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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Of the publicly available sources I think CloudFlares Radar is one of the better ones. Silver linings of having such wide dragnet on the internet. It puts Linux market share at 3-4%, with some regional variance

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...

Fun tidbits, Finland is at ~10% (!), and Germany at 6.3%.

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This was probably a lot more true in the past but Linux users tend to be more privacy conscious and do things like spoof their user agent, so this is almost certainly an undercount. You basically used to have to do this to browse the web before Firefox became one of the dominant browsers.

If you spoof user agent, you will get more captchas because it won't match their other fingerprinting.

You also get more captchas because you are on Linux, I see the Cloudflare one on my computer everytime.

Used to be worse. Something happened in the last year and I'm seeing way way less random captchas for regular use from a residential IP. In '22-'24 it used to be extremely common, now it's an event when it happens. Also went from mint to plain ubuntu so that might have something to do with it?

It's a good thing too, because when I see the Cloudflare captcha I try it once and if that doesn't work then I just close the tab and add it to the list of non-functioning websites.

Cloudflare captcha = infinite loop of captchas (if it doesn't work on the first try). You can give up the moment that happens, because you will never get to the website itself.

I don't know anyone who goes through the trouble to spoof their user agent and I know plenty Linux users.

I do, to access YouTube TV on my Ubuntu HTPC.

The archwiki Firefox privacy guide comes to mind, which mentions UA spoofing:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Privacy

Actual reason: SBC retro handheld consoles now run Linux and people are using them to play steam indie games. The China holiday had some blow out pricing.

Non primary devices more likely to run Linux. Primary still windows.

Tons of people did and do this to get higher resolution on a certain streaming site.

Unfortunately I have to use some government websites which refuse to work when my user agent contains "Linux x86_64". So I just always spoof it.

This is the reality - most people won't spoof until they figure out it's the way to make a specific site work; and then they'll likely spoof for everything.

I'd also like to add that we forget that we're doing it, or at least I do. Once you set something up like that, there's never any reason to get rid of it; nobody is positively discriminating towards Linux.

I love when a ruleset (firewall, for example) has a "comments" field because I inevitably forget why I added something and then Chesterton's fence means I leave it forever, lest I spend hours a year later wondering why something broke.

Every time I try to change my user agent with a FF extension I get hit with brutal cloudflare captcha loops. How are you changing your user agent in a way that this is not a problem?

Privacy minded Linux users probably also know, spoofing your user agent is likely to increase fingerprint entropy and actually decreases privacy. It may have been true in the past, but I don't think anyone even recommends it anymore.

There's still plenty of web sites that check the OS and if it's not Mac OS, Windows, or Andoid it's no service for you. Faking your UA is not always about privacy, it's about defeating stupidity.

You should only do this on websites that actually require it otherwise you're almost certainly going to cause more problems than you'll solve.

Messing with the UA header is going to get you flagged by every bot detection tool because when you change your header from "Firefox on Linux" to "Chrome on Windows" your fingerprints don't add up anymore and you look exactly like a poorly written bot. You're likely going to see more captchas, you might get blocked or rate limited more often, and get placed under increased scrutiny, orders held for verification, silently filtered or shadow banned, etc.

Browser yes, but OS? Rarely, I have issues with Firefox, but never had Chromium not working, too.

It any case, it would be silly to assume services measuring OS popularity would put up such limitations. And more likely than not, people are changing their UA as a work-around on a case-by-case basis than make it a default, since that's gonna cause trouble.

In the last decade, the only time, I actually had to touch the UA is when breaking ToS with curl :D

I'm sure there are some, but having used Linux for 32 years, it's been at least 20 years since I needed to do that.

The only websites that really do this anymore are ones that are delivering native code for those platforms or those that require DRM that only work on those platforms.

Even when that is the case (what is a minority of the time), just because I'm using Linux, it doesn't mean that I don't want to download some Windows software.

But well, I haven't had to spoof my browser's UA for a few years. If some site refuses it, I'll just move on. (Including some that started doing it after I brought thousands of dollars worth of stuff from them.)

Actually that sounds like exactly the sort of nuanced reality that “privacy-conscious Linux users” aren’t that likely to know at all.

The EFF's "Panopticlick" paper was published in 2010 [1], together with Firefox/Tor research that knowledge became mainstream. Therefore privacy guides don't recommend it. The Arch wiki linked above has this warning in bright red:

> "Changing the user agent without changing to a corresponding platform will make your browser nearly unique."

Sorry, I am not sure, if arguing about nuanced reality is the battleground, where I see you thriving.

[1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ (browser test since 2014)

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