artyom comments on Linux desktop use spikes to over 10% in North America for the first time. There is also a corresponding drop in Windows and OSX use.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 14 points 3 months ago (4 children)

There's no way that's accurate, right?

[–] Manticore@lemmy.nz 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

Quite likely. Many Linux distros aren't visible because they hide their telemetry, and would be marked as 'unknown' - or they spoof Windows or Mac for compatibility reasons. It'd be impossible to get an accurate read on how many computers run Linux, but it'll be higher than the number that report it.

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[–] artyom@piefed.social 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

AFAIK they get their data through crowd-sourced browser header data. And I really doubt any significant number of people are manipulating that.

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[–] cecilkorik@piefed.ca 7 points 3 months ago

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg has over a million users on Chrome alone. It's possibly more common than you think.

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[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 points 3 months ago

"Looking at browser headers" usually means they're parsing the User-Agent string, which all kind of people (and bots) spoof for all kinds of reasons. There even used to (and might still) be a Firefox extension that would generate random ones.

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