Linux Market Share Hits Record High

bobdevine writes: The Linux operating system has reached a notable milestone in desktop market share, according to the latest data from StatCounter. As of July 2024, Linux has achieved a 4.45% market share for desktop operating systems worldwide. While this percentage might seem small to those unfamiliar with the operating system landscape, it represents a significant milestone for Linux and its dedicated community. What makes this achievement even more thrilling is the upward trajectory of Linux's adoption rate.

i wonder

[ole_timer]

what "unknown" is?

Re: i wonder

[wgoodman]

Linux boxes that don't leak data

Re:

[techno-vampire]

And what, I wonder, is the percentage of Linux boxes leaking data and how does that compare to the percentage of Windows boxes leaking?

Re: i wonder

[Rick Schumann]

Why are so many Christians God fearing instead of God loving?

Because Man made God in Their own image, which is why it's a god of blood and vengeance.

Re:

[BringsApples]

When people don't think for themselves, they think in the way that people tell them to think. Those people that tell others how to think, are not always good people.

Re:

[nospam007]

'I know you probably aren't really interested in a theological discussion, but that is actually an interesting theological question with a wide body of historical answers.'

Who wouldn't fear a god who gives babies Aids and creates insects that eat children's eyes.

Re:

[skegg]

I also don’t believe that the poster was genuinely interested in a theological discourse. (And also worth mentioning that was his signature, not in the post.)

The Old Testament used by Protestants and Orthodox Christians is a version translated by 70 Hebrew scholars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint) centuries before the birth of Christ; those word-boffins would have been at home here on Slashdot, picking apart posts with the best of us. So don’t accuse Christians of re-writing / amending

Re:

[gosso920]

Proverbs 1:7 states, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction."

Re:

[dmay34]

Wow. Every thing you said was wrong.

You should return your TikTok archeology degree.

Re:

[quenda]

Wow. Every thing you said was wrong.

With such an ability to make up origin stories based on nothing, maybe he should consider starting a religion?

Re:

[gosso920]

i love all your counterarguments. here you go, a simple google search for "when did the goths overtake the roman empire" which was obviously too much of an effort for you to partake in, returned this at the top: "Alaric, king of the Visigoths, sacked Rome in 410, signaling the beginning of the end of the Western Empire.

Well, that's clearly wrong. Everybody knows it happened when The Cure co-headlined with Bauhaus. Don't rely on Wikipedia when doing research.

Re: i wonder

[dmay34]

The "because God can nuke you" is only part of it. The concept of "fearing God" is much more complicated and nuanced than that, if only because the bible wasn't written in English and the ancient Semitic words that get translated into "fear" have broader meanings that just "be afraid".

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Niccolo Machiavelli put it best: “it is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

Re:

[XXongo]

what "unknown" is?

OS-360, I'm sure.

Nothing ever really dies.

Re:

[ole_timer]

smile

Re:

[thegarbz]

what "unknown" is?

It's Statcounter. Infamously useless site. Probably a large portion of the "unknown" are the many millions of people who decided to stop using OSX in December last year for no apparent reason according to the site.

The site may be good for macro trends but it is really useless. You should say Linux currently has a market share of 4.45% +/- 4% because their error bars are huge.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

OpenBSD.

No Question

[The Cat]

Linux is the most successful operating system in the history of computers.

The Internet, computers in general, and society would all be very different if Linux and Apache hadn't been invented when they were.

Re:No Question

[UnknownSoldier]

> Linux is the most successful operating system in the history of computers.

I'd say so given it COMPLETELY dominating Mobile and Super Computers. It is only Desktop and Console that Linux is nonexistent.

* 100% of the Top 500 Super Computers all run Linux [top500.org]
* Back in 2017 Google announced Linux is in over 2 Billion Android devices.
* 66% of Azure runs Linux. Hell has officially frozen now that Microsoft not only uses Linux and has contributed a huge number of patches. Maybe someday they will get the memo and support Wine. /s

Not bad for a small "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones".

Re:No Question

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This week on "year of Linux on the desktop": online services like MMO games and streaming video services make a fortune by running Linux free of charge on their own servers but won't properly support paying customers who run it on their desktops.

Re: No Question

[Midnight_Falcon]

I saw Linux's rise as an active user from well before the 1.0 kernel, it was never an 800lb gorilla. Sun Microsystems with Solaris was along with AIX were the silverback gorillas. Linux was a little scrappy upstart platypus (pre penguin, it was a platypus I assure you, I'll never forget the Slackware 96 CD cover) that somehow could. Yes, BSD existed but it was a royal pain with brittle drivers, less consumer/PC hardware support than Linux, and by the mid 90s far less software that would work and compile on it (recompiled binary software on NIX platforms was far less common in the 90s, you usually compiled from source in a .tgz). BSD was a highly centralized project with mostly developers in Berkeley with academic pedigree. It had a more restrictive license than Linux, so independent non-pedigree kernel and software developers flocked to Linux.

Re:

[Anne Thwacks]

That was the absolute opposite of my experienced. I tried various Linux distributions from a whole bunch of CDs, and none would last more than a couple of days.

Eventually I tried BSD386, and it worked perfectly. It was almost identical to BSD on the VAXen I used at work. I could even take home software from work, compile it and use it (not the 14" disk and 1/2" tape drivers I wrote though ;-)

Eventually I moved to Ubuntu for my desktop, and now use Devuan because of some feature in Debian that totally scr

Re:

[Midnight_Falcon]

I think in the mid-90s transitional period first saw Linux adoption uptick for desktop and low-end-professional use cases like myself, I helped run a small local dialup ISP/BBS and also text-only MUDs available over the internet. Everything was done on cheap, commodity x86 hardware, and FreeBSD just didn't work for this use case due to lack of various drivers (US Robotics 56k anyone?) and even perl dependencies.

I do recall that people who had more professional setups such as DEC, VAX and SparcStation g

Re:

[drinkypoo]

My hot take by Slashdot standards (not probably by most tech company employees) is that this resulted in the existence of the most desktop-usable BSD derivative and member of the UNIX family: Mac OS X.

I agree that it's the most usable BSD, but not the most usable member of the Unix family. Mac OS contains a lot of seriously dumb UI mistakes, like the centered dock that grows as applications are launched, at the bottom of the screen, when NeXTStep had it in a fixed location and at the side of the display. You can change its behavior, but last I looked it involved plist editing, so it's the same kind of wankery as Windows where you have to go to the registry for stuff that should be in a config UI.

I use XF

Re:

[ole_timer]

actually system 5 came fist, that was a paid for unix, kernigan and ritchie came up with that for the 3b2 back in about 1980 or so

thanks to M$ and crApple

[cornfeedhobo]

M$ keeps making their OS worse and filled with ads.

crApple keeps alienating would-be converts.

Linux becomes the obvious choice.

Sadly, many will be steered towards Ubuntu, which IMHO, is the worst of the popular distros.

Re:thanks to M$ and crApple

[TWX]

It's funny, I was at a Costco last week and saw the Apple product display, they seem to have almost fixed their products. The laptops had physical function-row buttons on the keyboards, they had multiple USB-C as well as USB-A, HDMI, and honest to goodness headphones jacks, and they had even brought back full-sized SD card readers.

And then I saw they took a chunk out of the monitor at the top-center for their camera. I'm already not a fan of that on cell phones, it was really obtrusive on the laptop.

They can't quite seem to avoid dropping a turd in the punchbowl. There's always something wrong with their design choices.

Re:

[fluffernutter]

Because you are looking for a laptop that was designed with functionality in mind, silly person.

Re: thanks to M$ and crApple

[wgoodman]

Making you look like a super serious script writer at Starbucks is technically still a function.

Re:

[Bert64]

Don't see it as a chunk taken out of the screen.
See it as two strips of extra screen either side of the camera.
On any other laptop you get a bezel as high as the camera, so you have plastic strips of wasted space either side of the camera. If you really want that space to be a solid color you can always configure the macbook to do that.

Re:

[organgtool]

My Dell XPS has a camera in a very thin top bezel which houses a nice 16:10 display. There's no need discontinuity in the top of my screen, just a nice, crisp rectangle full of display.

Re:

[Bert64]

It does black out the menu bar when playing video...
Plus most videos are widescreen format, so you have much larger black bars above and below the video anyway.

One thing that irritates me is that video players always vertically center the video, giving equal size black bars above and below. I'd much rather have the video shifted up so the lower bar is bigger, then that area can optionally be used for subtitles without overlaying them ontop of the video.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Here's a different idea: You know how when you make video calls, you can either look at the person's eyes or at the camera, so you're never even close to resembling making eye-contact? (Yes, for those of you on the spectrum, it IS a desirable thing for most people.) Well, how about making the webcam moveable so users can put it out of the way when they're not using it but when are are using it, they can position it anywhere they like on the screen, e.g. where the caller's eyes would be?

Probably lots of p

Re:

[Malay2bowman]

So I'm thinking this is a laptop with a 'bezeless' display. I guess the user would get used to this as he or she got used to having a "notch" on their phone.

Re:

[slapys]

Honest question, what would you prefer they do instead? That design removes the need for a large bezel where the camera would go. Would you have them add the bezel back, or not have a camera for doing Zoom calls with?

Re:

[_merlin]

You still get "holes" in your display for cameras, light sensors, etc. You can't actually use that part of the screen for anything important. It's annoying as hell.

Re:

[garett_spencley]

I recently upgrade my personal PC which is the only device I have that has a Windows dual-boot for games and certain apps that I need it for. I really wanted a fresh install of Windows so I bit the bullet and "upgraded" from 10 to 11.

I have to admit, I didn't hate 11 as much as I had feared. I haven't seen a single ad in the start menu (and I remember that being a thing in 10). I was actually able to uninstall Cortana and while there are some annoying default settings I needed to change (when aren't there o

Re:

[mustafap]

I'm an embedded developer, and for development and certainly for writing and running test scripts, Linux rocks.

Re:

[organgtool]

I have to admit, I didn't hate 11 as much as I had feared

That's what qualifies as a resounding success for Microsoft products.

Re: thanks to M$ and crApple

[FudRucker]

I always reccomend Slackware because it is the purest Linux out there for learning what Linux is (under the hood)

Re:

[StormReaver]

Most people don't care about Linux purity, and Slackware will absolutely turn off the very people we're trying to attract since it relies heavily on the user doing things manually. People care about:

1) Can I run the software I want to run under Linux? This is the classic catch 22 Linux has been confronting for ages.
2) Can I get support for that software?
3) Will my hardware work with Linux?
4) Is Linux easy to use?
.
.
x) Is Linux secure?
x+1) Will updates break my system?
x+2) Are update easy to apply?

And then a

Re:

[BringsApples]

Slackware isn't what you're saying it is. On Slackware, today, one can use all of the popular apps for all business purposes, as well as anything that one would do from home. Slackware users are certainly very comfortable with the command line, but cranking up the GUI works on most all PCs today. Give it another shot.

Re: thanks to M$ and crApple

[FudRucker]

Slackware is all I used for the last 25 years, I dont know any other distros, I will try the top 5 easy distros and pick the 2 best for recommendations for windows escapees looking for alternatives

Re:

[unrtst]

I'm sure there's a Slashdot article from the late 90's that addresses all those questions. Catch up.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Yep. This. Absolutely. Most users aren't geeky autodidacts that love problem-solving & learning new things. The OS has to "just work" & the apps have to be effective replacements for what they're already used to using.

If a govt is serious about reducing their dependencies on US companies & transitioning away from Microsoft, they should put Linux computers into education so that that's what they're used to long before they enter the workplace, i.e. LibreOffice, Firefox/Chromium, GIMP, etc., fr

Re:

[toxonix]

Slackware + Fluxbox
I used to run Xubuntu with Fluxbox but Ubuntu has devolved into my least favorite distro now. I mean aside from all the other obvious non-choices.

Re: thanks to M$ and crApple

[Midnight_Falcon]

There was a period from around 2007-2014 where Apple became super computer nerd friendly. Mac OS is actually a solid OS and it became the choice for many software developers then. It's gone downhill since then with the push to make it more consumer and more similar to mobile iOS.

Re:

[Bert64]

People used windows because a general purpose computer was needed in order to get online back in the days...
Most people are not geeks, and never wanted to worry about software updates, viruses, fixing the registry etc etc, they tolerated windows because they had to.

Now there are much more user-friendly devices (android, iphones/ipad, chromebooks) which serve the needs of the average user much better and with a lot less hassle, so a lot of people abandon general purpose computers. A lot of people i know only

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

The biggest customers & users of desktop computers are governments. It's the people who use computers at work that we're mostly talking about here. That's why Microsoft get very aggressive whenever govts talk about switching to another OS, e.g. Linux. I bet the US State Department often quietly get involved behind the scenes too.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

You know how US politicians are getting upset about foreign companies having access to US citizens' & business' & govt data? Well, foreign governments feel the same about US companies having access to their citizens' & business' & govt data. There's big pushes by several govts to get away from US software companies with strong ties to the US military & intelligence agencies. See how it works both ways?

Linux is the obvious choice to build replacement desktop distros that the US will fi

Re:

[Zappy]

I have been using Fedora for as long as it exists. Suits my needs (almost) perfectly.

Re: thanks to M$ and crApple

[eggegick]

I like Mint. https://www.linuxmint.com/ [linuxmint.com]

Re:

[Teun]

Which is a Ubuntu based distro.
I prefer Kubuntu and it 'just works'.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Which is a Ubuntu based distro.

Right, but it's an Ubuntu-based distro that was created with the specific goal of removing the crap (e.g. "Snap") the GP was likely referring to when he chose the phrase "worst of the popular distros".

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Yeah, Snap really is a pain in the arse. I add PPAs & use apt whenever possible. Well worth the extra faffing around at first.

Re:

[jenningsthecat]

I like Mint. https://www.linuxmint.com/ [linuxmint.com]

Seconded. I'm old-school, so my preferred flavour is XFCE. Its file manager, (Thunar) has some features that I would sorely miss if I didn't have them.

It's been a long time since I've looked at other FMs, so some of them may have caught up. But the last time I checked, no other file manager had Thunar's outstanding bulk rename capability, nor its graphical pathbar which at the click of a button becomes text so the full path or any portion thereof can easily be copied.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Ubuntu Gnome's standard File manager does all that. Yeah, very useful.

Re:

[kalpol]

If you want something simple that works like Windows, Linux Mint is hard to beat. OpenSUSE Leap is really solid with KDE, once you get through the learning curve of the differences in KDE it's really, really nice. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it is really solid for a rolling distribution. Really solid. I don't know how they do it, but the testing automation must be amazing.

Re:

[Malay2bowman]

The problem is is the average user isn't used to choice, and is confounded by all of the "distros", different available desktops, etc. and does not even care about these things. That user just wants his office files to open and maybe some gaming or streaming music on ithe side. Zoom is paramount too. This really needs to be factored in whatever distro is ultimately going to be used to get people to move from M$ or Apple to Linux.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Just install Ubuntu. It typically works on most machines with minor glitches here & there that are usually easily fixable. The most important thing for users is support & documentation, i.e. Are there lots of succinct, clear instructions easily available to get stuff done & to fix stuff when it goes wrong? & I mean for people are "normal users," not geeky autodidacts who love problem-solving & learning new things.

Re:

[unrtst]

The problem is is the average user isn't used to choice, and is confounded by all of the "distros"... This really needs to be factored in whatever distro is ultimately going to be used to get people to move from M$ or Apple to Linux.

You went into this labeling the entire Linux ecosystem as a problem. Hard no. Just stop viewing an OS as something that must be one size fits all. There are distros for all types.

This thread started from, "Sadly, many will be steered towards Ubuntu, which IMHO, is the worst of the popular distros.", and someone replying to ask what a good distro was. Just have to tweak that question... what is a good distro __FOR_THAT_PERSON__?

Personally, I think Ubuntu is a perfectly fine distro to recommend to someone new

Re:

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

Debian GNU/Linux is the Roman Catholic among the Linuces. Everything else is just herecy.

All in

[zekica]

I'm all for people using Linux - I've been using it since 2003 as my main Desktop/Laptop OS, and I really hope that this is real; -4.5% is no longer a rounding error.

Can we get better data than just a percent? For example, how many samples there are in the dataset (and what the total number of samples was a year ago), are they double-counting (Firefox stores cookies per-origin)?

Glad I could help

[smooth wombat]

Installed Mint about 2 years ago and haven't looked back. It does exactly what I need. Installation was completely painless. Recently, I put in a different video card (albeit an older model) and before I logged into my account the drivers were installed and working. No fiddling needed.

Considering my first experience with Linux over a decade ago, things have come a long way. A few more tweaks and I can't imagine the average person not being able to switch seamlessly to Linux, if they wanted to.

Re:

[kalpol]

I don't know what counts as an average person, but anyone who uses webmail and Google Docs is pretty much there. Show them the Firefox button and Chromium as a backup, and you won't hear any complaints from them for a while. (This is not terribly reassuring as it means locally installed software is sort of on the way out in many areas, along with associated control.)

Re:

[QuietLagoon]

Linux Mint here took two Windows desktops/laptops out of service, and replaced them with one laptop. I also have not looked back.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

Installed Mint about 2 years ago and haven't looked back. It does exactly what I need. Installation was completely painless. Recently, I put in a different video card (albeit an older model) and before I logged into my account the drivers were installed and working. No fiddling needed.

Considering my first experience with Linux over a decade ago, things have come a long way. A few more tweaks and I can't imagine the average person not being able to switch seamlessly to Linux, if they wanted to.

I started in Linux with the Debian CD that came with MaximumPC. Remember those? Magazines with monthly CDs? That was sometime in the mid nineties. That first install took hours to sort through, with the only resource at hand being the magazine itself until the system was up and running to the point of being able to access online resources, which were available back then, but not quick or easy to sort through. Come a long ways. I installed MX on a newer (to me) laptop a few weeks back and I think it took ab

Have we?

[lsllll]

Have we reached the mythical and the folklore year of the Linux desktop now?

Re:

[GoTeam]

Have we reached the mythical and the folklore year of the Linux desktop now?

Patience. It should come right around the next major Windows release.

Again?

[war4peace]

Dupe: https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
The market share people keep mentioning... and mentioning...

win 11

[fluffernutter]

I plan on buying tons of windows 11 incompatible systems and putting linux on them. I'll use them on my TVs for media boxes and do everything I can with them. The suckers can buy a new system because "Microsoft said so".

Re:

[kalpol]

hey that's what I've been doing since....always!

Re:

[Spacejock]

Sounds like a good chance to upgrade all the 2nd and 3rd gen i5 systems I have around here, as well as three older Core2 Duo and Quad PCs. (I fill them with old, smaller-capacity hard drives and plug them in to take secondary backups, then unplug them again.)

Windows 11 is really that bad

[ebunga]

It's making linux on the desktop a thing. My mom, 75 years old, asked about running linux because she's annoyed by Windows 11.

Re:Windows 11 is really that bad

[Major_Disorder]

It's making linux on the desktop a thing. My mom, 75 years old, asked about running linux because she's annoyed by Windows 11.

Try it. I put my elderly non-technical mother on Mint years ago. Her support calls dropped to nothing after about 2 weeks of "What do I use instead of Internet Explorer?" calls.
Set it up to auto update and you are done. I also put in a weekly cron job to reboot, because my mother would never close anything.

Re:

[jetkust]

My mom quit using laptops/PCs entirely because of Windows. And that was back in Windows 8 days.

Re:

[nospam007]

'It's making linux on the desktop a thing.'

Are you actually saying that this is the year of Linux on the desktop? :-)

Re:

[Major_Disorder]

'It's making linux on the desktop a thing.'

Are you actually saying that this is the year of Linux on the desktop? :-)

I know you are just feeding the meme, but for some of us The year of Linux on the desktop came many years ago.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

My long-retired mum's been using Linux since her first laptop PC. However, she used to work on SQL via the CLI back in the day so it's all perfectly familiar to her.

Us /.-ers & our families & friends are not your typical computer users. Once you've done some user-group testing with non-nerds/geeks, you'll understand.

Re:

[Spacejock]

My mum is 81 and I switched her second laptop from Windows 10 to Ubuntu yesterday evening. The device is much quicker, and she doesn't have to worry (as much) about getting hacked.

The other factor is the staggering amount of perfectly usable hardware that will otherwise be consigned to the tip when Windows 10 goes EOL and users find they can't upgrade to 11. I have 5 PCs here running Windows 10 that can't officially run Win 11. I'm not throwing them away, so they'll be upgraded to Linux Mint or Ubuntu.

I wonder

[Big Bipper]

I wonder just how much use Linux on Windows is getting. How many people are using it more or less daily to run one or more favorite Linux apps, or to test Linux alternatives for Windows apps. Too bad there seems to be no way to capture that information.

Linux needs ecosystem, with a benevolent dictator

[Pinky's Brain]

Ubuntu has always flirted with the concept of building an ecosystem with certified hardware and an income stream from their store, but they are just not big enough to pull it off.

Chromebooks are closest to what a normie Linux desktop OS should be, with just the right amount of freedom to allow hobbyists to mess with it and still allow good centralized QA. Having the main income come from pushing Chrome for advertising rather than hardware certification fees and a store is a millstone around its neck though.

I'm always hoping Gabe Newell looks at Chromebooks and thinks "hey, we could fork that OS and that development model to make a Steamtop". Games are the perfect vehicle to get people to try out the competition.

Re:

[thegarbz]

I'm always hoping Gabe Newell looks at Chromebooks and thinks "hey, we could fork that OS and that development model to make a Steamtop". Games are the perfect vehicle to get people to try out the competition.

The Steamdeck would like a word.

Re:

[Pinky's Brain]

Steamdeck has two problems. First it's only really useful for portable entertainment and secondly their support for third party hardware is low priority.

With the Chromebook development model third party hardware is much better supported (hardware certification and firmware/software support fully handled by Google).

It's about to get higher.

[eriks]

Last time I posted on a "linux desktop" story (about a year ago?) it had reached 2% or so, and I made a joke about me being solely responsible for the increase, since I had recently switched. So it's more than doubled in a year if those numbers are accurate, which is huge and no joke at all. I suspect it has a lot to do with people not wanting to throw away perfectly good computers because they won't run windows 11. So more to do with windows being awful and stupid than linux being great for a desktop, though linux *is* a great desktop for almost everything, which apparently some people are finally discovering. Thanks Microsoft! There's windows in a VM if you really need that, since dual booting without wizardry may cease to be an option... I went with linux mint (LMDE) on my daily driver myself about 2 years ago and couldn't be happier. I'm about to replace win10 on three older laptops with linux mint, since they will remain perfectly serviceable machines for at least a few more years, and I know for a fact that Mint (or stock debian) will run on them without issue.

How many of these "Linux" users are bots?

[dmay34]

Because a lot of them are probably bots.

web based everything

[BringsApples]

Everything is web-based today. Who gives a shit which fanboy you are?

lost me recently

[toxonix]

I used to use Xubuntu and other Ubuntu flavors for work and at home. Then just at home. I had used dozens of other distros before that.
I tried out Ubuntu Studio this year for studio stuff and I hated it. The KDE desktop sucks. Everything in the system now is an alternative of an alternative, and the expected stuff like /etc/init.d are there for "backwards compatibility" but not used? I know Systemd is not "new" or anything, and software is always changing, but the way I configure things 10 years ago is now

4.45% is a "significant milestone"?

[VaccinesCauseAdults]

Thatâ(TM)s Numberwang.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Last time, it was 4.44%, so this is a major increase!

This makes me happy

[DaMattster]

After all, Linux is a superior OS to Windows.

It's the microplastics

[John.Banister]

Most penguins people encounter in their lives are toys that contain plastic and try to be attractive looking. Broken windows are associated with sharp bits of glass that cause injury. So, when people's brains encounter stress from Windows breaking, the microplastics in the brain create a subtle pull towards penguins. Random impulses in the brain generated by cosmic rays usually cancel out, but in close proximity to a penguin, a sudden tunneling followed by a "mental penguin cascade" can occur which makes

All credit to Microsoft and Apple

[JustNiz]

....for continuing to shoot their own users in the ass so badly that even the diehard sheep are finally wising up.

The graph differs from the headline

[Tony Isaac]

The graph in the article shows Linux at 3.56%, while the headline says 4.45%. What gives?

4.20% blaze it

[Gavino]

Looks like Linux blazed past 4.20%. I'm not surprised, given that it's all pot-smokin' hippies. But in all seriousness I would have Linux as my daily driver if I could get Adobe Lightroom and Microsoft Office and Microsoft OneNote on there. Until it gets the big-boy apps, I'm stuck on Windows. I use Linux everywhere else though.

PRC gov switched to Linux?

[dwater]

I wonder if the PRC government switching to Linux had any significant impact on these stats. It was a few years ago, iinm.

Re: PRC gov switched to Linux?

[dwater]

"We have a suspicion that there may be many times more users of the various forms of Kylin than all the other Ubuntu variants put together."

https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]

Note that they apparently use ad servers

[Casandro]

So this shows the market share among those that don't use ad or javascript blockers, so the Linux share is likely somewhat higher.

Add one more

[Spacejock]

Yesterday I wiped a sluggish windows 10 install from my mum's 3-year-old ultra portable laptop, and installed Ubuntu instead. She only uses a web browser on it anyway, and now it's fast and far more usable.

Before this it was taking 5-10 seconds just to open the start menu, and no, it wasn't infested with viruses or trojans. It was a very cheap piece of hardware that didn't really have enough resources to run Windows properly.

Re:

[1s44c]

I believe the problem was the attacks on Richard Stallman and all the toxicity that created. The gender identify of the attacker didn't cause the damage. Repeated and well publicised attacks against Stallman caused the damage.