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

ddviola about 3 hours ago 23 commentsRead Article on old.reddit.com

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Discussion (23 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

toplinesoftsys•8 minutes 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•12 minutes 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.

bigfatkitten•about 1 hour ago

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

wmf•about 1 hour 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•41 minutes 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I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.

bawolff•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour ago

Also, Chromebooks.

Brian_K_White•38 minutes 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•2 minutes ago

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

eru•15 minutes ago

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

ediamondscience•about 1 hour 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•5 minutes ago

Netcraft confirms it...

hedgehog•about 1 hour ago

https://archive.is/kaef0

rvz•about 1 hour 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.

IAmGraydon•about 1 hour 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•11 minutes 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•about 1 hour 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•15 minutes ago

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

abdullahkhalids•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.

paxys•about 1 hour ago

Source: vibes

wmf•about 1 hour ago

I guess Steam OS counts as Linux?

intothemild•9 minutes ago

That's because it is Linux, specifically Arch.

All Linux is Linux.