Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America | Hacker News Reader

Linux Desktop Market Share Surpasses 10% in North America

linuxiac.com

105 pointsleephillips79 comments

(insert Ron Paul It's Happening meme here)

I work in the refurb department of an ewaste recycling company. Because we don't have a Windows OEM license, we officially can't install Windows on any of the PCs we sell. (I'll direct people to download the Windows install media if asked.[0]) On the systems I sell[1], Linux Mint has a nice OEM install option that after installation, there's a 'ship to customer' script[2] that starts an OOBE after the next boot, so I don't have to make up a login, and hope it doesn't get lost anywhere.

I'm not sure how many people keep the Linux install after they buy it, but it's cool to think we're helping move the needle on this! FWIW, I've had several people directed to me specifically for Linux systems, so I know it's more than 3.

Yes, I run Linux everywhere at work (it's the wild west without a Windows domain), and at home.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 (ewww)

[1] https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling

[2] https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/lates...

From one recycler to another, thanks for the work you do!

Personally, I typically use gray market Windows keys. I have a hard time moving machines with Linux on them.

But I think you are doing a really good thing!

I am curious what is considered a grey market license here? I would guess legal departments only see 2 colors for their licenses, so what makes it a middle-state?

... skip the legal department

you don't ask the legal department, this way its both black market and white market simultaneously

Schrödinger’s Licence.

The law is more grey than either black or white. People get in trouble when they think they know something is cut & dried when in fact it's always arguable.

Some other commenter recently said "the law is not autistic".

In this case of course, there is an ocean of valid keys that were purchased or otherwise obtained legally, but under terms that said "you can't resell them or use thim for this or that purpose" but those terms may just be wishful thinking. Just because you write down a demand, even in a contract, even in a contract that both parties agreed to, doesn't garantee you actually ever had a right to that demand or that the other party is obligated to honor it. It might be, or it might be only in some juristictions and not others, or anything else could happen if you put it to the test, and whatever result might even not be final even if you do get your way.

Even if the act of selling or using the key was able to be squarely established illegal, that does not necessarily matter to any downstream recipients. Maybe the key itself is still invalid and MS can detect it and invalidate it any time they want, but that doesn't necessarily mean the end user in in any legal risk since a lawyer might be able to argue that they didn't knowingly do anything wrong (they just bought a computer). Even the recycler might be able to say the same thing, that they just bought keys from someone else. Their legal obligation and cuplability would have to be proven, not just assumed.

The world, including legal departments, has almost no black or white anywhere in it. Merely people with interests in trying to convince you that there is black & white, and they know which is which, and you better give them everything they want with no questions or contest.

There are websites which will sell you a license key which is real and valid but is not sold directly by Microsoft or an authorized OEM. These keys could be volume license keys that are being "misued" by reselling them, they could be keys from another country being used in the US (for example), or in rare cases they could be keys that were 'stolen' from someone else (e. g. copied and used).

That's a 'gray market' key. It's 'gray' because you don't know the provenance, and so in the worst case, you might end up with the key being deactivated, theoretically.

But I've sold computers with gray market keys on them for years and never once has a key been deactivated. I have had keys come up as not usable, in which case I typically ask for my money back.

Most of the time, from what I've seen, it's the first case - a volume key being resold.

We have certifications to keep which are pretty important for the business model (data security, ethical disposal and recycling)[0]. The auditors keep tabs on our retail channels.

Disclaimer: I am an employee, I did not found the company.

[0] https://sustainableelectronics.org/welcome-to-r2v3/

A local thrift store has been slapping Ubuntu on every computer for over a decade. The easiest part is you can just clone it from one computer to the next and it'll Just Work™.

As the article points out, we’re not sure about the validity of these numbers.

Anecdotally though, the idea of major creators like Linus Tech Tips and Marques Brownlee putting out Linux content was unheard of a few short years ago.

I have been seeing a wide trend among the Windows tech-savvy universe of frustrated users who have social media platforms suggesting strongly that people give it a try.

Plus, you’ve got Steam, which has made Linux an excellent game platform for the very large percentage of Windows desktop users who play games.

I also find that the availability of AI makes troubleshooting for newbies way easier. Dump your error message in or describe what’s not working and you’re on your way.

It is truly the year of the Linux desktop. I switched away from Windows thinking I’d still need a dual boot partition but so far I really don’t.

In my experience, LLMs are not great at resolving linux issues, but they are better than what we've had in the past. Trying to use forums and web searches was exhausting, and you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

I totally disagree there. My medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude. As the resident IT person among my friend group this blew my mind.

I’ve noticed that it’s helped me as well, because it’s able to give me diagnostic commands that I can run and report back with the results. For example, I fixed/set up a virtual machine with libvertd and I just wouldn’t have gotten that far without it, especially for when I broke the setup later.

> medium-technical non-programmer friend completely installed set up Linux without my help using Claude

I mean, not to do the HN thing, but I feel like if anything that's a bad sign for Linux that Claude was needed? Basically any desktop distro from the last decade has a simple GUI installer, if anything it's genuinely easier than installing Windows. I'd expect a medium-technical person to be able to handle it just fine, what did Claude help them with?

I do use LLMs for random debugging questions (most recently laptop dual graphics for instance) but the base install has always worked fine for me

> what did Claude help them with?

https://askubuntu.com/

There's decades of this stuff.

Conversely, my windows 11 has fundamental issues that neither google nor claude can find solutions to.

I wonder if AI recommends regular full reinstalls?

It’s like this on a fresh install too

This reminds me of how my journey from Windows 11 to CachyOS on my gaming desktop happened because of something like this.

I started getting driver crashes in certain games with my AMD 9070XT graphics card. Everything I tried didn’t work: DDU, reinstall, settings changes, etc.

I don’t know if it was AMD or Microsoft’s fault, but I don’t really care, because everything is more stable on Linux and I’ve been able to run 100% of what I want to run.

The Windows 11 ISO on a two year old Lenovo laptop did not have the Ethernet or WiFi driver. “Have Disk” also did not work for whatever reason when I downloaded the driver to a USB drive. I had to open up a command prompt within the Windows installer and run the GUI driver installer.

In Linux, I now have a custom Arch install which Gemini did help with a lot. It helped unblock significantly where I wanted to get fundamental understanding. A Debian installer will just work though (ironically, some years ago, I had issues with Ubuntu working out of the box but not Debian).

Mostly it was needed to help with stuff like making install USBs and helping with disk partitioning.

Like I said, this person is not really technical.

I don’t consider it a very bad thing in the sense that it’s not high friction to have to ask a question.

Also, more and more preinstalled options are available as time goes on. You can just order a framework laptop and have it come preinstalled with Ubuntu and everything will be working. You can buy a Steam Machine or Steam Deck and they have Linux preinstalled.

Linux Desktops are having a moment this year, but there are still all sorts of sharp edges that a user has to navigate.

Getting a laptop to properly hibernate such that the battery life is usable on the road is a whole roll-your-own-adventure.

WirePlumber apparently mis-classifies some headphones resulting in only input or output working in web meetings.

I've worked with Linux on the server side for over 20 years and these were just two Fedora issues that LLMs helped me sort out recently. If I had to spend a whole day debugging these items, I would likely be drifting back towards macOS or WSL2.

Getting Linux installed has always been the "easy" part. It's everything after that in daily operations that has been hard.

LLM's also came at a time of search decay. Getting google to surface good results was approaching impossible, (although the new ai categories somehow are even worse as they are adding strange terms or location data to create new unrelated searches.)

Hopefully there is a middle ground, where I can explain to my crawler which results look good, which dont, what it got wrong, and it adapts. A return to crawler/surfacer agents that work to find and retrieve would be a step in the right direction.

Hard disagree. Claude with full access to a system is an amazing forensic, digging through obscure dumps, configuring tracing and measuring results, fast. It's also an amazing interface, from setting up environments, tweaking hidden parameters and everyday operations. I don't have such a customized (and functional) system since I was a way more energized teenager with plenty of time to fiddle around. Now it's instant.

I do think llm assisted linux has a bright future. It feels like scifi using a system with them, gluing all the power scattered in small tools.

They do pretty well at this, and like I said they're better than what we had before. But I've spent hours with LLMs trying to figure out kernel errors and going down rabbit holes that lead nowhere. Fortunately I've gotten pretty good at recognizing when this is happening.

I dare say LLMs were one of the things that finally pushed me over the top to be a full time Linux user. For a lifetime Windows user Linux novice like me they really helped me get unblocked on basic stuff like installing Nvidia drivers and setting up a samba share.

> you'd often deal with people who were trying to show how smart they are and rather than answering your questions they demand to know "what are you really trying to do?"

In over 30 years of using the Internet I have seen this question form countless times, and I have posed it myself countless times.

I have never had it in mind to "show how smart I am", and cannot recall ever walking away with the impression that someone else was doing so.

The goal is to solve the other person's problem; the rationale is a genuine belief that the other person has an https://xyproblem.info/ . This belief is, often, motivated by confusion over the description of what's happened so far, or by the OP taking actions that seem inconsistent or needlessly convoluted.

Getting help from other people, as a beginner in a field (any field) requires accepting that you might not yet know the right question to ask, or how to ask it. That's just how knowledge works.

The worst thing about forums in my experience, by far, is people who pose as wanting help but who really just want to rant. Specifically for Linux forums, rant about Linux because it doesn't work like Windows.

On the contrary, LLMs such as Claude Sonnet have been great for diagnosing complete system freezes that aren't logged, and handling iptables.

LLMs are fantastic for helping with Nix stuff. Particularly the error logs, because Nix errors are atrocious to read. Being able to throw the error at an LLM and have it get to the point of what I need to fix is nice.

I've also had it build me a nix flake for a piece of software that wasn't in the repo and save me a ton of effort running it.

If it can solve Nix issues that well, given how relatively obscure Nix is, I don't think it'll struggle with most topics. Though the entire Nix repo being written in Nix and on GitHub might give it a huge boost in training visibility. It's not like other Linux topics aren't also very well represented though.

Don't forget PewDiePie, the last person I expected to do a video about migrating to Linux.

whatever happened to that guy? He used to be the biggest thing on Youtube.

stopped with gaming content for the most part, moved to japan and does the occasional vlog about his kid or family or whatever. retired, basically.

I keep hearing he's retired, yet his channel looks just like any channel by a full-time influencer. The few videos of him I've watched (all quite recent) must have required substantial effort. Like, he's showing off extensive Linux ricing, complex UI/orchestration tools for LLMs,... on top of refined video editing. Whoever actually made all of that, that must have required non-negligible resources. Probably a lot more than videos in his older style, which were more like stream recordings. The cadence of his videos also seemed comparable to other channels I follow. And his videos were all monetized hard, through YouTube, in-video sponsorships, and even in the video description he was selling his subscription newsletter. To me this seems more like he's still very much in the business of selling online content and just evolved his style.

tl;dr: I don't think you and I have the same meaning associated with the word 'retired'.

He is likely quite wealthy now, from his long career on YT.

I'm sure that many of the things you see as "work" are hired out. Video editing, thumbnails, etc. Even hiring multiple Linux developers to help him get through a tricky spot in the build would be reasonable for someone "retired" but with a lot of money.

Hiring people isn't retirement, if anything it means growing your business. You're outsourcing some of the menial tasks and inherit managerial tasks instead. The show and the ROI on all those expenses still ultimately depend on him.

That's a completely normal evolution for any succesful influencer. In what world is that retirement? The only thing I can see being retired is his old online persona, the new persona seems more mature, likely tailored to please his fanbase who presumably have grown out of their teenage instincts (and have more money to spend now).

Moved on from content for kids, now retired peacefully in Japan.

There was that odd moment where he was competing for subs with T-Series, the Bollywood music company, but when he realized he wouldn't be number 1 on YouTube forever, he just stopped giving a shit.

Well, it was always a safe guess that their "Unknown" numbers were almost all Linux.

We developed Linux with 1st class support for our desktop app. It was extremely painful due to missing some Webview functionality that is available for both MacOS and Windows, so we're maintaining an entire 2nd branch of UI code to run CEF instead. One of our developers is 24/7 on Linux and basically just fixes Linux bugs, and even they need a couple VMs to try out random (especially old) distros and DEs to make sure it all works.

Anyways, I'm saying this because we expected ~1% Linux users, but we needed something to stand out against our competitors. I just pulled our latest data, and 7.5% of our paying users are on Linux.

What business domain is the software?

I think a lot of companies dont realize how little support linux users get from corporations. If a company chooses to support linux they are likely the only one in whatever space they operate in, and while the linux user share is small being the only one means you can capture that entire share and your only real competition is open source volunteers if such a solution even exists.

I understand that linux is a pain when it comes to packaging and platform targeting but if a company is willing to work with the community then a whole lot of that work can actually be handled by volunteers who just want to get the thing working on their own system.

Not to mention that linux users tend to be technical users who share good software with each other when they find it so you can release something and get volunteer help to support niche edge cases and you can get free marketing and you can get an untapped user base all to yourself. While the big tech startups are willing to burn billions to gain users/market share, any company can gain the majority of linux users just with a small amount of support.

Im just surprised more companies dont want to get in right now while they can dominate the space. If they wait until everyone is on linux and every company supports it then they dont get any of the above benefits and it will be the same amount if not even more work to support linux since the volunteers will be spread out across multiple companies instead of the first/only one willing to support linux.

Great move by Microsoft to spur Linux adoption by making Windows 11 installable only on the “latest and greatest” hardware. I have a T460p which is still perfectly fine for most office use and gaming and has 32 GB of RAM, a TPM 2.0 and a quad core CPU but because that CPU is not on Microsoft’s list I can only install Windows 11 through some shady hacks.

I guess especially now as new hardware skyrockets in price people think twice before buying a new rig just so they can update Windows, Linux starts to look really good for these folks.

This article is just a rehash of the following source.

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

I don't know what their methodology is but it's hard to take their findings seriously when it shows windows dropping over five percentage points between may and June, or when Linux almost doubled during the same time period, or when it shows an "OS X" spike in October 2025, or when it has OS X and macOS on the same graph…

I've been using Linux on/off since the late 90s. And now, both my mini-PC and my laptop are running Fedora, and I swear by them.

So as much as I want to believe that others share my taste, I'm not sure how to interpret the two statistics in this article.

Sadly, I'd lean towards this article's attribution:

"Cloudflare’s unfiltered figures may include automated requests unless human traffic is classified. This is especially relevant to Linux, widely used for servers, automation, development environments, and headless browser workloads"

I suspect many people are running AI agents on cloud servers, which are most likely running Linux, and many of those agents are browsing the web. That's more likely what is driving this adoption. That, and as the article points out, more accurate OS classification on the part of StatCounter (from unknown to "Linux"), especially if its over the span of 1 month.

A big shift I've noticed in the past few years is how much Windows is increasingly a second-class citizen for developer focused things.

Increasingly you'll see a new tool or library or language, and there'll be installation instructions for everything except windows.

Or Windows will be "supported" but when you go to run the tests they just don't work.

Development has often been more Linux friendly, but it was rarely the case that Windows got completely ignored.

Rightfully so, I think. I’m on a mixed team - Mac, Windows, Linux targeting web; the issues the Windows users have just getting the computer to work are astonishing. I don’t think it is the corporate spyware because my Mac also has corporate spyware.

Windows is just a profoundly awful development environment. So bad they think “run everything in a Linux VM” is a good answer, despite all the performance footguns and complexities it raises.

If you choose to run windows for development, it’s either because you were forced to (e.g. building WPF full time) or you are deliberately choosing a painful rake-filled path.

Not to mention for ~5 of the past 6 years it has simply been impossible to get a good Windows laptop given where Mac set the bar for good.

they are not thinking running linux in a VM is a good answer, but that it is the only option they have to keep windows relevant for developers, short of porting windows itself to run on top of linux. i am confident that day will come.

Fair enough, although I think they _could_ focus on fundamentals and try to be better than Linux on the merits, which could pair well with a thoughtful desktop environment and strong software ecosystem. They of course won’t do this.

The previous approach I thought was more technically interesting - take advantage of Windows NT’s design to support multiple “personalities” - providing Linux compatibility without an extra kernel.

macOS proves it is possible to have a decent developer experience without literally being Linux.

Their source is StatCounter. I would trust the trends but not their absolute values. This month, Steam reported an increase to 4.01% while Cloudflare's human activity reports ~6%.

Even the trends should be taken with caution. By the very nature of their collection methodology and Firefox’s user base, they massively undercount Firefox (almost certainly by more than 30%, from the last estimates I remember; and possibly significantly more). I would expect them to heavily undercount Linux for similar reasons.

Discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140696

Though that was flagged. Perhaps due to being hosted on Reddit and shenanigans there.

This thread is just as low quality and it's also a dupe.

Fair enough.

Why is all windows lumped into one but Mac OS's separated. As well as linuc and chrome os?

For sure Linux ecosystem will dominate over Windows if things remain as now. The question is when: in 5 or 15 years. There are so many reasons:

- high hardware prices push people to keep their 5-10 y-o PC that crawl under updated Windows versions

- stupid Windows practices, like ads and updates, that make people feel, well, stupid

- improvement of Linux distro support, mainly due to instant help by LLMs

- a series of other goodies, like games on Steam, practically non-existent malware, strong security, lack of privacy invasion and the most important: legally FREE.

At about 30-35% market share there will be a tipping that will accelerate the adoption through support by big corps, mild monetization and by being just a "sexy compute".

> However, the sharp monthly increase needs context. Statcounter’s June figures included an “Unknown” category that accounted for 9.24% of North American desktop usage. Its reduction seems to have coincided with Linux’s rise, possibly indicating better identification of previously unclassified traffic.

Still good news for those wanting to see broader Linux adoption, but the news really is the usage was correctly recognized as Linux for the first time.

I use Windows 11, Linux and MacOS on a daily basis and don't have any axes to grind on which one I think is best.

For older hardware that won't run Windows 11, I'm a huge fan of Linux Mint, especially for people migrating from Windows.

Bots pretending to be desktops?

I hope this is not true, but it feels plausible to me. All of those “TV boxes” selling residential proxies may be thousands of additional Linux installs showing up in the stats. If those machines then make a habit of rotating their user agent, could noticeably impact the numbers.

Article is blocked in India.

Yeah. I had to access it by archive[dot]org

What ISP do you use?

The blocking is being done by linuxiac.com, not by the government or by your ISP. (If it were done by them, you’d get TLS connection errors over https:, and a message over http: something like “The website has been blocked as per order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under IT Act, 2000.”)

That’s bad. I wouldn’t have submitted this article had I known that. Why would they do that?

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140696

one thing I can bet on - Windows will ship their own distro & that will be the end of official 'windows'.

all the other windows apps - will be either through a wine layer or migrated to web.

But the question is "which" distro? If it's one of the "hyped" ones, I wouldn't be surprised if people migrate back to Windows.

Why wouldn’t you be surprised?

There are zero android and ios users because reasons.

Realistically, windows probably doesnt even break 1% these days.

Reasons = because they are computing the desktop market share.

Its 2026, that distinction doesn't exist any more. Android and ios devices are orders of magnitudes more powerful now than desktops were when desktop was actually important as a category.

I am very happy to hear this. Usually, when I tell people that my main operating system is Linux, they don't even process it and assume it's either Windows or Mac. Sometimes, they get confused and claim that no one uses Linux.

Now that there is data in terms that people can understand (capitalism), I think people will finally accept that Linux is an OS. The next thing is the false equivalence between Linux and Android.

Several people at a LAN party in April were surprised I was running Linux. It runs everything you can imagine playing except a handful of games that rely on kernel anti-cheat by choice, like Fortnite.

I have Windows on dual-boot in case I need it, but I'm in Linux 99% of the time now.

There are gamer-focused Linux distributions that really test games specifically and make things smooth. The typical general purpose distributions still usually don’t support games very well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com