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Comment by GeneralMaximus | Hacker News Reader

At least according to Statcounter, Linux is currently at 3.86% worldwide: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.

It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india

Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.

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There's also the people like me that couldn't historically run certain games well directly on Linux, so we have Windows virtual machines with GPU passthrough. Which would read as me being a Windows user in the Steam stats, but a Linux user in other stats.

The state of gaming has improved drastically since I started doing it that way, though, and I'm considering ditching the VM entirely. Multiplayer games seem to be getting the hint about anticheat exclusion on Linux. ARC Raiders, for example, is a competitive game and runs flawlessly directly on Linux.

The high amount of "Unknown" is interesting. Especially as it doubled in the last 6-8 months.

"Unknown" is always mostly some version of Windows that they couldn't classify for one reason or another.

Probably. But part of it might also be something else entirely. I'm not saying it is, but how's anybody to tell? Statcounter is just not a good way to research Linux market share. Unfortunately, what they lack in statistics, they seem to make up for in SEO... everybody's landing there.

Last time I looked on stat counter it showed 4 and something percent. That's where I pulled the number from. But it seems they updated it to 3.86 now. It's so over for the Linux community.

also, I would bet Linux desktop users are more likely to use an Adblocker or Brave browser, which actually block statcounter! Probably not enough to bump numbers significantly, but maybe 1-2% additional.

Statcounter isn't just "not fully accurate", it's a hot dump of analytics garbage, at least for this purpose. Take your time to reflect on these diagrams - what's happening there? What's the 55% "unknown", and what does that tell you about the quality of those stats? (I've commented on this problem before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472324 )

I suggest referring to Cloudflare instead: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&loc=&dt=5...

They're actually even putting Linux on 5.1% for desktops as of now - strangely, down from 6.5% in June last year.

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