Linux desktop market share climbs to 4.45%

After all of the frustration I experienced getting Windows 11 setup in a way that was comfortable for me to use I'm ready to switch to Linux the next time I need to reinstall a operating system. So glad that SteamDeck is making Linux gaming viable. Now we just need the GPU manufactures to give Linus the same driver support Windows gets.

I've been a linux desktop user for a long time now (~25 years?). I generally don't talk about it, as it's not a suitable environment for a lot of people. So I'm always surprised when I stumble upon somebody using it. Just recently I took a Google Cloud training course and the instructor used it as his daily driver. Not only was this impressive to see "out in the wild" but it was nice to see all the tools needed to lead a remote training course worked in his setup. He had a webcam working great (even focused/panned on him as he moved). He had a powerpoint/slideshow going. He had zoom/teleconferencing software working. And it all worked through the course. There was never 10-20 minute pause because something wasn't working right. Having this level of viability and operability is something I never expected to see.

Bought $2k laptop Acer Predator Helios Neo 16. Windows 11 doesn't install at all (can't see the hard drive). Win10 installed but touchpad doesn't work (even after drivers install), network didn't work (neither ethernet nor wifi) without external USB stick, and so on. After internet connection and installing all updates touchpad and dynamics still don't work.

Pop OS works near-perfectly.

I used Linux first as a 14 year old kid in the 90s who found Win$ows to become slow overtime and we couldn't afford a new computer. Fell in love with Linux instantly given the customization and efficiency. Not needing things like an AntiVirus was huge. I haven't looked back at all and its likely what drove me into CS. Sometimes constraints are a good thing. We had a few courses in Undergrad (outdated of course) that required students to run things like LAMP server and GCC and there was a good culture of running Ubuntu and other distros. I would have done 30+ installs for my classmates and ran into all sorts of issues with laptop drivers, overheating etc. Things are probably better on that front now with compatible hardware, (I only buy linux compatible hardware so I'm not sure).I really wish to see more widespread adoption especially in developing countries.

Semi-relevant but a few years old, a 2021 VFX industry survery found that around 60% of workstations run Linux, and that number is expected to continue growing.

What's interesting to me is that VFX and game dev are kind of similar in terms of software and expertise, but game devs predominantly use Windows. I wonder why that is?

Source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...

(From https://vfxplatform.com/linux/)

Without knowing the methodology that StatCounter is using, the numbers themselves aren't especially meaningful, although a consistent upward trend in those numbers could be showing something real.

In any case, ChromeOS is also Linux, so tack that on there as well, along with whatever portion of that 7% "unknown" that you think is reasonable (which could be a relatively large portion, depending on methodology).

(Also, the bar chart shown in the article is messed up because they're charting the value of each item averaged over the previous year.)

I’m surprised about the amount of negativity in the comments here. I’ve been running PopOS on a few different machines for the last 4 years or so. It’s been almost seamless. I can’t think of the last time I even considered booting into windows - in fact I recently wiped my dual boot partition because I needed the disk space.

I’m not really a desktop power user - I don’t even bother changing the wallpaper usually.

I think it’s just so much easier now - almost every app is a web app. The stuff I run locally - development tools mainly - all have Linux versions.

Statcounter's "stats" are garbage, and should not be reported on. They're computed from untrustworthy information generated from a skewed and undisclosed sample, and processed with an unknown methodology. All that's published is aggregate data that's so coarse that it's impossible to actually reason about what's happening and what's driving the changes to the number.

But fairly regularly their stats are either so volatile or so absurd that it's obvious they have no relationship with reality. Like when they reporter Windows 8.1 climbing from 0.1% to 6% market share in the US in late 2023.

One could easily come up with half a dozen other explanations for this Linux desktop market share number that are as plausible as the hypothesis of significant growth in desktop Linux usage.

I recently migrated from Windows to Linux. I bought a new machine with Windows 11 Pro preinstalled and it was a cesspool of Microsoft ads for their services coming from within the OS and preinstalled apps. It was happening so often, and affecting my productivity while annoying the heck out of me, that I decided Windows is hindering more than it's helping; I bit the bullet and installed Linux for the first time.

Fast forward and I've been on Linux for more than 6 months now and, while it's not all roses, my overall experience has been far better than Windows 11. I still remote into a Windows machine regularly for things that I have not yet migrated to Linux and, while it's a familiar space, it's no longer a space I want to be in.

Moved to Linux Mint a few months ago and 90% of the Steam games I play work the same (or better) which surprised me. Dev experience is way better and I haven't had to tinker with much at all, Bluetooth controllers connect just fine and no more bloat + spying by default.

I switched to linux desktop about 2.5 years ago.

TBH, I'm ready to go back to windows.

The way I put it, driving a car with a driver's seat that looks like 747 cockpit is pretty cool and definitely very powerful. And it has auto-pilot if you just want the basics.

But man, if you want to do more than the absolute basics, a regular Toyota corolla drivers seat is _way_ more accommodating and intuitive. You don't need to spend a year studying the machine to use it fluidly.

Linux is cool, the idea incredible, but man, searching for guides that tell you to turn cryptic knobs, flick unlabeled switches, and push seemingly random buttons just to get the window to roll down has become too taxing for me. Especially when half the time it doesn't even work.

I want a GUI, .exe's, and hover text on options. There is a reason every consumer grade linux/unix OS hides the terminal (android, iOS, macOS).

I'm a macOS user but would be interested in getting a linux desktop, I've heard Linux Mint or PopOS are pretty good just from a ease of use perspective? I've used Ubuntu in the past and had all sorts of display graphics driver problems.

I know it's an impossible question, but nonetheless, what's the best distro to use for someone who just wants a useable desktop?

I hope adoption of Linux accelerates.

Windows has become incredibly anti-user. I built a new PC recently. No internet because the latest version of the Windows 11 installer didn't have a realtek Wifi driver on it. This driver was present in the Windows 10 installer.

If I didn't know the work around, I would not have been able to install the OS.

Ok, so I got the OS installed, and was greeted with an OS with 4 different UI styles glued together from W7 on up. Keep in mind, the OS in its entirety has UI elements dating back to Windows 3.1.

Still no WIFI drivers which I had to hunt down and wait because the OEM's website was spittling out corrupt data for a while.

WIFI up, Windows update missed a bunch of drivers. Installed them manually.

After about 45 minutes, finally got the OS ready to install apps. Basic apps. Office, dev stuff, photo stuff. This took over an hour, what with Windows updates, and all.

I also put the latest copy of Fedora on my laptop. No internet connection needed. Typed in username, passcode. Installed in about 10 minutes. WIFI working out of the box. One reboot later, I had a fully functioning OS that came with everything I needed. 20 minutes total, perhaps.

Microsoft has completely thrown away any notion of usability while Linux is accelerating towards it.

I still can't quite wrap my head around requiring internet to install the OS while also not providing a means to access the internet via WIFI.

And then of course there are all the other issues surrounding the OS that has been talked about at length here.

Finally, Windows 11 is a buggy, slow, unresponsive mess of an OS, and it makes using Windows 10 feel like a breath of fresh air due to its comparative responsiveness and lack of bugs. Keyword is comparative. Windows 10 is still a corpulent waddling pig of a sloppily glued together OS.

Linux seems to be stealing more market share from OSX than Windows: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.

I switched to desktop Linux about a year ago. Fedora Sway Spin. I have done a major version upgrade without issue. None of the buttons moved. Nothing broke. Just business as usual. No complaints about the OS itself. The final straw was a Steam game that wouldn’t launch on Windows 10 but worked in Steam/Proton. I haven’t booted Windows since.

Linux on desktop is just a solid workhorse. My 13+ years laptop is chugging along happily with Ubuntu and my Windows8 10+ years beefed up desktop takes 10 minutes to start and 5 minutes to open a browser and basically a broken mess of security holes.

As a user of 27" 4k monitors, the terrible 150% DPI scaling has been a dealbreaker for Linux desktop for me for years. Every so often I will go out and search to see if it's any better, and I always find people insisting that it works "perfectly" now, and then I will go and try to replicate what they did only to find out that "perfectly" means something very different to Linux desktop users who clearly have never used MacOS or even Windows with fractional DPI scaling.

Nearly 6%, really. Only misreported due to a certain browser not including 'Linux' in its user-agent string.

Having switched back to Linux after many years, even looking at Mac OS feels like poverty now. Not because of the UX or hardware but because of the company behind it.

Atomic Linuxes really are the gateway for regular people to use Linux.

I've been using Linux since the 90s and I never really would recommend Linux to anyone unless there were very special circumstances.

But today I'd gladly recommend for example Fedora Atomic, I haven't tried other atomic Linux distros but the key feature is being able to revert back to a previous state in the boot manager.

No software will ever be perfect, but once an issue happens a non-technical user must be able to easily revert back to a functional state so they can proceed with their work and life. Otherwise the OS is worthless to them.

And sure you've been able to do this with BTRFS and snapshots but Fedora Atomic is the first time I've personally seen a distro come with this feature out of box, while also being very modern and easy to use.

Just the other day I did an ostree upgrade and after rebooting Firefox couldn't play videos, Steam wouldn't even start. I just wanted to get on with my day so I simply rebooted into the previous commit. An end-user is given time and breathing room to wait for the issue to be resolved and try another update.

Linux is getting better all the time and Windows is getting worse all the time. We'll definitely make it to 5% eventually.

The highest share seems to be in India with 16.21% Linux. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india

I wonder whether that's real or a mirage caused by Linux servers masquerading as desktops.

Linux can win the desktop by just sitting still while Windows makes itself more and more awful and user-hostile.

I think the more people that have to suffer with windows 11, the more they will turn to Linux. To the average user, Linux is still a clunky, disjointed operating system, but despite its flaws it's vastly better than Windows 11.

Linux Desktop got so much better in recent years but it also stayed the same. If you’re trying to be productive and not just switching between editor and terminal windows there are still endless frustrations that never end.

I remember playing with GNU/Linux since 2005 due to frustrations with the Windows XP and, eventually, Windows Vista. I think it was around 2007 I commited to it, thanks to a "beginning Ubuntu" book that came with the recent release distro CD.

Since then, I have only used GNU/Linux, trying different distros. In the end I kinda settled down with Debian but open to others like Guix.

However, my recent laptop which I've had for 3 years now, came with Windows 10. About a year or so ago it just upgraded itself to Windows 11. I don't mind it but there are just ** on it I don't care for. If I want it, I will install it. Even when I remove it, it comes back on the taskbar, etc.

I am only on Windows due to my current job - but as I am close to resignation... it wont be long before I backup important data, wipe the hard drive, and install debian.

I honestly think GNU/Linux as a desktop is far superior that Windows 11. I guess it all depends what you use a PC/laptop for. If you are stuck in a world of Microsoft products, such as Office.. I get it. It can be hard to break away what you are familiar with and, in some ways, some Micrsoft products dont really have close alternatives.

For me as a programmer, I pretty much have everything I need and my wife who use her laptop as a general user, had no complaints, either.

Honestly, since the rise of Steam on Linux and complaints on Windows 11 -- I am not suprised the market share for linux is rising.

How much of this is due to non-technical users simply using phones and tablets instead of laptops and other devices with "desktop" OSes?

I used to run Linux on my desktop as a teenager, but now as a middle aged man I just want to sit down after work, boot up my computer, click the icon of my favourite game and relax for a bit.

And for that, I prefer Windows. I have stopped caring about my distro, my window manager, my desktop environment, the package manager I use. Even my wallpaper is just the default Windows 11 one.

Is it including or excluding the SteamDeck users?

I moved to Linux for a few months (currently on EndeavourOS, but just distro hopping...). The main reasons for me was because of how the latest updates on Windows 11 has been very horrible.

Windows had only one OK consumer mail app, the inbox Mail apps, and they killed and replaced with Outlook Web App basically.

File Explorer got super awful, unstable, slow...

A ton of native things getting replaced by web apps... And each web app using their own Webview2, instead of at least using a shared webview between the apps (that's how W8 and W10 worked).

The result for this is that to show a simple weather info on taskbar, it literally needs a webview. Yes, the temperature thing on taskbar uses webview. If you are low on resources, the system just can't handle all of that.

Meanwhile on Gnome here, although with some issues, none comes close to that, and the design has been very consistent as well.

Sadly I'm moving back to Windows by the end of the month due to the lack of audio production software, the only area where WINE, virtual machines with USB passthrough fail..

I'll still use Linux VMs for various services while my host is Windows and I'll develop in WSL but it's sad that a creative niche like audio production has practically no players in the Linux scene, I'm talking Native Instruments, Spitfire, EastWest, Dorico, even MuseScore with its MuseHub do not run under NixOS for example. Quite a shame.

I don't know why this is always in the news. %4.45 is still very small. Linux came out 34 years ago. That's an ion in computer years. Linux desktop is in too many flavors. MacOS is one MacOS. whatever the latest. Windows 11 is Windows 11. Not many flavors of it.

I feel like Linux people are cheering for a tiny number. They'll take whatever desktop market share they can. 10 years from now maybe it will be 6%. Well... big f*king hurray! Open the champagne bottles!

This is all silly.

As a Linux desktop user, I installed windows in a VM to use an application that is not available for Linux (a printer app made by a vendor was available only for Windows and macOS).

Awful! Slow, bloated, my files by default were uploaded to Microsoft (and the setting is easily reversed with updates if turned off), lots of advertisement everywhere I click, edge is slow, …

Glad to be a Linux user! The quality of open source software is frankly very high. The only limitation is that some drivers or software are not made for Linux.

I wonder if more people are using linux as a desktop or generally, people are using less desktop devices with the rise of phones and tablets. What i mean is, before even old people and the normal users would need desktop and they would prefer windows and mac, but now i feel like they are generally less probe to use desktops and dont need them so that might be contributing to the sudden market share rise of linux maybe? U know what i mean?

I wonder just how much of this has been driven by third-party vendors dropping Windows 7 users. I know it's not zero, because I helped a die-hard Windows 7 user switch to Linux specifically due to the Steam deadline. It's easy to chalk that kind of stubbornness up to a generic "fear of change", but in his case I think he very specifically loathed the direction Microsoft took with 8/10/11.

I am done with windows after issues with the quality of windows updates (even security updates!), dark patterns everywhere, pushy anti competitive nudges to Microsoft products, copilot privacy issues, and things like ads in the start menu. I want to use Linux but the main issue for me is battery life of common Linux laptops, especially since standby doesn’t work reliably.

The beauty of this decades long race is that the end game is still ambiguous. The Windows desktop trends towards being a thin client for opaque cloud services, which means at some point the Linux desktop proposition will be quite dramatically different, with its emphasis on local, private, open source etc.

In any case, for power users the Linux desktop is already a formidable platform.

With modern hardware it's also completely viable to have a Windows VM idling in the background on a Linux desktop to run things like MS Office. Local RDP performance (with FreeRDP/etc.) is excellent and suitable for business or dev work that doesn't require accelerated graphics. You can have shared directories, a shared clipboard, and so forth.

"Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place,"

I don't think it makes sense to count "unknown" as being in third place…

In case you're wondering if it's real growth, or just noise:

2009: 0.69

2012: 0.85

2015: 1.5

2018: 1.69

2021: 2.38

2024: 4.54

Finally, 2024 will be the year of the Linux desktop!

On a serious note there seems to be an interesting lesson here about what sort of products just don’t seem to work in a non-commercial open source model. Specifically, simple user friendly UIs for non-power users seem to require financial incentives and competition.

It only took 30 years, time to update growing projections for the next 30 to come.

It will be beating the 10% mark?

I think Windows 10 was the best desktop experience. There was a period when OSX was nice. Linux is doable but it’s always 80% there (speaking strictly in terms of DE). Things break more often than I’d like. Not a problem if you do everything in terminal.

I kind of wonder or suspect that user agents are being misidentified. I have heard that sometimes Android gets identified as Linux. (which I guess is actually not wrong, but you get the point...)

I don’t trust these stats at all. I’d like to see a breakdown by user agent.

It makes much more sense to me that ChromeOS is becoming more common than that everyday users are switching to Linux.

C'mon Adobe. Release CC for Linux. Bless a DE or ship your own. Linux's market share will only increase and your suite should be pretty platform abstracted by now, anyway.

Ho, hum. Linux has been on my desktop for 23 years.

Good. Linux desktop is the future.

Across the week, I go between Linux, MacOS and Windows - my work issued device runs MacOS and my personal desktop PC dual boots Windows and Linux. I am biased towards Linux because I like it but it's far from perfect.

UX is a passion of mine and something I'm a little pedantic about and while Linux has made strides, it still has a long way to go in this department though it's _so close_ and constantly getting better.

Gnome and KDE all have their little inconsistencies and/or lack of functionality. Individually they are minor but together they make it feel unpolished or incomplete.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of things that I feel could be improved - don't get me wrong, I love Linux and use it constantly - nit picking is my way of finding areas to improve it so I can recommend it in earnest to friends looking for a bit of OS strange.

Some things that I think could be improved;

===

- Gnome; has an incomplete file manager, though generally no file manager available on MacOS or Linux beats the one on Windows 7 or 10.

- Gnome; Window snapping doesn't always work for Chrome and in general window snapping needs some love.

- Gnome,KDE; While Chrome has its own style on all platforms, it somehow feels less congruent to Linux desktops than it does to MacOS and Windows - plus you can't drag tabs off the window in Wayland Chrome.

- KDE; Password keychain stuff. Feels like this needs to be native to Linux and not the DE.

- KDE; (minor) If you have a high refresh screen, KDE will use 60hz for workspace transition animations but 144hz for everything else.

- Gnome; Window decorations on Gnome are overly padded which makes the interface feel unpolished and somewhat clumsy compared to the tight fonts and spacing you see on Windows and MacOS. I assume this is because Gnome aspire to make a play for a mobile OS one day in the future?

- Gnome; The Gnome/libadwaita guidelines prefer a application menu design that is obscured from view resulting in too many clicks - I think this is also related to their mobile play. I believe that Cosmic gets this right.

- Linux; Please fix application installations. Flatpak is kind of okay but I constantly have issues with it so I tend to avoid it. I really love MacOS's "Foo.app" "executable folder" concept. It feels similar to AppImage but I don't think that's going to win the packaging wars any time soon.

- Fedora 40 + AMD GPU; This is my configuration but it might affect other distros/hardware - Steam doesn't launch from the icon right now. You must install Steam then launch it from the terminal.

===

There are lots of areas for improvement but regardless - every new release of Gnome and KDE gets better and better.

Steam has helped put Linux gaming on the map, that combined with the poor experience of Windows 11 has encouraged IT savvy people & gamers to genuinely consider running a Linux desktop for the first time.

Also the Cosmic desktop is shaping up to be a real strong contender in the Linux DE space and I am excited to see what happens there.

It's an exciting time to be watching the desktop computing space and I am hopeful that the additional attention Linux is getting will continue to push investment into polishing the desktop experience.

Nice news, slow and steady grows in the past decade :)

Regarding the article...

> While Linux's growth is noteworthy, it's important to view it in the context of the overall desktop operating system market:

>

> Windows remains dominant with a 72.08% market share

> macOS holds steady at 14.92%

> Chrome OS trails at 1.41%

>

> Linux's 4.45% puts it firmly in fourth place, ahead of Chrome OS but still well behind the market leaders.

Uhm what? And some people claim LLMs are great at summarizing data...

FreeBSD at 0.01%. There are dozens of us! :)

The year of the Linux desktop?

Year of the Linux desktop

"As awareness of data privacy issues grows, more users are turning to open-source alternatives like Linux"

I'd love to see Linux for mobile devices just because of that reason. Old school "what happens on device, stays on device"

This is the year of the Linux desktop