Linux market share approaching 4.5% for first time, could hit 5% by 1Q25
tomshardware.comMicrosoft seems determined to push people away from Windows with its user-hostile tactics—built-in ads, constant nagging about Edge, and forced OneDrive backups. It's really soured my experience. I’m done with Windows personally. While I have to use Win11 at work, I won't use it anywhere I have a choice.
I finally made the switch earlier this year after realizing just how good Steam Proton is for gaming on Linux. Day-to-day computing on Linux is just so nice compared to Windows. It doesn't feel like I'm fighting with the OS anymore; the machine actually serves me now, instead of it constantly trying to undermine my intentions.
I grew up gaming on PCs. I still game regularly, and haven't used Windows for around ten years.
Anybody that wants to explore alternatives to Microsoft has every reason to do so, the software works about as well or better than running natively on Windows.
For $reasons my son has been gaming on my PC for the last month or so. First on Debian, now on Bazzite (I installed it out of curiosity, will probably revert back to Debian as I saw no advantage).
Last night he wanted to play a game that doesn't run on Linux because of its anti-cheat. I have a Windows 10 partition that hasn't been booted on for months. He went on it and that's when it really hit him how bad and user hostile Windows is. He always knew but it was only after being on Linux full-time for a few weeks and then trying to go back that he actually understood.
For people who never use anything except macOS / Linux, I challenge you to install Windows and experience it for yourself. The entire OS is like surfing the internet without ad block on. The nags, the pop ups, the malware you can’t remove. It’s truly incredible how awful Windows is. They are just milking the aging demographic who still uses Windows and squeezing as many clicks out of them as they can before Windows is dead as a home OS.
I do hate the direction Windows is going. That said as someone who also uses Linux / macOS I just use group policy to disable all of this and do not notice any of it, even across major version updates.
I use UNIX systems since 1993, Linux since 1995, subscribed to Linux journal during its lifetime, do devops stuff, yet I gave up on the Linux Desktop other than Android and WebOS, which is debatable how Linux kernel matters in a managed OS userspace.
Windows in all private laptops, at work we also do macOS, with GNU/Linux on VMs when required.
There is always that one little thing that makes one spend a couple of weekends, last being a NUC whose EUFI couldn't get to read any distribution installed on the internal NVMe, only when used from external devices. Windows, no biggie, works both ways.
That really depends on the hardware and the quality of its firmware.
Got myself some refurbished Lenovo M910q Tiny with 32GB RAM and low-power (35Watt) Core i5-7500t and 7700t (Kaby Lake).
Upped one with Mushkin Essentials to 64GB, put new SSDs (1x Sata, 1x NVME) into them, and they are all fucking flying,
with all crappy mitigations ON, while staying mostly silent.
Everything runs on them without problems. Even Hackintosh which I tried for fun.
Switching them on or off via keyboard, or resuming successfully from suspend?
No matter if to RAM or DISK, works every time.
Virtualisation? Covered.
2x 4K via DP? Covered. Though at 60Hz only. (Don't care, don't have faster screens anyways)
LAN could be more and faster, only 1x 1GB. (Don't care ATM)
Could even be expanded via 1x half-length and low-profile
PCIe 3 x8, depending on the card and PSU. (Don't care ATM)
Any relevant video-codec is HW-accellerated, for de- and encoding. No sweat.
It remains to be seen if they'll still get BIOS updates for any new vulerabilities,
but again, I don't really care.
Excellent (small) homelab or automation stuff.
Depending on configuration they come from 200 to 300USD/EUR.
Edit: This stuff https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/products/desktops-and-all...
...while staying @40° to 44°C during heavy browsing, streaming yt-audio in one tab with no tricks at all (like using ytp-dl -> mpv). Just one tab in FF-ESR with uBo playing along.
Bootup is @34°C, while room temperature is @19°~20°C.
Edit:
> Everything runs on them without problems...
Even https://genode.org/ from USB-Stick.
Never seen such clear booting, kernel-logs, DMESG regarding ACPI/DSDT, workarounds/quirks. Not even on a ThinkPad T60p or HP-Elitebook 2540p (which was very good for the time).
I use Mac as my personal system and used Linux for many years. Yet all this Mac and Linux experience is part of the reason I didn’t hesitate to have two Windows machines: one for work, one for light gaming. Windows isn’t that bad. I use it the way most folks probably do: just a way to get to the application I need. I don’t notice most of the ads. It works. Its auto-update mechanism is better than the Mac’s.
I don’t love Windows, but as a launching pad for proprietary software made for it, it gets the job done.
> its auto-update mechanism is better than the Mac’s.
Wow, what can a Mac auto-update do that is worse than Windows blocking your screen for 10 minutes during a Powerpoint presentation because the OS is «updating itself». (The only auto-update I know to be worse than Windows is Telsa's, bricking your car in the middle of the road for 45 minutes if you missclick on the touchscreen in traffic)
> Wow, what can a Mac auto-update do that is worse than Windows blocking your screen for 10 minutes
Rename random internal user accounts without informing the user, breaking many third-party package managers with an overnight upgrade? https://determinate.systems/posts/nix-support-for-macos-sequ...
Oh, or it could depreciate an entire class of software you may-or-may-not use without any opportunity for replacement besides downgrading your Mac? https://support.apple.com/en-us/103076
More mundane, but it also unconditionally blasts a bunch of config files under /etc that rightfully belong to the user/administrator. I've not seen any OS as willing to simultaneously Sherlock existing apps and rip out the APIs they depend on, either.
macOS upgrades are indeed generally exceptionally disruptive to applications.
> 10 minutes
I guess I have never seen Windows update take 10 minutes. Did you add the restart time into that? Because the restart after an update usually takes half of that alone.
10 minutes is around the login time for new user at my work computers. (That is, after it is fully booted and loaded, just the time for the user to log in.)
But yeah, the Mac updates aren't even remotely as bad as Windows.
And yet, my Windows machine somehow applies a simple heuristic to figure out my active times and always does the updates when I'm not typically using it. Of course, it means the machine has to be on during those times, but I've never had the update in the middle of the day problem you've described. At least not as long as Windows 10 has been around.
> when I'm not typically using it. Of course, it means the machine has to be on during those times
This “simple heuristic” only works if you let your computer on while not using it (why would you do that? Except to accommodate for a broken update mechanism…)
I've mostly used Mac for the past 15 ywars os so. I was in a situation where Windows wasn't really politically acceptable for work and Linux was still sort of a pain in the butt to get work done for someone who wasn't familiar. So I just bought a Mac for the first time. At this point, I'm not sure it matters but I'm not a gamer, ChromeOS is mostly oriented towards low-budget educational market, and I have no particular reason to run Linux.
I'd imagine people using MacOS are well familiar with in-desktop ads, random news articles popping up in your task bar, and notifications that are literally indistinguishable from marketing.
> They are just milking the aging demographic
It can't just be an aging demographic.
Young people today use Windows.
Mac has an eerie vibe to it.
Linux sounds too difficult.
And you want to play games.
It's the Standard Business Operating System! What you say can't be correct!
enterprise gets a better version too. less ads
> built-in ads, constant nagging about Edge, and forced OneDrive backups
I must be using it wrong because I don't have any of those things.
It's a very common experience. You not seeing it does not invalidate this reality.
Perhaps it doesn't invalidate the reality but it does suggest that the sort who experience it are not very good at figuring out to properly operate an OS and are just as likely to encounter problems when they switch to any other OS.
I imagine the moronic mass-bricking a few months back also forced people to move away from that eco-system.
No kidding, I'm building a PC for someone to move to Linux, probably MX
Statcounter's data is based off hits to a certain websites. Not unique hits but hits. It's really hard to see their data as worthwhile from my perspective.
This is already desktop stats, a market that isn't really growing. Then figure they're unlikely to be partnered with anyone like Facebook, Tiktok, or Discord, the sites that 90% of users spend most of their time on.
Think of the remaining internet they might have deals with, does that seem representative of users as a whole? Now add in that it's based on hits, with no reason to suspect they're effectively filtering out bots. I don't see the value of such data.
> filtering out bots
For all but the most advanced of bots, the only such filtering comes from something as simple as a user-agent or other maybe some other header fingerprinting. What percentage of bots even bother to switch from the default of "python-requests/2.25.0" so that they might be detectable as Linux?
If it's 1% of bots that switch, it could still be fairly meaningful when tracking hits.
Yes, their data is garbage. macOS losing 20% share in one month. ChromeOS losing 50% in one month. A huge "unknown" share. Lots of volatility. This is just the Linux faithful seeing what they want to see.
Desktop and laptop sales have been declining worldwide for years and while laptops have dipped up in 2023 desktops continued their downward trend.
My hunch it’s less that people have suddenly discovered Linux and more that desktop sales have been slipping for a long long time so either it’s shifted to Apple or people stick with just phones and tablets. Thus it’s not necessarily that Linux market share has increased because of increasing numbers vs a dedicated minority sticking with a dying market segment.
Unless I misunderstood something, the graphic shown on the article does not imply that. Linux market share grew from a decline from OSX and ChromeOS, while Windows share is more or less stable.
Desktop and laptop sales are declining, but that's probably because they're all fast enough now and there's no reason to replace them unless they break. That's actually more room for Linux, because the big two OSes are gradually going to leave those people behind. Most people are going to have fairly new phones in their pockets and super-old laptops at home.
Anecdotally I've been getting a lot of calls from normies afraid of surveillance and now AI in the OS (both Mac and Windows), asking how to switch to Linux. The ones on Windows also very much hate Windows.
I have a feeling that Microsoft and Apple will not mind this, Linux desktop share getting that high is in fact a comforting, Firefox-sized claim that consumers have other, freer, functional options. It also allows their most disgruntled users to leave rather than become obsessively angry with an OS they've been trapped with.
> Desktop and laptop sales are declining, but that's probably because they're all fast enough now and there's no reason to replace them unless they break.
This, and a lot of people got new desktops/laptops during the pandemic.
I actually got my laptop in late 2019, and it is still running smoothly. Back in thr day a 5 year old laptop would be ancient. Now it still runs fine everything I want on it.
I also think current hardware is lasting for a longer time than before. I remember I used to have a lot more issues with faulty components after a few years of use, etc.
Another thought, though I'll fully disclaim I didn't look into data on sales:
What's being counted as desktop sales?
Because I would suspect that more gamers and hobbyists than ever are simply putting together mid and high-end PCs themselves out of parts, rather than buying prebuilt.
It's been made trivially easy even for the totally inexperienced and uninformed by simply copying popular youtube guides, and I suspect the pandemic chip shortage price hikes greatly increased consciousness about prices even after it muchly recovered.
Every time I see this, I refer to Krazam's brilliant video about LinuxCon Worldwide. https://youtu.be/nUsDk8wjRPs?si=KnSxBan1QV5WVwih
I love that video. It somehow captures the whole linux community in that 2 minute window (of course it lacks many discussion around systemd, native package managers vs snap or flatpak, wine compatibility, etc)
Direct link => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUsDk8wjRPs
I truly believe that once Linux solves its app packaging problem it could go mainstream for casual use on home laptops. (Office machines obviously are a different beast, needing Microsoft Office\365 support, etc).
We're 99% of the way to being able to hand an everyday person a laptop with Linux on it and have them have a decent experience - but they need to be able to go to a website and download a program without screwing around with package managers and wondering if someone's even made a package for their distro. Flatpak and Snap are great, but then you still have to worry about which of those, if any, your computer supports. That's fine for anyone on Hacker News, but it's not fine for my parents or most people who don't take a special interest in tech.
If they do that, 2078 really could be the year of the Linux Desktop. But in the meantime we'll all have been using Steam Decks anyway.
Tho if it does become mainstream I do admit I'll miss feeling special and smart.
Flatpak is winning and will ultimately win. Flathub is really good and has momentum behind it.
App stores already solved this for regular folks.
Suppose websites don't change. What should Linux do about:
1. Packages only offering building from source for the Linux crowd.
2. Packages with soft DRM, offering Windows builds easily and Linux builds referencing the forums.
3. Packages with hard DRM, actively rejecting attempts to run on Linux.
4. "Downloads" built for YUM or APT or whatever.
5. "Downloads" which are basically just scripts designed to shit all over your directory structure and do the real installation later.
6. Downloads only available for a particular distro, and only then by trusting a third-party repo and otherwise doing key-based shenanigans.
...
I bet you could get a decent chunk of the way there with a script turning the "normal" install procedure from that above garbage into a nice desktop icon and an easily deletable binary (with an associated uninstallation script), but people package software differently for Linux than they do for other OS's, and unless you change that part of the culture or manually package a lot more things I don't think you'll solve that particular problem.
Does one really care?
Have you looked at
https://www.clearlinux.org/ https://github.com/clearlinux
https://cachyos.org/ https://github.com/CachyOS
https://mxlinux.org/ https://github.com/MX-Linux ?
Would they lack anything? I picked these three specifically because I tested them recently on new hardware I got.
What they have in common is their focus on encapsulating 4. for mere mortals, while not doing 5, or at least not more so than it's common for Windows.
One of these years, it'll be the year of the Linux desktop.
Just you wait.
5% is honestly meeting that benchmark imo. One in twenty? That's firmly a competitor. Certainly nowhere close to leader but no longer a rounding error you can't even see in a pie chart.
Fusion or ubiquitous Linux desktops (wsl does not count), which happens first?
WSL does count. The average Linux user doesn't know squat about how the kernel, drivers, or services work; they just like the CLI. If MS can give them enough of the Linux CLI and functioning packages to do their job, it's game over.
Looks like the upward trend shows that it is not in fact “game over”.
Steam making sure than the vast majority of games run fine on Linux at the first try is much more impactful than WSL in the grand scheme of things.
Can confirm. I've been working with a VMWare Linux Mint machine for two years, and very recently installed Windows 11, and decided to try WSL2. It's seamless, and literally Linux. I installed asdf and all the stuff I would normally do with zero headaches. No more vms for me.
WSL2 is literally a VM.
And WSL1?
A translation layer. It emulates Linux system calls.
yes but it's not a "VMWare" window and completely separate desktop environment. come on.
Poland wins World Cup in football goes first in the impossible events department.
In the DPRK, it already is the year of the Linux Desktop.
If linux hits 5% this would be huge news and something Microsoft should be taking note.
Reminds me of an old Red Hat advert likely from the late 90s, based on the following quote (I cannot remember who said this.. gandhi???) :-
- First they ignore you - Then they laugh at you - Then they fight you - Then you win
At the end of the advert it said something like "You are here" which shows an aeroplane about to take off... just a matter of time before it leaves the ground. Its kinda symbolic to tell you its just a matter of time.
Of course, things have changed since this advert as the last 10 years Microsoft have been open towards Linux. While they are contributors, I still have doubts of their intentions. Personally, I view Microsofts strategy to control the GNU/Linux ecosystem not by the OS but their software. If they manage to win Linux distributions to use their tools by default (MS SQL Server, .NET, Powershell, etc) - would give them a lot of control!
Of course, linux admins might laugh at that idea... use Powershell? Please! -- But microsoft have some great influence due to their money and advertisement. Things could change drastically in the next 10-15 years.
Imagine big businesses using .NET or SQL Server and start to use Linux over Windows. Big businesses will happily throw support money. Makes you wonder how distributions will alter their views in a few short years.
Despite all I covered, Microsofts decisions on Windows 11 is baffling. At the end of the day, I just want a vanilla install of Windows. If there is a peice of software or feature I want -- I will install it or turn it on myself. Windows is no longer viewed as an Operating system but a full on IoT Service.
It just moves more people over to GNU/Linux. I only have 1 laptop using Windows at home - and I only have it for a job. I leave this job soon and when I do, the first thing I am doing is wiping Windows 11 for Debian.
I have Steam... so as long as I can play my favourite games on Linux (which are not the latest games) I am good! Despite being a Linux user for many years, I am still behind on the gaming side.
Maybe this 4.5% is just the technical crowd?
Now that windows UX is getting shittier, if there's a linux distro usuable without ever pulling up a terminal, maybe linux has some chance with non technical people.
That space is already taken by Android, ChromeOS, and WebOS, where the Linux kernel is an implementation detail, not directly exposed to userspace.
The steam deck is a fully consumer friendly Linux device that fits that criteria.
> Linux market share of desktop operating systems
This is measuring Desktop share, in case you’re curious.
Given that mobile is > 50% Linux (android). And I have to imagine server Linux share similar.
I set my user agent to Windows Chrome most of the time to minimize hassles. Linux usage is guaranteed to be higher than the official numbers.
All the games I play are working on Linux without issues, no need to waste time with whatever is left of Windows.
I use Linux on my servers and would love to use it on my laptop.
But there is Outlook and some corporate tools - it should be possible to find workarounds but I am not sure of that (how to read my PSTs for instance).
I try every 2 years for the last ... not sure ... probably 30 years to switch, the time is coming for a new test.
Are we sure these are desktops like Ubuntu or something a little bit miscategorized, like Android or ChromeOS?
If it included Android, the numbers would be way higher. Android is over 70% of mobiles worldwide, and mobiles outnumber desktops by 2 to 1.
android and chromeOS are usually excluded, but steam decks are included
It comes down to the fact that Linux is just so damn easy nowadays.
It is, until it isn't. If you deal with people in the mainstream business, legal, healthcare, etc. worlds you'll run into issues. If you work in one of those mainstream fields, you'll find yourself quite limited if you're running anything but Windows. None of your corporate/enterprise software will work unless it's web-based (which is more and more the case, but certainly not always).
Until one gets to install into a NUC with an UEFI that doesn't get Linux, despite all magic incantations on hard disk setup, or a wlan router whose connections keep being dropped.
My latest fun.
Are those mostly tech people or is it the general public?
Do non tech people run Linux? I've not seen this.
Thanks to Valve and Steam, it is a viable option and apparently a pretty good one at that
I recently switched to Elementary OS and for the first time I could imagine a world with sizeable market share.
That 3.1% -> 4.5% -> 5% would be a very large acceleration from the previous trend.
Linux distros should collaborate on a unified feedback initiative to boost adoption. The major distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.) could create a joint survey site targeting Windows users who have tried Linux but reverted back. This would provide invaluable data on pain points preventing wider Linux adoption.Questions like: What Windows-specific software or functionality did you miss most on Linux? If you could change one thing about Linux, what would it be? What was your primary reason for returning to Windows?
What would the purpose of that be? Why so much effort to increase "market share" of something that is not for sale. The entire concept of "switching" is weird because you don't have to legally declare your operating system. You can choose to use all of them.
I see your point, but I think a collaborative feedback initiative could really help improve the Linux ecosystem. While each distro has its own identity, gathering insights on why users revert to Windows could highlight common pain points that many distros face. This isn’t about pushing for uniformity; it’s about sharing knowledge that could help each distro enhance its offerings. Plus, collaboration could attract more developers and showcase the strengths of Linux as a whole. Ultimately, it’s about making Linux more appealing and accessible, benefiting everyone in the community—whether they’re new users or seasoned veterans.
They know what the problems are. They don't have the manpower to develop more than a fraction of what users want.
how do they meausre this?
I mean, is it counting distro hopping fresh installs?
or simultanous concurrent running sessions (telemetry hell) ?
That's a good question. I have lots of desktop templates on proxmox for spinning up VMs every now and then. I think maybe a month of usage might count as a legitimate user
They track website hits of their partners.