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?
What’s the difference between “OS X” and “macOS” on this chart?
Surely 20% of the market share isn’t Mac’s that are so old their OS is over 10 years old? I don’t know how else to interpret that…
nvidia is a big hurdle imo
I’m one of em. Finally listened to the linux evangelists on here and put mint on my laptop a few months ago. I’m not a very technical person but installation was a piece of piss, and setting everything up was easy too. Didn’t have to use command line once. Feels like I’ve got my laptop back, was hardly using it before because windows 11 was such a fuckin pain in the arse.
What I find interesting is that windows traffic collapses at night and during weekends, linux is much more stable.
We made it folks!!!
YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP BABY (im still stuck on windows 11 because of CAD)
FreeCAD has become quite usable over the past couple of years, and it keeps getting better with every update. I know you maybe don’t get to choose which CAD program you use since you’re a student, but thought I’d put it out there. I’ve been really enjoying it so far.
You might be interested in Winboat if that’s the only thing keeping you
I looked at Winboat’s website, and it seems really interesting but as an engineering student idk if it’s a good idea to take the risk of running a WIP software to access it. Plus, when I tried installing Linux last time (mint) it caused my trackpad, keyboard backlight, power mode options, and gpu/screen drivers to break (couldn’t run hdr, resolution locked to 1080p60, games only ran with integrated graphics). I know I can fix a good chunk of this is stuff on my own with downloading the right drivers/programs and enough time, but I don’t really want to spend any time doing that (and risk doing it incorrectly) since all my school work is on here
Some of that may have been fixed since last time you tried. Like, stuff is moving really fast right now. A lot of things that used to be stand alone fixes have been upstreamed.
Debian derived distros tend to move a lot slower (for the sake of iron clad stability), so even if something was fixed a year ago it might not be fixed in Mint, Ubuntu or the like.
Arch based distros like catchy will show what’s working right now.
Again, like, it still might not be to a point where you feel comfortable with it as a daily driver, but it’s still worth checking on from time to time, just to see if the issues you had have been fixed.
Good point. I’ve been eyeing Fedora KDE for the next distro I want to try out, and I’ve heard that’s among the most up-to-date distros that’s not straight-up rolling release
what gpu does it use? bazzite has a wizard for downloading isos that trivializes the whole driver problem
Im waiting to see how big corpos will ruin Linux.
By first putting age verification in systemd.
It will be like Android. You have to use their app store to install new programs.
Well android is Linux. That is exactly how Google twisted it to be their own walled garden. And as you can see they are raising the walls and requiring IDs to continue to be a part of it.
Honestly, this is too good of a news to be true. There has to be some kind of error somewhere. Not used to this.
Yeah how much is ai bots or other scrapers
I suspect the data is tainted by scrapers claiming to be a Linux desktop because that doesn’t have the same fingerprinting systems.
That’s one of the industries Mozilla announced a while ago they’d go into.
Mozilla is getting into fingerprinting? Do you have a source or something more for me to search with?
Into providing web browsing to LLM agents as a service.
I remember whn Linux hit 4% as if it was yesterday.
This is truely the year of the Linux desktop.
Why did it spike so much in just the last few months? That is a huge change!
No one wants to swap to Windows 11, even a lot of businesses; it’s that bad.
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
Anecdote, but myself and a few people I know have swapped to Linux rather than install Windows 11.
It can’t all be because of the steam machine.

Here I thought I blocked telemetry.
Which is why they knew you were running Linux. lol
As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.
I’m curious as to why you chose OpenBSD over other FOSS OSes
Yeah I thought FreeBSD was the most popular BSD on desktop…
Thought the same. I think it’s a pun. Could become a meme even. Just put “OpenBSD 0%” in any statistics report.
When your market share is a rounding error.
It’s just you, @pmjv@lemmy.sdf.org and some of the other !unix_surrealists
sweet, there’s 3 of us now!
there are (not even) dozens of us!
It’s a small club, and you ain’t in it!
– George Carlin
How do you like openBSD?
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?
“The last capitalist will sell us the rope with which we hang him” ass energy
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?














