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Operating Systems Linux

Linux Hits Nearly 4% Desktop User Share on Statcounter (gamingonlinux.com) 146

Posted by msmash from the encouraging-feedback dept.
From a report: According to Statcounter, which should be taken with a pinch of salt of course like any sampling, the Linux share on the desktop hit nearly 4% in December 2023. Last month was a record too and a clear trend over time, as going back a couple of years, it was rarely coming close to 2% but now it's repeatedly nearing 4% so it's quite a good sign overall.

The latest from Statcounter shows for all of 2023 below:

January - 2.91%
February - 2.94%
March - 2.85%
April - 2.83%
May - 2.7%
June - 3.07%
July - 3.12%
August - 3.18%
September - 3.02%
October - 2.92%
November - 3.22%
December - 3.82%

Looking at December it shows Windows rising too, with macOS dropping down. If we actually take ChromeOS directly into the Linux numbers for December 2023 the overall number would actually be 6.24% (ChromeOS is Linux after all).
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Linux Hits Nearly 4% Desktop User Share on Statcounter More

Linux Hits Nearly 4% Desktop User Share on Statcounter

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  • ... BeOS is dead.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        It's the OS that Apple should have adopted instead of NeXTStep.

        However, BeOS came with JLG and OSX came with Jobs. They chose the latter, then he killed himself with hippie-ass cancer "treatments" and died, and they got stuck with the inferior OS and the inferior CEO, too.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          pancreatic cancer is tough regardless of what treatments you get. And back then, there were fewer treatment options.

          • Except for the type of pancreatic cancer he had, which has a 97% survival rate. That small percentage is made up of people who choose the hippie option and don't get proper medical treatment. Jobs killed himself because he though some hippie whack job knew better than somebody who knew how to treat it. There can be situations where you know the doctors misdiagnosed you because their diagnosis flys in the face of what you told them, but this wasn't one of them and the correct solution in that case I mention

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by znrt ( 2424692 )

          well, they wanted to and they might have gone with beos if gassée hadn't pushed the bid as far as he did. valuated at 80m, offered 200m and expecting 275m ... that would have been a better ceo for apple? was he even in the deal?

          maybe beos was the better option to build a new os, but he would have a hard time beating jobs' record as a ceo: he literally saved a company on the brink which has become a billion dollar corporation almost entirely living off jobs' heritage.

        • It's the OS that Apple should have adopted instead of NeXTStep.

          However, BeOS came with JLG and OSX came with Jobs. They chose the latter, then he killed himself with hippie-ass cancer "treatments" and died, and they got stuck with the inferior OS and the inferior CEO, too.

          One core difference you are missing is that for the same amount of money as Gasse was asking for the rights to BeOS Apple could buy the NeXT company in its entirety. It meant that the the NeXT employees could (finally) cash out their stock options and enter become Apple employees or comfortably retire.

          I've used a BeOS machine; it was nice but I do prefer OS X.

        • Why? Because it was so damn fast at crashing?

  • ChromeOS is Linux (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @10:46AM (#64130915)

    the same way National Socialism is socialism.

    • Re:ChromeOS is Linux (Score:5, Interesting)

      by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @10:47AM (#64130929) Journal

      I'm curious if SteamOS is being counted as "Linux" as well. Those Steam Deck gaming consoles seem to be selling pretty well.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by WDot ( 1286728 )
        Indeed, I don’t have a Steam Deck but Steam works well enough on Linux (thanks to Proton) that it’s my main gaming PC. All those people who would say “I’d move to Linux but I need Windows for the games” now have a project for the New Year! ;) Last I checked the biggest shortcoming is that online multiplayer titles that depend on anticheat software do not yet work with the anticheat, but even looking at the recent Proton changeling, it’s something they’re currently a
      • My guess is that at least some of the increase, possibly a large part, is govt transition to Linux desktops from Windows. Quite a few countries have FOSS-first policies & a number of European govt agencies have already successfully transitioned. Govts are big users of desktop & laptop PCs. I wonder if Windows 11 being incompatible with existing hardware might speed the transition up in some cases, i.e. govts see that they may have to upgrade hardware more often with Windows & that Linux can run

      • SteamOs is Arch Linux but i suspect few people use their steam decks to browse the net. So i doubt they count that much on statcounter.

      • I'm curious if SteamOS is being counted as "Linux" as well. Those Steam Deck gaming consoles seem to be selling pretty well.

        Has to be something like that.

        Certainly, there's folks like me running Ubuntu or some other traditional distro as their main desktop, but the number of those folks didn't increase by 50% in a year.

    • If you are savvy enough, you can run anything made for another distro in any Linux distro, even some proprietary software. I think that is what makes Linux a family of operating systems. However, if you intend to do the same on ChromeOS, it will not work, and if you buy a Chromebook and intend to install Linux, you are in a worse situation than if you buy a Windows device or a Mac. I think that since ChromeOS doesn't play along with other Linux-based OSs, it should be considered something else.

      • The same can be said for WSL on Windows. For a while I was using a Windows system but 90% of the time I was actually using Linux via WSL2. How do you count those users?

      • I can run pretty much any Linux app on ChromeOS.

      • if you intend to do the same on ChromeOS, it will not work

        Actually, if it doesn't work it just means you are not savvy. Google's hacks are minor and you can work around them with a few symlinks.

    • I'd say ChromeOS is Linux in the way that social democracy is socialism.

      And yeah, have you ever tried installing Linux apps on ChromeOS? ChromeOS is even more of a walled garden than MacOS. Completely antithetical to the spirit of Linux & FOSS.

    • Actually, the same way revisionist troll is slashdot poster.

  • Thanks, Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

    Microsoft finally made Windows bad enough to get people to start switching to Linux full-time.

    End-of-Lifing Windows 7 is what pushed me. I flirted with Windows 8 briefly but it was too crap.

    • Re:Thanks, Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)

      by christoban ( 3028573 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @10:59AM (#64130983)

      Windows 8 drove me to drinking.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by piojo ( 995934 )

      I've been using Windows 11, but I'm tired of Microsoft's aggression in trying to force me to use Edge and Bing. Funnily enough, Windows Explorer is the killer app that's kept me using Windows. The amount of metadata it shows, combined with its good response to keyboard shortcuts and somewhat acceptable context menus, set it above anything I've seen on Linux--and I did look pretty hard, uncovering gems such as ROX-Filer. (And that's despite it not having history or bookmarks yet.) But I don't like being push

    • They also made it very easy to run Linux within Windows which, depending on how they count, may also inflate the Linux numbers.
      • thank you, voice of logic. no one in their right mind uses linux desktop. neckbeards don't count as persons

        • thank you, voice of logic. no one in their right mind uses linux desktop. neckbeards don't count as persons

          My lovely girlfriend uses Linux as a desktop on both of her systems. No neckbeard to be seen on her.

        • No one in their right mind uses Windows desktop, you mean. I have no choice but to use it on my work mail and skype station, and it's really crummy these days. On the workstation I do real work, I can run Linux, and it's so much better it's not even funny.

          At home I also run Linux. And now, when I game, I use a Steam Deck. Everything just works, and it's really sweet. Best of all, no ads in the start menu, and no phoning home except if I want it to.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Teun ( 17872 )
            I have a X1 Lenovo running Kubuntu and also use it for work.
            I work remotely and the company insists on Teams and Outlook, they run very well in Chromium.
            For office use I'm quite happy with Libre Office, Firefox an Thunderbird are my private go-to's.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      Congrats, you picked the worst version since Win ME to try. Your Win 7 license gives you the ability to run Win 10 for free, give it a try - there's no tablet interface, and it is quite stable & still supported for almost two more years.

      Personally, I gave up on Linux when I had to shovel 14 floppies into my desktop and then had to inure out modelines to run X Windows on my obscure VESA bus video card... /sarcasm

      • Your Win 7 license gives you the ability to run Win 10 for free, give it a try

        Not any more, they killed that option some time around October or November. Existing upgraded systems still work, but I read about someone who updated his BIOS and he had to buy a new MS Key.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 )

        I put my old hard drive in a new motherboard and now my key is permanently out of compliance. They finally closed that loophole.
         
        All I use windows for at this point is the rare AAA game that won't run in linux under steam's "proton" branch of WINE, and fusion 360

    • It was the "r u legit" tech help phone number that pushed me.

    • Microsoft finally made Windows bad enough to get people to start switching to Linux full-time.

      This exactly. I had not upgraded our home systems to Win11, so I didn't have much experience on it.

      Then our office pushed new Win11 laptops to everyone last year, and it has been incredibly infuriating. The damn forced updates are so in-your-face now it has driven me to strongly consider going Linux at home. I even had it happen that I was in the middle of a conference call, speaking at the moment, when Win11 pushed some update that kicked me off the call, and then spent 15 minutes rebooting and install

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )

      Looking at December it shows Windows rising too, with macOS dropping down.

      But yeah who needs to RTFS? lolol M$ BAD!!

  • It appears they use data from websites that use their products as the sample to calculate overall statistics. If that is the case for browsers, it appears Linux is about 1.5% of all browser users. [statcounter.com]. Since mobile devices account for about 50% of all devices, that would put Linux at 3%. Their OS chart does not include linux, so I used the number for December 23 in the headline.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Since mobile devices account for about 50% of all devices, that would put Linux at 3%.

      I still say Android is Linux. Yeah it's a weird variant, but normal Linux software can run JUST FINE on it, provided it's built for the right arch. I've been using Unix and Unixlikes for decades, and the userland of Android is quite familiar as well. The "average" user* can get everything they were hoping for out of Linux with Android+Termux.

      *Obvs the average user doesn't know what Unix is, but IKYKWIM

      • The problem for Android is that it isn't "Linux" the way Linuxheads want it to be Linux. That's not Android's problem to solve though, as Android is a functional desktop in the same way that Windows is functional; that being my Mother-in-Law can make use of it to do the things she needs without much fuss most of the time. No, she doesn't use command-line, but she also doesn't need to. And that is a good thing.

        ChromeOS is similar state, but even further away from what Linux power users might want.

        My personal

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Dwedit ( 232252 )

          "Linux" but not "GNU/Linux", there you go.

        • My parents got sick of having to deal with Windows and its weird updates that kept breaking things, so I installed Linux for them six years ago. Since then, there has been zero support needed except I do the occasional LTS version jump for them.

          Both Android and Linux are way more functional than Windows in that regard. They just work. With the difference that Android can't be upgraded after a while due to planned obsolesence by the chip manufacturer.

        • The problem for Android is that it isn't "Linux" the way Linuxheads want it to be Linux.

          Heh. It would be better for Android if it weren't Linux. The majority of critical security vulnerabilities year after year are all from the kernel, even excluding drivers. Syzkaller alone has proven that Linux is a security nightmare; they're finding vulnerabilities so fast that the kernel devs don't even pay attention -- but you'd better believe attackers are. Android would be much better off if Linux were replaced with something smaller and simpler, but the Android system is far too invested in Linuxisms.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      I don't understand why you felt the need to go to the "overall OS" stats and try to roughly extrapolate back to "Desktop" when the summary directly links to "Desktop" in the first place, with presumably more sophisticated understanding of the detailed data than rough estimations of how much is mobile versus desktop.

    • I've just looked at the graph for desktop OS usage and noticed that "unknown" had a noticeable peak on April and May 2023. Got any theory to that?

  • I know i have had a buildup of old machines that are horribly skow with windows 10 but just fine with manjaro kde linux. I'm installing it a lot.

    I repeat, manjaro kde.
    One more reminder that this is not a plug for manjaro kde.

    • KDE doing well on machines that Windows deems insufficient says a lot about how slow and bloated Windows is.

      • Yup. I was very surprised. Not just much faster but much more stable. In particular windows kept dropping the HDMI audio but no issues in Manjoro KDE. I have transparencies and other rendering eye candy going, no issues.

        • Also, you don't have to put up with shit like surprise reboot for mystery exploit patch while you're in the middle of an important video conference.

      • KDE was heavy in the late 90's and early 00's. Since the 10's to now it's been middling to low resource use, comparatively. Sure, it's heavier than running a raw WM with no or minimal daemons, but it hasn't been on the heavy side for a long time now.

        Windows on the other hand has just gotten heavier and heavier. I don't even know what they're doing with all that CPU. Many services just chomp it down without appearing to do anything useful. And using a spinning disk is nuts, it just never gets to park and sle

        • KDE was heavy in the late 90's and early 00's

          It never was, really, Always had a superior footprint compared to Gnome, notwithstanding heavy propaganda to the contrary. There was a time when it suffered from dynamic linking overhead, which was fixed both by reducing the number of links and improving the linker.

          • Yes, Gnome was always heavier, and remains heavier to this day. It's pretty bad. The Pop OS fork is for some reason better in my anecdotal experience. But both were pretty heavy back around the 00's, compared to what many distros would default to shipping.

            Today, of course, neither comes close to Windows in heaviness. Though Gnome certainly tries.

  • 1% per year (Score:5, Funny)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @11:08AM (#64131007)
    at that rate, the year of the linux desktop could be as early as 2120
  • Where there are places where Linux is really good and has plenty of market share, and other places where it struggles with low market share. Supercomputers are an example where Linux won. IoT is also mostly won but VXworks still hangs on in some niches. We won the browser war where most browsers descend from a KDE project. On the desktops things have advanced realy fast in 2023 to my surprise, fixing a large amount of bugs. The true "final boss" of Linux adoption is the anti cheat developers relying on secu
    • ...Adobe deliberately forcing you to use their subscription racket on a unfriendly OS.

      What do you need Adobe for that you can't replace with FOSS? If you need .pdf files, LibreOffice can do them just fine. If you need page layout, Scribus is a fully featured commercial quality page layout program that's FOSS. And, of course, there are .pdf readers available as well. Just go FOSS and ditch Adobe.

  • A lot of big moves happened for December.

    The last time someone noticed such a random anomaly in this sort of statistics, turned out the curator of the statistics did a methodology change.

    I doubt the market shifted as dramatically for December in practice as is illustrated on their data. I doubt in one month 25% of all macOS users suddenly gave up on macOS, which is something else their data suggests happened.

    The longer scale trend is appearing positive, but I think I'm inclined to ignore December data given

  • Maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong, but December was the only month that came close to 4%. The previous record was closer to 3% if we're doing rounding.

  • ...2024 is the year of Linux on the desktop!!!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Malc ( 1751 )

      Does that mean Ubuntu 22.04 won't have a floppy disk icon on the left side of the desktop when I install it under VMWare Fusion, like 20.04 does? WTF?!

    • And 2025 will be 5%. See the pattern?

  • Outside the office, I would estimate >50% of the laptops I see are Macs. So Macs dropping market share doesn't reconcile with what I'm seeing in the wild. At my office, it's close to >90% Macs. In my circle of friends and family, it's probably 75% Macs. I haven't personally seen any evidence of Windows is making a coming back. Granted, my experience is US centric. I'm sure less wealthy countries have a higher proportion of cheap Windows machines given there's no such thing as a cheap Mac. The limiting

    • Your observations are just anecdotal though. I can add an opposing anecdote. It's irrelevant.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      As irrelevant and failing as Windows is (based on your world view), Microsoft seems to be doing OK - Win 10 and Win 11 are fine desktop/laptop OSes and the vast, vast majority of computer buyers and users choose it over Uber-proprietary MacOS or free-as-in-beer Linux. Name me the major corporation with over 1,000 employees that isn't running windows on the desktop (besides Apple)?

      You remind me of the New York socialite that commented she had "no idea how Nixon won the election - no one she knew voted for hi

      • I agree with you on choosing MacOS versus windows.

        I disagree on your assestment that most users chose it over linux (maybe as a passive choice since their computers have it installed already.) Most users would be stuck on creating a bootable USB device or get scared that they could not get Windows back if they installed Linux - if they have even heard of linux.

        That said, the reason doesn't matter. Windows still is winning but not on any machines in my home :)

    • Outside the office, I would estimate >50% of the laptops I see are Macs. So Macs dropping market share doesn't reconcile with what I'm seeing in the wild.

      The correct conclusion to take from these observations plus the documented statistics is that your local sample is unrepresentative, not that the statistics are incorrect.

      The limiting factor here is "desktop", because if we remove that filter, Windows is a small minority of all computing devices with Linux / UNIX holding the dominant share.

      Indeed.

      To put that into context, there are almost 2x as many iOS devices as Windows devices in the world.

      And there are more than 2x as many Android devices as iOS devices.

      If we include all Linux devices (equipment / servers / appliances), then Windows has 10% OS market share.

      And if we include all of the microcontroller OSes, it's even smaller yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dadoo ( 899435 )

      Outside the office, I would estimate >50% of the laptops I see are Macs. So Macs dropping market share doesn't reconcile with what I'm seeing in the wild. At my office, it's close to >90% Macs. In my circle of friends and family, it's probably 75% Macs. I haven't personally seen any evidence of Windows is making a coming back.

      Wow, you hang out in very different circles than I do; the last time I saw a Mac was at the last Cisco Live! conference I went to, which was six years ago, and the only Linux wor

    • I work at a high tech company, and of everyone I associate with there, exactly one person uses a Mac outside the office. More people use Solaris, to put that into some perspective.

      Windows is irrelevant in the cutting edge sectors, yes, but it has always been. That doesn't matter. Microsoft's bread and butter isn't in the cutting edge sectors, but in established companies, and there you will find that all desktops and lots of back end run Windows, often with proprietary solutions on top built on Microsoft pr

  • Is what I want. I don't want Windows 11, or a Linux OS that has second class third party support and/or a UI that has inconsistent or duplicated ways of doing things. Unfortunately Apple will never sell it for PC because it's all about their hardware sales :(

  • Remarkable (Score:3)

    by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @01:42PM (#64131615)
    Taking into account the relentless efforts by the Gnome team to keep Linux practically unusable in the desktop, this is compelling news.

  • It's officially the Year of the Linux Desktop. Again.

  • Windows will continue to dominate the business (Score:3)

    by kwelch007 ( 197081 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @02:51PM (#64131915) Homepage

    I don't care whatever people choose for home. Whatever works for them is just fine with me. I'm no particular fan of Microsoft. But until some other vendor comes out with anything approaching the capabilities of Active Directory and GPO (for all their faults such as the Registry,) Microsoft will dominate the business desktop/laptop market. And I'm OK with that too.

    The only way I really see this changing would be if we move back to the thin-client model, be it web-based apps or whatever. Otherwise there is simply no other Enterprise solution for endpoint-management that comes close to Microsoft's. And the best part is, Microsoft didn't even invent most of it.

  • Steam Deck (Score:3)

    by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Thursday January 04, 2024 @05:59PM (#64132675)

    The Steam Deck is most likely the cause of the latest bump. Hardly a desktop, but it is a rather typical Linux distro, now based on Arch it seems.

    ChromeOS could also be considered Linux, but it is its own category, so it can't be that.

  • The year of Linux on the desktop!

    • Don't get too excited, it didn't actually hit 4% yet. That milestone is still 0.18% away. Once we get there, THEN the end will come.

  • I was under the impression that there are A LOT of WSL2 users out there. How are they counted?

  • Don't jump to conclusions and wait for more data: the whole year it stays relatively constant at 2.7-3.22% and then December jumps to 3.82%. It might be just a counting anomaly, see if the value keeps around 4% in February-March too and then is reason for celebration.

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