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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Linux has about half of the market share of all OS X versions combined. Not too bad considering there's not exactly many systems that come with Linux preinstalled. Still minuscule compared to the Windows market share but I'd gladly announce that the year of the Linux desktop has finally arrived if it gets to OS X level...which isn't all that far to go.

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I wonder if they are counting Chromebooks which run a modified Linux. Those are starting to catch Mac https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/chromeboo...

I'd put them into their own category.

But remember that Chromebooks are a US only story. There are very few of them outside the USA. One good year in the USA doesn't gain many percentage points in a worldwide stat.

Why? Just because Google made a Linux distro makes it no longer qualify as a Linux distro?

well the user space is nothing like any other distro.

Google Chrome OS is based on Gentoo Linux.

It's not a prior Linux distribution until you add crouton. Same as why Android isn't a Linux distribution.

Huh? They're sold and somewhat popular here in Australia

They are widely available in Europe. Do you mean they don't sell well outside of the USA ?

My dictionary definition of widely is a bit different than yours.

Once in a while, in a blue moon, I see one single device at Saturn megastores in Germany. Usually it stays at the store with increasing "product of the week" discounts until someone finally takes it away.

In Portugal, Italy and Greece I am yet to bump into a store selling them.

In the UK most computer stores have a few.

Some big shops like FNAC in France have stopped selling chromebooks in its stores.

I love my chromebooks (I have two), plus I bought one for my mother for whom it is absolutely perfect - a laptop (i.e. with keyboard) that is fast, light and trouble-free.

I think the actual Linux market share is higher. I know a lot of enterprises that have switched to Linux (for reason completely unrelated to the os itself).

which should be reflected in these numbers, no?

Look at their sampling methods. They use analytics from certain sites (news, social media, gov, ...)

A lot of enterprises are beyond proxies and many places don't allow you to access internet outside a few select sites

A proxy won't mingle with the User-Agent header, or with the tracking JS that runs in the browser.

I guess there are different types of proxies. The ones we use definitely strip and modify headers.

> I think the actual Linux market share is higher. I know a lot of enterprises that have switched to Linux (for reason completely unrelated to the os itself).

So they switched to Linux because well, not because it's Linux. Funny :-) You probably meant : they switched to Linux for none of the reasons HN's readers like Linux (open, free, people-like-us, etc)

Nitpick: More like a third (0.36).

You are correct, I only scanned the other OS X versions from the bottom and kind of missed the 1.1% of 10.10.

I've used Linux and FreeBSD (desktop|laptop @work/home) for everything since 2002. Within the last five years it really has been a very simple and feature rich environment with acceptable stability for most distributions.

Think if I hadn't started with KDE at that time I would be much more fond of OS X.

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