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Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
- IAmGraydon 2mo agoUnfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%. https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&dt=28d&loc=north-america&filters=deviceType%253DDESKTOP%252CbotClass%253DLIKELY_HUMAN https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
- benjaminl 2mo agoIt’s still really strange that Linux is several times larger than ChromeOS. I would not have guessed this. And I daily drove Linux for years.
- hparadiz 2mo agoIn what universe would I jump from a proprietary OS to another proprietary OS without a damn good reason?
- AndrewDucker 2mo agoOne where you don't like the first OS, believe the second OS does what you want, and don't care whether it's proprietary?
- pmontra 2mo agoYou have to buy a Chromebook to run ChromeOS, right? You can install Linux on your PC as dual boot. The investment is far smaller. However you have to buy a Mac to run MacOS so maybe that means that a Chromebook is not a very compelling machine to buy, or has a limited use case.
- microtonal 2mo agoI don't believe this for a moment. I have seen many more Chromebook users than desktop Linux users. Not individuals, but a lot of schools use Chromebooks where I am. They are probably not well-tallied in the results, because they are often used to do some work in Google Docs/Sheets, plus some education-specific sites and less browsing on the general web. I guess my point is that it is nearly impossible to get reliable counts from user agent statistics, etc. (lots of crawlers, that identify as a regular desktop as well etc.). The best way would probably to do real-world surveys among random population samples. But that costs money/time.
- pmontra 2mo agoI never saw one on this side of the Atlantic Ocean (Europe) but I do see a few of them in the malls. I asked to a high school professor and she told me that she does not even know what a Chromebook is. She googled for it and "It's a kind of PC?"
- IshKebab 2mo agoIf you increase the date range to 12 months you can see that ChromeOS is several times larger than Linux but recently there must have been an update so ChromeOS is now incorrectly detected as Linux.
- abdullahkhalids 2mo agoIf you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed. ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?
- ndiddy 2mo ago> ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured? It's schools letting out for summer. Most Chrome OS users are schoolchildren using their school issued Chromebooks. We will see it jump back up from ~1.5% to ~5% when school starts in September. The same pattern happened to Chrome OS usage in summer 2025.
- SwellJoe 2mo ago6%-14% (throughout the day, for some reason it's most popular late at night, Steam Box and other gamers, maybe?) is still the largest it's ever been, though, and it's presumably not getting smaller. It's about the same as Firefox share, which is getting smaller.
- cwnyth 2mo ago6% is still significant. I'm used to seeing 3-5 in that slot. Hey, I'll take any increase, even a single percentage!
- eddythompson80 2mo agoIs my understanding of that graph right? if the periodic change is the weekends, that means the total share percentage of requests from Windows and macOS users drops, while Linux increases in share percentage. Linux traffic is stable regardless of weekday/weekend cycles compared to Windows and macOS? Otherwise if there was equal drop in Linux, then the share percentage would be a smoother line. Is that right?
- boomlinde 2mo agoYou can't tell from this graph alone the extent to which the change in share during weekends is due to decreased use of the more popular operating systems or due to increased use of Linux.
- bawolff 2mo agoI imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets
- nwah1 2mo agoAlso, Chromebooks.
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoI don't think I've ever seen a single chromebook in the wild being used by a real person for real. I am sure they exist of course. I must have even seen one and forgotten it. But in all the years since they have existed, and all the varied people I've come in contact with in all those years, if I can't think of any, then the percentage is low. I think a relative's kid had one issued in high school a few years ago. There you go. One out of who knows how many hundreds, and that one was not even a voluntary purchase. In fact that same kid built himself a budget desktop gaming & streaming rig when deciding what to do with his own money. So I wouldn't even call him a chromebook user. The chromebook was just school equipment he had to operate like a copier or projector.
- eru 2mo agoI used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.
- alpaca9 2mo agoIt would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.
- esseph 2mo agoVscode can run in a browser, your code is often in git, and it normally is going through CI/CD (being compiled/packaged/deployed elsewhere). All you need for that is a dumb terminal.
- hedgehog 2mo agohttps://archive.is/kaef0 https://archive.is/kaef0
- bigfatkitten 2mo agoThe separation of “OS X” and “macOS” gives me pause about the reliability of the other figures, particularly Linux and Chrome OS.
- wmf 2mo agoThe last release of OS X was 11 years ago but this site shows it having over twice as many users as macOS. It's totally implausible.
- Caligatio 2mo agoI haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent. I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.
- fragmede 2mo agoDid you run any advanced TCP fingerprinting techniques to dig a bit deeper?
- Caligatio 2mo agoWell, guess it's worth spending a little time looking at it. It appears that it's the Cloudflare Security Center scanning service? This would also explain how my unpublished service was located as I use Cloudflare for my DNS.
- kelnos 2mo agoRegardless, they're the same OS, so any serious (read: competent) person compiling stats like this would combine them into the same bucket.
- frollogaston 2mo agoI saw reddit and turned around already
- wmf 2mo agoI guess Steam OS counts as Linux?
- intothemild 2mo agoThat's because it is Linux, specifically Arch. All Linux is Linux.
- fragmede 2mo agoExcept for Android and ChromeOS. Nix is kinda weird too. But other than that, yeah.
- stinkbeetle 2mo agoIf it uses the Linux kernel then it is Linux, that's where the name comes from. Android is no less Linux than RedHat or Debian is (when Debian is using Linux rather than FreeBSD kernel or Hurd, of course).
- wmf 2mo agoI see people didn't get my point. If StatCounter considers Chrome OS different from Linux then they might also consider Steam OS a separate bucket. Or they might include Steam OS in their Linux count and thus the rise of Steam OS might be causing the increase in Linux share.
- ediamondscience 2mo agoI don't know if the BSD folks would be happy to see it mentioned or unhappy that it's at 0%. At least you know that most of those users are human
- eurleif 2mo agoNetcraft confirms it...
- paxys 2mo agoSource: vibes
- rvz 2mo agoImagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.
- NitpickLawyer 2mo agoDepending on how this data is being collected, a factor could be the rise of search / fetch / scrape capabilities, added in lots of places. Agentic this, google killer that, and so on. The easiest way to parse web content nowadays is to load up a browser and drive that. And thats easier to do with linux / mac distros, both at scale (i.e. datacenter based solutions) and at home. As a bit of a side note, this year I started noticing captchas / cf verify speed bumps while browsing from the same residential ISP with the same mac laptop. I never used to get them. Maybe has to do with all that "buy a mac mini" craze that happened a while ago.
- toplinesoftsys 2mo agoYes, the dam has been broken. Major linux distibutions are getting polished for many decades already and they are totally ready for the mainstream adoption. No amount of marketing will be able to reverse this trend. Considering that Big Tech is spending all their earned money (and even more by borrowing from investors) on AI, nobody will be even trying.
- kibwen 2mo agoIt's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even want to be in the consumer desktop OS market anymore, they'd rather pivot to being pure B2B like IBM did. Likewise, it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification and infantilization of their OS until it will eventually be useless for anything except developing iOS apps. So neither major player will bother spending a marketing budget to reverse this trend; they'd rather not play the game at all. On the flipside, fewer and fewer people will have traditional desktops in the first place; owning only a phone and no PC at all is the new normal.
- andsoitis 2mo ago> it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification What’s an example of a specific iOS-indication in macOS that makes the OS worse?
- fragmede 2mo agoLaunchpad. It sucks on macOS. You can just not use it but it's there. Fullscreen apps and Spaces. My Mac isn't an iPad, but their window manager wants me to use it like one. Hidden scrollbars. App sandboxing.
- olyjohn 2mo agoI think people don't know what OSX was like, when it was a glorious Unix system that did what you wanted. It let you install extensions and run unsigned code. Now its just a boring locked down iOS that has a windowing interface.
- raincole 2mo agoOS X: 21.14% macOS: 8.6% Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself. Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/ https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
- prologic 2mo agoAren't macOS and OS X the same thing? > Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.
- kelnos 2mo agoI think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?
- eddythompson80 2mo agoEven if you assume OS X is 1999-2016 and macOS is 2016- then the numbers are still odd.
- prologic 2mo agoThis is what Wikipedia has recorded.
- philistine 2mo agoI presume Chrome on Mac still reports OS X as its OS, even when running a newer version. It is such a ridiculous idea not to put that together.
- kirb 2mo agoIt’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies. https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-gaining-market-share-in-2025/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-g...
- yoyohello13 2mo ago[flagged]
- sublinear 2mo agoAnd increasingly, reposting crap from Reddit.
- vector_spaces 2mo agoI recently googled the phrase "German Jews who voted for NSDAP" after seeing it mentioned in passing The AI overview contained the construction "Consensus on Reddit is..." What a time to be alive, I guess
- kjhbunkog 2mo agoNevermind the AI crap, your search query requiring a disclaimer (“after seeing it mentioned in passing”) is more worrying than anything else.
- vector_spaces 2mo agoWhat is the point of a sock puppet if you can't be explicit about what specifically you found worrying there? And I thought I was neurotic Anyway recently I watched a video in which Alan Derschowitz compared Jews who voted for Mamdani to Jews who voted for the NSDAP. The ridiculousness of the comment aside, I was curious to what extent this was actually a thing. It did happen but it was a tiny number of fringe German nationalist Jews, <1% of voting age Jews -- but still a fair bit more than what one might expect given that the NDSAP was not mincing words when describing their intentions with Jewish people. Those who supported them regardless included Max Naumann, who went on to collaborate with the Nazi government as leader of the VnJ movement, through which he pushed for Jewish pacification and assimilation as an answer to antisemitism. There were others -- though vanishingly few -- who collaborated in various ways, with enthusiasm seemingly beyond what was coerced. Those who were publicly Jewish usually ended up being targeted by the Nazi regime in the end regardless -- VnJ was outlawed and Naumann was picked up by the Gestapo a few years before he died of cancer. The Nazis viewed Jews as politically irredeemable so extensive collaboration was not generally sufficient to save anyone
- andrewstuart 2mo agoI do not believe this. Unless it’s some sort of tricksy word game or counting android or something. There is 0% chance that 10% of desktops/laptops are running desktop Linux.
- gr_norm 2mo agoLogin-walled for me. Redlib link: https://safereddit.com/r/linux/comments/1vcpk8i/linux_desktop_market_share_has_hit_over_10_in https://safereddit.com/r/linux/comments/1vcpk8i/linux_deskto...
- Der_Einzige 2mo agoThe same people who believe these numbers also think open routers token measurements are indicative of total token demand - lol.
- simongray 2mo agoI don't think these numbers are correct, but desktop Linux is no doubt having its year now. So many big YouTube content creators are covering Linux content and switching to Linux specifically, since the major obstacle to switching (gaming) has now been solved. Add to that the push effect from the constant enshittification of Windows.
- myaccountonhn 2mo agoI think Linux is getting a lot more popular, but not this popular.
- padjo 2mo agoStatCounter is a joke.
- timbit42 2mo agoCloudflare is showing 9.2%. Steam is showing 7%. US gov is showing similar stats.
- factorialboy 2mo agoI'd pick major Linux Desktop Environments (KDE or GNOME for instance) over macOS and Windows any day of the week. I feel 3-4x more productive on Linux. With LLMs, I've been creating little desktop apps to fill the odd gaps. For example, yesterday, I made a little offline dictation app for KDE.
- jsnell 2mo agoFlagging since statcounter's data is just so unreliable that discussing it is like discussing last week's lottery numbers. (Just a couple of weeks ago there was an equally implausible frontpage post showing the Firefox had more than doubled in use in the US, to 12%, but only in the US, not in any other country. My money is on scraper bots identifying as Linux-Firefox, run from US IPs to minimize the impact of geo-blocking. But when Statcounter doesn't explain their methodology and doesn't care about the quality of their data, we'll never know.)
- Sammi 2mo agoBetter quality data comes from Steam with the qualifier that it only applies to Steam users. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ It's also showing Linux usage exploding in English speaking regions.
- Markoff 2mo agoDoes anyone has list of North America countries according Statcounter? Can't find their definition of NA whether it includes Mexico or not.