It peaked at 4.05% in March. The last 2 months it went just below 4% as the Unknown category increased. For June the reverse happened, so 4.04% seems to be the real current share of Linux on Desktop as desktop clients were read properly/werent spoofed.
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This is probably a good place to ask, but when ditching windows for Linux, what’s a good distro to go with? Preferably one that has a good WINE interface.
Preferably one that has a good WINE interface.
IIRC, Zorin OS handles that the best. Furthermore, it’s actually a distro that targets beginners (like e.g. Linux Mint does). So, overall, it’s a great pick.
Of course, don’t just expect that all your Windows software just works on Linux with WINE. Instead, search if they’re somehow available on Linux and/or work through WINE. If that’s not the case, then ensure that an alternative is available that you’re willing to use instead.
Finally, ensure that the distro you choose, actually works great with your hardware.
Well this is the funny thing that has occurred in the last 24 hours. I have been playing about with basic Ubuntu and I installed Wine on it. But when I tried to come up with a Microsoft dependent application to test it out on I came to the realization that there are no applications that I use that are exclusive to Microsoft. Nearly everything I use is either web-based or has a Linux port.
Hell, even MS Office is web based nowadays. I think Windows truly has become obsolete, or at least out moded. That is for casual desktop users such as myself. There may be enterprise programs out there that still rely on Windows architecture.
Edit: P.S. the Ubuntu was really just a test for the machine I will be working with. I think I’m likely gonna stick Mint on it and give that a try after a new hard drive arrives for it later this week.
I’ve seen a lot of people move to Mint or Pop_OS or Kubuntu. They’re Debian based so updates are pretty stable.
I personally ended up with EndeavourOS using the KDE desktop environment. I have a steam deck, so this felt very similar to me. This is Arch based so sometimes updates break things, but I’ve had more success here.
Also remember that no distro is problem-free, but neither was Windows. The longer you commit, the easier it gets.
EDIT: If you’re hesitant to fully commit at first, I also recommend dual booting with Windows. Over time you’ll use it less and less until one day you feel like reclaiming the disk space.
I tried doing a dual boot to Mint awhile back, I did the mint backup at the start like it suggests, changed some things, broke it, restored from the backup thinking it was great id already made one, and broke the WHOLE pc.
I had to pull the battery on the BIOS to get it to go beyond a black screen when turning on.
It was terrible.
It seem to recall at the time recommendations about not doing dual boot, and if you wanted to dual boot, remove the main OS drive when you install Linux. Then put it back in.
If you’re hesitant to fully commit at first, I also recommend dual booting with Windows. Over time you’ll use it less and less until one day you feel like reclaiming the disk space.
I have a 10 year old laptop that I had to get rid of the hard drive for and am installing an nand drive and want to use to re-familiarize myself with Linux on it. Especially since my main desktops are too old to upgrade to Windows 11(not that I’d want to anyway) and I figure going Linux now will save me from scrambling when the pooch gets thoroughly screwed after Win 10 updates end.
I’d personally recommend Linux Mint Debian Edition. After distro hopping for a bit, it has personally been the best one for working right out of the box, both for my games and for my peripherals.
I like the UI, it’s about at my tech level/needs. I have little to no complaints about it, which is as good as it gets.
This is one of many comments I’ve seen on several posts that have recommended Mint. I’m currently playing around with Ubuntu, just because it’s the one I’m most familiar with from back in the day, but since the drive I’m using is temporary I might do a wipe and then load Mint and see how that operates.
In my experience, experience with one distro is experience with them all. 90% of what you are familiar with will be either similar or completely the same. So definitely give LMDE a shot.
404: Not found
I wonder what’s on the ‘unknown’
Netcat, mostly
Bare Metal, they are injecting Ethernet cable directly into their bloodstream.
In essence Netrunner then?
Case on his Ono-Sendai
That 6% attributed to “unknown” is the one true OS, the only one ordained by the Almighty… Temple OS!
True Temple OS has no networking
It does have networking if you truly believe!
Heretical, you will burn in hell
Based security approach
Amiga.
likely content blockers preventing the trackers from working properly and invalid user agents. So i would expect about the same ratio of usage on there as well. Maybe very slightly more Linux since maybe the users are more likely to tinker with their browser configs and install content blockers, but even there Id say its an extremely slim minority of even linux users who do that
StatCounter also sometimes miscounts when new versions of windows or macos come out. At one point (I think at windows 11 release) there was a huge dip in windows 10 users and a huge gain in “unknown” and it was quickly fixed.
Where do they get data from?
They get the data from user-agent strings, so it may not be 100% accurate
@Tixanou @Madiator2011 Plus they are basing themselves off of a sample of websites, so it’s like polls it’s made to be representative but cannot be 100 % accurate
User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/
User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.
Shit started hitting the fan when everyone started faking Netscape’s “Mozilla” user agent. Then “KHTML, like Gecko” and after that every fork kept the originating name in the string and extended it.
There’s a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites
This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.
Oh nice. Googie once again deciding for the entire Internet what it should be using and forcing it down everyone’s throats.
User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.
From cookies.
What kind? Personally I wouldn’t trust any kind with raisin.
What about peanut butter? Or are you more of a salted chocolate kind of person?
Both are very trustworthy.
From analytic cookies.
The combined forces of microsoft reaching new heights of greed and intrusion, plus the massive dev efforts for the best ever GNU Linux and Proton 📈📈📈
Microsoft set themselves up the bomb
All your corporate greed are belong to us
Microsoft: As long as Adobe, Office, Autodesk are on my side, I have nothing to worry about.
I use Linux for personal use, and Ive been using windows for work due to necessity.
There is one app I need that does not support Linux. I contacted their support asking about a Linux version and they suggested using waysroid to run the android version of the app.
So, when I have free time I’m working on switching things over.
My main motivation is Microsoft pushing ads everywhere and being aggressive about using online accounts and stuff that like.
Whats interesting is that both income , profits and the stock have been growing well for years, maybe they are just monetizing more aggressively because they can’t compete on product quality (unlike other markets that are still evolving, AI and Cloud). not a ton of stuff to improve in operation systems it seems.
There are system dialogs that have unused space for ads, still plenty to improve!
In all seriousness, cloud (azure) and office subscriptions blew up and account for like 70% of MS profits. They know the Windows experience is lacking, but when they already capture so much of the market and it’s such a small slice of revenue, they have no incentive to improve.
dont forget soystemd and wayland
i don’t have a strong opinion on systemd, i just heard someone call it soystemd in some YouTube video once and it just stuck in my head for years
I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time. I remember when it was predicted to hit that in 2010, obviously it didn’t happen*. Of course for me personally, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2007 when I was finally able to use it as my main OS at home, I tried it before many times since 2003.
* not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.
Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.
You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.
not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.
not OP, but my guess is that he was referring to android
Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…
Perhaps the definition isn’t good enough or accurate. What would you call a system that perhaps uses Darwin kernel or Hurd plus GNU user land, or any combo of.
Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…
I think Alpine uses Busybox, but it’s feasible for a Linux distro to use BSD coreutils. Not sure if any do that, though.
I am still hoping it will hit 10% market share within my life time.
Do we really want that?
We have it pretty good right now. I would actually say we’re living in a golden age of desktop Linux: there’s constant innovation, good support, you get to do pretty much everything you need, while flying under the radar.
Linux has won the majority of the industry (servers, mobile etc.) so it’s not like it has anything left to prove.
If it starts getting noticeable on the desktop I fear we’re just gonna get negative attention. Users who take and not contribute, because Windows had taught them to be entitled. Unwanted attention from Microsoft, who I bet are not going to be doing nice things once they start getting paranoid about it.
I really don’t think that large companies like Adobe will care about Linux even at 10% and even if they did, they are a super toxic company nowadays, the least we get to interact with them the better.
Do we really want that?
As long as competition and choice continues to be the mantra of the Linux desktop, then yes, I’d love to see more and more people using it.
We have it pretty good right now. I would actually say we’re living in a golden age of desktop Linux: there’s constant innovation, good support, you get to do pretty much everything you need, while flying under the radar.
Very true.
Unwanted attention from Microsoft, who I bet are not going to be doing nice things once they start getting paranoid about it.
I mean, Ballmer called Linux a cancer pretty early on, so that ship sailed a long time ago.
I really don’t think that large companies like Adobe will care about Linux
Once they start losing large sums of money due to people switching and finding viable alternatives, they certainly will care. Right now Adobe has one main thing going for them – apathy and muscle memory of the aging demographic of their users. That will eventually change.
the least we get to interact with them the better.
Absolutely. I used to be an Adobe fan, back when Kevin Lynch was a part of it, and I was a Flex developer. Then Jobs wrote his thing about Flash, and a year later, not a month after Jobs’s death, Adobe dumps Flex – and literally overnight my position changed from Flex to HTML5 and Java.
There are many games & software with no Linux support, not to mention AC blocked games. Increased marketshare could change a thing or two, at least.
THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
Now you jinxed it
People have jinxed it 20 years in a row
the year of the unknown desktop!
Man i hope linux becomes more popular
I see multiple posts on reddit everyday asking for advice for migrating to linux. I think linux userbase is increasing a lot since Window’s questionable recall announcement.
And the valve steamdeck But some people install windows on it which defeats it’s linux purpose
Nevertheless, Valve’s work with proton has pretty much crushed the argument that Windows is needed for games. That use to be a major sticking point, preventing people from leaving Windows - but now not so much.
If you play games that requires anti cheat It’s gonna be harder to switch
Also vr support
Halflife alyx?
There’s some other good ones too, but fair point
A lot of mods are also windows locked too.
Oh
Nexus mods is working on a Linux client which is really exciting! Also Steam Workshop works on Linux. This covers a ton of use cases.
Not saying everything is 100% perfection, but it’s easier than ever to switch, and only getting easier.
I imagine “Windows locked mods” would probably also benefit from just disconnecting the internet and keeping it set up just the way one likes it, since MS is gonna drop Win10 soon.
That’s the case with WMR VR headsets. Sadly don’t see those getting cracked to work on Linux any time soon. :(
I just saw the news for Nexus mods like 20 minutes after I posted that. Hopefully it can be integrated well soon.
But yes, over time, things will continue to get better. Even Nvidia finally started working on open drivers for their GPUs.
Almost all anti-cheats work on linux or offer linux integration or builds. It’s the scummy unethical publishers who run the typical games that uses anti-cheat who refuse to pay engineers to make the minimum effort to support linux. Because it would undermine some of their bullshit claims used to manipulate their players. Fortunately for some people like myself, the typical game that requires anti-cheat is not a game they would want to play anyways.
Ohh okay I have never seen a anti cheat that supports linux
I feel like both “people who install windows on the steam deck” and “people asking for advice for migrating to linux on reddit” are just vocal minorities which you encounter on the internet but don’t really influence the Statcounter’s results in a meaningful way. Generally (from my view) it’s the kids who got a steamdeck for xmass and the coders who use ubuntu for work influencing the numbers.
true and the kids want to play their favorite game but they cannot on steam deck or its hard
Can we commit to only posting about round number percent changes?
What’s interesting is that multiple trackers are now saying it’s above 4 percent. Last time something was posted, people questioned the data and where they got their data (which they should). Now there’s multiple sites showing a real increase.
No, we will not stop
4.040000000000000000000001!
We could contact that person as a community
Based on a world population of 8 billion, that would be roughly 0.000000000000008% of a person. It’s also not even representable as a 64 bit float so I had to do this math in my head (Calculator just says 0)
So you’re saying that that number keeps going up as I get closer and closer to the actual weekend when I install it as my daily driver?
No, we have to post these when it’s the year of the Linux desktop
Sorry, I stopped playing factorio on my work Linux computer. I will play next month to get us back up.
Don’t worry, I’ve been playing plenty of Linux factorio for the last few weeks to make up for it.
Thank you for your service
I have had to do some work on my windows pc and I hate it. I have been away from desktop for a while now and changed to linux for personal one. At work it is all G suite, which does work to its credit, but the windows OS and microsoft cloud documents suck so much. The look and feel is clunky, so clunky. Constantly refreshing and just being shit.
Never forgive forcing outlook.
I work in email Marketing and Outlook is the worst client, especially desktop. Everything I make has to have accommodations for this shitty inbox
And as a user do I hate it too. It is too many times while I edit an email and click delete that is deletes the email instead… It seems if I click a word and get the spell window does the focus always change to the list of emails… And it also force a spell correction if I click space… I didn’t pick one of the options I just want to edit the word myself!!! And if I scrolldown to remove some parts of the email thread or just want to copy a part won’t it let me if I don’t click twice… and it jumps around…damn I hate it so much. Sorry that I replied to you with all these anger. But I really felt it when I saw yours and ops comment. I hope we one day will at least think it is an ok client to work with
All the different versions as well. Outlook web is decent, desktop is terrible. The Mac version seems to be closer to web, some problems I have are fine in one version of outlook and only appear in another. Why can’t the app just be a container for the web version?
As a service outlook (microsoft mail) sucks, as a web service their page sucks andnisnpoorly laid out and optimised and the new desktop client is atrocious.
They made me change from hotmail outlook, created a hotmail folder for under the new outlook and now I dont get notification for that address on the outlook app. If something gets marked as spam that isnt, marking it not spam sends it to the outlook inbox regardless of intended destination. If I reply to a mail it prioritises outlook despite the mail being sent to hotmail. As a result I cant log into shared files that people gave access to one but not the other.
1980s: Hey guise, computers are now cheap enough that you can run an entire system and all your programs on your own machine at home instead of having to dial in to the mainframe!
2010s: No, we’re putting it all back on the servers, you get a thin client.
No technical reason btw, just because “fuck you”.
From a macro economic perspective, (and im not advocating for a conspiracy, just aggregate business interest) they’re dropping energy usage so they can pay less on their electricity bills.
So actually a double fu. get less so they can pay less rent, to provide lesser service.
Because rent seeking is the only tech bubble left.
In theory I guess it provides better security in some ways, but certainly not all over giving you hardware and a VPN. So there’s that. But yeah, it sucks.
I switched to librewolf so I will now show up as windows
Same, there must be a percent or so of Windows actually being Linux instead.
I unspoofed Librewolf back to Firefox + Linux. That way I’m not contributing to Chrome and Windows market share and perceived dominance. Plus the more people don’t spoof, the less of a need there will be to actually spoof at all as the Linux market share increases.
The problem is that websites sometimes change there behavior.
Do you have any examples of this?
After seeing Garuda Linux set my user agent to Windows, I set my Windows install user agent to Linux.
Seeing Twitch.tv login break after changing my user agent was hilarious
What did it say? Why does it break?
Yeah me too, safety in numbers. Maybe if Linux desktop gets bigger than Windows they’ll swap it around 👨💻
Windows 11: Add advertisement to the start menu, add remote Artificial intelligence to your daily live. Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.
What will they do next?
- More advertisement.
- More features that require an always on internet connection?
- Forced restart for software updates
This is why I expect Linux share to slowly increase until the old computers die and you will not be allowed to choose to boot another operating system besides Windows on your Microsoft-Copilot+ PC that would be your only option.
Next:
-
Must always be online
-
Cost is now $9.99 per month (free with commercial breaks. For now of course.)
-
Everything is stored online (60GB free, $5.99/month to up it to 199GB, $49/m for 400GB).
-
Windows decline has nothing to do with any of the actual features.
It is declining because fewer people are buying PCs anymore. Every one is using a mobile device or tablet.
This is also the reason they are squeezing windows harder to make up for the down turn.
This is clearly a statistic about PCs, otherwise the share wouldnt be ~73% windows. So the decline of the desktop PC doesnt really matter here
The people who are more likely to retain a PC and not just use a phone, are more likely to be tech literate power users.
This selects against casual windows users, and selects for hardcore Linux users
My brother, who want nothing to do with computers if he can, asked me to install Linux on his domestic laptop. It’s not an everyone is doing it yet, but there’s definitely something.
Forcing everyone to stay connected will make pirating it harder, and that will drive many, many people away.
Fair enough, I am looking into buying PC only as a server, but as I am kind of migrant still trying to settle down it will be somewhere in 2025, if not 2026. And right now laptop + phone cover basically all my needs i.e. work, gaming, reading, surfing the web, interacting with the local government. Not to mention that it is much easier to get around with those compared to the headache that is moving PC :)
And from my experience most PC users now are either people who bought it 10+ years ago and they just still have it, or people really invested into AAA gaming. Everyone else has combination of smatphone and tablet/laptop.
But we’re talking about proportions of Desktop operating systems. People using the desktop less might decrease (or slow the increase) of total desktop usage; but there would need to be more reason that just that for it to impact Windows disproportionately.
The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.
Forced restart for software updates
If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.
Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.
How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?
I dunno, longer than 6 years, which is about how long it took for Skylake to go from brand new to not being supported by the new version of Windows?
And I honestly can’t think of a time that’s even happened before when you could get 10 running on 10+ year old processors as long as they were powerful enough. And the difference between a Core 2 Duo and a Skylake i7 is vastly more than between the Skylake i7 and the current generation.
The issue is not that the hardware stops getting support, either… It’s that the hardware is expressly and needlessly being blocked long before it’s no longer useful. My old Skylake is now 9 years old and more than capable of running as a moderate power machine on current workloads, other than being forcibly blocked to encourage me to put it in a landfill so I can continue the consumer march for more stuff to feed the corpos.
It’s wasteful. And for the most part, all that’s needed is for the old drivers to be allowed to function. And to make things like TPM 2 be optional, especially considering I don’t think you’re even required to actually use it for Windows 11, just have it.
Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.
TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.
I have some Sandy Bridge systems here running strong as Linux desktops for light work. You know, these 4-core 3,3GHz processors from - hmm - 2014?
why do we negate chromeos we are 10% at least so there we really are
For starters doesn’t it only run apps from the Google play store?
You can “sideload” apps outside the google store.
For example I’ve been using myinsta instead of IG. It was very easy to download and install.
and what kernel would you say it and android runs? relevant?
This is the format collision discussion that has no solution so far. A tablet that runs windows is counted as Windows. A laptop that runs android does not. Neither does an android cellphone. It all boils down to web browser user agent fuckery. This is why steam’s numbers are more reliable than other sources, they’re direct hardware surveys.
But the point is that a steam deck is not (but in a way it is basically just) a PC. There are tablets than run desktop interfaces and now there are laptops that can be used as tablet. Eventually the artificial mobile vs. PC/desktop/laptop schism will stop making sense.
true, but in this case you can look at the same graph that was linked and see another Linux distro clearly marked that they choose not to treat as one in their headline. seems a little silly to me
uMatrix prevents me from loading this statcounter website. :-( Can’t lookup how they measure things. In the comments people assume the stats would be counted by just looking up the user agent, which is a naive approach. I don’t think agencies dedicated to stats are doing it this simple. They have way more possibilities to track and to look what browser you are using. The stats are more accurate than you probably think. They do not need to know the exact version of browser you are using, just which type and maybe what operating system you are on.
If a script for Windows does not work on Linux and fails, then they know you are not on Windows in example.
Why are you still using uMatrix in 2024? Wasn’t it discontinued 3 years ago or smth?
It’s still useful with all its functionality. Even if it does not get updates, it still blocks most stuff and I can enable or block stuff too. Plus the blocklists it uses are still updated, as they act independently from the main addon. There is no better alternative in my opinion. I use uMatrix + uBlock Origin.
