Linux hits nearly 4% desktop user share on Statcounter

I&#x27;m in way too much of a bubble. I worked at Microsoft for years and continued to run Windows for some time afterwards, sometimes dual booting with Linux. I&#x27;ve tried but always hated MacOS.<p>But Windows 8 completely broke me -- this was just an unusable OS, plastered with ads and shortcuts that didn&#x27;t work and a wildly inconsistent UI; big tiles one second, tiny icons the next, some things you had to double-click that used to be a single click, some things you still had to double-click. Some buttons were just plain text, others were buttons, others were just frames with text. It made you sign in with a Microsoft account for reasons never explained. It was just such a heap of garbage that I couldn&#x27;t do it any more. Trying to help family members who had trouble with their computers became a horrifying slog.<p>So I completely unplugged from Windows; switched to Chromebooks for casual stuff and recommended them to my family members, and a variety of Linux distributions for more serious stuff.<p>But I really know almost nobody who uses Windows; this is the bubble I&#x27;m in. Lots of people use MacOS, many people use Linux, and the others use ChromeOS. When I see a survey like this saying that 72% of users still use Windows I&#x27;m shocked to my core. I guess my next computer I&#x27;ll stick with Windows for a bit to see if things are more sane now.

Coincidentally I saw the latest Steam hardware survey results[0] just about an hour ago which says that Windows is dropping and macOS and Linux are both gaining:<p><pre><code> Windows -0.16% macOS +0.10% Linux +0.06% </code></pre> [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;hwsurvey&#x2F;Steam-Hardware-Softw...</a>

I realise for casual users Windows is always going to be the OS of choice if for no other reason than it comes pre-installed and most people don&#x27;t know how to reinstall an operating system.<p>However, Windows may be in trouble with more tech-literate people who do know how to change it. I can only speak for myself, but I&#x27;ve been a Windows user since 95. All but one of my programming jobs over the last 20 years have also been working on Windows. But I really dislike the direction Microsoft are taking and I find Windows to be terribly slow these days, with each version seemingly worse than the previous one. So I decided to look elsewhere.<p>A couple of months ago I bought a new laptop with the express intention of running Linux on it and giving it a good college try (I didn&#x27;t want to mess around with dual-booting and I still need Windows on my main PC for work... for now). I know very little about Linux, but I&#x27;ve decided I&#x27;m not going to use Windows past 10 so it&#x27;s time to find something else.<p>I went with Debian running dwm (Debian because I value stability over everything else, and dwm because I like the suckless philosophy) and it&#x27;s honestly surprised me how good it&#x27;s been. It&#x27;s SO snappy. Everything is instant. It&#x27;s really been a breath of fresh air.<p>I was especially dreading programming since I&#x27;ve solely used Visual Studio since Visual C++ 4.0 and don&#x27;t really know anything else. Anyway, I went all-in and started learning Vim, GDB, and Make, and boy do I feel like I&#x27;ve been missing out. I&#x27;m really enjoying programming again, which for me has just become a job over the years.<p>Anyway, my point is, if tech-literate people are willing to give Linux a try, I wonder how many of them would be as surprised as I was and may make the switch permanently. With Windows getting worse, and Linux getting better, maybe more than ever.

This is it! The year of the linux desktop is coming!

I find this sort of metric rather pointless...<p>For one, how do we define Linux desktop? ChromeOS is a distribution of Linux, unlike say Android even advertising official support for a Debian container to run Linux desktop software, and while it lacks GNU utils, Alpine does too and yet we still include it in this category...<p>Next is the whole way we&#x27;re counting the supposed number of Linux computers: user agents. There&#x27;s zero reason for browsers to provide true and specific user agents, in fact, true user agents often yield broken sites (like YouTube assuming ARM PCs are all a specific Chinese smart TV) or pose a great privacy risk. Certainly a significant percentage of Linux users made the choice against it, either by themselves or as a browser default.<p>Then there&#x27;s the fact specific demographics have their own distribution of platforms. For example, StackOverflow developer survey showed 40.23% of developers prefer Linux for personal use, compared to 31.07% who prefer MacOS. The absolute numbers matter little if your users in particular tend to be on a certain platform.

Long time windows user here, developer of cross platform applications for 30+ years.<p>Started getting very frustrated with the way windows treats its users. It’s simply a non starter for any serious user these days; what with the ridiculous resetting of all bing settings periodically, the non stop abuse of your login mode (live vs local), and man every time that fucking Out Of Box Experience wizard would start and interrupt your login I would nearly shit myself with annoyance.<p>…<p>Recently took a position on an all Linux dev project, totally removed windows from my life (and kids). Whole house runs Linux now.<p>Very happy not going back.

The existence of Linux and the abusive practices of Microsoft are a kind of daily reminder about why competition is so important even for basic, fundamental technologies like operational systems.<p>If Linux weren&#x27;t always behind the door threatening Windows, surely we would have today as the only option a hiper restricted OS with a terrible performance, a huge pice tag and horrible terms of use(well... this is already the case).

What&#x27;s impressive to me is how long Microsoft has been playing defence against the Linux Desktop successfully - they were doing this back in the 90s.

I&#x27;m curious how much of this can be attributed to the Steam Deck.

My experience:<p>- I have several rasperry PIs that perform various tasks, so yeah, they could generate Linux traffic (at least 3 of them are running)<p>- I game on a playstation. After work, I do not want to update steam, windows, uplay, drivers, origin, battlenet. I still use discs. When I want to play I insert disk and play<p>- I do not want to deal with limitations of Windows. Some programs display too much ads. I prefer fighting with app setup once, compile, etc. After creating scripts I can setup my machine again without any problems in minutes<p>- If my windows machine becomes slow it is often slow to download fresh ISO, and install it. I do not want to restore it from partition as I am not sure what kind of bloatware was installed by the manufacturer. On Linux I can download ISO and install it in maybe 15-20 minutes<p>- Most of my apps, self hosting is much easier for me to set up on Linux than on Windows. It may be because I do not know how to set it up properly in Windows<p>- In Windows I feel as guest, rather than admin of my machine<p>- I have set up some mini-PCs for my friends, since their Windows became unusable. After using Linux they could still use their machines (they use only browsers, Libbre Office suite, etc.)

I&#x27;m not a gamer, in fact I think they are mostly poison for the brain, but I really REALLY appreciate what steam&#x2F;valve&#x2F; proton whoever has done to help bring people over to the FOSS side. Ive converted a lot of kids when before I couldn&#x27;t convert anyone :-)

Microsoft did this to me.<p>If OneDrive didn&#x27;t hijack your filesystem, I would have dealt with auto-open edge links.<p>I tasted Fedora and... Oh my God Windows <i>sucks</i>. Like its awful in seemingly every way compared to Fedora Cinnamon. The UI&#x2F;the speed&#x2F;the experience is breathtaking.<p>Fedora Cinnamon is so good, I&#x27;ve become outspokenly anti-Debian&#x2F;Ubuntu for giving Linux a bad name. I&#x27;m amazed that an operating system this solid has been existing under my nose.

finally switched from Win10 to full time EndeavourOS KDE&#x2F;Plasma and havent looked back.<p>got sick of my OS customization getting reset after every unstoppable auto update. oh, and the ads. the constantly changing ui shenanigans.<p>i kept TPM 2 turned off to prevent Win11 from metastasizing its way onto the machine, but the straw that broke the camel&#x27;s back is that Win10 totally fucked up my dual boot setup after an OS auto-update.<p>btw, i used to roll my own winxp isos with sysprep and regedits baked in. all of that is impossible now without the unobtanium that&#x27;s Windows LTSC.<p>(my hardware&#x2F;usage is recent AMD thinkpad, time is spent mostly in browser, vscode, mpv, krita, darktable, terminal)<p>i do miss the Affinity products tho, they keep making them more Windows&#x2F;MacOS-only, now relying on the windows store&#x2F;msix installer, basically guaranteeing they&#x27;ll never work with Wine&#x2F;Proton :(

I&#x27;ve been playing with Linux desktops since the 90s. Every few years I load up a few distros in a VM to see what&#x27;s going on, and I just did that again over the holidays with some free time and a recent urge just to tinker with stuff. Some random, recent thoughts:<p>- Knowing how Linux works (and having the skill to use it) is hugely advantageous for most software developers and IT professionals--I personally wouldn&#x27;t hire an IT or DevOps admin who didn&#x27;t have some level of familiarity and comfort around Linux. Reckoning with the modularity and composability of Linux helps to build a deeper understanding of how computers work, and many of the most important IT topics of today (containers, cloud management) are built off Linux&#x2F;Unix fundamentals such as chroot and cgroups.<p>- I tried Arch for the first time and enjoyed it as a nostalgia trip. It reminded me of installing Redhat or Suse or Mandrake back in the 90s. I appreciate it for what it is--a tinkerer&#x27;s distro. I don&#x27;t understand the meme around it though, and found nothing esoteric about setting it up... Is manually partitioning a disk drive supposed to be a feat of strength today?<p>- On the other side of the distro spectrum, I&#x27;m mightily impressed by Zorin. Less so these days with Ubuntu. I get folks&#x27; distaste for Snaps over Flatpacks.<p>- I don&#x27;t get folks aversion to bloat. For me, finding the ideal setup was about installing everything a distro had to offer and then chiseling down. The exploration was always the fun in using Linux. I remember installing Suse back in the 90s with 10 different window managers and I loved fiddling with them all.<p>- Hyprland is really neat.

I&#x27;m not associated with System76 but if you currently use Ubuntu as your desktop check out Pop OS. It does a great job of smoothing some of the rough edges and has great support for Nvidia cards. After years of using Ubuntu exclusively, I switched to Pop OS about 4 years ago and never looked back. Note that my comment comes from using it as a desktop on my custom-built PC, not a laptop.

It will be interesting to see if W10 EOL end of 2025 will have any effect. That will instantly obsolete hundreds of millions of useable computers (everything before Q4 2017). For non power users that only need some web browsing and basic office functionality a switch to Linux would be perfect. A 10 year old laptop is fine as a web browsing machine.

Using the words of a true poet:<p>&gt; Up, up, up the ziggurat, lickety split<p>As Windows continues its enshitification, and as Valve continues investing into its awesome Steam Deck, I do hope the trend continues.<p>Personally, after using Steam Deck a lot, I bought a desktop and tried a standard distro (OpenSUSE in my case) for gaming. The experience has been not ideal, but doable. My issues:<p>- My Xbox controller worked, then suddenly stopped working. I&#x27;ve been using a PS controller instead which works great, but would vastly prefer the Xbox one.<p>- NVidia has been such a pain that I&#x27;m thinking of selling my current card and buying an AMD one. NVidia drivers are truly horrible. For example, during boot time, the proprietary drivers randomly fail (like 1 in 7 reboots), which is not catastrophic (the system recovers by itself) but does lengthen the boot process by roughly 1 minute (very noticeable when the whole computer normally boots in ~10s). Note that this is with the latest driver version, and even after modifying kernel parameters as per NVidia devs&#x27; advice.<p>- Some games still don&#x27;t work great under Proton (anticheat, mostly). This is expected and I&#x27;m quite fine with the current state of gaming compatibility on Linux, but might be surprising to some folks that are coming from Windows.<p>But overall, I can just play whatever is in my Steam library, and I truly love that.

In the stats from Wikipedia traffic[0], Linux&#x27;s share is more stable - ~2.1% for 2023, ~2.1% for 2020-2022, ~1.6% for 2016-2019 (I put the dates in the pie chart filter, and looked at the &quot;Linux&quot; and &quot;Ubuntu&quot; labels). By the way, there are some strange peaks in that data - Linux going up to 7% in single weeks, Ubuntu going from 0.2-1.0% baseline to 1-3% for a couple of months in 2022...<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;analytics.wikimedia.org&#x2F;dashboards&#x2F;browsers&#x2F;#desktop-site-by-os" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;analytics.wikimedia.org&#x2F;dashboards&#x2F;browsers&#x2F;#desktop...</a>

We&#x27;ll see if those numbers are stable, or on an upward trend. I can see why the numbers would be going up. I&#x27;ve been on macOS for almost 20 years and I&#x27;m not sure that my next workstation will be from Apple.<p>I still think the Mac is great, but as work require more and more Linux specific tools switching starts to make sense. All the tools I don&#x27;t already run in a terminal or in a VM is also available on Linux, the only Mac only application is Apple Mail and I&#x27;m not that attached to it.

probably the share of devs grows as more people are mobile only XD

This is not unexpected at all. 10 years ago I had a dual boot system, occasionally trying out games on Linux. Some of them worked out of the box, some of them worked after configuration, and some of them were totally borked. This year, I built a gaming PC, installed Arch Linux, installed Steam, installed Cyberpunk 2077, hit the green play button and that&#x27;s it, I can play recent AAA games without any problem. There are still issues around anti-cheat systems though, especially around the kernel-level ones.

&gt;Looking at December it shows Windows rising too, with macOS dropping down.<p>I posted something similar except for browser. [1] Desktop Browser Market Share Worldwide – December 2023, Safari saw a sharp decline to less than 9%, down from 14% in June.<p>It seems for whatever reason a lot of people tried Safari but then switched back to Chrome.<p>I wonder what were the reason the drove this action. And on the Linux 4% sharp increase in December.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38833412">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38833412</a>

I wish more people would use Ubuntu on their home PCs. It&#x27;s so easy to do. With so many things being web based it&#x27;s never been easier to switch to Linux.

Linux already has the largest market share because of Android, ChromeOS, embedded devices. The 4% here actually refers to GNU&#x2F;Linux.

I think we&#x27;ll see the end of desktop OSs before we see macOS or Linux overtake Windows. I know a ton of people who don&#x27;t use a laptop for desktop PC outside of work at all. Their computing is accessed entirely through a smartphone. The desktop OS will become a niche thing for offices and gamers, but I think desktops will eventually be on their way out

I&#x27;m one of those long-time programmers who has run Linux on the desktop for decades, and I also use Android out of a sense of obligation for running comprehensible, auditable, open source software in as many places as practical. Also, IMO, there is something important about using the &quot;non-dominant&quot; platform as a techie. I might need to start using Firefox (rather than Chrome&#x2F;Chromium) for the same reason.<p>I have no regrets about Linux on the desktop over decades. Using my Linux desktop is a joy, and I always viewed Linux system administration as a worthwhile skill which I have cross-applied professionally in the realm of cloud servers and DevOps.<p>In the period where Windows had dominant market share, I relegated Windows usage to a VM for a handful of software packages (e.g. Quickbooks), running on my Linux host.<p>Sometime around 2018, I realized I hadn&#x27;t booted a VMWare VM in a few years, so I could just delete that VM guest, and the host software, too.<p>Nowadays, I basically ignore the entire Windows desktop space in my everyday computing. I keep an eye on Windows 11 via a Media PC I use for streaming edge cases to my TV, like old Blu-ray or DVD rips. I use a proprietary desktop via a Mac Mini, which is my dedicated &quot;Zoom call box&quot;, but also where a handful of proprietary apps live. I don&#x27;t need desktop Quickbooks anymore, so instead this is my way of accessing things like MSWord, MSExcel, Acrobat, and ScanSnap software. Basically, those rare situations where web software alternatives won&#x27;t work.<p>Here&#x27;s an interesting question I&#x27;ve been thinking about: in 2023, why are so many developers encountering Linux in their day-to-day lives even if they aren’t running Linux as their main workstation OS?<p>For Windows developers, it’s the rise of WSL. Windows was always missing a great UNIX shell and now WSL provides it in spades.<p>For macOS developers, it’s native support for Linux VMs &amp; containers as well as the rise of Apple Silicon &amp; ARM. These two trends make it so that macOS’s BSD heritage and local terminal is a less comparatively useful proxy for local development (vs just running a local VM or container running Linux, which is now easy enough, and fast), whereas perhaps in past years the BSD heritage was good enough to e.g. run Python, Ruby, or Node.<p>For all developers, Linux is the standard deployment environment in the cloud, whether you are using Amazon EC2 or Google GCE or something else like DigitalOcean. Even developers running Linux workstations find a need to virtualize and containerize Linux environments, but this can now be done in a lightweight way with F&#x2F;OSS options.<p>For all developers, IDEs have gotten better at working with remote Linux machines, or local containers. See VSCode “Remote” extension, and private networking tools like Wireguard, Tailscale, ZeroTier.<p>Finally, Linux has showed up in a lot of “long tail” hardware use cases, such as Raspberry Pi, Android, NAS devices, Steam Deck, etc.<p>So I wouldn’t really call 2023 (or 2024) the year of the Linux “desktop”, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Linux is the “#1 #2 operating system”.<p>That is, it’s not the OS everyone runs on their workstation, but it is the OS everyone runs in their workstation, from their workstation, or around their workstation. It’s the closest thing developers have to a “standard development &amp; deployment OS” even while their workstations and desktop environments fracture on Windows&#x2F;Mac&#x2F;LinuxDistro lines.<p>And if a developer has a homelab server or a favorite remote development VM, it is almost certainly running Linux and accessed via ssh.

Ubuntu is an amazingly mature Desktop without the MS bloatware. For my AI work, I fully rely on it. Would I use it if I had to make only Powerpoint slides and Word docs? Likely not.

Doesn&#x27;t surprise me. I&#x27;ve used primarily Linux on a laptop and a little System76 Meerkat desktop since 2015.<p>There are a few odd edge cases but most things run smoothly.

Finally, the year of Linux on the desktop.<p>(Meanwhile, my laptop running Ubuntu still won&#x27;t sleep properly. It just spontaneously wakes up and drains its whole battery).

This data is highly suspect. Just last year they had “unknown” at 12%, and the recent macOS drop strains belief.<p>Most likely this reflects increased bot activity.

I think it will continue to grow, as the two major OS&#x27;s have each become enshitified in their own way; Windows with ads at every turn, and macOS with &#x27;security&#x27; restrictions and limitations anytime you deviate from the annointed path.

The Steam Deck might have something to do with this.

Surprising, given the Wayland&#x2F;GNOME sabotage.<p>(I installed Ubuntu 22.04 on a Dell XPS 17 yesterday. After running apt update &amp;&amp; apt upgrade it boots into a black screen)

Linux can conquer the PC desktop by just sitting still while Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows. Mac also grows this way, but you get way more bang for your buck $&#x2F;performance wise with commodity hardware vs. Apple hardware.

I wonder if smartphone usage has any influence in this. I would guess a lot more &quot;casual&quot; internet users use their phone to browse the internet. And maybe more .. eh, lets call them &quot;advanced&quot; users are part of the desktop share?

It&#x27;s never going to happen