It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.
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The combined forces of microsoft reaching new heights of greed and intrusion, plus the massive dev efforts for the best ever GNU Linux and Proton 📈📈📈
Microsoft set themselves up the bomb
Microsoft: As long as Adobe, Office, Autodesk are on my side, I have nothing to worry about.
All your corporate greed are belong to us
Whats interesting is that both income , profits and the stock have been growing well for years, maybe they are just monetizing more aggressively because they can’t compete on product quality (unlike other markets that are still evolving, AI and Cloud). not a ton of stuff to improve in operation systems it seems.
There are system dialogs that have unused space for ads, still plenty to improve!
In all seriousness, cloud (azure) and office subscriptions blew up and account for like 70% of MS profits. They know the Windows experience is lacking, but when they already capture so much of the market and it’s such a small slice of revenue, they have no incentive to improve.
dont forget soystemd and wayland
i don’t have a strong opinion on systemd, i just heard someone call it soystemd in some YouTube video once and it just stuck in my head for years
In all seriousness, I think government bodies switching to Linux (UK’s, China’s, some Indian states’) attributes the most to this.
Even if that’s the case, it’s telling of Linux’ maturity.
Oh absolutely!
No I think it’s the Steam Deck. It’s like half of all actively used Linux machines.
Half of the Linux machines on Steam, not the entirety of Linux.
Yes sorry you’re right
A very important distinction
Source? Last I checked, the Steam Deck was very much in the minority even when narrowed down to just desktop Linux.
Source is the Steam hardware survey set to show Linux data only. He forgot to mention the statement is only true for Steam Gamers, not for all of Linux desktops outside of Steam.
I believe the Steam Deck would be a significant portion of the Linux desktops, but Steam’s survey might be a biased source, still
What does significant portion mean to you?
I confused it with Steam statistics sorry
But that’s not really a Desktop is it? If we’d count mobile device we’d also have to include Android and then the situation would look completely different.
Steam deck has a full fat kde desktop on the stock os
We don’t include Android here. What I meant is that the Steam Deck does count in that statistics.
Steam Deck is a desktop. It is exactly the same PC hardware and software you are using on your desktop PC. It runs the same games and is software compatible. Steam Deck is a desktop PC.
Android has a different hardware (not x86 compatible), is focused on phones, its eco system of software is not compatible with PC and in reverse does not run your PC software. Android based smartphones are not a PC.
But how many use it for browsing, which I imagine this data is from?
Valid point to be honest, but the answer is probably more than you think. I have a PC and still used the Steam Deck to browse the web too, not at least to install stuff. Also searching something while playing is useful too. Its made to be docked to bigger screen as well.
While you are probably right, my point was its still a PC, because he compared it to Android. And why this is hugely different. His point was to exclude Steam Deck, because it is not a PC, just like we would exclude Android. This data from the stats probably does not make a difference if its a Steam Deck or not (nor can it tell it? because browsing is the same as on PC, its an Archlinux and regular browser after all). On the other side it can definitely tell if its Android and exclude it.
So regardless if you think people browse the web with Steam Deck or not, this data should not be able to tell the difference between most distributions and Steam Deck, as its just a normal PC with Firefox (or other web browser) from the point of the stats. Just my assumption.
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Connect the Steam Deck to a compatible dock and you can quite easily use it as a desktop. At the end of the day, it’s still an x64 based PC that’s just handheld.
I’m not sure that’s really a good argument. I can connect an android smartphone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and call it Desktop. It’s also just an arm64 or x64 based PC just handheld.
A Desktop PC IMHO is a device that is used for everyday “office” work and neither android smartphones nor steamdecks are that - but laptops for example are (IMHO)
no, the statistics are based on browser agents, very few steam deck users browse the Internet on their devices. it’s also only half the Linux devices on steam, not of all Linux desktops
Oh that is a good point, why didn’t I think of that!
In Steam maybe. But this is StatCounter which is website visits. I doubt many Deck users are browsing the web.
I’m fairly sure it’s deficiencies in StatCounter’s measurement that’s accounting for it. Statistical noise, basically.
It’s probably even higher than that. These stats are mostly based on website visits I believe. And many Linux users are also privacy-minded and might spoof their OS in the browser. I bet a large portion of the Unknown is actually Linux too.
It’s hard to tell, as there are so many things that influence it. A huge factor is selection bias, as only a small number of website embed StatCounter, and that’s very likely to not be a representative sample. I’d bet that the influence of that is magnitudes larger than of user agent spoofing.
And a portion of the “Windows” as well. Hiding in plain sight and all.
I switched to librewolf so I will now show up as windows
After seeing Garuda Linux set my user agent to Windows, I set my Windows install user agent to Linux.
Seeing Twitch.tv login break after changing my user agent was hilarious
What did it say? Why does it break?
I unspoofed Librewolf back to Firefox + Linux. That way I’m not contributing to Chrome and Windows market share and perceived dominance. Plus the more people don’t spoof, the less of a need there will be to actually spoof at all as the Linux market share increases.
The problem is that websites sometimes change there behavior.
Same, there must be a percent or so of Windows actually being Linux instead.
Yeah me too, safety in numbers. Maybe if Linux desktop gets bigger than Windows they’ll swap it around 👨💻
Fwiw, my blog’s statistics say Linux is around 10% and I know a lot of browsers identify themselves as running on Windows when they’re not, so I wonder how it’s measured.
What’s is the main topic of your blog?
Travel, nothing tech related
I think the venn diagram overlap of linux users, and users of adblockers or noscript users that block such tracking is quite large. Must impact the statistic significantly.
I would wager thats your audiences bias showing up. If you did that measurement in lemmy users, you would get likely 90% Linux users.
lol no you wouldn’t. I’d be shocked if Lemmy users were greater than 20% Linux.
You can tell from the neofetch screenshots of their VMs showing weird configurations like 3 cores and 6 GB RAM with 15 minutes uptime.
Weird configs aren’t always a tell, my daily driver is a desktop with a tigerlake mobile engineering sample cpu
Are you implying that the host OS in those situations is not Linux?
We should do a poll, who uses Linux?
Seems like you will get a biased sample here…
I wonder what’s on the ‘unknown’
likely content blockers preventing the trackers from working properly and invalid user agents. So i would expect about the same ratio of usage on there as well. Maybe very slightly more Linux since maybe the users are more likely to tinker with their browser configs and install content blockers, but even there Id say its an extremely slim minority of even linux users who do that
StatCounter also sometimes miscounts when new versions of windows or macos come out. At one point (I think at windows 11 release) there was a huge dip in windows 10 users and a huge gain in “unknown” and it was quickly fixed.
Bare Metal, they are injecting Ethernet cable directly into their bloodstream.
In essence Netrunner then?
That 6% attributed to “unknown” is the one true OS, the only one ordained by the Almighty… Temple OS!
True Temple OS has no networking
It does have networking if you truly believe!
Based security approach
Netcat, mostly
I have had to do some work on my windows pc and I hate it. I have been away from desktop for a while now and changed to linux for personal one. At work it is all G suite, which does work to its credit, but the windows OS and microsoft cloud documents suck so much. The look and feel is clunky, so clunky. Constantly refreshing and just being shit.
Never forgive forcing outlook.
1980s: Hey guise, computers are now cheap and small enough that you can run an entire system and all your programs on your own machine at home instead of having to dial in to the mainframe!
2010s: No, we’re putting it all back on the servers, you get a thin client.
No technical reason btw, just because “fuck you”.
From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.
So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.
Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.
I work in email Marketing and Outlook is the worst client, especially desktop. Everything I make has to have accommodations for this shitty inbox
And as a user do I hate it too. It is too many times while I edit an email and click delete that is deletes the email instead… It seems if I click a word and get the spell window does the focus always change to the list of emails… And it also force a spell correction if I click space… I didn’t pick one of the options I just want to edit the word myself!!! And if I scrolldown to remove some parts of the email thread or just want to copy a part won’t it let me if I don’t click twice… and it jumps around…damn I hate it so much. Sorry that I replied to you with all these anger. But I really felt it when I saw yours and ops comment. I hope we one day will at least think it is an ok client to work with
As a service outlook (microsoft mail) sucks, as a web service their page sucks andnisnpoorly laid out and optimised and the new desktop client is atrocious.
They made me change from hotmail outlook, created a hotmail folder for under the new outlook and now I dont get notification for that address on the outlook app. If something gets marked as spam that isnt, marking it not spam sends it to the outlook inbox regardless of intended destination. If I reply to a mail it prioritises outlook despite the mail being sent to hotmail. As a result I cant log into shared files that people gave access to one but not the other.
Can we commit to only posting about round number percent changes?
No, we will not stop
4.040000000000000000000001!
We could contact that person as a community
No, we have to post these when it’s the year of the Linux desktop
What’s interesting is that multiple trackers are now saying it’s above 4 percent. Last time something was posted, people questioned the data and where they got their data (which they should). Now there’s multiple sites showing a real increase.
The youtuber matt from thelinuxcast sucks.
I am regular user, i don’t code for living and my job is not tech related. I wanted to try linux and many of you guys supported and now I’m using Linux since 2 weeks its linux mint. That matt guy was so against linux mint that i thought it was shit too. But when i installed and started using it. It has been a smooth journey. Many people in linux community were helpful. But people like matt really make it for us regular guys scared to use linux. I really hope many good linux user help regular people switch to linux and increase this number.
I assume the problem is hardware. Matt’s hardware didn’t work well with LM, therefore Matt thinks LM sucks… I do wish there was better hardware support but it’s the reason apple went with 1 product = 1 OS = 1 general set of hardware. Sure not every iPhone has the same hardware, but that’s why they have the model numbers, and it’s so much easier to test 200 model mixes than 2,000,000 (Android). Windows gets all the debug info sent directly to them like the others but they also have a huge stack of hardware they can use or they can buy it to test.
Mint is great and is absolutely enough for most people using computers, still as of now. It comes with its limitations though:
- By default it runs pretty old kernel. This is fine if your hardware is at least 3 years old. It allows to easily switch to newer kernel with just few clicks, but I expect newbies to not be aware of this at all. Oh, and I don’t know if it offers some custom kernels like tkg etc, which some might want to squeeze best gaming perf etc.
- Cinnamon is still limited to X11. If you have multi-screen setup, VRR, mixed refresh, mixed DPI etc, it’s better to switch to Wayland. Plus, Xorg server gets less and less maintenance and development. All the innovation moved to Wayland, so the experience on X will remain pretty stale.
- The Ubuntu base makes it so that for 3rd party software you either need deb packages or PPAs. Some will argue (me included) that it’s not the best solution
All of the above can easily be irrelevant to you and Mint is just perfect for what you need. It’s important to point out limitations of that choice, but crapping on it because you don’t like it is just pointless fuss
On your last point, there’s also Flatpak which is available right from the baked in software center… That’s not without its issues too, but they’ve been an overall smooth experience for me so far
404: Not found
THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
OK, who did you guys bully over basic tech support questions?
uMatrix prevents me from loading this statcounter website. :-( Can’t lookup how they measure things. In the comments people assume the stats would be counted by just looking up the user agent, which is a naive approach. I don’t think agencies dedicated to stats are doing it this simple. They have way more possibilities to track and to look what browser you are using. The stats are more accurate than you probably think. They do not need to know the exact version of browser you are using, just which type and maybe what operating system you are on.
If a script for Windows does not work on Linux and fails, then they know you are not on Windows in example.
I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time. I remember when it was predicted to hit that in 2010, obviously it didn’t happen*. Of course for me personally, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2007 when I was finally able to use it as my main OS at home, I tried it before many times since 2003.
* not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
Question: Why is BSD so low? (And why/what is unknown?)
Because it’s not overly popular as a desktop os, you are far more likely to see it in certain appliances and server applications etc, none of which will show up in a pagevisits based statistic.
Less hardware support than Linux without enough substantially better about it to make it anyone’s clear preference. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t have advantages over Linux. Just that the average BSD user is going to be able to easily swallow their pride and run Linux if things went wrong with a BSD install (trust me, I’ve literally done this, these people do exist)
The BSDs got screwed over by a lawsuit in the 90s that made a lot of people hesitant to use them (coincidentally leading to the creation of the Linux kernel). Inertia carried it from there and Linux ended up getting more hardware and software support, which is the primary reason that people pick Linux over the BSDs now.
This is probably a good place to ask, but when ditching windows for Linux, what’s a good distro to go with? Preferably one that has a good WINE interface.
I’ve seen a lot of people move to Mint or Pop_OS or Kubuntu. They’re Debian based so updates are pretty stable.
I personally ended up with EndeavourOS using the KDE desktop environment. I have a steam deck, so this felt very similar to me. This is Arch based so sometimes updates break things, but I’ve had more success here.
Also remember that no distro is problem-free, but neither was Windows. The longer you commit, the easier it gets.
EDIT: If you’re hesitant to fully commit at first, I also recommend dual booting with Windows. Over time you’ll use it less and less until one day you feel like reclaiming the disk space.
