Linux has reached 4% for the partial Feburary 2024 data on StatCounter | Hacker News Reader

Linux has reached 4% for the partial Feburary 2024 data on StatCounter

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84 pointsicthelpnz79 comments

I'm 39 now and have a lot of coworkers/friends in their 20s who are absolutely fascinated by Linux and know nothing about it. But they seriously think it's the coolest thing. When I became a sysadmin in my 20s nobody thought it was cool and we made $40k to run million dollar networks. What happened.

I have friends who just want to sit there and watch me code they're so fascinated and I spent basically my entire childhood/youth hiding my hobby because it was "nerdy."

Every time I post an SRE job listing I get more programmers who want to move into infra than infra who want to program. When I was a sysadmin in 2006ish I was DYING to be a programmer and NOBODY wanted to sysadmin it was the computer janitor no respect job.

Now I do the exact same thing but at hyper scale and it's cool I guess.

This is me :) dying to be a sysadmin... It is so cool

I'm a high school dropout, no GED, no degree, etc dude at the SRE staff/principal/architect level.

You can absolutely do it.

I went many career paths before I focused on this route. Sysadmin, network eng, network admin, IT, helpdesk, sys eng, platform architect, etc etc. You'll bounce around and figure out what you enjoy. I hated networking with a passion and my dream as a kid was to finish my CCIE lab, I did my written when I was 19-20. That was my rocketship to $130k+ and out of Home Depot back then 2008ish. Between not joining the marines after 9/11 and not getting my CCIE or going networking I had no idea where to go and wound up just in random tech areas until I finally realized I want to work as little as possible and that automating my entire job and everyone elses (devs) jobs is... a job. And I REALLY love writing the automation to automate myself and my teams. I want things to run so smooth that we only know infra is shifting if the shifting breaks.

I make way more than that now automating infrastructure and it is way more fun.

Ping me if you ever need advice.

https://github.com/mikejk8s

edit: And I'll say the one absolutely unifying thing in 90%+ of my career was - nix. I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today without knowing how to manage nix. I owe my entire career to an efnet IRC channel that got me my first sysadmin job at a porn host and unix. There will never be a week in my career where I'm not writing some form of a bash script in a container or CI. Even the 4-5 years I was a literal Windows Systems Engineer I had to know *nix because of proxies and caching, etc.

Did you know IIS didn't know wtf a hostheader was until IIS 6 (2003ish?). You had to buy a 3rd party $35 plugin to host multiple websites with IIS lol.

And most people using IIS just think they need to use IIS because their desktop is running Windows. Not kidding. I had to manually write everything for Windows Server. It doesn't come with ANY RBL blocking or IP address blocking intelligence or anything by default and nobody in the Windows server sphere shares that stuff with one another. Awful ecosystem. I had to scan it's event logs for specific error codes and trigger firewall events if stuff like an account got too many password attempts. NO security by default.

In 15+ years of Windows NT nobody open sourced a damn automatic user block? I didn't either but hey it was corporate IP.. .

Wait until you try it out, it seems cool, but it's drudgery work most of the time.

I'm in the process of migrating the fleet from centos-7 to rocky-8, I can say for sure this is not fun. I'd rather be programming

I don't enjoy anything that isn't containers nowadays so I don't envy you at all. I hope it goes smoothly.

> Every time I post an SRE job listing I get more programmers who want to move into infra than infra who want to program.

No surprise there. Traditional coders have been replaced first by "coding bootcamp" graduates barely capable of churning CRUD apps and offshore body shops, and now it's AI. Respect for developers has fallen down the drain.

In contrast, us sysadmins will be like cockroaches: no matter what kind of bullshit management decides in their infinite wisdoms, someone like us will always be needed around to keep the lights on. Bonus points for dev-turned-sysadmin, we'll also serve as QA for the crap AI churns out, so we're a relatively safe career path.

I think the experience on the SWE end of things is a lot different than the SRE end. For instance, I wanted to hire 2 JR/SRE1s last year and my team are all self-taught so we wanted to focus on finding someone early in their career who we could actually teach good practices to - this is something that sysadmins/etc in the mid2000s didn't have at all. We were in that "Need 3-5 yoe" but nobody would hire you to get it and you better know what you were doing when you showed up.

We decided to bring on a current customer support agent who had no prior server/aws experience, and someone who came from client-side IT, which I remember being stuck in and DYING to try to figure out how to move up from. I've never heard of a SWE team bringing on someone who didn't already know a language. We expected to teach Terraform, go, etc.

I can't even remember what my team went to school for I don't even look at that part of someones resume beyond a curious glance.

Because the Infra/Ops people like us come from a less standardized CS background, you know, a LOT of us are dropouts and the rebellious punk youth types with face tats (/s) I think we tend to empathize a lot more for unique backgrounds over Stanford and what not.

We were treated like trash and almost everything was trial-by-fire, as in literally firing you if some big customers website went down. I got fired once for taking down a Six Flags database when I had 2 years of experience and NO other windows syseng at my company.

BUT! Now that people like us who did potentially get treated like absolute trash by NOCs or managers or whomever else stifled us in our climb up that hellish aldder are in charge we can break down the gates.

None of my job ads mention a college degree or anything of that nature and a bunch of my project friends in some major github projecfts do the same at their corps.

I HOPE things loosen up more on the SWE end of things. As an example, I hated my experience interviewing at Google.

Starting pay in the field isnt worth my time, unfortunately, so I have spent the last few years of my twenties agressively pursing linux knowledge on my own time. Only hitch is that im spinning the wheels but not moving!

I want to say we brought on 1s around 90 but in full honesty that's just my assumption and what I would probably pay one if I signed the check.

I have had a lot of SWE 1 friends who wanted to move to SRE 1 and it's around 20k less than they want. They're usually around 90-120.

Which one is the best decision long term is very subjective. Personally I think an SRE needs far more experience in various things than a SWE so they should be someone further along in their career.

My first sysadmin job (around 2005-6 I think) was $40k, but I went from $12.50 so I was happy. Very SR SREs are in the 250s+ easy. Datadog and the faangs etc are in the 300ks.

And thats the other problem, my current job will eventually kill me, and to reach those levels of pay requires a level of stress that I see breaking people. That starting salary is nothing to bawk at, an incredible step for most, but that would be ~30% paycut given my circumstamces.

Im banking on someday being the guy that responds on reddit when you have an issue, "oh yea, just run sudo zap -wtf ${: | grep %". When I eventually master this arcane art, ill apply for a paygrade that keeps my lights on.

I’m so surprised that more companies aren’t offering full-time positions as 20-30 hours a week and a corresponding drop in salary. “My current job will eventually kill me” is on the minds of some of the best people out there and I see many subconsciously (and consciously) avoiding positions that have a risk of that.

I think the reason behind this is fewer Windows users, not necessarily more Linux users.

Casual people use computers less and less often, at least outside of work. The pandemic reversed this trend somewhat due to remote work and especially remote schooling, but the pandemic is over now.

I know several well--educated, young people who don't even have a computer at home any more. A phone and a smart TV is all most people need.

What we're left with now are people using computers for work (still usually on Windows), PC gamers (still usually on Windows) and computer nerds, which are far more likely to be using Mac or Linux. Even people at work are using their computers less, as a lot of non-work activity like internet surfing or social-media browsing, often performed on work devices in the past, is now done on their phones.

My previous partner is on the genz/mil cusp and she never owned a computer and wrote all of her reports/papers/etc for ALL of her years in school on her iphone.

I have never had something make me feel like an absolute old boomer than that. I don't even like texting on my iphone I typo so much and everything else I will do anything to be able to use my desktop/laptop over my phone.

As someone a bit older I find these stories somewhere between amusing and sad. How much time do (mostly) young people now waste trying to do substantial work on unsuitable mobile devices with toy apps when they could have been using a proper computer with real peripherals and the right software for the job?

The point is that an iPhone is a very powerful computer. With Bluetooth. So you could attach it to your HHKB like I did with my smartphone. Screen small, true. Don't know about iPhone video output but Android recent usually work with USB-C. You can do same with STB, except the video output is dealt with via TV. Insane.

But then again any old, second hand laptop would suffice as long as it is at least x86-64. In UA kids love to use these for (remote) school/teleconference. Many old ones got send from West.

Yes, agreed they are monstrously powerful compared to the computers that were commonly used to first write papers, but they are still lacking a lot of the raw UI/UX speed. We’ve (hopefully) all seen someone navigate a UI so fast that it’s hard to follow, or seen someone work through a text file after they’ve put in the hundred hours to discover all the shortcuts and “power user” tricks. You just cannot do that on a phone, especially not an iPhone with it’s forced animation delays and keyboard-second design patterns.

I see youth do things on their touchscreens in lightning speed :) both IRL and in movies/series. Sure, I am much slower. And for me, the UI is too big / screen too small (regardless of 7" smartphone or 6" or 5" the touchscreen takes too much space but it is a godsend that you have it with you 24/7).

Nokia back in the days of Hilton (touchscreen GTK) was trying two horses, resistive touch with pen UI and then same but for finger. Capacitive finger UI won, and capacitive finger needs a bigger UI.

OSX is on the rise, too.

  "2024-02": {
    "Windows": 72.04,
    "OS X": 15.81,
    "Unknown": 6.05,
    "Linux": 4.02,
    "Chrome OS": 2.06,
    "Other": 0.02
  }

I wonder what the split between OS X and iOS / iPad OS is

OS X (MacOS) doesn't include iOS numbers; this is desktop only. (otherwise the Linux numbers would be much higher, given Android)

I think these are just the desktop/laptop numbers but I could be mistaken.

E: it's just the desktop numbers.

I was wondering if this was significant, or a one-month blip, but it does look like a legitimate (and long-lasting) trend:

2009-01 "Linux": 0.64

2013-01 "Linux": 0.88

2017-01 "Linux": 1.55

2021-01 "Linux": 1.91

2022-01 "Linux": 2.19

2023-01 "Linux": 2.91

2024-01 "Linux": 3.77

Steam boxes?

Valve has supposedly sold "millions" of Steam Decks - https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23954205/valve-steam-deck...

In addition to the large number of Steam decks, there are similar handhelds from other companies that run Linux in some cases. The work Valve has done to make gaming on Linux happen, along with the high quality of desktop/mobile Linux distros lately (and the declining quality of Windows UX) has made it quite attractive. I recently put Pop OS on a laptop for personal use and am super happy with it.

same for Windows, which started 2009 at 95%

now down to 72%

Windows in 2009 was Windows 7 I think (just rolling out as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7)

If you ignore percentages and focus on # of computers in rotation, I wonder how different 95% Windows in 2009 vs 72% Windows in 2024 is

4% is tremendous for Linux. However, If I look at the data for the recent month, OSX was 21% in November and now roughly at 16% - as it was at the beginning of 2023.

What I want to say is: this data seems to be very volatile. I doubt, that it is a sufficient representation of the real world.

We do see some of this data mirrored in other stats.

I would like to see the methodology. I am also rather skeptical. This data should be rather stable. I suspect bot activity.

At least 6.08%, really. The default browser on what is probably the most popular Linux distribution deviates from including "Linux" in its user-agent string so it is counted separately in these figures, but is still counted and still Linux.

Which browser?

Which distribution?

YotLD jokes aside, one of the big historical lock-ins for Windows has been gaming, but the work done on Proton for the Steam Deck has made Linux a viable option if the only thing keeping you on Windows is games. It's still not for your grandma, but I know a few gamers who have made the switch, largely due to how awful Windows 11 is, and they haven't regretted it.

My Windows partition, which ostensibly exists for gaming, sees little action these days.

Proton truly has made 90% of games I play awesome on Linux, not to mention that games are increasingly targetting it natively.

Did the same, after a year I decided I wanted the extra space and havent looked back. If a game doesnt run, well, I didnt need that game, personally.

The biggest problem with games not running well on Linux now seems to be the invasive anti-cheat malware that some of the big online titles demand. It says a lot about Windows and Linux as "secure" platforms that this concept exists at all on one of them but effectively doesn't on the other.

Sometimes games dont run, and im not tech savvy enough to press the issue, but it is well worth my piece of mind to be off windows.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

MacOS went from 16% in early 2023, 20% in mid 2023 and now back to 16% in 2024.

Chrome also went from 4% to 2%.

And to me the most surprising thing was FreeBSD at 0.01%!

Globally Android is also bigger than Windows it seems https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-202302-20...

I think the two factors leading to this are:

- Covid, and the quarantine, forcing people to buy new computers to use at home, and giving them the freedom to choose operating system, in contrast to work computers.

- Steam, giving people an easy way to play many games on Linux.

And Microsoft's endless struggle to alienate long time users who'd be willing to put up with a lot in exchange for being allowed to keep old UI habits. In combination with large parts of steam libraries just working, it's almost a perfect storm.

It was Microsoft's nerfing of the "Pro" Windows editions that did it for my business. We're small but we still need control of our own systems to operate professionally - just like the bigger organisations whose IT teams would never accept Microsoft forcing things like updates, reboots, and telemetry on their users. Since around Windows 10 it seems like Pro is just Home with a couple of minor concessions but still 99% of the junk we won't tolerate so we're now almost exclusively Linux and haven't bought a new Windows machine in a long time.

Could someone explain what I'm looking at? I think this is from `https://statcounter.com/` (?), but that site doesn't load for me at the moment, and there's no readme or description on that (1 star) repo, or its associated account.

That partial data is very likely to regress to the mean over the rest of the month- though it's good to see high linux usage (on whatever metric this is tracking).

Effectively a duplicate of this discussion last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853877

(The distinction between "almost 4%" and "4% over partial data for 4 days instead of a month" doesn't seem like significant new information).

While I get some satisfaction emotionally from seeing a number like 4%. I know logically that any and all usage numbers are irrelevant.

How many Mercedes cars are on our roads? 1%? 10%? 100%? Does it matter?

How many Ford cars are on our roads? 1%? 10%? 100%? Does it matter?

Those of us who drive a Mercedes don't care that we might only make up 0.0001% of cars on the roads. Or maybe there's 2% of us. Or maybe there's 20% of us. IT DOESN'T MATTER AT ALL.

We drive a Mercedes because we like to drive a Mercedes. There are others out there who drive a Ford, because they like to drive a Ford. Some people out there even like to drive a Ferrari! (I remember the first time I was in a Ferrari. I expected so much, and was so disappointed at such a heap of junk. Such a letdown!)

Forget the numbers. They mean as much as HN karma points, or Reddit karma points: zilch.

Were the other, dominant car companies actively trying to kill Mercedes by making the roads unusable by Mercedes drivers? No. That's why Linux having a strong and growing market share is important.

That may be true, but looking at just one miniscule facet of the computing world is pretty irrelevant. "Desktop usage" is one very tiny and decreasing niche market, in today's world.

If you look at TOTAL Linux usage, the argument is really pointless. I'd venture to guess (and merely a guess, mind you) that Linux usage is about 98%, with the number of Microsoft systems being merely rounding error. The items in my house alone that use Linux in some fashion would be about a dozen.*

There are A LOT of household appliances that use Linux 'under the bonnet' where it is hardly ever seen, and Linux computers are so cheap that anybody can dedicate a Linux computer to doing nothing but one single task. I have a headless Raspberry Pi which silently sits on the end of a cable and does nothing else at all but host a website.

* 'Non-computer stuff' off the top of my head: washing machine, satellite TV box, two smart TVs, fiber-to-the-house internet box and router, fridge, .... and I'm sure there's more. (Anything where a 'reset' takes 10 seconds or more is very probably Linux-based.)

Running Linux on a headless server or a completely custom hardware stack was always possible (for some version of possible). It was the very specific use case of Linux on PC as a PC/workstation that was problematic. It sucked in '04. It sucks a lot less now.

People who aren't interested in computing still aren't interested in computing. But, unlike back then, more people can realistically choose to do it if they want to. That's a good thing.

Interesting to see my own feelings reflected in the larger trend. I switched to the Mac back in the day (10.2 Jaguar) because OS X was Unix without the headaches. These days I am increasingly tempted by Linux. Linux is where most of the interesting technical action is (ML, CUDA, HDLs, etc.), my perception is that it has matured considerably for desktop use, I already use it for cloud servers and training, I already game on it (Steam Deck), and Apple is increasingly moving MacOS away from being a Unix that just works and towards being another walled garden like iOS.

The only thing holding me back is Apple Silicon. The Apple Silicon laptops are just that darn good. When the new Snapdragon X Elite laptops come out, or whenever Asahi Linux gets good enough, I’ll probably give Linux a spin as a daily driver.

Where does this data come from?

StatCounter

Can we elaborate? Is this some well-known tracking system?

Yes, but what is that? I'm a kernel developer, and not a web developer, so I don't know the web ecosystem well.

I just googled and wikipedia claims its used on 0.9% of websites, and may not be a representative sample.

I think it's because of two things.

- The first one Chrome OS.

- There's a noticeable trend where the general population is increasingly favoring smartphones over traditional computers for their digital needs. This shift has predominantly affected Windows users, as they represent a significant portion of the casual computing market. As a result, the proportion of dedicated Linux users has become more pronounced

Chrome OS and Android are their own category in this list.

While obviously I'm rooting for Linux to become the de-facto OS, I'm much more excited to simply watch Windows die a slow and painful death.

IMO Microsoft is in a terminal spiral they have no hope of recovering from. The enshittification of Windows is marching forward unabated and is only going to get exponentially worse as time goes on. It's already entirely untenable for anyone who cares, and is quickly approaching a point where it's untenable for the common layperson. Soon it will be untenable for business entities. After all, who would trust their business data to an OS that doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's exfiltrating all kinds of data to Microsoft?

Can't wait to see the fireworks when W10 is EOL'd and 11 becomes a mandatory forced update. I think it will drive a lot of Linux adoption

Strategically I still think selling out Windows like they did is a massive long term mistake. Windows is a entry getaway to the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem and while they are okay to let it rot to focus on the cloud instead, it's going to bite them later.

they're not letting it rot

they're pouring gasoline on it and setting it on fire

after 30 years Windows is now broadly stable, and they load it up with spyware and adverts that would make bonzibuddy look mild by comparison

That's the worst part: Windows would be the best it's ever been if it weren't made intentionally worse.

Windows 10 is actually quite good underneath all the crap. Except for a few extremely specific gripes, I think it's just as good as 7 was. But the real W10 experience is the worst available anywhere at any time for most people. It's honestly impressive just how bad they've managed to make it while still being a nearly-functional operating system.

W11 is worse, from what I hear. I don't really care to find out.

Without the absolute numbers it's a bit tricky to conclude much. Linux could simply be stable, while many are simply giving up on desktops and just use their phone or maybe a table. The Linux users aren't the ones dropping the desktop or laptop, it's the people who where using a cheap Windows computer 10 - 12 years ago.

Several questions have been posted here asking if this includes mobile.

No, it does not.

Mobile is a different file in the same directory. Linux is still 1.5% of overall traffic when Android is separated out (Android is by far the largest OS overall, at 43% by itself).

It's also nice to see that this is just the latest data point in a steady increase of Linux's share since 2009, and not just an anomaly.

The obligatory "this is the year of the Linux desktop".

Does this include phones? So Android is lumped in? I'd expect it to be much higher if it did.

You can look at the link. It doesn't appear to include mobile devices, as IOS isn't listed.

ChomeOS is listed separately from Linux, so I imagine if Android were included that it would be separate too.

this is "desktop" category, I doubt there is many android desktops ;-)

it's happening

Of course. Microsoft Ubuntu anytime soon. Free APIs. Premium APIs with a subscription.

If that happens im moving back to fedora

This is the finally FINALLY the year of the Linux desktop?(????)

Even Wayland is mostly usable on a desktop now - so long as you don't need colour management anyway [0].

[0] - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

The more devs using wayland, the faster we'll hammer out the remaining bugs! Everyone is invited!

Color management should land this year.

For the 2024-02 dataspan, Linux has reached 4.02%. Happy Linuxing!

Is this increased bot activity associated with LLM training?

You're welcome. I just finished linux-ifying the last pc in the house. I'm sure this is what brought us over the edge.

I mean all we need is a browser and steam. Both work halfway decent on mint on older hardware. Sometimes inkscape, gimp, freecad and a slicer -- all are cross platform. As long as we stick to pre-2022 aaa titles, it works just fine. Sure was cheaper than a full household tech refresh.

Thunderbird really stepped up their game too. Maybe this is the year. Maybe.

Year of the Linux desktop.

chromebooks?

ChromeOS has its own data point

Been using GNU/Linux exclusively for 15 years now. I'm so happy that more people have seen the light. Welcome to the free world! I wouldn't enjoy computers anywhere near as much without it. I was ready to change career completely when doing web dev was effectively impossible without Windows in the dark IE days. Luckily I found a career in science where Linux was widely used.

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