Linux Hits Nearly 4% Desktop User Share on Statcounter - Slashdot
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Linux Hits Nearly 4% Desktop User Share on Statcounter
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Linux Hits Nearly 4% Desktop User Share on Statcounter (gamingonlinux.com) 115
Posted by msmash
on Thursday January 04, 2024 @09:40AM from the encouraging-feedback dept.The latest from Statcounter shows for all of 2023 below:
January - 2.91%
February - 2.94%
March - 2.85%
April - 2.83%
May - 2.7%
June - 3.07%
July - 3.12%
August - 3.18%
September - 3.02%
October - 2.92%
November - 3.22%
December - 3.82%
Looking at December it shows Windows rising too, with macOS dropping down. If we actually take ChromeOS directly into the Linux numbers for December 2023 the overall number would actually be 6.24% (ChromeOS is Linux after all).
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What's BeOS?
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It's the OS that Apple should have adopted instead of NeXTStep.
However, BeOS came with JLG and OSX came with Jobs. They chose the latter, then he killed himself with hippie-ass cancer "treatments" and died, and they got stuck with the inferior OS and the inferior CEO, too.
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pancreatic cancer is tough regardless of what treatments you get. And back then, there were fewer treatment options.
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Except for the type of pancreatic cancer he had, which has a 97% survival rate. That small percentage is made up of people who choose the hippie option and don't get proper medical treatment. Jobs killed himself because he though some hippie whack job knew better than somebody who knew how to treat it. There can be situations where you know the doctors misdiagnosed you because their diagnosis flys in the face of what you told them, but this wasn't one of them and the correct solution in that case I mention
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and jabbers who died of heart failure
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You fucking dope.
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It's the "I am rich so I whatever I think must be right" syndrome. Endemic to that ilk. Corporate flavor is endemic too.
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One good thing that came out of Job's foolishness is that it moved the consequences of rejecting science based treatments in favor of fantasy treatments to the forefront for a little while.
Although it is likely impossible to determine the impact of this, I suspect that there are some number of people alive today who would not be if they hadn't been tipped over to the "conventional treatment" rather than "fantasy treatment" side by Job's idiocy.
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Iâ(TM)d argue it also pushed Apple to make health integrations, health data capture, and display of that data very important to how they built out iOS and Apple Watch.
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well, they wanted to and they might have gone with beos if gassée hadn't pushed the bid as far as he did. valuated at 80m, offered 200m and expecting 275m... that would have been a better ceo for apple? was he even in the deal?
maybe beos was the better option to build a new os, but he would have a hard time beating jobs' record as a ceo: he literally saved a company on the brink which has become a billion dollar corporation almost entirely living off jobs' heritage.
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One core difference you are missing is that for the same amount of money as Gasse was asking for the rights to BeOS Apple could buy the NeXT company in its entirety. It meant that the the NeXT employees could (finally) cash out their stock options and enter become Apple employees or comfortably retire.
I've used a BeOS machine; it was nice but I do prefer OS X.
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Haiku has roughly no hardware support and even installing it in a VM can be problematic. There's no good reason to keep it going if they can't solve the driver problem, and how could they?
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Haiku is a reimplementation, not a fork.
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It lives on as Haiku. In a similar way, OS/2 Warp has been rebranded as ArcaOS.
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It's numbers are in outer space...
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I'm curious if SteamOS is being counted as "Linux" as well. Those Steam Deck gaming consoles seem to be selling pretty well.
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Much more than chrome os as it's built on a real linux distro.
All the ambiguity is taking our OS name from a kernel:)
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Yeah, the ambiguity is what drove me to BSD...
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Isn't Chrome OS based on Debian these days? I know it used to be Gentoo for a bit. Or am I conflating Chromium OS with Chrome OS?
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The Linux container you can use to run Linux apps in on ChromeOS uses Debian by default but the underlying OS is still based on Gentoo I believe.
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In what way is Chromeos not a real linux distribution?
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Indeed, I don’t have a Steam Deck but Steam works well enough on Linux (thanks to Proton) that it’s my main gaming PC. All those people who would say “I’d move to Linux but I need Windows for the games” now have a project for the New Year!;) Last I checked the biggest shortcoming is that online multiplayer titles that depend on anticheat software do not yet work with the anticheat, but even looking at the recent Proton changeling, it’s something they’re currently a
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Once Valve does a full SteamOS that supports a full suite of desktop PC parts (CPU, GPU, etc.) I think that Linux will get a huge bump in people switching to it full time. Ought to be interesting, for sure. Yes, yes, I know that it can be done already. I've tried several modern distros and none of them are quite good enough for me to switch full time.
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My guess is that at least some of the increase, possibly a large part, is govt transition to Linux desktops from Windows. Quite a few countries have FOSS-first policies & a number of European govt agencies have already successfully transitioned. Govts are big users of desktop & laptop PCs. I wonder if Windows 11 being incompatible with existing hardware might speed the transition up in some cases, i.e. govts see that they may have to upgrade hardware more often with Windows & that Linux can run
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SteamOs is Arch Linux but i suspect few people use their steam decks to browse the net. So i doubt they count that much on statcounter.
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Has to be something like that.
Certainly, there's folks like me running Ubuntu or some other traditional distro as their main desktop, but the number of those folks didn't increase by 50% in a year.
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If you are savvy enough, you can run anything made for another distro in any Linux distro, even some proprietary software. I think that is what makes Linux a family of operating systems. However, if you intend to do the same on ChromeOS, it will not work, and if you buy a Chromebook and intend to install Linux, you are in a worse situation than if you buy a Windows device or a Mac. I think that since ChromeOS doesn't play along with other Linux-based OSs, it should be considered something else.
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The same can be said for WSL on Windows. For a while I was using a Windows system but 90% of the time I was actually using Linux via WSL2. How do you count those users?
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I can run pretty much any Linux app on ChromeOS.
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Actually, if it doesn't work it just means you are not savvy. Google's hacks are minor and you can work around them with a few symlinks.
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I'd say ChromeOS is Linux in the way that social democracy is socialism.
And yeah, have you ever tried installing Linux apps on ChromeOS? ChromeOS is even more of a walled garden than MacOS. Completely antithetical to the spirit of Linux & FOSS. -
Actually, the same way revisionist troll is slashdot poster.
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Microsoft finally made Windows bad enough to get people to start switching to Linux full-time.
End-of-Lifing Windows 7 is what pushed me. I flirted with Windows 8 briefly but it was too crap.
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"Windows 8 drove me to drinking."
And I never even thanked it...
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I've been using Windows 11, but I'm tired of Microsoft's aggression in trying to force me to use Edge and Bing. Funnily enough, Windows Explorer is the killer app that's kept me using Windows. The amount of metadata it shows, combined with its good response to keyboard shortcuts and somewhat acceptable context menus, set it above anything I've seen on Linux--and I did look pretty hard, uncovering gems such as ROX-Filer. (And that's despite it not having history or bookmarks yet.) But I don't like being push
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Tried Dolphin?
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My thoughts.
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They also made it very easy to run Linux within Windows which, depending on how they count, may also inflate the Linux numbers.
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thank you, voice of logic. no one in their right mind uses linux desktop. neckbeards don't count as persons
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My lovely girlfriend uses Linux as a desktop on both of her systems. No neckbeard to be seen on her.
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No one in their right mind uses Windows desktop, you mean. I have no choice but to use it on my work mail and skype station, and it's really crummy these days. On the workstation I do real work, I can run Linux, and it's so much better it's not even funny.
At home I also run Linux. And now, when I game, I use a Steam Deck. Everything just works, and it's really sweet. Best of all, no ads in the start menu, and no phoning home except if I want it to.
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I have a X1 Lenovo running Kubuntu and also use it for work.
I work remotely and the company insists on Teams and Outlook, they run very well in Chromium.
For office use I'm quite happy with Libre Office, Firefox an Thunderbird are my private go-to's.
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Congrats, you picked the worst version since Win ME to try. Your Win 7 license gives you the ability to run Win 10 for free, give it a try - there's no tablet interface, and it is quite stable & still supported for almost two more years.
Personally, I gave up on Linux when I had to shovel 14 floppies into my desktop and then had to inure out modelines to run X Windows on my obscure VESA bus video card.../sarcasm
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Your Win 7 license gives you the ability to run Win 10 for free, give it a try
Not any more, they killed that option some time around October or November. Existing upgraded systems still work, but I read about someone who updated his BIOS and he had to buy a new MS Key.
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I put my old hard drive in a new motherboard and now my key is permanently out of compliance. They finally closed that loophole.
All I use windows for at this point is the rare AAA game that won't run in linux under steam's "proton" branch of WINE, and fusion 360
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It was the "r u legit" tech help phone number that pushed me.
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This exactly. I had not upgraded our home systems to Win11, so I didn't have much experience on it.
Then our office pushed new Win11 laptops to everyone last year, and it has been incredibly infuriating. The damn forced updates are so in-your-face now it has driven me to strongly consider going Linux at home. I even had it happen that I was in the middle of a conference call, speaking at the moment, when Win11 pushed some update that kicked me off the call, and then spent 15 minutes rebooting and install
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But yeah who needs to RTFS? lolol M$ BAD!!
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It appears they use data from websites that use their products as the sample to calculate overall statistics. If that is the case for browsers, it appears Linux is about 1.5% of all browser users. [statcounter.com]. Since mobile devices account for about 50% of all devices, that would put Linux at 3%. Their OS chart does not include linux, so I used the number for December 23 in the headline.
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I still say Android is Linux. Yeah it's a weird variant, but normal Linux software can run JUST FINE on it, provided it's built for the right arch. I've been using Unix and Unixlikes for decades, and the userland of Android is quite familiar as well. The "average" user* can get everything they were hoping for out of Linux with Android+Termux.
*Obvs the average user doesn't know what Unix is, but IKYKWIM
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The problem for Android is that it isn't "Linux" the way Linuxheads want it to be Linux. That's not Android's problem to solve though, as Android is a functional desktop in the same way that Windows is functional; that being my Mother-in-Law can make use of it to do the things she needs without much fuss most of the time. No, she doesn't use command-line, but she also doesn't need to. And that is a good thing.
ChromeOS is similar state, but even further away from what Linux power users might want.
My personal
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"Linux" but not "GNU/Linux", there you go.
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Your Greybeard is showing !
(yes, I resemble that!)
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My parents got sick of having to deal with Windows and its weird updates that kept breaking things, so I installed Linux for them six years ago. Since then, there has been zero support needed except I do the occasional LTS version jump for them.
Both Android and Linux are way more functional than Windows in that regard. They just work. With the difference that Android can't be upgraded after a while due to planned obsolesence by the chip manufacturer.
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Heh. It would be better for Android if it weren't Linux. The majority of critical security vulnerabilities year after year are all from the kernel, even excluding drivers. Syzkaller alone has proven that Linux is a security nightmare; they're finding vulnerabilities so fast that the kernel devs don't even pay attention -- but you'd better believe attackers are. Android would be much better off if Linux were replaced with something smaller and simpler, but the Android system is far too invested in Linuxisms.
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MACH kernel, BSD userspace, Apple skin.
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I don't understand why you felt the need to go to the "overall OS" stats and try to roughly extrapolate back to "Desktop" when the summary directly links to "Desktop" in the first place, with presumably more sophisticated understanding of the detailed data than rough estimations of how much is mobile versus desktop.
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I've just looked at the graph for desktop OS usage and noticed that "unknown" had a noticeable peak on April and May 2023. Got any theory to that?
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That would explain a few things.
I was wonering how this number is possible when another recent headline said that Firefox's market share had dropped to barely 3%. Somehow, I doubted that at least a quarter of all Linux users (assuming a Firefox share of 0 on Windows and Mac!) choose Chrome. But if 2.5% of those 4% Linux users are SteamOS or Android, it's more believable.
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I know i have had a buildup of old machines that are horribly skow with windows 10 but just fine with manjaro kde linux. I'm installing it a lot.
I repeat, manjaro kde.
One more reminder that this is not a plug for manjaro kde.-
KDE doing well on machines that Windows deems insufficient says a lot about how slow and bloated Windows is.
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Yup. I was very surprised. Not just much faster but much more stable. In particular windows kept dropping the HDMI audio but no issues in Manjoro KDE. I have transparencies and other rendering eye candy going, no issues.
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Also, you don't have to put up with shit like surprise reboot for mystery exploit patch while you're in the middle of an important video conference.
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KDE was heavy in the late 90's and early 00's. Since the 10's to now it's been middling to low resource use, comparatively. Sure, it's heavier than running a raw WM with no or minimal daemons, but it hasn't been on the heavy side for a long time now.
Windows on the other hand has just gotten heavier and heavier. I don't even know what they're doing with all that CPU. Many services just chomp it down without appearing to do anything useful. And using a spinning disk is nuts, it just never gets to park and sle
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It never was, really, Always had a superior footprint compared to Gnome, notwithstanding heavy propaganda to the contrary. There was a time when it suffered from dynamic linking overhead, which was fixed both by reducing the number of links and improving the linker.
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Yes, Gnome was always heavier, and remains heavier to this day. It's pretty bad. The Pop OS fork is for some reason better in my anecdotal experience. But both were pretty heavy back around the 00's, compared to what many distros would default to shipping.
Today, of course, neither comes close to Windows in heaviness. Though Gnome certainly tries.
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at that rate, the year of the linux desktop could be as early as 2120
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except "Linux" boxes will actually be running a massive incomprehensible grey box, systemd, that will make troubleshooting impossible
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Sigh, the major distros have spolen Systemd us where it 's at now, it might not be oprimal but waiting your energy on being repeatedly annoyed by it does not help you. Btw is systemd really that bad? Yea we had that ussue where it killed porocesses on dutatched consoles (rendering tmx useless) but that was more about a bad default config, and if memmoey serves it was rather quickly dealt with
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Systemd isn't actually that bad. Not great, but there are worse things out there, especially on Windows. Systemd does tend to expose warts in connection with use cases the authors never tried and never cared about, but these get fixed over time. In most cases the fix is pure configuration without requiring any patch to Systemd. Mind you, I do have my issues with Systemd, for example there are way too many cases where it gets stuck in shutdown, e.g, waiting for some process to finish that never does.
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In itself, it's not so bad. Where it got obnoxious is when Red Hat tied it into unrelated software, like Pulse Audio and Gnome, making it pretty much a prerequisite to running any kind of a functional linux system.
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Where there are places where Linux is really good and has plenty of market share, and other places where it struggles with low market share. Supercomputers are an example where Linux won. IoT is also mostly won but VXworks still hangs on in some niches. We won the browser war where most browsers descend from a KDE project. On the desktops things have advanced realy fast in 2023 to my surprise, fixing a large amount of bugs. The true "final boss" of Linux adoption is the anti cheat developers relying on secu
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...Adobe deliberately forcing you to use their subscription racket on a unfriendly OS.
What do you need Adobe for that you can't replace with FOSS? If you need.pdf files, LibreOffice can do them just fine. If you need page layout, Scribus is a fully featured commercial quality page layout program that's FOSS. And, of course, there are.pdf readers available as well. Just go FOSS and ditch Adobe.
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A lot of big moves happened for December.
The last time someone noticed such a random anomaly in this sort of statistics, turned out the curator of the statistics did a methodology change.
I doubt the market shifted as dramatically for December in practice as is illustrated on their data. I doubt in one month 25% of all macOS users suddenly gave up on macOS, which is something else their data suggests happened.
The longer scale trend is appearing positive, but I think I'm inclined to ignore December data given
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Maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong, but December was the only month that came close to 4%. The previous record was closer to 3% if we're doing rounding.
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...2024 is the year of Linux on the desktop!!!!
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Does that mean Ubuntu 22.04 won't have a floppy disk icon on the left side of the desktop when I install it under VMWare Fusion, like 20.04 does? WTF?!
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And 2025 will be 5%. See the pattern?
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Outside the office, I would estimate >50% of the laptops I see are Macs. So Macs dropping market share doesn't reconcile with what I'm seeing in the wild. At my office, it's close to >90% Macs. In my circle of friends and family, it's probably 75% Macs. I haven't personally seen any evidence of Windows is making a coming back. Granted, my experience is US centric. I'm sure less wealthy countries have a higher proportion of cheap Windows machines given there's no such thing as a cheap Mac. The limiting
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Your observations are just anecdotal though. I can add an opposing anecdote. It's irrelevant.
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As irrelevant and failing as Windows is (based on your world view), Microsoft seems to be doing OK - Win 10 and Win 11 are fine desktop/laptop OSes and the vast, vast majority of computer buyers and users choose it over Uber-proprietary MacOS or free-as-in-beer Linux. Name me the major corporation with over 1,000 employees that isn't running windows on the desktop (besides Apple)?
You remind me of the New York socialite that commented she had "no idea how Nixon won the election - no one she knew voted for hi
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I agree with you on choosing MacOS versus windows.
I disagree on your assestment that most users chose it over linux (maybe as a passive choice since their computers have it installed already.) Most users would be stuck on creating a bootable USB device or get scared that they could not get Windows back if they installed Linux - if they have even heard of linux.
That said, the reason doesn't matter. Windows still is winning but not on any machines in my home:)
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The correct conclusion to take from these observations plus the documented statistics is that your local sample is unrepresentative, not that the statistics are incorrect.
Indeed.
And there are more than 2x as many Android devices as iOS devices.
And if we include all of the microcontroller OSes, it's even smaller yet.
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Outside the office, I would estimate >50% of the laptops I see are Macs. So Macs dropping market share doesn't reconcile with what I'm seeing in the wild. At my office, it's close to >90% Macs. In my circle of friends and family, it's probably 75% Macs. I haven't personally seen any evidence of Windows is making a coming back.
Wow, you hang out in very different circles than I do; the last time I saw a Mac was at the last Cisco Live! conference I went to, which was six years ago, and the only Linux wor
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I work at a high tech company, and of everyone I associate with there, exactly one person uses a Mac outside the office. More people use Solaris, to put that into some perspective.
Windows is irrelevant in the cutting edge sectors, yes, but it has always been. That doesn't matter. Microsoft's bread and butter isn't in the cutting edge sectors, but in established companies, and there you will find that all desktops and lots of back end run Windows, often with proprietary solutions on top built on Microsoft pr
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Is what I want. I don't want Windows 11, or a Linux OS that has second class third party support and/or a UI that has inconsistent or duplicated ways of doing things.
Unfortunately Apple will never sell it for PC because it's all about their hardware sales:(
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I find the long-term trends [statcounter.com] more interesting. No matter how you look at it, Windows' dominance has been eroding over the past 15 years. It still has ~73% according to StatCounter, but the decline is steady and I can't see any reason to believe that trend won't continue. The other interesting thing is that it's not just one OS that's gaining, it's numerous. As more services go online, it's becoming easier to switch operating systems. And the end of support for Win7/8.1 on Steam may encourage even more p
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These things level off rather than continue on a downward trajectory. Mostly the desktop OS market is dead, and what we're seeing is less emphasis on platform. A significant number of applications that people use everyday are web-based now. And there an increasing number of companies making apps that target some generic runtime or use a language that is easy to compile for multiple OSes. I think we're seeing an end of the age of there being a dominate player in the OS market , which is a very different stor
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Taking into account the relentless efforts by the Gnome team to keep Linux practically unusable in the desktop, this is compelling news.
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It's officially the Year of the Linux Desktop. Again.
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I don't care whatever people choose for home. Whatever works for them is just fine with me. I'm no particular fan of Microsoft. But until some other vendor comes out with anything approaching the capabilities of Active Directory and GPO (for all their faults such as the Registry,) Microsoft will dominate the business desktop/laptop market. And I'm OK with that too.
The only way I really see this changing would be if we move back to the thin-client model, be it web-based apps or whatever. Otherwise there is simply no other Enterprise solution for endpoint-management that comes close to Microsoft's. And the best part is, Microsoft didn't even invent most of it.
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The Steam Deck is most likely the cause of the latest bump. Hardly a desktop, but it is a rather typical Linux distro, now based on Arch it seems.
ChromeOS could also be considered Linux, but it is its own category, so it can't be that.
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The year of Linux on the desktop!
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You could argue that it is the DRM that behaves badly.
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