Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA | Hacker News Reader

Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA

ostechnix.com

1,021 pointsmarcodiego614 comments

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.

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).

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.

> The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different.

Linux is a kernel.

The Steam Deck is absolutely a full blown Linux. But it's not a desktop. It's a handheld.

Well, unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose. No idea how many people do that. But if you do that, phones and tablets also become desktops.

Typing this from my Steam Deck, its the best Linux desktop I've ever had. It's awesome to have my PC also be a handheld when laying in bed. I hope the Deckard has M+KB support too.

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.

I guess the parent discussion is partly about whether the GNU/Linux desktop experience is getting popular, & if no one is using desktop mode in practice then this is not super informative, though good to know

Totally agree. It's what finally got me to commit to a linux machine for my recent desktop build!

What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one? Many Android tablets (especially those with Samsung Dex) can certainly double up as desktops if its users were so willing, at least a lot more so than the Steam Deck.

Market share only matters to geeks and commercial software vendors when deciding the total addressable market. A “Linux desktop” that is connected to a TV used to play games is not part of the market they care about.

You are being obtuse.

99% of Steam Deck users won't ever use the desktop mode except for maybe setting up emulation or Discord.

In general, that makes Steam Deck users no more Linux users than people that use Android.

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.

> 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?

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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

(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 .

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".

I’m curious to know the country, if you don’t mind sharing. I thought these EU letters of happiness are a real deal.

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.

Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.

> 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.

FWIW, this is my experience too. I'm 50yo, live in the Boston area.

Hey, some of us are non-gamer nerds doing computing infrastructure and cybersecurity with towers too :)

>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.

If you are doing all of your work in a browser anyway, you might as well use a less finicky iPad with longer battery life with a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Why would I recommend a Linux system?

>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.

That's very anecdotal of you. Proves absolutely nothing.

Since we're posting anecdotes here, everyone I know has at least one computer that is not "their work computer" (which is confusing, is it employer-owned, or just personally owned for their own purposes?).

Many people do not like typing on tablet or phone keyboards, real keyboards are much nicer. Bigger screens are also much nicer than tiny phone screens and most tablet screens.

I suspect your anecdotal circle is probably very young and may just not be able to afford a real computer, or have never used one, so they are fine with their tiny devices, not knowing the benefits of having a more traditional laptop or desktop computer.

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.

But those "features" exist, and people did not switch (at least not in great numbers).

Both my parents run on Microsoft Excel. Neither of them care much for phones or tablets, but if there was an ExcelDeck running ExcelOS and it had a web browser and worked like the desktop version of Excel does, maybe they would go for it.

As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.

Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.

Why is this is a top comment? Market share is a relative measure. Even if there is a drop in the number of personal computers, still it's an achievement that the drop didn't affect Linux, while it affected other platforms.

> 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.

I disagree. Imagine that Linux became the OS used on 95% of personal computers. According to your reasoning there wouldn't be much to celebrate. Says who?

Because it's an important distinction. If all PC sales fall to almost zero, and only the most hardcore tech nerds keep using them, and use Linux like they've been doing for two decades now, did Linux really win the battle or did the entire war evaporate and they are some long lost leftover soldier in the jungle fighting some battle no one else even is anymore.

> 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.

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

> 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.

> 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.

I've been saying this for a while, in the sense that the "year of the Linux desktop" isn't going to come from mass adoption of Linux on the desktop, but will come because overall "desktop" market share will decrease to the point where if you need a desktop, you are probably technical enough and more likely to be running Linux.

Desktop (and laptop) computing is becoming niche outside of work. Like you said, most folks just use their phones, and maybe an iPad. By having a non-day job computer at home, and having it be a core device, already puts you in a niche group of users.

Gamers, devs, media professionals and enthusiasts are the remaining desktop computing users. Linux is well suited to take over gamers and devs, media professionals will continue using Macs. So yeah, it might appear Linux usage is growing, but I think the more likely story is it's relatively stable and overall desktop usage is shrinking.

> 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?

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.

I'll chime in here; while I'm in one of those niches you described at the start of your comment (with multiple laptops, a gaming PC, and a homelab made up of what I'd call a reasonable number of physical computers of various descriptions), me and a few other friends of mine recently made the jump away from Windows and to various Linuxes on our gaming PCs.

I went for Ubuntu, while my friends mostly went to some type of "gaming-optimized" flavour of Arch.

I'm definitely an edge case as most computing goes, but it feels for the first time like the gaming-on-Linux train's gaining traction, and there's enough community support out there that making the jump feels like a palatable ideal.

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.

Dell

I'm not sure but going on 3 years now after having mostly only used it full time at a previous job where everyone's workstation was a Linux one.

It helps that I can now do all of my gaming on Linux, so I'm not touching Windows again, outside of an employer paying for my work devices to use it on.

> 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?

This is largely people who were previously Windows customers but who chose to go another way. Microsoft is doing a lot of shenanigans with their monopoly power, and anti-trust is largely toothless.

I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.

The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.

it seems grok thinks that its mainly due to more people using linux now: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_3ca6a3ae-6342-422e-9...

> 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.

That's a tiny minority of PC users, though.

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.

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?

People do all kinds of crazy stuff with steam decks. I don't own one, but at least I give to steam that they created a general computing device that people can use however they please instead of yet another walled garden console. It would not surprise me if people actually also use them to browse the web.

I do. It's a device that is often hooked up to my TV so it becomes the shared device for watching things like Youtube.

I think this is probably it. That plus the SteamDeck and maybe other random linux running devices.

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.

Edit: might as well link to the merch: https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling

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).

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.

> 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.

> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?

I got my hands on a Dell that was retired out of an office somewhere for $30+shipping. Add the cost of a couple HDDs, time spent removing a disc drive and installing Linux, I got myself a cheap backup server on my LAN.

They're great for machines you don't want to drop a lot on for basic utilities.

Would just like to add it’s not needed so much now. I’m a pretty avid gamer and I’ve been using Bazzite as my OS now for months without issue.

Proton has completely changed the game (pun not intended). All that’s really missing now is the big studios who won’t release their anticheat for Linux.

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!

I've sold linux mint laptops on ebay and I always reach out after sale basically saying "just to be clear, this isn't running windows, it's linux. I'll be happy to cancel if this isn't what you expected"

and 100% of the time the person was like "yes! Linux is what I wanted"

Well alright then, there you go...

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.

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.

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.

I did something similar back in the before times, an initiative that takes donated devices and give them a second life to people who need it. We had major resistance back then to anything linux.

I thought the Windows license was burned into the BIOS, so a reinstall would pick it up automatically?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That might be even worse then, you'd be reselling a machine which was licensed under the previous owner's Windows key

The link is appreciated! I like the selection of ruggedized laptops.

Thanks! I've been going through my to-do stack, and there was quite a few there. They've been selling fast! I've got a stack of Toughbooks to go through, too... someday.

Hey, that seems like a cool gig

It is! If my supervisor didn't kick everyone out at 5 and lock the place, I'd probably work all night everynight nerding out over everything in there.

Have you considered ChromeOS Flex?

How do you keep them auto-updated? I've just started on Mint and I'm disappointed how the software installer/updater still needs the admin password.

You can either configure unattended updates (e.g. cron-apt or unattended-upgrade), or you can give system administration privileges to other users so they can accept pending updates. I don't think the latter is granular enough to only allow package upgrades, it also allows installing/removing packages.

That’s surprising to hear. It’s been many years since I ran Ubuntu, but I never get a password prompt for the updater on Fedora.

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?

Bingo.

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...

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.

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582058

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.

> 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.

Unless they're using JS for something specific, getting the user to load anything at all would give them the OS from the useragent string in almost all cases. I'd believe their URLs being included in default filter lists though.

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.

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.

> 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.

This could be related to the re-versioning of macOS from 10.x to the year of the release.

Can you even have a successful TLS handshake with Mac OS 9 ?

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.

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...

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.

"mac OS" not "MacOS". MacOS is for the older pre-OS X versions.

You can also look at the Steam survey as another data point. Linux use among English speakers is just above 5%, but the data is biased toward power users/ gamers.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

I wonder what a more reliable measure would be. Maybe something like the "Crane Index" where we count the number of new software packages for Linux. Particularly, it makes sense to focus on paid software, because there's actually some bar to entry there (setting up an LLC, accepting payments, etc.) I haven't actually looked into this, but I think the initial data for this figure is zero, and we're projected to reach zero by next year.

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?

That’s not classic macOS… that’s modern macOS, as in post OS X dude

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%

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.

I am still using Windows 10. I use Flow Launcher ( https://www.flowlauncher.com/ ) and have it bound to ctrl-alt-shift-g, but then use an AutoHotkey binding to rebind it to Caps lock. Point being I almost never use the Start Menu, I just use Flow Launcher. And Flow Launcher has half the latency to display with no ads. When I'm forced to update to Windows 11 I may be forced to investigate alternate taskbars.

Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.

A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.

I have a script that puts my laptop from suspend to hibernate automatically within some sane amount of time (hours), and so either I pickup my laptop within hours, or it’s hibernated and reliably not wasting my battery away while sleeping.

> I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.

The ever increasing number of GPUs of the world are making the cloud PC gaming services ridiculously cheap. I only pay $12 USD/month (boosteroid, gaming only).

If I bought a gaming PC with similar specs, it would take over 7 years to pay it off (no use for a PC besides gaming). That would be 7 years of fixed hardware, where the cloud hardware specs keep improving with time, and I can pause the subscription whenever I want.

You definitely pay with some extra input latency, but not enough to impact my casual play. Definitely worth trying, if you have nice internet.

You can easily buy a gaming PC for less than $1000 that provides a better experience than cloud gaming. You also need to remember that these companies are trying to create a market for their product and right now they're happy to sell their services really cheap. Once its adopted it will be raised.

Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.

It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.

For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.

I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.

What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.

>New things pop up here and there with each update every few years

In my experience this is every few weeks.

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.

> 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.

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.

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).

Microsoft used to have a Teams for Linux application. It was identical to the Windows application because it's just an Electron app, but shockingly it was buggy on Linux (???) I don't even know how... I mean, Microsoft chose a cross-platform framework. They must've written some stupid ass code that isn't portable, at which point why not use one of the dozen Microsoft GUI frameworks available?

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.

The "great" part about the Office desktop apps is that they're written in electron, so it's already essentially a web app but somehow worse.

> Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...

I have that exact workflow with any computer I do not use on a regular basis. If I use the thing every day it is ok. But if I let something sit for like 6 months it is 'patch city'. I usually play that game on my game consoles because i do not use it much. My daily used computers 10-15 seconds tops until usable desktop.

Do you use your Windows laptop daily?

Normally, yes. Due to current circumstances I hadn't used it the day before (Tuesday) although I did use it Monday.

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.

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.

You pretty much need Windhawk to fix and remove all of Windows 11's poor design and architecture.

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.

Current battery life is better than it was on Windows. I know Windows is very good from this standpoint but things always degrade over time. That is my expectation with arch as well - good now but let's see how it is 6 months from now. That is always the real test. Regardless, my laptop is too small to run Windows + WSL so will probably stick with just running Linux.

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).

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.

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").

What's "windows pirating" when Microsoft offers public ISO downloads and you can activate them with MAS?

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...

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.

None https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots There's no reason for those bots to report any specific OS

Anything that's automated today is linux. So, I'll assume almost 99.99%, or may be BSD in some cases.

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.

So basically the 5% number is pulled out of thin air.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wish Windows 11 looked more like Windows.

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.

> 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?

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.

Hey, you have a github or maybe just briefly expand on something for me, I'm interested in the luckfox pico bootloader you wrote and separately using it as USB via raw gadget which are things you've talked about last year, these are things I'm actually wanting to do with my otherwise untouched LF. (was planning on writing a poc for 2024-53197 (iirc that's the cve)

I may be looking in the wrong place but your comment was one of the few things I came across referencing LF + usb gadget.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 *

"oh no, the peasants are using MY operating system, this can't be good"

You're probably talking about enshittification [0], which typically affects centralized for-profit entities, not community-based free software projects.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484

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?

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.

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!

It's conceivably part of the reason.

Earlier reporting on Windows MAU noted "400 million Windows PCs vanished in 3 years" (https://www.zdnet.com/article/400-million-windows-pcs-vanish... ). As Windows 11 wrecks havoc on older PCs, many may just sit unused or get discarded, thereby increasing the relative share of the surviving PCs (including Linux PCs).

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.

The reason Linux won't take off is because Windows users have unrealistic expectations. They define "intuitive" as "works like Windows".

But Windows is not intuitive - it's, possibly, the least intuitive operating system to ever exist. It's just familiar.

But it's a Catch 22. If Linux is like Windows, then there's zero reason to use it. Just use Windows. But if Linux is not like Windows, then it's not familiar.

The solution is to reframe your expectations. If you expect Linux to work like Windows, you will be disappointed - and rightfully so. Nobody expects MacOS to work like Windows, no, you adapt.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

You can't do ctrl-c and ctrl-v in MacOS too, that's doesn't break their marketshare.

> 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".

>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

How is it a fumble? Linux is doing very well to scope up users from people looking to leave windows. Its not a monolithic company. There is no marketing budget only users to spread the word.

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.

Coming from decades of using a Mac, I swap left alt and left ctrl. I remap the Terminal using AutoKey so that ctrl+c and ctrl+v are copy and paste, and alt+c effectively sends a ctrl+c to terminate a program.

Microsoft <3 Linux so much, they ruined Windows so people would switch to Linux. Thank you Microsoft!

Seriously though, I switched to Linux late last year and haven't looked back. It has everything I need for a computer and a lot of the "problems" people say is holding them back from switching full-time are greatly exaggerated. Like if you're not willing to make some small compromises so you can have a computer that respects you as a human and not a metric then I don't know what to tell you.

This has been my take. They even made Windows 11 look like a linux desktop so they can do a switcheroo later on.

Microsoft could kill off Windows as a desktop operating system and it wouldn't dent their financials in a major way. You'll know they're truly serious, though, when they start making contributions to Wine and also makes bash the default command line interpreter in windows.

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.

Oh hey another "I'd fully be on Linux if it wasn't for Fusion 360" person. Although in my case I'm too lazy to maintain VMs, so I just use windows as my base OS. Microsoft may force the issue next year when my perfectly good desktop stops getting Windows 10 updates and can't install Windows 11.

What's torturous about using Fusion 360 in a VM?

I have no GFX performance with virtualbox. Sometimes I run Fusion via another system and remote connected using NoMachine which works better even with the USB spacemouse connected via NoMachine...

I really liked the recent picture of Linus Torvalds and Bill gets, hard to believe that after all these years of “competition,” they had never actually met before. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1lh34ox/linus_torval...

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.

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...

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.

FWIW you could install Flash on Linux. It was sometimes a pain but it did work.

Massive PIA.

Since flash didnt work I didnt use Linix

Since I didnt use Linux I wasnt very good at it

Since I kept at noob level, I couldnt install Flash, which was pretty hard

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.

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.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/united-s...

> 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.

Browser selection is a heated topic in linux land just like text editors and window managers.

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.

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

> No more whack-a-mole MS telemetry I have to read obscure guides to find out how to turn off.

My routine at some point after moving to W10 was to create/update system partition image, turn off all bypasses/tweaks that kept update components tamed. Then do the update, reboot and quickly run through all setting that in the past tend to reset "itself", apply tweaks again and reboot to see if these still work, and finally - look up if some processes or services were added.

I was dualbooting, using VM's for years and pandemic gave me something to do so I finally escaped from Microsoft grip.

Tho, it wasn't issues-free ride. Mint and Manjaro would randomly soft-hang for no reason; some Manjaro updates would made me few times reinstall the system (that would be still faster than manually correcting everything). I had to freeze GPU drivers for older card because newer ones would crash games. Keeping unified look across all types of applications is indeed a sloppy task - especially with all Gnome shenanigans regarding theming but atm is still doable. But overall, I'm happy and I see how much changed and improved since Mandrake 8 times when I tried Linux for the first time.

For majority of people, for doing basic tasks plus playing some games Linux should be fine.

So refreshing isn’t it? It’s like having an OS that’s actually designed for you, not them. Imagine!

Occasionally I will boot into a Windows partition because I have to do something windows-only. I’m so out of the Windows world these days that I mentally have to prepare myself not to get too fired up with it all, just calm down do the thing and get out. :)

Agree that it’s a lot of effort to switch though, so good for you on making the switch!

2 years ago i replaced my last win10 installation with linux mint and i literally never think about going back. i am a pretty technical person and i still run into issues sometimes that take a few sessions to resolve though. i wish it was an easier sell to my friends. i began to feel extremely creeped out by my computer running windows which was was ultimately motivated me, but i not only avoided the evils of microsoft, i feel much more in-control and capable of doing more on linux.

it's crazy to me when my friends will say shit about configuration and i'm like, what's the tradeoff? configuring windows to just work like a normal computer is MUCH more work. the only way to put in no work is to be farmed for data and treated like a child by your own computer.

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.

I don't get the anti-Linux hate that some people have. I get apathy, it's normal not to care. But I don't understand why anyone would actively root against a free and open alternative.

This is great news btw, and consistent with what is coming out of the Steam survey.

Comment generator: "Concerns about privacy invasions, adware, and forced updates in Windows are pushing users away. Many users are fed up with Microsoft "urging users to train their AI for free"."

1) Windows chatting behind your back causes distrust. And for good reason. 2) Yes, forced updates, but the consumers don't understand that they're just crofters in MSFT's world with all MSFT's products. MSFT will update as much as fits their needs to protect their property, not yours. 3) Re: adware. Part of your relationship with MSFT is that you are the commodity. It's a general internet business revenue model.

Is SteamOS included? I am not really surprised. Linux is quite often only usable option, now when Win 10 is not really supported.

Why not use Win 11?

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.

Because it's actively user hostile? Microsoft shoving their spyware and unwelcome AI into it regardless of consent

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.

Because there's lots of good hardware out there that's unsupported by Windows 11, but supported just fine by Linux distros.

Personally I'm taking another kick at Linux desktop in advance of Win11, I installed Mint with Cinnamon... and I gotta say, I'm kinda disappointed how many pain points there still are. Type in your admin password every 5 seconds just to install routine updates, ugly-ass GRUB screens, confusing UI, and SDL2 games being half-broken with resolution-switching and audio. Installing software still involves bouncing around figuring out if I want the Flatpak or to add a new Apt source or what.

So I'm assuming these "5% desktop market share" aren't using that kind of distro.

You installed a distro that aims to preserve suckage for future generations, and even developed an entire DE out of pure aversion to change. It’s often recommended by change-averse Linux users…

Successful Linux-based OSes have unattended atomic updates and user-friendly app installation. That includes ChromeOs and Android, as well as modern atomic desktop distributions. Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Bazzite.

edit: however, market share is probably coming from legacy distributions. That’s largely a sign of how bad Windows gets, and how desktops/laptops become more niche.

Ah, I had no idea Mint Cinnamon was about "preserving suckage". I remember when Mint launched it was all about "Ubuntu but easier, like non-free stuff included" and my understanding was Cinnamon was their own DE built to follow familiar UI patterns and customizability instead of Gnome's opinionated stuff.

Didn't realize that it was also for grumps who wanted bug-compatibility in their workflow.

Updates only arrive once a day maximum, can wait for a few days if you like.

Ugly grub? It's a black and white list. Hide it, I guess? Set the plymouth bgrt (manufacturer logo) theme.

Confusing sometimes means one isn't familiar, which passes.

Use the software manager and choose default apt source unless you know for sure you need something newer.

The web browser app paradigm changed everything. The Windows API isn't nearly as important as it once was.

Then again, using Linux has no obvious advantage anymore, as you don't "own" most software you're running anyway.

I am doing my part.

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.

Very cool! If you extrapolate the current trend by 2073 Linux will dominate the desktop market.

And the desktop market will have 4 users in total.

My step dad doesn't know how to share links over messenger (constantly sends me screenshots of pages), but he runs Thinkpad Manjaro for last 3 years without issues. At first, I was afraid that I will have to do some sort of support regularly or answer questions, but besides "Which music player should I install?" it was crickets for the last 3 years.

2025: The Year of the Linux Desktop! [0]

0: https://hackaday.com/2025/06/03/my-winter-of-99-the-year-of-...

Some related earlier discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41312883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39600172

Wow! That's a day growth actually. What happened? Is it Steam OS?

*great. Can't edit this comment, strange.

I will say though, I teach in Computer Science at university, and every semester in a class of 100, there's only ever at max just 1 student who has a Linux distro of any flavor on their laptop. Usually it's 0. It's pretty sad if you ask me.

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop 5 years ago and haven't looked back. Windows at this point just feels like crappy spyware. Not a single thing I miss about Windows.

Also gaming on Linux works great for the most part with Proton. Thanks Steam!

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 :)

Finally switched full time to Fedora KDE back in 2018 and only use Windows in QEMU KVM's. Of course my work laptop is Apple.

I am no power user by any means, but everything I do is supported: minor web dev, Davinci, Blender, Steam, even Battle.net running on Bottles (Diablo II: Resurrected has never crash once and runs at an excellent frame rate), basic browsing, etc. I get random issues here and there, but I also did on Windows and still do on Mac OS.

No regerts.

I wonder how much of this is driven by Linux gaming performance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44560913

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

Anecdote: I’ve run Linux and MacOS. I switched to Linux when Apple hardware got stupid expensive (soldered memory and harddrive) and Dell offered laptops with Linux installed. My brother was always saying “Apple just works … less hassle”. But he’s now worried about expense and privacy and moving to Linux.

I feel like the geeky bleeding edge is leaving Apple for Linux.

Makes sense, I now do the majority of my personal workflows, except for photography, on Arch Linux on a Framework 13 laptop. I still have a M1 MBP for personal use that I primarily use for photography and not much else. There's a very minimal set of "normal" use cases that cannot be served on Linux at this point, and Linux desktops are more stable in the ways that matter to users now than the alternatives.

Impressive because nobody has ever successfully made a Linux desktop computer targeted at consumers the way Apple has. I wouldn't count Chromebooks or Android devices. I mean a system you would use as a workstation or a power user's computer. And I don't mean a Windows PC that you have the option of pre-installing Linux on like from Dell or HP. I mean a computer designed and built around Linux.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Linux remaining reliable and the other platforms getting worse, rather than Linux getting substantially better.

But that's a very key point of advantage in by-design open-ness and non-commercialisation.

It's taken 30(-odd?) years and the coining of the word enshittification, but the advantages of this ideology is now having the last of the clay and sand brushed off it, baring its beauty to a growing audience.

And Linux has, in fact, gotten steadily better over that time too, but it's been a slow consistent grind, so it doesn't appear as grand as a sudden red-curtain-unveiling-worthy improvement, but it is, in fact, that grand.

(What Valve / Steam / Proton has done may be the closest to a rapid increase of usability / marketability, but even that has been relatively subtly under the radar unless you're paying attention).

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.

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!

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.

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

I would not be too surprised to find out that significant portion of Linux on Desktop here is actually headless Chrome web scraping.

Microsoft is killing it's platform. One egregious example is their efficiency mode that literally cripples your computer in the name of some misguided "green initiatives".

I primarily went back to Linux Mint because of this problem. Thankfully Steam allows me to game my library just like on Windows. I have no reason to return.

This is anecdata, but with my own very limited (by choice) website analytics, I see a strong correlation between Linux users and headless browsers. So while my Linux user base seems higher than ever before so is my headless traffic. When I remove headless traffic, my Linux user base is in that 2-3.x% region.

Have people looked at the numbers? Chromeos and Linux have swapped, and if you include the unknown OS which are most likely Windows behind a corporate proxy it is back up to 70% of the market. In addition, the number of sites statcounter pulls from us dropped in half in the last three years if that matters.

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.

Also, 99% of all day to day apps now run in the browser, so having MS Word on your machine is not so important.

I think adoption has to do with the fact that desktop environment efforts are divided across so many distros.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

If you resize the plot to be very skinny, it becomes very visually apparent that the growth in Linux is extreme, given the time period is only one year.

I can't think of any logical reason to exclude ChromeOS and count it separately,and a good portion of the "Unknown" category may as well be Linux.

The "real" number shouldn't be far from 10%, if not already exceeding it.

I think the Unknown category could be custom standalone devices like Playstation, FireTV, webOS, and Switch which have browsers to make those stats but could be BSD based. And, I wouldn't exclude ChromeOS also, I thought it's built off of Gentoo Linux.

> I can't think of any logical reason to exclude ChromeOS and count it separately

Because virtually nobody who says "desktop Linux" means ChromeOS.

I think Fedora should be taken out too. Fedora stands alone and shouldn't be lumped in with the rest of the LinuxOS.

Fedora going up is a sign of progress. Regular Linux going up is just a sign that Windows sucks.

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.

It’s surprising to me it’s not higher. Gaming is excellent on Linux and Windows 11 is simply not good. Just a relative easier distro like Ubuntu is outstanding and learning curve is lower than ever.

I think it's going to keep increasing. I know people who resisted linux for decades and after playing with a Steam Deck are now considering building a linux gaming PC. This is in large part because they are investing into the Steam ecosystem for the first time ever and seeing how great it is. Mad props to Valve for all their work on Proton and Steam.

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.

Microsoft is the biggest contributor to the Linux desktop market share.

These stats are bogus: OS X market share drops by 50% in a few months, macOS market share at zero for most of last twelve months. Windows market share goes up 8% in a few months? Total garbage.

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?

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

How much of this is AI tools pretending to be users? If they use a real browser instead of identifying as a crawler then it's going to skew the stats.

Someone pinch me when VisualStudio runs under Wine/Proton with at least a silver rating. It is quite literally the only app keeping me on Windows.

Out of interest, what do you need visual studio for that you cant get on linux?

VsCode works fine on Linux

Perhaps people don't want copilot and other enhancements but just an OS. Also Windows forcing certain CPUs for Win 11 could play a role.

> 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?

Pretty sure most of the recent gains are coming from gamers

It’s becoming a more viable option - assuming you don’t need multiplayer with anticheat

And at this rate, 6% by 2035, come onnnnn!

I still wonder how they can know that reliably.

elf/linux distros are hardly pre-installed on PCs and forced upon users.

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.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/faq#methodology

> 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.

FTA

>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!

Very cool. My take on the growth...Chat bots make it very easy to find commands and troubleshoot issues.

Yay PewDiePie

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.

There’s no reliable way to collect this data. Linux “desktops” could just be bots.

Thanks Microsoft for making Windows so crappy that ppl switch to Linux!

Is this because Linux became so good or because Windows 11 is so terrible?

I guess a bit of both.

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.

Windows 11 is great if you install the IoT LTSC version. Better than Windows 10.

This is huge =)

I remember the days when we were under 1%.

Congratulations to all involved on making this true.

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?

Still looking forward to the year of the Plan 9 desktop. I'm helping!

Thanks to Linux I’m still rocking a surface pro 3. Will never look back

That's enough that we could form a 3rd political party.

That political party would fracture into 30 competing ones before the next election.

I don't believe this number for even a second.

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.

WSL+windows replaced the Linux desktop for me.

is this the year of the linux desktop?

What year is it?

Wasnt this what Mac looked 15y ago?

There has been noticeable momentum this year with the Windows 10 end of support date looming near and the continued enshittification of Windows 11.

Been there since 0.5% :)

This is not surprising, and further growth is inevitable. I am heavily involved in a local Linux users group, and the number of people switching away from Windows increases every year. Anecdotal, of course, but Microsoft's enshittification of Windows makes the argument in favor of a free OS easier every year too.

installed Omakub by @dhh (let say "opinionated setup" based on Ubuntu) few days ago, look how cool it looks: https://x.com/szolim/status/1943798085806702988/photo/1

also there is a sister project for Arch: https://omarchy.org/

Finally! It is the year of the Linux Desktop! :D

Is this the year of Linux on the desktop?

There are dozens of us. Dozens I say!

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.

this is the year of Linux

> install linux

> 1 week later PC stops booting

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