I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with.
Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
Android systems don't even run the linux kernel in any real sense, pretty much every downstream kernel has millions of lines of patched code that will never make it upstream in their current form. Of course, that's no different from mostly any other "Linux" embedded device, but it's very different indeed from what's standard on desktop systems.
The Steam Deck is absolutely a full blown Linux. But it's not a desktop. It's a handheld.
Well, unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose. No idea how many people do that. But if you do that, phones and tablets also become desktops.
Typing this from my Steam Deck, its the best Linux desktop I've ever had. It's awesome to have my PC also be a handheld when laying in bed. I hope the Deckard has M+KB support too.
Admittedly yeah SteamOS does walk that line, and I guess technically given that I think these numbers are based on browser data it would only be capturing the people that actually go into desktop mode (maybe?).
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
I guess the parent discussion is partly about whether the GNU/Linux desktop experience is getting popular, & if no one is using desktop mode in practice then this is not super informative, though good to know
What even is "Linux Desktop" and why does Android not qualify as one? Many Android tablets (especially those with Samsung Dex) can certainly double up as desktops if its users were so willing, at least a lot more so than the Steam Deck.
Market share only matters to geeks and commercial software vendors when deciding the total addressable market. A “Linux desktop” that is connected to a TV used to play games is not part of the market they care about.
If your belief is that Steam Deck is Linux Desktop then you need to count Switch/PS5/Xbox as desktops as well and take those into account with the OS percentages.
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
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My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care.
But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-)
Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something.
That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash.
I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
(US minnesota) recently a 23 year old new hire advised me that he doesn't have a normal computer or laptop and he buys plane tickets, files his taxes, plans projects etc on a phone or ipad. Thinking that some tasks are better suited to a desk / 2 monitors is apparently a millennial thing now .
Netherlands here. Most people I know (outside of gamers) tend to have a laptop only if they have one for work anyway, they use their phones for banking, tax, searching the correct spelling of words etc. That's in the age groups from like 30 all the way to 70.
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes.
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
> Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
>everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
If you are doing all of your work in a browser anyway, you might as well use a less finicky iPad with longer battery life with a regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
>Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
That's very anecdotal of you. Proves absolutely nothing.
Since we're posting anecdotes here, everyone I know has at least one computer that is not "their work computer" (which is confusing, is it employer-owned, or just personally owned for their own purposes?).
Many people do not like typing on tablet or phone keyboards, real keyboards are much nicer. Bigger screens are also much nicer than tiny phone screens and most tablet screens.
I suspect your anecdotal circle is probably very young and may just not be able to afford a real computer, or have never used one, so they are fine with their tiny devices, not knowing the benefits of having a more traditional laptop or desktop computer.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
Both my parents run on Microsoft Excel. Neither of them care much for phones or tablets, but if there was an ExcelDeck running ExcelOS and it had a web browser and worked like the desktop version of Excel does, maybe they would go for it.
As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.
Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.
Why is this is a top comment? Market share is a relative measure. Even if there is a drop in the number of personal computers, still it's an achievement that the drop didn't affect Linux, while it affected other platforms.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I disagree. Imagine that Linux became the OS used on 95% of personal computers. According to your reasoning there wouldn't be much to celebrate. Says who?
Because it's an important distinction. If all PC sales fall to almost zero, and only the most hardcore tech nerds keep using them, and use Linux like they've been doing for two decades now, did Linux really win the battle or did the entire war evaporate and they are some long lost leftover soldier in the jungle fighting some battle no one else even is anymore.
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here.
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I've been saying this for a while, in the sense that the "year of the Linux desktop" isn't going to come from mass adoption of Linux on the desktop, but will come because overall "desktop" market share will decrease to the point where if you need a desktop, you are probably technical enough and more likely to be running Linux.
Desktop (and laptop) computing is becoming niche outside of work. Like you said, most folks just use their phones, and maybe an iPad. By having a non-day job computer at home, and having it be a core device, already puts you in a niche group of users.
Gamers, devs, media professionals and enthusiasts are the remaining desktop computing users. Linux is well suited to take over gamers and devs, media professionals will continue using Macs. So yeah, it might appear Linux usage is growing, but I think the more likely story is it's relatively stable and overall desktop usage is shrinking.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
The article is specifically claiming a shift and growth. But if all that really changed was an increase in percentage due to less devices overall there really isnt much of a shift or growth.
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
I'll chime in here; while I'm in one of those niches you described at the start of your comment (with multiple laptops, a gaming PC, and a homelab made up of what I'd call a reasonable number of physical computers of various descriptions), me and a few other friends of mine recently made the jump away from Windows and to various Linuxes on our gaming PCs.
I went for Ubuntu, while my friends mostly went to some type of "gaming-optimized" flavour of Arch.
I'm definitely an edge case as most computing goes, but it feels for the first time like the gaming-on-Linux train's gaining traction, and there's enough community support out there that making the jump feels like a palatable ideal.
Yeah, are there any big box retailers selling machines with Linux installed as an option? Maybe the numbers are small enough for hobbyists to make a dent, but until you see Linux machines in best buy, etc., this is probably due more to people dumping their personal windows machine in favor of a using their work laptop or iPad almost exclusively.
I'm not sure but going on 3 years now after having mostly only used it full time at a previous job where everyone's workstation was a Linux one.
It helps that I can now do all of my gaming on Linux, so I'm not touching Windows again, outside of an employer paying for my work devices to use it on.
This is largely people who were previously Windows customers but who chose to go another way. Microsoft is doing a lot of shenanigans with their monopoly power, and anti-trust is largely toothless.
I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.
The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.
Tablets and phones have replaced PCs for casual use and content consumption. If you want to make anything beyond posts and videos you usually need a PC.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
People do all kinds of crazy stuff with steam decks. I don't own one, but at least I give to steam that they created a general computing device that people can use however they please instead of yet another walled garden console. It would not surprise me if people actually also use them to browse the web.
I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Due to licensing costs and our certifications, we can't sell anything with Windows. My coworkers install Ubuntu, but I install Linux Mint. We don't have any clue if people keep using Linux or install Windows, but it's cool to think we're helping to move this needle.
I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines? A new machine for an enterprise or gamer will probably retain windows because it's needed but people not using their computers for more than surfing will be happy enough.
On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most lay-people, my ex and her parents don't have computers anymore and my daughter hardly uses her either.
Those that actually need computers such as developers are more prone to use Linux anyhow (especially when Microsoft is pushing annoying features such as forced reboots for those dropping their computers anyhow onto powerusers).
Anecdotal evidence, but Steams' Proton compatibility layer that lets you run Windows-only games on Linux works really really well. I haven't had to log into years and years by now.
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
> I think this plays a huge part, is it elders/poorer/others that receive these machines?
I got my hands on a Dell that was retired out of an office somewhere for $30+shipping. Add the cost of a couple HDDs, time spent removing a disc drive and installing Linux, I got myself a cheap backup server on my LAN.
They're great for machines you don't want to drop a lot on for basic utilities.
Would just like to add it’s not needed so much now. I’m a pretty avid gamer and I’ve been using Bazzite as my OS now for months without issue.
Proton has completely changed the game (pun not intended). All that’s really missing now is the big studios who won’t release their anticheat for Linux.
I've sold linux mint laptops on ebay and I always reach out after sale basically saying "just to be clear, this isn't running windows, it's linux. I'll be happy to cancel if this isn't what you expected"
and 100% of the time the person was like "yes! Linux is what I wanted"
Actually, as a long time Linux Desktop user, i have at least 4, refurbished bought Notebooks in my place yet. Beside the 4, another 3 new new bought Notebooks.
The reason why I buy refurbished is, that my use-cases don't need the newest hardware and for a long time, older hardware was more compatible with Linux and BSD for me. Also, you get for a small price, high quality hardware.
If you now ask yourself, why that many notebooks? Notebooks are like handbags. They have to match the occasion.
I am the same. I decided a few years ago that I really really like the thinkpad t450, and have gradually bought 5 of them online for a total cost of about 300 USD. I may never need to buy a laptop ever again.
Agreed! Old laptops are more than powerful enough for Linux, and I like having purpose-oriented computers. The hobby programming computer doesn’t have games on it and is at any rate too weak to run them. The music laptop has every flac I ever ripped from a CD, and precious little disk space for anything else. And so on.
I did something similar back in the before times, an initiative that takes donated devices and give them a second life to people who need it. We had major resistance back then to anything linux.
It’s not burned into the BIOS, instead Microsoft maintains a database mapping licenses to hardware identifiers. But transferable licenses still exist, and enterprise volume licenses are yet a different beast, so it all depends on what Windows license the PC was originally sold with, if any.
I worked selling refurb computers and this wasn't the case from Windows 95 - XP. The rise of TPMs and EFI is after that time so it's possible some newer system provides a way of tying licenses to computers, but it's not BIOS.
The biggest issue right now is really the upcoming EOL of Windows 10. Most of these machines will be old enough (pre Intel 8th gen or Zen 2) that they won't be officially supported by Windows 11.
It’s in the ACPI tables, in ACPI Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), not the BIOS. An home user might be able to active it, but the repair shop probably can’t legally.
On most machines we sell that's probably the case. I don't know of anything that stops me from linking people to the official Windows installation media on Microsoft's site, so I do that even on the listing.
Thanks! I've been going through my to-do stack, and there was quite a few there. They've been selling fast! I've got a stack of Toughbooks to go through, too... someday.
You can either configure unattended updates (e.g. cron-apt or unattended-upgrade), or you can give system administration privileges to other users so they can accept pending updates. I don't think the latter is granular enough to only allow package upgrades, it also allows installing/removing packages.
The statscounter data is not reliable, and it is just embarrassing how often these posts make it to the HN frontpage.
You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months. The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of these numbers?
Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.
1. Radar is also reporting a Linux increase over the past month: 3.3% to 4.4%.
2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.
3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.
This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
Mentioned this in another comment [0], but analytics.usa.gov has the % of visitors on Linux operating systems at 5.7% in 2025, up from 4.5% in 2024. Of course "visitors to U.S. government websites" is not fully representative of all U.S. computer users, but it's worth noting.
Additionally, with the number of people who use ad blockers on Linux and given that statcounter mostly uses 3rd party JS tags, I highly doubt these numbers are correct.
There's a discussion in a peer thread about how people never notice its Linux and keep using their refurbished machines as-is. This too, is surprising to me, as my own experience as well as the ones I've heard in person from IT folks and IT-related forums online, people immediately notice that the UI looks different and panic as to how to achieve their current tasks. I'm skeptical of that entire thread too.
In general, I just wonder how much of any popular forum is just people LARPing. I do wish that it didn't occur here, though it's undoubtedly difficult to moderate.
> people immediately notice that the UI looks different and immediately panic as to how to achieve their current tasks
This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.
I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.
Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
Unless they're using JS for something specific, getting the user to load anything at all would give them the OS from the useragent string in almost all cases. I'd believe their URLs being included in default filter lists though.
Pretty sure OS X and macOS should be combined, not doing that feels like amateur hour, very puzzling. But even with that in mind, you see wild ups and downs as large as 3.5% a month from 10/24 to 11/24 to 12/24 to 01/25 and there’s no way in hell actual deployments are fluctuating like that. Error bars like that make a number of 5% pretty meaningless, however feel-good it is.
Also, for people unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem: the OS X => macOS rebranding happened back in 2016, IIRC the Safari user agent never ever included macOS (Safari on M4 Macs running latest macOS 15.5 reports itself as “Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7” in its UA), so absolutely no idea where they’re getting this new “macOS” category. Maybe they publish technical details of their methodology somewhere? I can’t bother to check.
Indeed, OS X goes down, and obviously none of us actually believe that. But not only does Statcounter report that clearly faulty number, but they have yet to fix the problem.
This happens all the time. When their numbers are clearly wrong, they don't care about the numbers enough to fix even the glaring problems, their sample is unsound, and their methodology is unpublished, why exactly are we supposed to give any of their numbers any credence?
What you've written is the first I've heard of a recent change to the Safari on OS X user-agent string, and I see no indication of it in my access logs. What's it supposed to be now? It seems a bit unlikely, and given Safari never ran on classic Mac OS, it seems like a company that's supposed to specialize in analytics should be able to handle it...
I don't understand why Statcounter reports them separately though. They're just two different versions of the same OS, and those are grouped for other OSes in this chart. Makes no sense.
You can also look at the Steam survey as another data point. Linux use among English speakers is just above 5%, but the data is biased toward power users/ gamers.
I wonder what a more reliable measure would be. Maybe something like the "Crane Index" where we count the number of new software packages for Linux. Particularly, it makes sense to focus on paid software, because there's actually some bar to entry there (setting up an LLC, accepting payments, etc.) I haven't actually looked into this, but I think the initial data for this figure is zero, and we're projected to reach zero by next year.
For another anecdata point, https://analytics.usa.gov tracks user device demographics to all visitors of U.S. government websites. Which of course might skew in ways different than the general U.S. population. But checking out the numbers right now for Linux users:
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
I am in this category, but I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the state of the market for OS's:
I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).
Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).
I think it comes down to the following wishes:
A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.
B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.
I am still using Windows 10. I use Flow Launcher ( https://www.flowlauncher.com/ ) and have it bound to ctrl-alt-shift-g, but then use an AutoHotkey binding to rebind it to Caps lock. Point being I almost never use the Start Menu, I just use Flow Launcher. And Flow Launcher has half the latency to display with no ads. When I'm forced to update to Windows 11 I may be forced to investigate alternate taskbars.
Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.
A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.
I have a script that puts my laptop from suspend to hibernate automatically within some sane amount of time (hours), and so either I pickup my laptop within hours, or it’s hibernated and reliably not wasting my battery away while sleeping.
The ever increasing number of GPUs of the world are making the cloud PC gaming services ridiculously cheap. I only pay $12 USD/month (boosteroid, gaming only).
If I bought a gaming PC with similar specs, it would take over 7 years to pay it off (no use for a PC besides gaming). That would be 7 years of fixed hardware, where the cloud hardware specs keep improving with time, and I can pause the subscription whenever I want.
You definitely pay with some extra input latency, but not enough to impact my casual play. Definitely worth trying, if you have nice internet.
You can easily buy a gaming PC for less than $1000 that provides a better experience than cloud gaming. You also need to remember that these companies are trying to create a market for their product and right now they're happy to sell their services really cheap. Once its adopted it will be raised.
Windows 11 only sucks if you get the Home version. If you get the Pro version you can disable all the annoyances. New things pop up here and there with each update every few years (recently asking to connect my phone so I can see notifications), but those can be disabled easily.
It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.
For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.
I agree with this. Couple years ago I splurged on a nice Thinkpad X1 carbon, and decided to give windows a try after abstaining for many years. I really liked the WSL but overall it was a resource hog. It would blast the fan for seemingly no reason, the task manager would slow down, the laptop would overheat. And even playing basic games like freecell would randomly fail to launch, probably because it couldn't reach the ad server.
What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.
1. The statistics only show Desktop usage relative to each other. But I could totally imagine that macOS "loses" users to iPadOS. Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general (I see more and more people who don't actually have a personal computer anymore).
2. Valve (and others, surely) is doing an incredible job with video games on Linux. 20 years ago, I needed a dual boot just to play games. I dropped Windows when I stopped playing, and I started playing again thanks to the Steam Deck. I am convinced that many people today "need" an OS on which they can play video games, except that today they have a choice (thanks to Valve and others).
3. Privacy. I think it's becoming a lot more important outside the US (it's actually now a national security concern there), but I'm convinced that people are slowly learning about that. TooBigTech pushing to train their AIs with everything the users do surely has an impact on that.
> Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general
But this is desktop only. If someone stop using windows completely, it won't show a decrease in windows usage. This will basically only show when people switch from desktop OS.
You sure about that math? If there are 2 linux users and 8 windows users, then that's 20% linux, 80% windows. If one windows user quits using computers, then that's 2 linux users (out of 9 total) and 7 windows users (out of 9 total), or 22% linux and 77% windows users.
I had a Teams meeting for an outside of work topic this morning. Since all my personal machines are Linux based I was kinda happy I had my work laptop available with Windows and Teams installed.
Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
After rebooting twice and only five minutes before the meeting started I reverted to my Linux desktop, opened the email with the link to the Teams meeting and was a minute early using the web version of Teams.
Phew, saved by Linux.
Kudos to Microsoft for making Teams web version operating system and browser agnostic. But fuck what they've done with Windows updates. Numerous coworkers also saying their computers decided to reboot of their own volition the last couple of days in order to install updates.
Maybe it's a worthwhile trade off for security, but I'm glad I had an alternative option this morning.
I'm the five-odd years since switching to Linux exclusive at home, my decision is only ever reconfirmed as correct.
(I'm a reformed gamer from a long while ago, but the very few games I do play I have gotten to work on Linux).
Microsoft used to have a Teams for Linux application. It was identical to the Windows application because it's just an Electron app, but shockingly it was buggy on Linux (???) I don't even know how... I mean, Microsoft chose a cross-platform framework. They must've written some stupid ass code that isn't portable, at which point why not use one of the dozen Microsoft GUI frameworks available?
This is a very common workflow for me, except I was using Teams on a Mac. And thanks to some update there are now two non-working versions of Teams installed ("Teams" and "Teams new" or some equally tacky naming). Luckily I have a Linux laptop next to it that can run it in-browser.
I would love to know what Microsoft thinks the purpose of the standalone app is, when it is both slower and less reliable.
> Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
I have that exact workflow with any computer I do not use on a regular basis. If I use the thing every day it is ok. But if I let something sit for like 6 months it is 'patch city'. I usually play that game on my game consoles because i do not use it much. My daily used computers 10-15 seconds tops until usable desktop.
After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.
Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.
There are still issues. Just going with your example, see the threads in the Framework forum around lid close issues (almost all from Linux users): https://community.frame.work/search?q=lid%20close
Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.
I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.
Current battery life is better than it was on Windows. I know Windows is very good from this standpoint but things always degrade over time. That is my expectation with arch as well - good now but let's see how it is 6 months from now. That is always the real test. Regardless, my laptop is too small to run Windows + WSL so will probably stick with just running Linux.
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Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the people that would have already had Linux desktops continuing to have theirs since they would likely be the same people (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) less likely to be making that switch.
Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
Given these numbers are percents I would be very curious.
Now yes there is a clear uptick thanks to the Steam Deck (however with Microsoft pushing their optimized for gaming Windows it will be interesting to see if that continues or goes backwards). But I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
> thanks to the Steam Deck [...] but I would be reluctant to call that Linux Desktop anymore than I would call Android an uptick for Linux.
The Steam Deck very much runs Linux Desktop. Android runs the Linux kernel, but everything else is different. SteamOS is a Linux distribution based on Arch. If you run your Steam Deck in "desktop mode", it is very much a Linux Desktop (with a read-only system and A/B updates etc, but still).
Linux is a kernel.
Well, unless you hook a screen and keyboard to it, I suppose. No idea how many people do that. But if you do that, phones and tablets also become desktops.
But, I think there is a conversation around this to ask how many of the people using a Steam Deck actually go into desktop mode or care that it is Linux (or even understand that it is Linux) vs would switch to a Windows version if it worked as well.
99% of Steam Deck users won't ever use the desktop mode except for maybe setting up emulation or Discord.
In general, that makes Steam Deck users no more Linux users than people that use Android.
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
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My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care. But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-) Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something. That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash. I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
I don't think I know any non-gamer that has an actual desktop, just people with laptops.
For the gamers consoles are the vast majority, of the PC gamers pretty much all use Windows. When I tell friends I use Linux it's mostly "oh yeah I looked into that as well when Windows 11 came out but didn't end up switching".
Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
Interesting. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a personal computer at home. Mostly laptops. With the exceptions of nerds like myself, the signifier that someone is a gamer is that their home computer is a tower rather than a laptop.
I wonder how much regional variation there is around this sort of thing? It sounds like it might be quite a lot.
And of the remaining desktop/laptop users, 90% of their work is being done in a browser. Which makes Linux distros like Ubuntu suitable for more people.
Why would I recommend a Linux system?
That's very anecdotal of you. Proves absolutely nothing.
Since we're posting anecdotes here, everyone I know has at least one computer that is not "their work computer" (which is confusing, is it employer-owned, or just personally owned for their own purposes?).
Many people do not like typing on tablet or phone keyboards, real keyboards are much nicer. Bigger screens are also much nicer than tiny phone screens and most tablet screens.
I suspect your anecdotal circle is probably very young and may just not be able to afford a real computer, or have never used one, so they are fine with their tiny devices, not knowing the benefits of having a more traditional laptop or desktop computer.
What's important is that we have an alternative to keep Microsoft and Apple honest. If they overdo it with their crappy ideas - like showing ads in the start menu or recording the desktop - then people can easily switch, at least for personal computing.
As it stands though, that's not the case, so I'll be stuck supporting a couple of Windows desktops permanently.
Before you suggest the app versions of Excel or Google Sheets, that's already a step too far. My mom told me she's "basically done learning new technology" and that's just how it's going to be.
> Basically if the higher percent is due to less desktops overall instead of a major uptick in Linux desktops, it is not really much to celebrate.
I disagree. Imagine that Linux became the OS used on 95% of personal computers. According to your reasoning there wouldn't be much to celebrate. Says who?
> [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets)
Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume.
One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media; hence the concomitant rise of picture and video and the smartphone camera, which is now the primary medium through which many, many people view the world. Editing anything longer than a Tweet is torturous on a phone or even a tablet, and I suspect that this lack of ergonomics is what leads to the proliferation of reductive, simplistic, short-form, and byte-sized thinking.
Computing "interface culture" was once hyper-literate; "in the beginning was the command line" [0], and people's primary way of seeing the internet was through words, keyboards, and terminals. Now we have the "colossal success of GUIs" and a Disney-fied [0], touchscreen interface to computing, where the control mechanisms used by adults are the exact same as the ones used by toddlers.
[0] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
The key addition obviously being “for me.”
For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media.
I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard.
I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
I've been saying this for a while, in the sense that the "year of the Linux desktop" isn't going to come from mass adoption of Linux on the desktop, but will come because overall "desktop" market share will decrease to the point where if you need a desktop, you are probably technical enough and more likely to be running Linux.
Desktop (and laptop) computing is becoming niche outside of work. Like you said, most folks just use their phones, and maybe an iPad. By having a non-day job computer at home, and having it be a core device, already puts you in a niche group of users.
Gamers, devs, media professionals and enthusiasts are the remaining desktop computing users. Linux is well suited to take over gamers and devs, media professionals will continue using Macs. So yeah, it might appear Linux usage is growing, but I think the more likely story is it's relatively stable and overall desktop usage is shrinking.
Why? If Windows & OSX desktops are in decline, but Linux isn't, I'd still celebrate that - apparently Linux is serving the more "important" / long-lived use cases?
I think there is likely an argument that the people that would have previously used Linux are likely using Linux for tasks that would not easily work on a phone or a tablet and are likely more technical users.
Where as many users who would have previously used Windows or Mac for general basic computing can easily accomplish those tasks on their phones or tablets. (Not all tasks obviously, but there are a lot of tasks that an iPad can do that you would have previously done on your traditional computer).
That is why to me just celebrating a percent change really is not telling us much of the story. And to be clear here, I am asking the question not to say that the number is not something to celebrate but to ask why the number is the way it is and celebrate accordingly.
I went for Ubuntu, while my friends mostly went to some type of "gaming-optimized" flavour of Arch.
I'm definitely an edge case as most computing goes, but it feels for the first time like the gaming-on-Linux train's gaining traction, and there's enough community support out there that making the jump feels like a palatable ideal.
It helps that I can now do all of my gaming on Linux, so I'm not touching Windows again, outside of an employer paying for my work devices to use it on.
So, the true meaning of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" was that in the end there would only be a single unit left?
I know quite a lot of professionals, who for them the last straw was purchasing the professional edition, and then finding out later after an update that their company lock screens now have ad's posted; and worse, those ads frequently have malware that cause even more headaches for them in a unmanageable way.
The bean counters at MS pushed their biggest supporters over the knifes edge, and alot more people are getting serious about alternatives to MS now.
A Linux desktop is far better to run LLM experiments with.
My home, tinker workstation used to be Windows but there was no reason to keep it that way, when most of the build and support tooling prefer Linux.
Mobile OSes are strictly designed for consumption and are too restricted for most other use cases. It’s an OS limit not a hardware issue.
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The stats come from website trackers - do people browse the web on Steam Decks?
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Edit: might as well link to the merch: https://www.ebay.com/str/evolutionecycling
On that side-note I would also not be surprised if people are leaving "computers" altogether in favor of phones, it's a capable enough computer today for most lay-people, my ex and her parents don't have computers anymore and my daughter hardly uses her either.
Those that actually need computers such as developers are more prone to use Linux anyhow (especially when Microsoft is pushing annoying features such as forced reboots for those dropping their computers anyhow onto powerusers).
I know that a large portion of our business is to other resellers and businesses. FWIW, long before I started working here, I replaced XP with Xubuntu on my parent's computer about 15 years ago. I told them that "it works like Windows[0]", showed them how to check email, browse the web, play solitare, and shut down. Even the random HP printer and scanner worked great! I expected a call from them to "put it back to what it was", but it never happened. (The closest was Mom wondering why solitare (the gnome-games version) was different, then guided her on how to change the game type to klondike.)
[0] If "it [Xubuntu] works like Windows" offended you, I'd like to point out that most people don't care about how operating system kernels are designed. They care about things like a start menu, and that the X in the corner closes programs.
I got my hands on a Dell that was retired out of an office somewhere for $30+shipping. Add the cost of a couple HDDs, time spent removing a disc drive and installing Linux, I got myself a cheap backup server on my LAN.
They're great for machines you don't want to drop a lot on for basic utilities.
Proton has completely changed the game (pun not intended). All that’s really missing now is the big studios who won’t release their anticheat for Linux.
Most people likely don't have an opinion besides being able to browse the web and will not even be aware that they are not using Windows.
So this is great work! Keep it up!
and 100% of the time the person was like "yes! Linux is what I wanted"
Well alright then, there you go...
The reason why I buy refurbished is, that my use-cases don't need the newest hardware and for a long time, older hardware was more compatible with Linux and BSD for me. Also, you get for a small price, high quality hardware.
If you now ask yourself, why that many notebooks? Notebooks are like handbags. They have to match the occasion.
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You even have a demonstration in this very article, with the surge of classic Mac OS to 7% for several months. The data is obviously nonsense, and when it has errors nobody at the company cares about them. But when they have persistent "data reporting issues", why are we supposed to believe any of these numbers?
Cloudflare has also OS stats available and I'd imagine they are far more reliable. Some silver lining of them having such wide dragnet on the web. They report 4.4% Linux desktop marketshare in the US. Tbh I believe the summer vacation season probably influences the numbers here, but there is some real growth too.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
2. Both StatsCounter and Radar break out Linux and ChromeOS; if you combine them, StatsCounter hits 7.7%; Radar hits 6.3%.
3. That being said: Both StatsCounter and Radar experienced an anomalous drop in ChromeOS clients & rise in Linux clients over the past month. StatsCounter took ChromeOS from ~4.4% to 2.7%. Radar took it 2.6% -> 1.9%.
This kind of implies that something changed with a major ChromeOS device out that; some model/version maybe changed its UA and started reporting itself as a Linux device instead.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44582058
There's a discussion in a peer thread about how people never notice its Linux and keep using their refurbished machines as-is. This too, is surprising to me, as my own experience as well as the ones I've heard in person from IT folks and IT-related forums online, people immediately notice that the UI looks different and panic as to how to achieve their current tasks. I'm skeptical of that entire thread too.
In general, I just wonder how much of any popular forum is just people LARPing. I do wish that it didn't occur here, though it's undoubtedly difficult to moderate.
This was probably a bigger problem 10 years ago than it is now. Plenty of people never do anything at all with their computer besides opening a browser. No matter what OS you use, "click the Chrome logo" still applies.
I've watched my grandparents use a computer. I guarantee I could swap out Windows for KDE or Cinnamon and, as long as I make the wallpaper the same and I put the Chrome icon in the same place, they wouldn't notice anything had changed. I'm not actually going to do that, because then I become the only person in the family who can tame their computer if it starts acting out, but still.
Also, Microsoft's own UI isn't a steady target. Windows 11 is, dare I say it, more akin to Plasma 6 than it is to Windows 7.
Also, for people unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem: the OS X => macOS rebranding happened back in 2016, IIRC the Safari user agent never ever included macOS (Safari on M4 Macs running latest macOS 15.5 reports itself as “Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7” in its UA), so absolutely no idea where they’re getting this new “macOS” category. Maybe they publish technical details of their methodology somewhere? I can’t bother to check.
25%+-3.5% means it's 5%+-0.7% for proportional error bars. They don't have to be linear, true, but they are certainly not 5% +- 3.5% either.
I'm not sure what's up with listing both "OS X" and "macOS", but I'm quite confident it's not classic Mac OS.
So that looks like it might be some change in how Apple computers are reporting their OS.
This happens all the time. When their numbers are clearly wrong, they don't care about the numbers enough to fix even the glaring problems, their sample is unsound, and their methodology is unpublished, why exactly are we supposed to give any of their numbers any credence?
What you've written is the first I've heard of a recent change to the Safari on OS X user-agent string, and I see no indication of it in my access logs. What's it supposed to be now? It seems a bit unlikely, and given Safari never ran on classic Mac OS, it seems like a company that's supposed to specialize in analytics should be able to handle it...
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Are you disputing that? Or did you miss that in the article?
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
I've used macOS for work for many years and Arch-based derivatives for personal desktop. The challenge with that has always been gaming: Gaming on Linux _mostly_ works, but third-party launchers (e.g., Battle.net, Origin, etc.) HATE it. I also don't love the Proton shuffle (i.e., "Which version of Proton do I need to use to get this to work?"), but it's tolerable for me. I'll tell you for whom it _isn't_ tolerable: my wife (who mostly uses a different system running Windows 10, but sometimes wants to use the more powerful gaming PC running Linux). And thus the only remaining choice for the home system has been Linux + Windows (in some capacity).
Now, I've not used Windows full-time since 7, but I recently installed Windows 11 (via QEMU using LookingGlass) and it is simply TERRIBLE. There are full-blown ads in the Start Menu, the built-in search ignores your default browser/search engine settings, and (critically) __you can no longer put the Start Menu bar at the top of the screen__ (It's less common, but I've done this my entire life).
I think it comes down to the following wishes:
A. I wish Windows 8/10/11 didn't suck so much.
B. I wish Linux was widely-supported by ALL game platforms.
C. I wish macOS gaming wasn't so expensive.
Fundamentally the thing that keeps me on Windows is battery life. I need to be able to trust that my laptop won't lose more than 20% of its charge in a week when not in use and Linux just can't reliably do that.
A related thing is stuff like play/pause/mute not working when the screen is locked.
The ever increasing number of GPUs of the world are making the cloud PC gaming services ridiculously cheap. I only pay $12 USD/month (boosteroid, gaming only).
If I bought a gaming PC with similar specs, it would take over 7 years to pay it off (no use for a PC besides gaming). That would be 7 years of fixed hardware, where the cloud hardware specs keep improving with time, and I can pause the subscription whenever I want.
You definitely pay with some extra input latency, but not enough to impact my casual play. Definitely worth trying, if you have nice internet.
It does suck resources so using it on Laptops is not ideal, but for desktop its by far the best, mostly because of WSL2 integration, which is mature enough to not only run graphical linux apps, but also supports CUDA.
For Laptops, honestly, Linux Mint with I3wm is the way to go. Once you get used to I3, its hard to go back standard display managers with icons and menus.
What really surprised me was how hard it is to switch back to Linux. After about a year using windows there was a ton of friction to get my mindset back in Linux. But I made the switch and I will never use windows willingly again.
In my experience this is every few weeks.
1. The statistics only show Desktop usage relative to each other. But I could totally imagine that macOS "loses" users to iPadOS. Similarly, Windows could be losing users to smartphones in general (I see more and more people who don't actually have a personal computer anymore).
2. Valve (and others, surely) is doing an incredible job with video games on Linux. 20 years ago, I needed a dual boot just to play games. I dropped Windows when I stopped playing, and I started playing again thanks to the Steam Deck. I am convinced that many people today "need" an OS on which they can play video games, except that today they have a choice (thanks to Valve and others).
3. Privacy. I think it's becoming a lot more important outside the US (it's actually now a national security concern there), but I'm convinced that people are slowly learning about that. TooBigTech pushing to train their AIs with everything the users do surely has an impact on that.
But this is desktop only. If someone stop using windows completely, it won't show a decrease in windows usage. This will basically only show when people switch from desktop OS.
Booting it up about half an hour before the meeting... Installing updates...
After rebooting twice and only five minutes before the meeting started I reverted to my Linux desktop, opened the email with the link to the Teams meeting and was a minute early using the web version of Teams.
Phew, saved by Linux.
Kudos to Microsoft for making Teams web version operating system and browser agnostic. But fuck what they've done with Windows updates. Numerous coworkers also saying their computers decided to reboot of their own volition the last couple of days in order to install updates.
Maybe it's a worthwhile trade off for security, but I'm glad I had an alternative option this morning.
I'm the five-odd years since switching to Linux exclusive at home, my decision is only ever reconfirmed as correct.
(I'm a reformed gamer from a long while ago, but the very few games I do play I have gotten to work on Linux).
I would love to know what Microsoft thinks the purpose of the standalone app is, when it is both slower and less reliable.
I have that exact workflow with any computer I do not use on a regular basis. If I use the thing every day it is ok. But if I let something sit for like 6 months it is 'patch city'. I usually play that game on my game consoles because i do not use it much. My daily used computers 10-15 seconds tops until usable desktop.
Reports about high battery drain, suspend issues and similar exist as well.
I'm running Fedora on a Framework laptop, but with the awareness that it can require some tinkering.