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.
Also, notice one thing…along with windows, MacOS also lost share during the same time. People are fed up with Apple too!
You mean that OS X lost a lot of users to… macOS.
is this due to the steam machine? i heard it’s linux based.
superscript
I feel very happy seeing Linux attracting people, even if they get back again to Windows or Mac.
So far it looks like it’s only one month on the chart with 10% for Linux, it could be a fluke. We’ll find out if it remains around 10% in the coming months.
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.
Year of Luigi?
People should stop posting StatCounter, it’s so unreliable and noisy.
But I am surprised by the Cloudflare numbers, which are a lot more reliable, and still have Linux at ~5% worldwide, which is still higher than I thought! And even ~6.5% for the past two months, though I imagine that’s a seasonality effect - maybe Linux users in the northern hemisphere are more likely to use their computers at home during summer? :P
5% is realistic. Steam survey says 4% of their users are on Linux too. These two numbers approximately match
Yeah I know, I’d much sooner trust those numbers - but those are pretty good numbers! Desktop only of course, but still!
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…
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.
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.
nvidia is a big hurdle imo
People really ought to stop with that, I’ve used nVidia for literally decades on my desktop with a variety of machines with Linux with little to no issues. And that’s been with distributions that were considerably less polished than what’s available today.
OTOH, I’ve had a number of issues (mostly patched now) with my Radeon RX 9070 XT.The fact that you have to enable a separate repository or tick a box during installation isn’t a “big hurdle”.
Well, that’s not my experience with Nvidia and Linux, always breaking everything trying to use the Nvidia driver, or updating it.
Specially when trying to do both gaming and CUDA on the same OS, making it work with one always broke the other. I had to have two installations, one for machine learning and the other as daily driver and gaming.
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.
Probably because people have to Windows at work
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.
I started using Linux in 1998. It’s not ruined yet and Red Hat,and SUSE, Canonical have been around the entire time. Companies can ruin dislros but not the code behind it.
By first putting age verification in systemd.
It will be like Android. You have to use their app store to install new programs.
You are right, they justo can copy what they already did un mobile.
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.
Funnily enough, android being its own ecosystem that happens to use the Linux kernel has led to quite a few improvements over the years in the kernel. Better scheduling, new filesystem drivers (exfat for example) better power management, etc. plus you can use some Linuxy utilities and tricks on Android because it’s ultimately just a Linux distro
Why did it spike so much in just the last few months? That is a huge change!
AI bots
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.
