The Quiet Revolution: GNU/Linux Crosses 6% Desktop Market Share—And It’s Just the Beginning
The Quiet Revolution: GNU/Linux Crosses 6% Desktop Market Share—And It’s Just the Beginning – Purism
At work, the windows outage spooked management hard. They noticed that our small amout of Linux servers didn't go down. So now they are OK with us using Linux more. After many decades of Windows.
What Windows outage?
Maybe the CrowdStrike outage last year
Not certain what others experienced, but in my company, a bad Windows Update knocked out most of our computers for a full day. It was so bad, you can see it in like monthly financial reports when it happened.
It was one of the motivators for why my job dropped Microsoft.
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025.
Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer.
But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
Installed linux for my brother-in-law and for a professor last month. Both liked it and are probably going to use it insted of moving to win11. I'm doing my part.
o7
What distro did you go with?
Linux mint for my brother-in-law, and debian for my professor, because he said he has an aversion to stuff changing in his computer and wanted something that stayed almost the same in 10 or 20 or years from now and didn't fail him. He seemed enthusiastic with the concept of a distro that focuses on stability and wanted it, even if I said that it's a bit harder to use and recommended linux mint.
Is this the century of Linux?
That could actually be a reasonable view, considering Windows has fallen off since the late 90's or early 00's, depending on what version you draw the line on.
To be fair, it is pretty hard to keep increasing your market share when you get closer and closer to 100%.
But yes, 2000 or XP was the last respectable version of Windows. Maybe Win7, but I never used it.
Windows is falling off because they missed the mobile boat.
Most people never needed a full computer. All they do is consume and a phone and iPad is more than enough for that.
The desktop market is shrinking and the steam deck is pumping Linux numbers in an increasingly smaller pond.
Hi hello, this is partly me. My bad. I’m not moving to Win11 (by force and by choice) so I installed Arch just to start to get the hang of things and, well, now I’m just daily driving it.
I’ve run distributions in the distant past and toyed with recent ones. I think this one is staying though.
Feels good that when my computer is idle, it’s not busy spouting off telemetry to some server somewhere. I can customize way more than before, and with Proton, I can still play the games I want to.
Hi you, this is me too, didn't want to buy new hardware too just because MS wants me to. i went with Nobara because it liked my Nvidia GPU a lot more than many other distros, and deleted my windows partition after 3 days - i expected it to take a lot longer than that to feel safe doing that, but it just works and i can do more with my PC than i ever could with windows.
We are doing our part :-)
One of the hottest pics on the internet ❤️🐧
Please mark this as NSFW ( not safe for Windows)
Good choice! A tip: many media apps are better being installed as a Flatpak and not from the Fedora rpms. Many Fedora packages, such as VLC, are missing specific codecs and the Flatpak versions can generally play everything.
a little correction: its not VLC that misses the codec, but the distribution. most distros dont risk distributing hardware acceleration drivers for h264 and a few others because of patents
To be clear, flatpaks from flathub. Fedora has their own flatpak repository, and those are not the flatpaks you are looking for.
Be aware though, that flatpaks can fill up your drive very quickly. Using something like Warehouse and Flatsweep every now and then to clean things up can free up a shocking amount of space.
I thought this was a book at first glance
Welcome!
If you like Fedora and are looking for something gaming focused and stupidly stable, check out Bazzite. It's based on Atomic Fedora
Kids really need to be introduced to Linux earlier. None of this iPad baby shit.
Specifically, kids ought to be using Raspberry Pis. Linux + a bunch of other stuff designed to help them learn about computers, including an actual goddamn book ("Raspberry Pi Beginners Guide") if you buy a Raspberry Pi 500 (the built-into-a-keyboard version).
Oh hell yes get them off these crappy mobile devices
Yup, every time my niece and nephew come over I show them how awesome my desktop is! They also use my laptop but I want them to know what a proper PC can do.
Next up is showing them that the files they download don't just magically disappear into the ether on their device.
I think mobile devices aren't all bad.
Honestly the biggest issue is the exposure to marketing
Honestly I think we need more open less harmful mobile platforms. Mobile devices are perfectly fine but the ads and tracking can be a very serious problem.
Me: Junior! Did you hack a Gibson???
5yo: Maaayyybe...
I mean technically its linux
iPads are technically BSD, not Linux.
Technically, Android is Linux (but not GNU/Linux), but as @grue@lemmy.world mentioned, i(Pad)OS is based on BSD ("Darwin"), a UNIX derivate.
Both are unixoid systems.
Termux
All my extended family has been converted to linux because all they need is a browser, libre office and rustdesk for me to tech support them. The only issue is still printers but tbh they are equally awful on all platforms these days.
I thought Linux had decent printer support compared to windows.
It does, in my experience. At least in Linux Mint.
At home, my old Brother laser is tucked off in a far corner of the house connected to wifi, and my wired home PC as well as my wifi work laptop both see it and can print to it just fine.
At work even those big printers show up and function.
I think they are comparable in that regard honestly?
Printer manufacturers obviously try their best to make their printers work well with Windows.
Printer support on Linux is provided by CUPS, which is developed by Apple. Apple wants its Mac (and maybe also iPhone and iPad?) customers to have good printer support, so they try their best to make CUPS work well.
Depends on the brand really. Some like HP and Epson haven't worked as good in my own experience compared to Brother.
Decent printers yes, some demons from ninth circle of hell somehow are more problematic on anything non-windows.
I did not know about rustdesk. It looks to be very promising, I will give it a try!
My gamer Brother-in-law asked me about Linux gaming. Until a few years ago he was all like "Windows is super!".
I recently wiped my 10yr running windows install that had all manner of shady hacks applied over the years to basically lobotomize it, after a hardware upgrade. As I was wiping I was largely intending to create another "lobotomized" win10 install as the second install on dual boot, but windows on top of everything is known for breaking dual boot. Working around sheer hostility at every level, and for what? Basically just to play pirated games since steam games work on Linux now. I never bothered trying to prop it back up and have been only better off for it
You can use Lutris to play pirated games on Linux
I was dualbooting of two seperate nvme drives for each os. Worked pretty well for almost a year until i distro hopped. But for some reason my windows boot partition was located on my linux drive which i purged entirely while installing the new OS. Because why would be there any windows component on my linux drive, right?
Recreating the windows boot partition on the correct drive was more complicated than anything i ever encountered on linux so far. Took like 5 hours and funnily enough was only doable via a terminal.
Also there isnt a reason left for me to put up with microsofts bullshit. A few weeks ago i got a racing game with VR and wheel support running in an afternoon. The title is even abandonware so i had to grab some repack with a windows only installer.
Is Linux desktop marketshare increasing or is desktop marketshare decreasing as a whole, though?
If you’re sitting on a Windows 10 machine that can’t upgrade to Windows 11, or if you’re tired of Apple’s walled garden, now’s the time to explore PureOS, a FSF endorsed GNU/Linux distribution.
God damn it. This is how you scare people away from Linux.
Linux market share is increasing even in the charts with all OSes, desktop and mobile.
Yes
The Quiet Revolution?
is this implying that windows is catholicism and we’re mass secularizing our computers?
cause hell yea
I thought the quiet revolution was a specific thing to Quebec.
Otherwise it’s just Sparkling Nonverbal Civil Disobedience.
It happened in Spain as well. I think currently in Ireland as well.
Once again, someone misreports the number. It's not 6% of desktop OS market share. It's 6% of all OS market share. There's about 50-50 split between desktop and mobile OSes, which means the correct desktop market share of Linux, according to that site, is 12%.
source: https://analytics.usa.gov/
This is the result currently (last 7 days):
Windows 35.5%
11 18.5%
10 16%
7 0.8%
2000 0.1%
8.1 < 0.1%
8 < 0.1%
iOS 29.6%
Android 15.9%
Macintosh 12.3%
Linux 5.2%
Chrome OS 1.4%
Other < 0.1%
If we exclude Android and iOS (which make for 29.6 + 15.9 = 45.5%), then the contribution of each of the others would increase (by 100/45.5 = 2.19), leading to 11.388% (5.2 * 2.19).
Linux being in double digits: you love to see it
Windows 2000 having a larger market share than 8: you also love to see it, lol. I had some fun years where I was mostly using UNIX for school stuff and Win2k for games.
thanks for the breakdown. i was going to ask if they were counting android as linux and using other shoddy methodologies, but this looks good to me
🐧🌊
Antarctica rises!
Who is using Linux, though? Like, 6% (or 11.3% as others have pointed out) means tens or hundreds of millions of people. But where are they?
How do we know these numbers indicate real people?
I've been advocating for Linux for decades. People who have historically just dismissed me have been trying and many have converted.
Also (credit where it's due) behind the scenes Valve has been greasing the wheels on a transition to Linux gaming … which has quite often been the biggest fiction point in the past.
I'vs seen several content creators outside the traditional Linux bubble try Linux, notably including PewDiePie.
Copilot has shaken many small businesses out of complacency, often into modern self-hosted turn-key Linux solutions.
I have friends on Windows 10 who tell me they will not move to 11 - they're hoping Microsoft folds, but they're beginning to build a Linux-shaped parachute.
Who is using Linux, though?
My parents, both of whom are 70+, are using Linux laptops. I installed it for them.
I've been using it for over 2 decades as a main OS. I loathe using windows now. Their ads, including web results, and privacy issues. It's just become cumbersome. You have multiple choices of desktop environments in linux. Don't like your current DE? Switch to another gnome, kde, cinnimon, mint, etc. You need a program? Install it from the package manager. Remote mount a drive? sure, you don't have to jump through hoops like windows.
Hi, I'm here. Been using Linux Desktop for years, not solely nor religiously, since I usually have more than one machines at a time. Work, personal, family and such.
Also, does it exactly matter? Hundred of thousands, millions probably, of devices run Windows and they're not desktop machines. Think info screens, ATMs, Kiosk devices, Industrial Machines and the list goes on.
The year of Linux is finally here. Let’s go!
I love to cheer for linux (Fedora user here 😎) but the math and logic in the blog post is off. Firstly, the linux desktop-share for US government websites is much higher, because to calculate it, you have to exclude iOS and Android. But then again, the data may be skewed and linux-users may just be much more prominent visitors of US government websites. I think this sounds credible as many linux users are technically apt and active citizens.
Nevertheless, if the trend is true it is encouraging! Cannot verify because analytics.usa.gov only provides data a calendar year into the past by default and I can't be bothered to get an api key to see if more can be fetched.
The real desktop linux share for the last 30 days can be calculated:
windows = 33.2
macos = 11.6
linux = 6.9
linux / (windows + macos + linux) = 0.13346228
So that's 13% of desktop users being on Linux. That's much more than I anticipated.
Its honestly one of the easiest things people can do to reject the messed up corporate dystopia we have. Especially if you do it with both computers and phones.
And not only an easy thing to do, but something that bothers the big tech a lot! If it didn't bother, they wouldn't care to invest so much in making it harder for us, and if it bothers them, it means we're on the right track.
I use Ubuntu btw in my old and new computers.
Fuck You, Macrohard
Canonical is rather evil these days. They aren’t anywhere near Murdersoft levels of evil, but there are still more ethical options.
It took a long time, but my company is fully off Windows.
Most of our workstations are on Linux. Unfortunately, the programmers and designers are still on Mac.
What a handsome bovine!
If the average tech nerd uses linux and uses two computers every day and the average non tech nerd has only one device and uses his computer only once a week.
Could this distort such a usage report?
I tried to find out how DAP identifies users and I think it's based on device fingerprinting rather than IP address. So, I think, if you were to use two separate linux devices to access a .gov site using DAP it would register as two separate users. I don't believe frequency of use matters.
Or 1 tech need has containerised 100,000 instances of Linux and is turning them on and off.
*For the USA government only
I'm already using Debian 13 on my work PC. It's a self-issued work PC, but still.
Penguin wave
I understand why Android is not counted as GNU/Linux desktop, but why is ChromeOS not counted as such?
1: It's being phased out by google, to be replaced with Android.
2: ChromeOS, unless being dualbooted with another, more full-fledged operating system, is little more than a web interface.
I think the reason is because chromeOS is not open source and goes against the ethos of what people consider a linux distro. ChromeOS markets itself as its own standalone thing. "linux" as we refer to it is more than just a kernel otherwise we'd count pretty much everything as Linux.
Even if its mostly a web interface, the underlying technology is a GNU/Linux desktop and can run native Linux applications.
It's not GNU enough.
Android is not GNU, full stop. It's not about "enough". GNU isn't something one can do partially.
Android is uses some GNU tools but so does Mac OS. Neither are consider GNU.
Even Windows has GNU tools but no one would say it's not GNU enough.
Chrome OS is its own beast. It is closer to Android under the hood.
I think the reason is much simpler. Browsers on chromeos use a different user agent than when running on linux distros and then it gets counted as a separate category. I don't know for the first source linked, but statcounter uses data from user agent strings.
The point is, if they know its ChromeOS, why don't the put it into the general Linux category? Like all Windows versions are counted as one Windows entry. I mean if Windows 2000 is in the same stats as Windows 11, then you have to include ChromeOS as Linux.
I also wonder if any Steam Deck user browsing in desktop mode had any impact on these data.
I am on linux mint on both my laptop and my desktop. I only need my phone to be degoogled and I will be all set.
Check out the supported device lists of Graphene OS, Postmarket OS and Ubuntu Touch.
As a long time Ubuntu touch supporter and tester, I unfortunately have to say that it simply isn't ready for a lot of users at the moment :(
Even if you're willing to put up with most of its shortcomings, VoLTE device support is extremely limited.
But don't get me wrong, I REALLY want this stuff to be the future, I think it just needs a bit more time.
Yes. I wanted to do that, but when my last phone broke it was a damn emergency. I was distrustful of phone protection because I remember getting a phone that was armored up in a case and had a tempered glass screen but... it once (first time) fell flat from my shirt pocket onto the ground flat on its front screen and it immediately went black. I had it fixed. New screen, new protector, but the protector made it possible to plug it into charge... so I had to remove it in and out of the case to do so, but the screen was broken from the pressing (like fucking how? A new changed screen AND another tempered glass cover and it was still broken just a stronger finger press?) It just kept breaking. I then refused to use protection for years after that.
But the new one I got? I think it is protection that actually works.
I got a Samsung S23. Before I get a new phone I need to remove 2fa from a lot of shit so they dont have my new phone.
I want to ask a hell of a lot more questions about this, but later.
My advice is to always go in short steps, proving the ground and getting to know the alternatives. I'd recommend installing f-droid and having fun testing all the free apps you can, removing google stuff one by one, then, after feeling comfortable, trying a custom rom, and when you eventually need a new phone, looking for a model more friendly to degoogling.
The next revolution will be digitalized.
I wonder if it isn't still just a piss in the wind. All Microsoft has to do is require something propretary and the US government and their customers will just roll it out. I don't fee like we have the ability to choose with our wallets anymore. If they can't win fairly, Microsoft will cheat and collude with other companies to make them your only option.
That is what they have always done. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
That is what they have always done. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Jesus, way to advertise your age, dude. This hasn't been the case for over 20 years. MS was the largest contributor to the Linux repos in around 2010 resulting in WSL. Nothing got extinguished, but we got a bunch of nice compatibility layers from it, not to mention people trying it out and then switching full-time to Linux.
5% is 1-20 users.
I doubt in my city that 1 in 20 people are using desktop Linux, which means there must be higher concentrations somewhere else, maybe in some corporate fleets or university labs.
So where are the big concentrations of desktop Linux in the US? I’m not hearing more stories of big migrations happening outside of ChromeOS.
Steamdeck and other linux gaming consoles maybe?
Steamdeck is great, but there are not enough of them to change statistics like this.
I think that’s part of it.
Linux usage is very non-uniform. I think the important clusters are:
So, if we consider a classroom, it's roughly 1 or 2 students using linux in each class. I don't think it's too far off from real life experience.
While gaming is still 2.64%, meaning that the Chromebooks and discounted PCs without windows contribute massively to the stat
Is gaming stat based on steam survey? If so that shows wild variation, and also has a flawed metric collection. From a steam article they measure your game play of a title during the first 2 weeks of purchase, so if you dualboort and play more time on Windows for that period, that is the stat, negating if you then played months or years on Linux after it.
Statcounter has an other category, and when Linux drops or raises % there is a symmetrically opposite change in the Other %. To me this Other probably includes the machines you mention.
It is Setting Orange 26 Bureaucracy 3191 YOLD (Year Of the Linux Desktop)
Very nice to see, only worry is that Linux will get enshittified (primarily by the GNOME people).
Is it even possible for Linux to get enshitified? Wouldn't the open source community just go back and fork from before the enshitification began? Surely, enshitified versions could be made but people would simply not use them unless there was some proprietary component they wanted.
If there were a single corporate controlled entry point all these people were funneling into there would be posential for enshittification. Even if a single free vertically integrated project like debian suddenly had the majority of all PC users it would probably be impossible for them to avoid the corruption of money. But the linux ecosystem appears to currently be growing in a manner that preserves its diversity and organic nature and thus seems able to remain quite healthy in doing so
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I would be incredibly weary if someone like Meta, Google, or Microsoft started their own distro. Make a solid distro with lots of bells and whistles few distros have, pre-install it on the hottest gear, poach the best devs away from open-source projects, exert more and more influence over kernel development, wait for a majority to get locked in and then start making parts of the OS proprietary so open-source can't keep up, and the dominoes fall from there.
Obviously not blatant money/data harvesting like with big tech companies, but corporate strong-arming has been done on Linux (systemD) and can be done again. Granted it's much harder on Linux (in the case of my SystemD example there are distros like Void or Artix) but there is still a risk imo.
Oh no! An opionated desktop environment, what should we do?!
In the case of GNOME they take their whole toolkit with them. Obviously you can switch DEs but it's still sad and annoying to see. From 5 years ago but still holds up: https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/horrible-gtk3-gnome-ui-design-is-leaking-into-ubuntu-mate-applications-in-20-04/22028/58.
The problem is that they have bad opinions. Very, very bad ones
The gnome people have no profit motive to encourage enshittification.
Gnome 3 was sluggish when it came out, but it's perfectly fine nowadays. Just avoid it if you don't like the workflow.
I don't and I do. Cinnamon is a better Gnome experience now.
Fortunately on Linux you can easily switch to another shit
If only your distro would support more than one desktop.
I will say though, Gnome dropping support for other window managers does suck. That is them removing infrastructure that non-(or semi) Gnome users depend on.
Very nice to see, only worry is that Linux will get enshittified (primarily by the GNOME people).
You misspelled "systemd".
Just mentioned SystemD in another post of mine.
Nothing about Linux users is quiet.
I use arch btw
I have found myself deep in the Nix and nixOS ecosystem myself.
Somehow I feel like mentioning Nix and NixOS is the new 'I use arch btw'.
(No offense, but reading the 'I use arch btw' and then your response right after made me realize this)
My condolences
NixOS isn't great for non-programmers, I bet, but for programmers it's amazing.
To be fair, we have to be that way to push back against the field of inveitability that omnipresent corporate marketing creates in our minds.
The extroverted nerdiness is an effective tool to communally deprogram our rheified way of looking at computers so we can envision a different future.
But but Phoronix just told me yesterday that Linux users went dramatically down on Steam from 3% to 2.99%! Almost like this weekly/monthly claim of Linux users "crossing" another imaginary threshold line hold as much value as this comment /s