linux, it would mean that the corporation can move to Linux, and that would be big.
The problem is this works the other way also. If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Put another way, if Valve decided (not saying they would, just asking a hypothetical) to either write their own OS or switch the underlying OS to Windows but kept the look of SteamOS as it behaved now and performance was the same. Would most users of the Steam Deck know or care?
Personally I think for claims about the "linux desktop" to really matter, there has to be a conscious desire and care that it is Linux or it could disappear.
Agreed. And IMO, the thing is that you can benefit from the work made on SteamOS on any Linux Desktop. By making most games run on SteamOS, Valve contributed to make Gentoo a better platform for gaming.
> If most users of the Steam Deck don't care or really know that it is Linux there is not much getting in the way of Microsoft coming in with their new handheld/OS and eating up that market if they can get the OS to perform as well.
Sure. But what I see is really the other side: if SteamOS is relevant, then game devs will have an incentive to support SteamOS, which gives the opportunity for gamers to move to SteamOS. Now they are on Linux, so they can start using software that runs on Linux.
Users generally only care about the latter.
If Linux adoption is to increase significantly (and I guess I'm of the opinion that would be a positive thing), then at some point that can only be done by acquiring users who don't care particularly deeply or understand much about their OS. That is, the vast majority of people. And that's probably not going to happen by converting that demographic to true believers.
Some of those people might decide they want to dig deeper later, and that's great. Most won't and that's fine too.
It would be a bit asymmetrical to restrict the definition of "Linux user" to folk who really care what Linux is or know their way around coreutils.
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
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My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care. But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-) Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something. That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash. I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Latops, desktops now it's a mix here. Older people had mainly desktops in the past. That's my experience, at least.
Banking, yeah mainly phones because of ridiculous forced banking apps from corporate masters, like everywhere else? (certain bank even lost a lot of customers because of that)
Taxes, if you are just an employee, taxes are done by your employer for you, by law. (I presume it's a post-communism BS, so people doesn't pay attention how much taxes we pay.)
If you have other types of income, you do it yourself, you have app/website to click through it, easy. Not automatic though. Self-employed IT pay less taxes than normal employees :D and overall lower-income people pay bigger taxes by percentage, what a great country :D
We call your country Holland, great country imho, If I would thinking about moving, that's top option for me.
Only thing that keeps me here are best gun laws in EU (I have Glock, AR15 clone, Bren3 ordered), you can conceal carry nearly everywhere, you can even use gun for self-defense, sadly very low criminality here :)
Hell, I can even legally carry katana, not kidding.
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
The key addition obviously being “for me.”
For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media.
I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard.
I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
I'm sure that as a woman, you are entitled to your assumptions.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
So, the true meaning of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" was that in the end there would only be a single unit left?
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.
My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.
There’s interest in LLM and GenAI beyond regular tinkerers; local NSFW image generator models are apparently a thing.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
The stats come from website trackers - do people browse the web on Steam Decks?
Edit: might as well link to the merch: https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most lay-people, my ex and her parents don't have computers anymore and my daughter hardly uses her either.
Those that actually need computers such as developers are more prone to use Linux anyhow (especially when Microsoft is pushing annoying features such as forced reboots for those dropping their computers anyhow onto powerusers).
7-8 years ago it was pretty frustrating to spend £4k+ on a gaming rig to be unable to play a bunch of titles but I will not use Windows, I just accepted it.
Fast forward to today, and I'm playing Helldivers 2, with its anti-cheat and everything online with my nephew who's on Windows and getting far, far better performance (granted my PC is also more powerful). I can play the modern DOOM games with better performance than if I was running Windows on the same hardware.
My point is, Linux gaming is only getting better, I now also own a ROG Ally which I "flashed" (installed the same way you would any other Linux distro) with Bazzite straight out of the box without even booting Windows and I can play the single-player games I like to while travelling, or can have a quick game of Helldivers with my nephew if I'm not near my PC but have a stable connection. When I need/want to I can plug it into a monitor/kb/mouse with a single cable and have a full desktop with HDR, VRR etc.
Do you have any recommendation for an extremely lightweight Linus distro which installs and runs Steam fine? It would be used exclusively for that, so it shouldn’t run a ton of background stuff.
Basically, what I care is that as I’m running the game, the system is consuming as few resources as possible. It’s an outdated machine, so every bit matters.
> probably XFCE Ubuntu (Xubuntu)
Thank you. Will check it out.
Or if you have an AMD GPU, you could even try SteamOS itself, though it's intended for handhelds.
Bazzite looks to be the next best thing. Probably what I’m looking for. Thank you.
I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
The reason why I buy refurbished is, that my use-cases don't need the newest hardware and for a long time, older hardware was more compatible with Linux and BSD for me. Also, you get for a small price, high quality hardware.
If you now ask yourself, why that many notebooks? Notebooks are like handbags. They have to match the occasion.
Most people likely don't have an opinion besides being able to browse the web and will not even be aware that they are not using Windows.
So this is great work! Keep it up!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/activate-windows...
https://superuser.com/questions/1575650/how-does-a-windows-d...
Wrong. IT IS 100% stored in the UEFI firmware, specifically ACPI tables, MSDM field. Only if that exists, it is then verified on-line for activation to make sure the license is genuine and matches the device ID you're referring to for witch the license was sold(typically for OEM) or if it's portable.[1]
On linux you should be retrieve the license via something like:
OR [1] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-find-windows-10-oem-prod...You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months. The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of these numbers?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582058
Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.
3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.
This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
There's a discussion in a peer thread about how people never notice its Linux and keep using their refurbished machines as-is. This too, is surprising to me, as my own experience as well as the ones I've heard in person from IT folks and IT-related forums online, people immediately notice that the UI looks different and panic as to how to achieve their current tasks. I'm skeptical of that entire thread too.
In general, I just wonder how much of any popular forum is just people LARPing. I do wish that it didn't occur here, though it's undoubtedly difficult to moderate.
This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.
I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.
Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
So that looks like it might be some change in how Apple computers are reporting their OS.
This happens all the time. When their numbers are clearly wrong, they don't care about the numbers enough to fix even the glaring problems, their sample is unsound, and their methodology is unpublished, why exactly are we supposed to give any of their numbers any credence?
What you've written is the first I've heard of a recent change to the Safari on OS X user-agent string, and I see no indication of it in my access logs. What's it supposed to be now? It seems a bit unlikely, and given Safari never ran on classic Mac OS, it seems like a company that's supposed to specialize in analytics should be able to handle it...
[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-sequoia/
I'm not sure what's up with listing both "OS X" and "macOS", but I'm quite confident it's not classic Mac OS.
Also, for people unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem: the OS X => macOS rebranding happened back in 2016, IIRC the Safari user agent never ever included macOS (Safari on M4 Macs running latest macOS 15.5 reports itself as “Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7” in its UA), so absolutely no idea where they’re getting this new “macOS” category. Maybe they publish technical details of their methodology somewhere? I can’t bother to check.
25%+-3.5% means it's 5%+-0.7% for proportional error bars. They don't have to be linear, true, but they are certainly not 5% +- 3.5% either.
Are you disputing that? Or did you miss that in the article?
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).
Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).
I think it comes down to the following wishes:
A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.
B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.
C. I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.
1. The statistics only show Desktop usage relative to each other. But I could totally imagine that macOS "loses" users to iPadOS. Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general (I see more and more people who don't actually have a personal computer anymore).
2. Valve (and others, surely) is doing an incredible job with video games on Linux. 20 years ago, I needed a dual boot just to play games. I dropped Windows when I stopped playing, and I started playing again thanks to the Steam Deck. I am convinced that many people today "need" an OS on which they can play video games, except that today they have a choice (thanks to Valve and others).
3. Privacy. I think it's becoming a lot more important outside the US (it's actually now a national security concern there), but I'm convinced that people are slowly learning about that. TooBigTech pushing to train their AIs with everything the users do surely has an impact on that.
But this is desktop only. If someone stop using windows completely, it won't show a decrease in windows usage. This will basically only show when people switch from desktop OS.
I no longer have a windows machine. If I can't get a game to run on Linux then I don't bother with it. I played Clair Obscur start, to finish, in Mint on a 3090 with zero issues. I just forced it to load in steam since linux isn't officially supported.
Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
After rebooting twice and only five minutes before the meeting started I reverted to my Linux desktop, opened the email with the link to the Teams meeting and was a minute early using the web version of Teams.
Phew, saved by Linux.
Kudos to Microsoft for making Teams web version operating system and browser agnostic. But fuck what they've done with Windows updates. Numerous coworkers also saying their computers decided to reboot of their own volition the last couple of days in order to install updates.
Maybe it's a worthwhile trade off for security, but I'm glad I had an alternative option this morning.
I'm the five-odd years since switching to Linux exclusive at home, my decision is only ever reconfirmed as correct.
(I'm a reformed gamer from a long while ago, but the very few games I do play I have gotten to work on Linux).
I would love to know what Microsoft thinks the purpose of the standalone app is, when it is both slower and less reliable.
Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.
I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.
With over 50% of Internet traffic being robots, the results really don't make any sense at all if you don't.
12 years ago or so, a similar headline appeared, then someone explained that the Chinese government had recently cracked down on Windows pirating (to appease the Americans) with the result that some PC vendors had stopped including (pirated copies of) Windows with the computers they sell (shipping some Linux distro instead of course) but since pirated Windows install media was still widely available, there quickly grew a cultural practice in which the consumer installs Windows (or gets his more technically-inclined cousin to do it for him) as soon as he gets his new PC home. But the headline reported on a statistic that did not catch this cultural practice because it counted only the OSes on computers when they were sold (i.e., "OS shipments").
Either way I don't think the 5% are impacted by scraping bots.
I also think a number of influencers like PewDiePie moving to Linux has to have moved the needle at least a little as well.
After seeing SharePoint.exe using 1GB and 100% of the CPU today for over 12 hours I’m seriously considering removing my VM (that I only boot for MS Office). Edge even greeted me with a message that I have access to Copilot Vision that can now see everything I browse when I right clicked the process and clicked on search!
My choices were to spend $200 on a new version of Windows that was worse than the one I lost, or switch to Linux. Guess which I did?
No more hundreds of background processes sapping my battery life and performance.
No more blatantly manipulative ads every time Windows updates, about how I won't be "safe" unless I sign up for OneDrive, switch to Edge, and subscribe to Office Live Dynamics Pro Limited 365, because now word processing and spreadsheets are a subscription for some fucking reason.
No more 3 different generations of UI styles sloppily bolted together (though Linux desktop styling can be plenty sloppy).
No more news feeds in my start menu and task bar filled with the outrage and statistically improbable evil human acts of the day, no doubt with MS ads, alongside prods to install Candy Crush and other crap.
No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.
No more needing to sign in to a FUCKING CLOUD ACCOUNT to use my own computer.
No more stupid crap like copilot, sucking screenshots and forwarding them to MS and OpenAI, and other sparkly AI icons on every damn thing.
Haven't booted Windows in a month or two. So happy to have switched - my computer belongs to me again, for the first time in a long while
I've used all three OS's for many years and I really just.. don't care which one I'm on anymore. They all do the same thing. Currently on windows 11 after ~5 years of debian gnome and its fine. Enjoyable even, especially with WSL. GUI software support is much better here
Once the unwashed masses start coming in, the software and its interaction patterns pander to the lowest common denominator and the quality of the medium degrades.
On the other hand, I think it's great when companies or government try to move to Linux (if you're not a US company or the US government, it makes total sense to try not to depend on US software so much).
But I want to believe that there is space for everybody. I wouldn't use Mint myself, but I convinced a couple friends to use it and it works really well! EU governments moving to european distros like Suse and the likes is great. And I will stay closer to "more advanced" distros like Gentoo or Alpine.
The beauty of Linux is that there is not one Linux; it's about freedom of choice. Because many people move from Windows to Mint doesn't have to mean that it's hurting Gentoo, I think? Hopefully.
You mean other than Ubuntu and the likes?
not necessarily. There's room to have the mass market make breakthroughs in laymen software for linux if there's sufficient demand.
And having the mass market lowest common denominator doesnt remove the good stuff - they still exist and you could still choose to use them. This is esp. true for linux, where as you'd have fewer choice/customizability for windows as it's close sourced.
* just open the terminal and type this magic spell to make x work *
But other than that, as long as I can compile the project from source (and if it's done properly I don't need instructions for that), I'm fine.
I would assume that a repo providing instructions for the AUR is already better than one assuming that "Linux == Ubuntu", because the developer knows at least one distro that is not Ubuntu :-).
Pandering to the masses would be in the form of specific desktop environment, and maybe specific distribution integrating it well with all kinds of desktop software.
Nothing would change for the existing users of obscure software, hackishly stitched together.
If Linux software starts widely adapting more dark patterns it will probably impact users across all distributions.
What is preventing people from just creating a fork?
Not that I believe it will necessarily be good, but I'm not sure it will necessarily be bad. Could go both ways, IMO.
And I agree with that concern, though my hope is that we can make it easier for the peasants without sacrificing control for the nerds (trying to find a word that would work with "peasant" in this context :D).
it really isn't, as Google Chrome and Chromium shows there's no clear dividing line in the real world. Linux isn't developed by Bob the free software enthusiast, take a look at the code contributions to the kernel.
Overall I'm also in favour of driving linux adoption because it's still a better world but the idea that this has no spill over effect on anyone else is wrong. It's a fiction to think that Linux, just like a browser is anything but a collective project with most development driven by very few organizations who also have commercial or proprietary interests.
There are lots of Chromium forks. I don't really see how this contradicts my point.
My point being that it's okay for some projects to sacrifice control, as long as others don't. I can't tell Ubuntu how they should make their distro; what I can do is choose Gentoo (or anything in between).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484
Additionally, a smaller factor could be the growing trend of Dev and Op professionals moving from Macs to Linux. And the trend before, to move from Windows to Mac's because they are cheaper to administrate. This shift is supported by manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo, who are providing more devices with Linux pre-installed, aligning well with the supply chain requirements of IT departments.
Also, at least for me, it's hard to envision vendors specialising in Linux desktop hardware, such as Tuxedo, Framework, and System76, experiencing a surge in their market shares. I am very curious to see their numbers and the kind of people and companies that buy this products.
Then Office 365 came around and I could do quick work w/out a windows machine.
0: https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/my-winter-of-99-the-year-of-...
I wanted a gaming PC forever but I just couldn’t stomach Windows. I had a great experience with the Steam Deck in the past 2 years so I built a Bazzite desktop. I am having a lot of fun.
Some people will find the idea of elements of a mobile OS on their desktop attractive. Other people will find it less unattractive than buying a new PC to run Windows 11.
The simple example would be LibreOffice.
Also worth noting: if you count Chrome OS under the Linux kernel umbrella, the footprint is even bigger. It shows that open-source roots can quietly gain ground, even if the branding isn’t “Linux” front and center.
Thirty years ago Bill was writing angry memos about the rise of Linux and how Microsoft had to stop free software.
You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal. No faster way to scare off users than give them a CLI heavy OS and have the trip over the very first copy+paste command they try to run (once they figure out the circa ~1982 cursor)
I really cannot say enough about the total fumble of Linux distros in an age when people are more desperate than ever to leave Windows.
Why is 5% a magic number? Why not 4% or 6% or 10%?
> You still cannot crtl+V in the terminal.
Try Shift+Ins. CLI and GUI conventions have always been different, and the sort of users who work in the terminal are the ones who know the difference. Overloading Ctrl+V, and breaking applications that run in the terminal, just to make two completely different paradigms use the same hotkeys seems a bit ridiculous to me.
BTW, this applies across OSes, and isn't specific to Linux.
As you said, it works for the people who make it. Why does it need to do anything else? Linux desktop conquering the world is just an old Slashdot trope, it’s not something anyone is actually working to achieve in real life.
This makes no sense. There are so many different ways to use Linux, there is not a single profile of "people who love Linux".
The more poignant issues might be that there's inconsistencies around UI here. Some terminals allow that directly (Kitty), others require Ctrl+shift+v (Gnome shell, iirc Powershell and Konsole).
To be fair, the best non-windows OS likely is MacOS. It has software support for a lot of commercial prosumer stuff, e. G., Adobe, and has a convenient and stable 3rd Party offering for Windows VMs (Parallels).
As a Linux user it seems like there is a lot to learn in regard to UI consistency from both though (maybe less from Windows). Gnome and KDE are probably moving in the right direction here but it is still a bit off sometimes.
Fedora is a different level completely. With Fedora, I remember installing nvidia drivers via terminal, and that was essentially it.
Sometimes I open up ports for my kid doing minecraft, but that was it. Its not like when you use Ubuntu or Mint and you need to manually update something just to get Netflix to work on Chromium.
Fedora is so good, I won't call it linux. Linux has the Debian/Ubuntu baggage. Fedora stands alone. Its easier to use than Windows, I don't think I'm exaggerating. Windows 11 has ads, unresponsive search, UI/theme issues that make it impossible to read text, it has fake paths to files. Fedora just works.
When referring to the terminal, these are 1 time events every 12 months. Its not really a huge deal on Fedora because you basically don't need the terminal. On Ubuntu, its a much bigger deal given how many things are broken and need to be repaired.
5% seems too low. Would it be 30%? Or 51%?
Answering that question in the public sphere may quell many of the "Is ___ going to the year of the Linux desktop?" posts we get each year.
I think the biggest obstacle in the Linux world is people knee jerk recommending Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/outdated linux.
If people rallied around the current SOTA, Fedora, we would've hit 5% a few years ago.
The variety of distros cause people to get confused, and go with the most heavily marketed distros, Ubuntu flavors. Just because Ubuntu gave away free CDs 20 years ago, doesnt make them good. It makes them good at marketing.
People confuse Fedora with Arch, which is terrible. People confuse Ubuntu with 'stable like a table', instead of 'outdated stable'.
We almost need a reduction in favored distros. Out with the complexity: Fedora for desktop. It has all the DEs too.
Ultimately, anything that will run on one Linux distro will run on any other, with the only significant differences being on distros that run on unusual architectures or have made major changes to the kernel.
MacOS is the best model for a successful desktop Linux to use. Trim down the kernel/drivers to just what runs on that spec hardware, only support that spec hardware, focus effort on the OS and ecosystem, keep it stable, make upgrades trivial, and give it freedom to run other software, terminal apps, etc. And most of all- focus resources on these efforts and charge a lot of money for it!
I have way more stability issues and complicated upgrades on Windows.
and KDE was always ATLEAST as easy as windows, arguably more. At this time lots of older crappy hardware people had also only had win98 drivers, giving people immense problems. It mostly worked better on linux. This still goes today.
Rectangle/tiling window managers on top is the only way to make it workable.
Apart from wm, the existence of application notarization is a downright insult (though Windows is also guilty of this with smartscreen but to a much lesser extent).
Apple's "pay us 100 bucks a year or we'll tell your users that your program is malware" is just another step in the inevitable game of locking down macos and turning it into a mobile-like hellscape
Application notarization isn’t a problem anymore- you just have a single accept dialog. That problem that made you do a trick to get past it was only a problem years ago, due to whomever the moron was that thought that was a good idea. The current way is acceptable.
I install homebrew and random apps with no problems.
2. Built-in cloud AI spyware / Copilot
3. Millions of abandoned laptops that had been made 4-5+ years ago. Basically electronic and ecological waste: machines from 10 years ago work perfectly fine if you change thermal paste and don't hit them too much. Even if you don't care about the planet, you might care about your wallet though.
Role models for computer use today: “PewDiePie”.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I remember the days when we were under 1%.
Congratulations to all involved on making this true.
This will lead to a virtuous circle for Linux unless someone does something; privacy issues are leading people to the OSes where you get to freely choose your level of privacy. Anybody have any more weird old unix patents to throw at them and slow it down?
edit: maybe the way to stop Linux is heat up the war against all general purpose computing. Linux could be used to run unauthorized AI.
This means many Linux users install an alternative browser, not to use Firefox. That's funny, but so true.
It's not an apples to apples comparison. But the userbase is largely the same, and it's easier to switch a browser than it's to switch an OS. So it does have a significance.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s...
I guess a bit of both.
Linux hasn't necessarily gotten better, sadly. My install was unusable due to video issues, I had to boot a recover console to fix it. I also had to fix some issues with X desktop effects glitching after waking from suspend, making the desktop environment nearly unusable. Otherwise, Linux performs a lot better on my system than Windows.
Apple could do the same to some extent if they cut their prices some.
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Then is this really an increase in Linux "desktop" market share? I'm aware that it's Arch based and can surely run as a desktop but I see it's contribution no different than if they included ChromeOS or Android with the 5% of Linux. A targeted platform more intended for the purpose of gaming.
Desktop Linux's biggest obstacles have always been hardware/software compatibility, and user friendliness for average users. If they're going to list "Windows Woes", then how much of this increase is actually happening on the REAL forefront of Desktop Linux: Ubuntu, Mint and so forth?
I have an old ThinkPad with Linux, but agreed, no way this can be true.
When it comes to laptops, we have a lot of MacBooks out there, and an endless Sea of $400 low quality Lenovos and HPs eternally marching to the garbage bins.
Ultimately my observation is just anecdotal, but I have built a lot of computers for people worked on a lot of family PCS, etc, and have never once worked with a Linux system in that context in 25 years of doing that stuff. I'm not interacting with a tech oriented crowd though (obviously those people would be chatting about tech instead and I would never be touching their system). Perhaps the tech oriented crowd is big enough to hit 5%, or perhaps Linux gaming is moving the needle, but I can't imagine 1 in 20 system is Linux in the US. I just can't.
Linux has been very usable for a long time. Windows 11, being deliberately unusable on older hardware that works perfectly well is enough incentive for more people to try an alternative. That's not going to move the needle in corporate IT but it's enough for a couple percentage points of the installed base.
elf/linux distros are hardly pre-installed on PCs and forced upon users.
I think the general conclusion is that they don't know it reliably; notice the other comments in this thread pointing out that the numbers jump up and down more or less every time they're measured.
> Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 1.5 million sites globally. These sites cover various activities and geographic locations. Every month, we record billions of page views to these sites. For each page view, we analyse the browser/operating system/screen resolution used and we establish if the page view is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every page view referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every page view referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data to get our Global Stats information.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology
>According to the latest StatCounter Global Stats for June 2025, Linux now holds 5.03% of the desktop operating system market share in the United United States of America. This is fantastic news!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41312883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600172
> 1 week later PC stops booting
The "real" number shouldn't be far from 10%, if not already exceeding it.
Because virtually nobody who says "desktop Linux" means ChromeOS.
Fedora going up is a sign of progress. Regular Linux going up is just a sign that Windows sucks.