RetroFedLinux desktop use spikes to over 10% in North America for the first time. There is also a corresponding drop in Windows and OSX use.
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marcie (she/her)
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607
Cloudflare stats also seem to support peaks of 15% usage but around 9-10% on average. In the United States alone, the market share for Linux is nearly 12% now for the whole month and Cloudflare stats suggest peaks of up to 25% (!) Linux desktop usage on certain days and times.
The trendline suggests this is just the start. When will companies realize they cannot ignore Linux anymore?
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As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.
It’s just you, @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org and some of the other !unix_surrealists
sweet, there’s 3 of us now!
– George Carlin
Thought the same. I think it’s a pun. Could become a meme even. Just put “OpenBSD 0%” in any statistics report.
How do you like openBSD?
I’m curious as to why you chose OpenBSD over other FOSS OSes
Maybe some AI crawlers started to honestly report Linux instead of Windows as they possibly did before? Otherwise such a quick spike is hard to explain (unbelievable). Or did I miss any big news lately?
//I’m on Linux in the last 15 years and I don’t even care that much about what unrelated to me people use, although I always do help fellow Linux-ers when I encounter them in the wild.
ive noticed lots of videos on youtube of people switching to linux.
honestly, i think the Linus Tech Tips linux challenge videos gave many people confidence to take the leap, along with people’s general distain for win11, and probably also the work Valve’s been doing on proton and the “release” of the steam machine is driving all this.
it really feels like adoption has spiked.
I’ve noticed some pretty big spikes in download stats for certain distros like CachyOS and Bazzite, too. I’ve seen a lot of stories of people churning through Linux in the past and recently coming back to it because the software has matured so much and Windows and OSX are enshittifying.
I think datacenter use may be part of it- usage peaks at the middle of the working day and the highest peaks are on Monday. Its also possible a lot of companies related to AI swapped to Linux distros on workforce computers to reduce headaches in managing AI workloads. There is something that happened July 1st-6th that caused the trendline to accelerate, maybe Kimi K3 news and market shocks? But it should be noted Bazzite and CachyOS use peaked around this time as well.
Apparently Windows 11 sent out an EOL notice for October 2026 recently too. https://www.tech2geek.net/windows-11-24h2-support-ends-on-october-13-2026-heres-how-to-stay-protected/
Steam Machine also came out and sold around 20k machines in the USA. I also wouldn’t discount how good LLMs are at guiding people through “complicated” things like swapping to Linux. GPT for example suggests moving to Linux on first prompt after asking how to fix the windows 11 eol message. Seems like a perfect storm that led to a ton of people swapping to Linux for a wide variety of reasons.
yea a lot of them do report linux, if they report an os at all. however, in a survey of “desktop” visitors, one would expect visits determined to not be ‘interactively human’ to be omitted entirely from the counts.
I don’t think Ai companies / crawlers are honest, so I would rule that out. And its not like a single big event happened over time, but many and people slowly catching up now. In example the big PewDiePie video is just 1 year old, lot of other “smaller” channels like Linus Tech Tips and many other even smaller channels talk about their experience switching to Linux, how to switch, what it offers and why Windows sucks. Valve with their ongoing support and development of Steam operating system and hardware sending shockwaves of news throughout the entire industry. Then there are governments and companies in the world who suddenly switch lot of machines at the same time.
There is so much going on in small steps, then together it makes a single huge step. Or there is just an error in the graph and I made myself a monkey with this speech. Both possible realities are fun.
Most of my friends have either switched to linux or have said they will have to in the future
Its impressive how good microsoft is at getting people not want to use their os
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.
Honestly, at this point I don’t think Microsoft cares about Windows all that much. They make their money elsewhere, and even the control offered by owning the OS can’t be counted on, as the Internet Explorer wars showed.
At the same time, think about the weird coincidence that Windows 11 requires so much extra hardware firepower at the same time as said hardware firepower has become stupid expensive thanks to the same AI the company is pushing.
They made it unaffordable to run Windows 11, and that’s how we get the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
I’ve been saying this since the release of WSL, but Microsoft has everything to gain from switching to the Linux kernel. Even back then senior devs were being laid off, and quality kept backsliding.
Fiscally, why would they want to maintain a whole ass kernel and OS layer when they could probably get away with some sort of custom Atomic Fedora distro?
It’s only exacerbated by AI slop now. Their NT team will continue to shrink, and they’ll be left with no other options.
They also gave up really quick on mandating Windows Server on Azure and are now mightily happy to offer the latest and greatest Linux versions. I think you are onto something there: if it weren’t for compatibility, it would be so much cheaper for Microsoft to just use the Linux kernel.
I seriously predict them contributing to wine, or at least making their own fork. Because their strategy is almost completely OS agnostic at this point. Even offering Dot Net Core on Linux natively.
How easy would it be for them? “Hey Copilot, convert these NT calls to Linux Calls” and your done.
It would be so funny if they “outsource” their kernel to linux, because it would be cheaper… “Hey, hey, I’ve seen this one. I’ve seen this one. This is a classic!” ~Marty McFly
to be fair the internet explorer debacle is behind us, and we are way past the zeitgeist of holding them accountable for antitrust.
they can pump windows full of ads no problem and that should count to something but it’s never enough for them is it?
i think microsoft just doesn’t know what to do with windows and it shows (and it’s for the best, really)
To be fair they released 11 before the latest price surges, might have been during the graphics cards price hikes though, can’t remember when that happened.
Very true, but they also caused some of the price hikes with their Copilot push, no?
Also true, yes. I guess we can agree that Microsoft sucks lol. But seriously, what Microsoft division is actually doing good things? Windows is bad, xbox is horrible, corporate tools like teams are widely hated… What, their azure thing is doing okay I guess?
Weird that Apple has renamed OS X to Mac OS, my first thought opening the link to statcounter was NO WAY 8+% use an OS that was discontinued 25 years ago.
WTF Apple?
Opening Wikipedia it says Mac OS was introduced in 2001!?!?!!??
WTF? That’s the year it was discontinued!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS
For fucks sake! No it’s not “classic Mac OS”, it’s Mac OS. It was never named classic. Just because Apple fucks up doesn’t change the name of the original Mac OS.
And no OS X did not maintain the same version number for decades. It was introduced as OS X 1.0, 10 is not a version number, it’s part of the name like with OS/2 where the number is also not a version number but is part of the name, and describes something completely different, namely that it was meant as the default OS for IBM PS/2 computers.
Sorry for the rant, but the stupidity of Apple removing the X from the name and not distinguishing properly between the original Mac OS and the new macOS is just such a piss poor decision IMO.
For instance Mac OS does not have multitasking! But macOS does.
apple naming schemes are getting almost as bad as AMD’s
I think its intended to line up with the iOS and iPadOS naming scheme. They pooped out an update earlier this year to bring all three OS’s up to the same version number as well.
I have to disagree on side details: OS X did have version numbers starting with 10. I used it between Panther and Yosemite and I can remember Tiger being called version 10.4; it was literally printed on the installation disc.
Yes, that means “Mac OS X 10.0” had two tens right after one another. Apple aren’t Microsoft silly when it comes to names but they can be silly.
Also, it wasn’t introduced as OS X. It was “Mac OS X” until 10.7, then “OS X” until 10.11, and “macOS” since then.
Way back in 2010 I made a prediction to my best friend using Windows: In 10 years we will have reached 10% market share. The catch with this prediction is, it was purely a wish without ANY understanding of the market whatsoever. Obviously 10 years passed and in 2020 I was wrong. We got COVID instead… Buuuuuut… only 6 years later we have already reached 10%!
Besides all the efforts that are going in into the Linux operating systems and eco system, we got two major companies supporting Linux with a huge impact: Valve, with all their gaming related efforts and Microsoft, with their free advertisement through Windows 11. Thank you to both companies and all other parties involved making this possible!
With that said, I make a new prediction: 10 years later, we (Linux) reach 20% market share AND OS X+macOS together reach 42%! Yes I even make a prediction for Apple. Also why is even macOS and OS X not a single graph, while everything Linux related is and even all Windows versions are a single graph? That makes the Apple line smaller than it is.
Also macOS and iOS are basically the same OS under the hood at this point. They’re closer than many Linux distros are to each other
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
whats the difference between osx and macos?
The OS was renamed at some point; the first versions of the Unix/NEXTstep-based OS made by Apple were named Mac OS X, then at some point they switched to “OS X” (which hardly anyone ever actually said), then at some point to “macOS”. So it’s somewhat silly that they are separate lines and I don’t know what the difference is on that graph.
I thought the X was in reference to the roman numeral for 10. Mac OS X == Mac OS 10. They sat on version 10 for a long time and then moved on so it’s no longer X.
Yes, this is true (although the name change happened years before the major version was no longer 10) and doesn’t contradict anything I wrote. But the first version of Mac OS X was an entirely new OS technologically unrelated to Mac OS 9; not the case for later version jumps.
so is macos people running the apple chips and osx is people still running x86/64?
In general no, at least according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS#macOS the name change happened several years before the architecture change. But I don’t know what the distinction is on that graph; it’s possible it just depends on how the OS is called in the user agent string?
This is truely the year of the Linux desktop.
putting osx and macos on separate lines was dumb af. the ‘drop’ of osx over the last ~ 18 months is entirely offset by the debut (and thus, an ‘increase’ from zero) of the name change to macos. it’s a wash there.
linux gains are almost entirely windows’ loss, but whether it’s a legitimate trend or not will take time to determine.
How is chrome os so low when millions of kids use it in school?
If I had to guess, some ChromeOS browsers masquerade as Linux PCs
Microsoft legit single-handedly bringing about the Year of Linux with how they’re turning W11 into categorical dogshit lmfao 🤣
I can’t believe they somehow made an OS worse than Vista, and they’re just doubling down!?!?
Right? I remember vista, and good god was it bad. In fact, I was finishing college and looking for a job back around when W7 was coming out, and I remember specifically asking the interview what had happened with the quality on Vista compared to XP. Turns out the outsourced ALL of their SQA from Redmond to contractors in India. Nowadays, they don’t even have that excuse - it’s dogshit by design these days.
The difference is Vista was accidentally shitty. Windows 11 is shitty on purpose to maximize profitability. Destroying their future for short term gains. Like so many companies.
Windows 11 was categorical dogshit at launch, people just seem to accept it when Microsoft shits out garbage.
There was some good stuff back in the 10 insider previews but by launch 10 was also trash. Genuinely when has windows been good after 7?
Here I thought I blocked telemetry.
Why did it spike so much in just the last few months? That is a huge change!
Maybe because the whole being surveilled thing is pissing a lot of people off, I’ve heard a lot of talk of it on social media. Especially like how all the big tech is tracking everyone
These are American stats. US is generally more Apple minded.
Worldwide Windows is at 71%, Apple at 20% and Linux at 8%.
In Europe Windows is at 74%, Apple at 18% and Linux at 6%
Gonna need to know what they mean by “Linux” in this context. If it is Ubuntu/Fedora/etc that’s impressive, if it is SteamOS then while cool it is not nearly as impressive.
Nah, SteamOS is a normal Linux. It counts.
Edit2: you actually can get hardware surveys on steam os! Do you even get hardware surveys on steam os though?
Edit: question mark, curious here
It says “desktop use”. SteamOS is not desktop use.
It’s a gnu+Linux OS with a default desktop environment. It’s intended to be installed on bare metal where it’s accessed directly by the user.
It’s not for server use. (At least not primarily or by default.)
So I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that it’s not desktop Linux.
How not? Is the full KDE desktop mode not enough?
It counts if you use it to visit a website participating in stats collection. Maybe excluded if the device has a touchscreen and requests the mobile site (I haven’t used a Steam Deck and don’t know its default browser’s config)
Technicaly steamos is a desktop build on arch basis would love to know what the default User-Agent is for steamos as this is probably that basis of that data.
Im waiting to see how big corpos will ruin Linux.
It will be like Android. You have to use their app store to install new programs.
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY (im still stuck on windows 11 because of CAD)
You might be interested in Winboat if that’s the only thing keeping you
Ayy lmao. Also, OSX getting fucked too? Fantastic.
Also funny how freebsd is at 0%
I kind of love how Mac OS X hasn’t been called that for over a decade and hasn’t been supported by Apple at all since 2018 but people still hang on to it over the childish jellybean-looking squeaky toy that is macOS.