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do you see linux ever having 10 - 20 % market share in desktop space? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 36 points 7 months ago* (9 children)

Yes. It's already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years. There are several major external factors at play: Valve helping to push gaming on Linux, the continued and increasingly big enshittification of Windows, and the current deranged US regime (resulting in less trust and less users of US-company-produced proprietary operating systems). Remember that Linux or the open source BSD variants are the only (usable/practical) operating systems you can use if you want to achieve digital sovereignty. Plus, it's also getting even better over time by itself of course (that's the internal factor).

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    it’s already grown from ~1% to ~6% within the last couple of years

    Source?

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The primary source being cited by most of the articles is U.S. Gov Analytics, (or the less reliable Statcounter, which I wouldn't rely on.) U.S. Gov Analytics currently places it at around 4.7% over the last 30 days, 4.4% this calendar year, and 5.6% the last calendar year. It was about 6%-ish when most articles were written about the 6% number for the first time.

    Steam, so basically just gamers and not regular desktop users, has it more around 2.3%.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined

    Just normalize by language to English to avoid the huge spikes of Chinese users skewing the data and you'll see we're around 8.54% for English speakers:

    • English windows users: 0,2041×96,61 = 19.72
    • English Linux users: 0,826×2,23= 1.84
    • Filtered total: 21,56
    • Filtered percentage of Linux users: 0,085 i.e. 8.5%
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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Surely we don't count steam deck nor think gamers are a representative sample of computer users

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Gamers are the majority of the desktop space, and only growing in percentage as nowadays the main reason someone has a PC is for gaming with phones replacing almost all other uses. Also gaming has been historically the main issue with Linux, so looking at gaming stats has always been the pessimistic way of looking at this.

    Steam Deck might skew things a bit, but not by that much, as only 23% of Linux users are on SteamOS, so even subtracting all of those (which is not correct as some people might have a Deck and also play on other Linux, like myself) you still have a 6.5% pure Linux user base, which is what the message you're replying mentioned. Also I would argue people using the Steam Deck are using Linux, whether their other devices are Linux or not is irrelevant to the point that they are Linux users.

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