this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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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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[–] CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 109 points 5 months ago (6 children)

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 📈📈📈

[–] Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Microsoft set themselves up the bomb

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[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 85 points 5 months ago (4 children)

In all seriousness, I think government bodies switching to Linux (UK's, China's, some Indian states') attributes the most to this.

[–] poki@discuss.online 82 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Even if that's the case, it's telling of Linux' maturity.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 13 points 5 months ago

Oh absolutely!

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 46 points 5 months ago (7 children)

No I think it's the Steam Deck. It's like half of all actively used Linux machines.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 40 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Half of the Linux machines on Steam, not the entirety of Linux.

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[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Source? Last I checked, the Steam Deck was very much in the minority even when narrowed down to just desktop Linux.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 15 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Source is the Steam hardware survey set to show Linux data only. He forgot to mention the statement is only true for Steam Gamers, not for all of Linux desktops outside of Steam.

~ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=linux

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[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 months ago

I confused it with Steam statistics sorry

[–] 737@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 5 months ago

no, the statistics are based on browser agents, very few steam deck users browse the Internet on their devices. it's also only half the Linux devices on steam, not of all Linux desktops

[–] wischi@programming.dev 12 points 5 months ago (10 children)

But that's not really a Desktop is it? If we'd count mobile device we'd also have to include Android and then the situation would look completely different.

[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 23 points 5 months ago

Steam deck has a full fat kde desktop on the stock os

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 months ago

We don't include Android here. What I meant is that the Steam Deck does count in that statistics.

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[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm fairly sure it's deficiencies in StatCounter's measurement that's accounting for it. Statistical noise, basically.

[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's probably even higher than that. These stats are mostly based on website visits I believe. And many Linux users are also privacy-minded and might spoof their OS in the browser. I bet a large portion of the Unknown is actually Linux too.

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 11 points 5 months ago

It's hard to tell, as there are so many things that influence it. A huge factor is selection bias, as only a small number of website embed StatCounter, and that's very likely to not be a representative sample. I'd bet that the influence of that is magnitudes larger than of user agent spoofing.

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[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 13 points 5 months ago

China is actually down. India is high but not increasing

[–] Dark_Dragon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 65 points 5 months ago (5 children)

The youtuber matt from thelinuxcast sucks.

I am regular user, i don't code for living and my job is not tech related. I wanted to try linux and many of you guys supported and now I'm using Linux since 2 weeks its linux mint. That matt guy was so against linux mint that i thought it was shit too. But when i installed and started using it. It has been a smooth journey. Many people in linux community were helpful. But people like matt really make it for us regular guys scared to use linux. I really hope many good linux user help regular people switch to linux and increase this number.

[–] azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works 26 points 5 months ago (15 children)

Mint is great and is absolutely enough for most people using computers, still as of now. It comes with its limitations though:

  • By default it runs pretty old kernel. This is fine if your hardware is at least 3 years old. It allows to easily switch to newer kernel with just few clicks, but I expect newbies to not be aware of this at all. Oh, and I don’t know if it offers some custom kernels like tkg etc, which some might want to squeeze best gaming perf etc.
  • Cinnamon is still limited to X11. If you have multi-screen setup, VRR, mixed refresh, mixed DPI etc, it’s better to switch to Wayland. Plus, Xorg server gets less and less maintenance and development. All the innovation moved to Wayland, so the experience on X will remain pretty stale.
  • The Ubuntu base makes it so that for 3rd party software you either need deb packages or PPAs. Some will argue (me included) that it’s not the best solution

All of the above can easily be irrelevant to you and Mint is just perfect for what you need. It’s important to point out limitations of that choice, but crapping on it because you don’t like it is just pointless fuss

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[–] SimplyTadpole@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I get what you mean. I see a decent chunk of often more tech-proficient Linux users putting down Linux Mint, and it saddens me because even though I don't use Mint anymore, it was still the first distro I properly daily-drove and I still consider it an amazing system for people who are new to Linux.

I'm very glad you've been having a good experience with Mint!

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[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 58 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I switched to librewolf so I will now show up as windows

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 33 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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

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[–] archchan@lemmy.ml 20 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 13 points 5 months ago

Same, there must be a percent or so of Windows actually being Linux instead.

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[–] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 42 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Fwiw, my blog's statistics say Linux is around 10% and I know a lot of browsers identify themselves as running on Windows when they're not, so I wonder how it's measured.

[–] mindlight@lemm.ee 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What's is the main topic of your blog?

[–] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 37 points 5 months ago

Travel, nothing tech related

[–] sep@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I think the venn diagram overlap of linux users, and users of adblockers or noscript users that block such tracking is quite large. Must impact the statistic significantly.

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[–] Nomad@infosec.pub 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I would wager thats your audiences bias showing up. If you did that measurement in lemmy users, you would get likely 90% Linux users.

[–] NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 38 points 5 months ago (4 children)

lol no you wouldn’t. I’d be shocked if Lemmy users were greater than 20% Linux.

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[–] ComplexLotus@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (11 children)

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.

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[–] 555_1@lemmy.world 33 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Can we commit to only posting about round number percent changes?

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 30 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)
[–] 555_1@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago (3 children)

4.040000000000000000000001!

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[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 29 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I wonder what's on the 'unknown'

[–] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 40 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

[–] alexdeathway@programming.dev 29 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Bare Metal, they are injecting Ethernet cable directly into their bloodstream.

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[–] ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That 6% attributed to "unknown" is the one true OS, the only one ordained by the Almighty... Temple OS!

[–] bamboo@lemm.ee 23 points 5 months ago (3 children)

True Temple OS has no networking

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[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 28 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org 21 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

1980s: Hey guise, computers are now cheap and small 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.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

No technical reason btw, just because "fuck you".

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[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Man i hope linux becomes more popular

[–] lazycat@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 months ago (17 children)

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.

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[–] PanArab@lemm.ee 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] Phegan@lemmy.world 17 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Sorry, I stopped playing factorio on my work Linux computer. I will play next month to get us back up.

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[–] kerrigan778@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

I assume the proportions of people who spoof their OS is slanted towards Linux

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP

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[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 11 points 5 months ago (5 children)

why do we negate chromeos we are 10% at least so there we really are

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