Linux hits 4% on the desktop 🐧 📈
Linux hits 4% on the desktop 🐧 📈
This graph shows the market share of desktop operating systems worldwide based on over 5 billion monthly page views.
Don't panic, thats just me running it on PC, laptop, worklaptop, pinenote, pinephone, steamdeck and in multiple VMs for experimentation. (and don't forget my randomized fingerprinting setup in the browser)
Was gonna ask if this stat included the Steam Deck, as that's also accounting for the vast majority of Linux gaming numbers. Whether it does include the Deck or not, it's a nice rise, but all the better if it doesn't include the Deck. I wonder if the popularity of using Linux on the Raspberry Pi is helping too.
How is the PineNote coming along?
I love the idea of the Pinenote, but could never afford one.
This was my question too
Not great tbh. But I made it work for my usecase somewhat.
As a huge tinkerer I like it over the Remarkable2 which I had before and which was a huge pain to customize.
But I wouldn't recommend it to normal people.
How are you randomising your fingerprint? I'm very interested
Edit: ah, in your browser
It rubs the lotion on it's skin.
Hoe is the pinenote? I have been debating on buying one
https://lemmy.world/comment/8047127
Hardware is pretty solid, software is extremely lacking.
Only buy one if you want to develop for it.
tell me more about your browser setup.
how do you randomize the fingerprint?
Me, who could do everything I have set up with one RPi: FIVE? Guess imma get a third Pi
What do you use for randomized fingerprinting?
With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won't be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.
"You mean its free and doesn't try to sell me other products the whole time I'm using it?"
There is the psychological factor that Windows behaves more like malware with their forced full screen overlays to shove the Edge into your ass. Over and over again. Microsoft doesn't take No for an answer like an abusive partner.
You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It's the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most "reputable" tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.
damn, you might get me back on Windows if it feel like that 🥴
And Microsoft keeps enshitifying Windows because they know they can get away with it. So many businesses are backed into a corner and have essential parts of their business that are only compatible with Microsoft's tech. They can't switch, they won't even entertain the idea (much less the time/energy required to test it out). The folks at Microsoft know they've won. I won't be surprised when they make Windows 12's compatibility even more egregious than 11's.
2024 : The year of the Linux desktop
GUYS, IT'S HAPPENING
This time for sure!!!
MY BODY IS READY
10th year in a row
I think at 25 in a row it's a silver jubilee.
Linux also surpassed 10% in my country, Greece (10.72%).
I prepared a couple of old laptops I had around recently, to gift to my niece and cousin, and I put Debian with XFce in both of them. Worked great. And I think that's why Linux is big in Greece. Consider that when someone buys a car here, they use it until the end of its life. Very rarely they sell cars to get something new. The average car is 15 years old in Greece. I think that's the deal with old laptops and computers too: people try to extend the lives of their machines.
how do you check for individual countries?
Follow the link in the post and click on "edit chart data".. You can select time frame, countries, which data to show, etc.
there's a choice on the bottom of the page somewhere
on an unrelated note, people who squeeze in what os they use to every conversation also rises to 4%.
Didn't we hit 3% in January this year? At this rate well reach 350% by EOY!
I know it's a joke, but where did you get that number? If it's at 3% in January and 4% in February. Either it's a flat 1% increase/month or an increase of 33%. How else can it be interpreted?
You can download a csv of the market share from 2009, it shows it reached 3% for the first time in jun 2023, there might be some kind of rapid growth in popularity here.
How on earth can people stand using Windows full time? Everything I'm on a Microsoft product I feel claustrophobic!
Uh, most apps are still for Windows. That's why so many people use it.
If you tell someone to use an alternative OS, but then they are left on their own to run alternative versions of apps that don't work the same, forced to give up features they are use to, or run dozens of different programs through Wine or Proton or emulation or virtualization or whatever, JUST BECAUSE "Microsoft bad", they're going to laugh at you and go right back to Windows.
It's taken Linux 30(?) years to make it to 4%, and a lot of that is recent because of games. It's still a niche platform.
Maybe. But this does not change the fact that managing Windows is so much pain even if some of clients I manage computers for have Windows because of the software like Adobe, I think every day how good it would be to get rid of it.
Stuff just works on windows, I have a proxmox box with some Linux vms to run containers and I've tried several times over the last 20 years to move to Linux on my main pc but there are just too many faffy bits.
I really dislike what windows has become, it's bloat ware that's getting worse and worse, but I begrudgingly use it as I can be productive, the moment I can be as productive in Linux I'm off of windows, but even simple things like drivers are often not as good, lots of commercial software has barebones or no Linux support, there are many different package managers (on one hand great) but some have permission problems due to sandboxing when you need something like your IDE to have access to the dotnet package, also as a developer building apps/libs for Linux is a nightmare.
For example if I make an app for Windows I build a single binary, same for mac os, for Linux it's the Wild west, varying versions of glibc various versions of gtk and that's the simpler stuff.
Anyway I REALLY WANT to like Linux and move away from windows to it, but every time I try its hours/days of hoop jumping before I just end up going back to windows and waiting for windows to annoy me so much I try again.
(just to be clear the annoyances I have with windows are it's constant ad/bloat ware, it's segregation of settings and duplication of things, it constantly updating and forcing you to turn off all their nonsense AGAIN)
Honestly, you get used to whatever you use and learn to avoid the faffy bits. I was like that with Windows back in the day, I just learned how to deal with it.
Now when I have to use a Windows box, I end up in a rage because of all the stupid shit I just used to avoid or knew how. Most of the useful bits are hidden from that Settings app that seems like it's designed for children.
So really, if you get down to it and pushed your way through the familiarity stage, you'd be fine. If you want something that doesn't give you much visible complexity for configuration, use Gnome, if you like to have every setting at your fingertips, use Plasma.
If you want your applications in a single bundle, use AppImage which is essentially what MacOS does.
And for development, being able to do things like containers/distrobox for your toolchains right on your dev box, without whatever the hell it is that Windows does these days is pretty sweet.
Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone's personal computer (no matter O.S). It's also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.
The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn't run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.
The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they'll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don't have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we've had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).
For what it's worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don't work, developers who won't flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I'm just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn't being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don't want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol
I use both. Sadly, I have lots of software that doesn't work (or works pretty bad) on Linux. I love Linux, but there's no denying it can be frustrated, specially if your hardware doesn't support it, and that applies to too many people who has no saying in the hardware they use.
So in what world? Corporate world, science, CAD modelling...
There is a big misunderstanding in people's mind. LInux claims to run on pretty much every system (and it does ofc), but people take it as in every device and drivers is supposed to run flawlessly. I bought a 200 euros thinkpad knowing lenovo supported Linux directly, and I'm more satisfied with it than my 3000 euros macbook pro. In fact I havent opened my work one for 6 months+ lol
Mandatory I use arch btw
CAD world and corporate PLM is supported on REL or SUSE by Siemens NX v12 and Teamcenter
Most people are not really using the OS. All they do is starting the webbrowser and that's it. They need input & sound from the OS, but that's it.
This is exactly how I feel. I can't relax into my work (and my work quality is impacted) when I have to use Windows.
The majority of people ... just aren't into OSes enough to care.
Windows does what they want it to do, comes with the laptop they bought and doesn't require much setup for them to start using it. Even a tech illiterate can setup a Windows in 15 minutes.
The more advanced users just know how to read settings, and disable all the parts they do not like. Windows can very much be molded to adapt to the users preference, no matter what the Linux fanatics claim. Most of their arguments come from an ignorant perspective that hasn't rang true for 10+ years.
Steam decks ?
Probably a good chunk of it but admittedly it helped me feel confident in using Linux as my daily driver on my desktop. Nothing drives adoption like being able to play video games.
this data is from web trackers, how many people visit the web on their steam deck?
Finally the year of GNU/Linux desktop 🍾
If you count unix, its been the year of the Unix/GNU/Linux desktop for close to 40 years for me.
Haven't we celebrated 3% just a few months ago?
You can set it to go back to 2009. Apparently it hit 3% in Q3 2023. And apparently Windows has steadily been trending downward from 95% to 73% since 2009, which is wild to me. I find it hard to believe that that isn't due to other factors like increased smartphone use over desktops.
We did!
I hate that there is such a discrepancy between the amount of Linux server implementation and desktop usage. I'm hopeful for the future though, I've been noticing Linux has been getting more attention.
Linux dominates every computing sector except for the one it was originally created for
Very telling how Linux dominates every computing sector, except the one where the majority of users has to interact with directly.
Seems like Linux just needs a shell before the average user is able to interact with it in a consumer-friendly way.
It's already at 112% on my desktop.
I use Debian btw
I did my part.
This year I went back to 100% Linux for my computers. I’ve kept my primary PC with Windows just for games but with the advancements that Proton has made to WINE it hasn’t been necessary. The only thing I miss in being able to use Affinity Publisher and Designer on the computer and not just my tablet.
Same here. Thanks to Proton and SteamDeck, things have reached a point where I can find plenty of things to play without keeping a Windows license around.
Last time I did it was 2008 or 2009, the only game I played much was World of Warcraft and it ran great under WINE at the time. I don’t remember exactly why I switched back to windows back then but it was probably games. I know I needed it when I got my VR headset back in 2016 but it’s been a while since I sold that. I don’t know if Steam VR works on Linux or not, I want to have a headset again.
Where's the party?
I'm waddling over!
What's the chance that these are actual regular people doing this?
I downloaded Ubuntu recently. Don't hurt me
Define "regular people".
Not tech savvy people. Your aunt.
So... I have a couple 40-core Xeon servers in my homelab. What do I need to do to trigger these higher? I can Argo Workflow jobs that spin up VMs and execute a webhook / etc to whatever is needed. Let's get that needle at least past the fisher price of OS's MacOS.
Yeah, fake those numbers! That'll definitely help the cause and not at all make anyone look desperate or stupid or cause the data to be thrown away!
Go you!
This site is using stats based on browser's users agent string, very unreliable source of imformation today. Please stop celebrating when it have an anomaly and do it's temporary spike up or down every couple of months.
Linux is in fact rising, like all desktop OSes besides Windows, because Windows is losing market share. But celebrating stats from this site is not worth it.
I'm carious how they monitor linux desktop users maybe by web agent ?
It doesn't mean much, it's just a metric people like around here. This number can grow and shrink just as easily with spoofed user agents strings. I think brave spoofs it and there's a chrome extension, there maybe a few more examples.
I wouldn't take it at face value is what I'm getting at. There's just no other way to measure because most distros don't collect telemetry and Firefox doesn't seem to make theirs public.
Yes
Websites choose to use their web analytics, then the site combines the web analytics looks at the web agent and guesses from there. I don't think the number has much meaning, it could vary widely if a Linux centric site opted in or if a privacy extension chooses to black/white list their stuff my default.
Hold on here how is Linux Desktop beating out chrome OS? Don't get me wrong I am totally onboard with Linux winning over chrome OS. But I just don't believe it.
I can got to any local store right now and buy a Chrome OS computer. I can't say the same for Linux.
Not sure, but I'll say that if you use ChromeOS, you're much more likely to buy special hardware (Chromebooks) to run it on. Not many people download ChromeOS to run on their pre-existing computers. But you can just slap Linux on a toaster if you really want to. Even more, Valve's Steam Deck comes with Linux by default, and that's basically a desktop with touch and gamepad controls in mind.
I just wish the culture around open source gave more back to the people working on the software, even if it was just businesses. I think we'd see even more delevopment and support if the one guy making a critical driver for some obscure device that only power plants use, could take a vacation or quit his day job.
People around the world depend on open source being freely available and shareable. But if you're making millions of dollars a year, I think it's only fair to give some money to the people making your profit possible.
Not sure, but I’ll say that if you use ChromeOS, you’re much more likely to buy special hardware (Chromebooks) to run it on. Not many people download ChromeOS to run on their pre-existing computers.
That is my point. Normal people are not downloading any OS and installing it on their computers. They are going to the local big box store or online store and buying a computer and using whatever that OS is preinstalled. In my neck of the woods those options are Windows, OSX and Chrome OS. There is no Linux computers at your local big box store. And I am sure you could find a Linux computer online if you specifically searched for it but Amazon is going to put the Linux computer on page 500 if you search for "Laptop"
Valve’s Steam Deck comes with Linux by default
Yeah the Steam Deck is the only thing the came to my mind that mainstream people would get that would have Linux pre-installed. However I can't imagine it is the steam deck is selling anywhere near the numbers to what Chrome OS computers are selling and also these numbers are based on web browsing. Are people using their steam deck to browse the web? I have a Steam Deck and yes Gaming is amazing on it however if I am being honest the desktop experience is terrible I don't know how they manage to make the on screen keyboard suck so bad. I would prefer browsing the web on my phone over the Steam Deck. The only way I would browse the web on the Steam Deck is if it was fully setup with a Mouse and Keyboard and External monitor.
Granted this is all just based of my single experience and small corner of the world view point. Maybe Linux is poping off in other parts of the world like in India with a huge population base.
The statistics seem to be based on User Agent. A lot of people"fake" their user agent to avoid fingerprinting and other things.
I myself used to do it when I wanted to download Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft. If your UA said anything Windows you were forced to use download Microsoft USB Tool. If it said Linux you got a direct link to the ISO.
Isn't chrome os more or less US specific? Yes, I could buy a laptop with chrome os in central Europe if I looked for it, but is it widespread? Absolutely not. I don't know single person that have (or had) one.
That I don't know, I just know my territory in the US they are in every store that carries laptops.
I believe I have also seen them in Canada as well.
Linux has much better hardware support overall than Windows.
Yeah, why isn’t ChromeOS rolled into Linux?
StatCounter statistics are directly derived from hits—as opposed to unique visitors—from 3 million sites, which use StatCounter, resulting in total hits of more than 15 billion per month.[5] No artificial weightings are used to correct for sampling bias, thus the numbers in the statistics can not be considered to be representative samples.
But is the desktop really the most relevant measurement? Wouldn't it be more relevant to talk about "primary" devices? When I grew up, the desktop was what people used to connect with Internet and everything that comes with that. Hence, Linux on the desktop seemed to be relevant. Now, that is still relevant in relation to work and gaming, but for general use people use other devices. So instead of "on the desktop" I think we should talk about "for work", "for gaming" and "for programming".
Exactly.
As usual, the geeks in this forum are completely out of touch with reality. I say that as a Linux user of decades.
Desktop stats matter less than ever because ordinary people do not buy desktop computers any more and will do so even less in the future.
India having 15% linux desktop usage.
Linux numbers are overinflated by govt office pc running linux. All they require is just a chrome browser.
I still think it is better than having windows at offices. Why does it matter if they use only the browser on linux?
The Linux phone has hit 0.01% oooof
I'm calling to arms linux desktop users to dip their toes into this space as we need all the support we can get
Well... in 2022, linux wasn't even categorized on mobile, and was grouped into "others". Now its marketshare is relevant enough to have its own category. It's something.
That’s actually a nice silver lining ;)
As much as I'd like to use a Linux phone, it's simply not feasible for almost everybody at the moment.
What do people user their phone for?
- Private conversations
- Banking
- All kind of apps
Linux phones, at the moment, are way behind Android/iOS in terms of security and, since privacy requires security, also in privacy.
Even stock Android has so many more security features, that it's not even close. Verified boot, exploit mitigation, (working) app sandboxing and so on. Not even speaking of specialized projects like GrapheneOS.
Even if the app ecosystem was there and the OS mature, I'd never run my banking through a Linux phone at the moment.
I just built a new PC but I've still been booting up my old laptop from time to time to retrieve files/settings/etc. I'm going to take credit for this.
year of the linux desktop!!!!
I question the methodology here. The same site lists Linux desktop share at 2% in my country specifically. It feels like if it was that high you’d see it on people’s laptops more in coffee shops and what not… but I’ve yet to see a single other person using Linux on the desktop.
I know most of that 4% is in India… but still feels like it should be more ubiquitous if the number is that high.
With 2%, you would roughly find someone using linux for every 50 computers you stumble upon. Maybe it's not as far off as you imagine. However, like someone already mentioned, the distribution isn't homogenous, and maybe there are concentrations of linux computers in some universities, businesses, etc.
Or maybe linux users don't go out as often as the average person, so you never get the chance to see them in coffee shops lol. If the other linux users are like me, that's exactly the case...
2% is still very low, and thats not necessarily spread evenly throughout different areas/communities.
I’ve got LXC’s running on my Proxmox host and been playing or working with Linux for 25 years, but on my desktop I’ve always run Windows. Linux is great right up until it isn’t and then I spend more time than I’d like troubleshooting it. On my desktop I just want things to work and Windows does that. I hate the bloatware, spyware and the nagging to switch to Edge, but everything I run, runs, including games with anti-cheat. I’m sure I could get Linux to a similar state, but it would take a lot more effort.
o
The freedom of choice is wonderful, isnt it ? We are all free, to make our own decisions, as free as to live with the consequencies out of that^^
To see where we're at with the linux phone https://alexandrite.app/lemmy.ca/post/16514606.
I've never understood how this is good for Linux. Why is having more users so important?
More users means there is more interest from private companies to reach these users and to port their software/products to Linux. Ie Adobe, Games, AutoCAD Suit, etc.
You've never understood how support works? It doesn't matter that it's harder to find apps that work on Linux than windows and Mac? It matters less to me than most people but it definitely still matters
I would certainly benefit if more hardware supported Linux out-of-the-box.
Many people will benefit if that one key application they need is supported on Linux.
We all benefit from the paid developers working on Linux. The number of such people are linked to the profitability of Linux for companies which is a function of popularity.
Your point is a very important one. The numbers have to come up so that manufacturers notice. It might make the difference in a laptop designer choosing a well-Linux-supported wifi chip, instead of a shitty, closed chipset like Broadcom. When the price-per-unit difference is pennies, knowing that you're potentially losing some thousands of customers in exchange for saving a few cents per unit can make the difference in how you choose.
It also matters in user choice in the workplace. The more normalized Linux is, the more likely there will be skills in IT support, more mass-management tools, and more willingness to allow employees to choose their OS.
But where it really matters is in standards. Diversity puts pressure on software developers to use standardized and open data exchange standards. I can't emphasize enough how important diversity in OSes is to driving creation of, and conformance to, standards, and how much of an anathema to standards monocultures are.
Even within OSS this is true: github and git have become monocultures; they aren't standards, they're tools developers are forced to use if they want to interact with the wider development world in any meaningful way. They're not bad; git became dominant largely because github used to be so fantastically better than anything else available at the time; but now, their very dominance stiffles diversity and innovation. Want to try the rather exciting pijul, the patch-based spiritual successor to darcs? Fuck you, because you won't be able to collaborate with anyone, and you repos won't work with any proglang module systems like cargo or Go modules, because it isn't git[1]. Monocultures are bad, whether they're evil corporation software, or FOSS.
Higher Linux use increases diversity, encourages data format standards, and creates a healthier ecosystem. That's why these numbers are important.
[1] Go and Rust's cargo support more VCSes than git, but they could easily not, and I'm sure the maintainer's of the vcs code wish they could drop support for some of the long tails - and everything that isn't git is on the long tail at this point. There are attempts at creating some standards around this; ActivityPub has tossed around ideas, forgefriends has been trying for a breakthrough for years - none of them address the root issue of how tools can access sourcecode efficiently in a way abstracted from the underlying vcs. Any such tool currently must have some bespoke code to speak the network language of the vcs, for every vcs. And since git is the most popular, when faced with the daunting task of supporting N vcses, when N-1 of them are in toto used by a small percent of users, it's just easier to support only git.
Cool. Then many more people would switch from Linux to BSDs instead. Which is better.
Of course only correct selection is TempleOS.
I don't think its power is comparable to research unix :)