https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607

https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&dt=28d&loc=north-america&filters=deviceType%253DDESKTOP

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?

    • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      20 hours ago

      Ignoring that the default browsers on many distros are seen as bot traffic, filtering the alleged bot traffic on Linux still results in around 7% of overall traffic, up from 4ish a year ago. It also doesn’t explain the giant leaps in downloads on many distros that correlate with the spike. It’s possible some organization set up a ton of computers with openclaw and a wide variety of distros on it I guess to influence opinion 🤷‍♀️

      Also extremely biased source

  • MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    I got another email from MS recently saying: “We understand that moving to a new PC can take time. As part of our ongoing commitment to helping customers stay secure during the transition, the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) programme for personal devices is being provided an additional year.”

    Oh do fuck off. I don’t need a new computer, and I certainly don’t need YOU.

  • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
    25·
    2 days ago

    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…

    • MimicJar@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 days ago

      So I can’t find a great answer, but as best I can tell StatCounter uses user agents to determine this data, the web browser being the most obvious source but not the only source.

      The user agent for most web browsers on “macOS” the operating system generally report as “Mac OS X”. So other user agents, which report things like “Macintosh” but rarely actually “macOS”, are reported as “macOS”.

      This also explains why “OS X” has a larger share than “macOS”. Web browsers on the macOS operating system are used more than “other”.

      At first glance you’d think “OS X” and “macOS” should just be combined. But chances are if someone is using a web browser on macOS, they’re probably also using “other”.

      Another problem is that we don’t know how StatCounter is handling duplicate/fake data. If I constantly hit refresh or send analytics from a single device, how is that counted? What if I send “OS X” and “macOS” data?

      Luckily we also have the Cloudflare data, which shows Linux between 9% and 15%. So StatCounter using 10% is probably on the lower side, but within the margins.

    • Crashumbc@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Macs just work and the type to buy them aren’t going to replace them until they stop.

      Plus most Mac users don’t do anything stressful, browsing and streaming which even most 15 year old machines will do fine at this point.

  • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
    18·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    58·
    3 days ago

    As an OpenBSD user I find it funny how they list OpenBSD as 0%. Like, they could’ve just omitted it.

      • communism@lemmy.ml
        5·
        2 days ago

        I didn’t—I like to pick up old second-hand laptops that are selling for cheap and tinker with them (install different OSes, coreboot them, etc). One of the machines I regularly use is OpenBSD, but it’s not my sole OS. My gaming machine is Linux—afaik you’re gonna have a tough time trying to play AAA games on any other (FOSS) OS, but I’ve not tried, because the laptop I run OpenBSD on is an old underpowered Thinkpad anyway.

        I picked OpenBSD over other non-Linuxes because of its focus on security. Also I think the pufferfish is cute. It wasn’t that deep of a decision for that particular laptop. I do find it quite an enjoyable OS to use, and I have anecdotally had fewer problems with it than with Linuxes, I suspect because their whole security focus also means fewer bugs.

      • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        BSD is interesting. So it’s always worth giving it a try. It certainly won’t be as comfortable or convenient as Linux though. So exploring it on a side machine (or a secondary partition) is probably better.

  • UnLocoPoco@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 days ago

    Also, notice one thing…along with windows, MacOS also lost share during the same time. People are fed up with Apple too!

  • Bluewing@lemmy.world
    7·
    2 days ago

    It’s still going to be decades before Windows and iOS feel the pinch. This is a war of attririon. There is no quick victory here.

  • vas@lemmy.ml
    38·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • dadarobot@lemmy.ml
      32·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • marcie (she/her)@lemmy.mlOP
      17·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
      8·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Then there are governments and companies in the world who suddenly switch lot of machines at the same time.

        Yep. Both Germany and France’ governments are actively switching to Linux and open software as a matter of policy