Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

157

ddviola 1 day ago 65 commentsRead Article on old.reddit.com

FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

75% Positive

Analyzed from 970 words in the discussion.

Discussion (65 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

raincole•1 day ago

OS X: 21.14%

macOS: 8.6%

Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself.

Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

laserbeam•1 day ago

It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.

prologic•1 day ago

Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing?

> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.

kelnos•1 day ago

I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?

eddythompson80•1 day ago

Even if you assume OS X is 1999-2016 and macOS is 2016- then the numbers are still odd.

kirb•about 24 hours ago

It’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-g...

VCFundedGenYer•about 16 hours ago

Sort of. Apple half-heartedly changed their version numbers after 10.15, but there were times where they wrote both the 10.X and N+1.x versions elsewhere, so I think it's just generally a confusing mess with them now.

iPadOS masks itself as macOS/OS X (depending on where you look), so that doesn't help either.

ouchqt•about 24 hours ago

My understanding is that apple officially changed from OS X to macOS in 2020 with the launch of macOS 11, even though the branding changed a few years earlier.

relyks•1 day ago

We should really be able to downvote submissions... This analysis is clearly factually inaccurate. I am curious to know why OS X and macOS are showing up separately though

csomar•1 day ago

The thing is, there is an ongoing linux boom (the percentage doubled which means linux user base has effectively doubled too). But god help us in this AI-slop phase.

padjo•about 24 hours ago

StatCounter is a joke.

timbit42•about 11 hours ago

Cloudflare is showing 9.2%. Steam is showing 7%. US gov is showing similar stats.

bigfatkitten•1 day ago

The separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.

wmf•1 day ago

The last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.

Caligatio•1 day ago

I haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent.

I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.

gr_norm•1 day ago

bawolff•1 day ago

I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets

nwah1•1 day ago

Also, Chromebooks.

Brian_K_White•1 day ago

I don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low.

I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.

tapoxi•1 day ago

Yea Chromebooks are wildly popular in American education. They've replaced the school desktop PC.

eru•1 day ago

I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.

myaccountonhn•1 day ago

I think Linux is getting a lot more popular, but not this popular.

toplinesoftsys•1 day ago

Yes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.

NitpickLawyer•1 day ago

Depending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home.

As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.

simongray•1 day ago

I don't think these numbers are correct, but desktop Linux is no doubt having its year now. So many big YouTube content creators are covering Linux content and switching to Linux specifically, since the major obstacle to switching (gaming) has now been solved. Add to that the push effect from the constant enshittification of Windows.

ediamondscience•1 day ago

I don't know if the BSD folks would be happy to see it mentioned or unhappy that it's at 0%. At least you know that most of those users are human

eurleif•1 day ago

Netcraft confirms it...

IAmGraydon•1 day ago

Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%.

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

cwnyth•1 day ago

6% is still significant. I'm used to seeing 3-5 in that slot. Hey, I'll take any increase, even a single percentage!

benjaminl•1 day ago

It’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.

hparadiz•1 day ago

In what universe would I jump from a proprietary OS to another proprietary OS without a damn good reason?

abdullahkhalids•1 day ago

If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.

ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?

SwellJoe•1 day ago

6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller.

It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.

andrewstuart•1 day ago

I do not believe this. Unless it’s some sort of tricksy word game or counting android or something.

There is 0% chance that 10% of desktops/laptops are running desktop Linux.

Der_Einzige•1 day ago

The same people who believe these numbers also think open routers token measurements are indicative of total token demand - lol.

hedgehog•1 day ago

https://archive.is/kaef0

rvz•1 day ago

Imagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.

paxys•1 day ago

Source: vibes

wmf•1 day ago

I guess Steam OS counts as Linux?

intothemild•1 day ago

That's because it is Linux, specifically Arch.

All Linux is Linux.