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Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America (lemmy.today)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linux@sh.itjust.works
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[–] 42 points 3 months ago (18 children)

For as long as I can remember it's always hovered around 4-5%. Even 5% seemed like a magical number to cross. To see it hit double digits in a span of a few months is crazy. I wonder how they're gathering the stats for this? What gave Linux a boost. Surely it wasn't the Steam Machines by themselves that caused this boost.

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  • [–] 41 points 3 months ago* (5 children)
    1. Linux runs games well now.
    2. New computers are expensive, and Windows runs like poop on old computers.
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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    1. Did you know Proton is 8 years old? Steam launched on Linux in 2013. Gaming on Linux is a 10+ year old endeavor at this point. I remember the days of Steam barely running through Wine and before Lutris and Bottles and Heroic.

    2. The part about old Windows PCs running like shit has been true going back to like Windows 95 when I first started using computers. Building PCs as opposed to buying a pre-built has always been a $1000+ venture for me.

    There's something else happening here. If I had to guess, everything being mentioned plays a factor into it but the zeitgeist surrounding Linux has finally shifted far enough away from being for nerds and terminal only mode to being "user friendly" enough for large swaths of people to switch. More than that though is the privacy issues with AI and Age verification. That seems more pertinent amongst Windows switchers than 'gaming is good.' Nobody want's to be bombarded by Copilot all the time.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    1. 8 years ago, compatibility and ease of use weren't quite there. This has changed a lot in the last 3 or 4 years, I would say (having followed linux gaming for around 30 years).

    2. That is true, but there's a difference now; for the first time in history Moore's Law has reversed: instead of doubling compute power at the same cost every X months (depending on the part), we're now having less compute power at the same cost than the previous Y months (we as in we consumers, not the hyperscalers, of course).

    Windows has always been resource intensive, but it's the first time that new computers, at the same price, have less resources to run than new computers the year before. Of course Linux is affected too, but as it runs well on pretty much everything with some tweaking, it's a much better choice now for every 12 year old kid that likes to play games and does the technical support in the family.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    What gave Linux a boost.

    My guess is summer. Perhaps people waited until they have more time to switch from Windows to Linux. And holiday means less work computers – which are all Windows machines – being used.

    Cloudflare Radar also shows a sudden jump from 3.5% to 5.5% from June 15 to June 29. It has since come down to 3.9%, which is still about 0.6 percent points higher than previous average.

    https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=os&filters=deviceType%253DDESKTOP%252CbotClass%253DLIKELY_HUMAN&dt=52w

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

    Im guessing it was Microsoft shooting itself on the balls over and over

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    This was the case for me last summer. Waited until the start of break so if anything went wrong it wouldn't be too much of a nightmare. Wouldn't be too shocked if others took similar opportunity. Depends a bit how many people have any sort of proper summer holiday these days though.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    I think it's due to how easy it is to set up now if you have a decent AI model to chat with. Instead of having to scour forums that may or may not have your answer, now you have an IT guy in a box who can take care of pretty much everything for you.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    You don't need an LLM to setup Linux, it is as easy, possibly even easier than setting up Windows 11. While LLMs can provide some help in troubleshooting, they can be just as wrong. If you think they can't be, quite frequently actually, you are living a dangerous life.

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

    I was gonna say what do you need an AI to use a 3 button graphical user interface for? Almost every distro besides Arch has figured out the ux for os install.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's handy when your video card drivers update in the background and then stop working. Then you get to learn fun commands like nvidia-smi to try and figure out what the hell is going on.

    Linux is good, but there is still a pretty heavy need to get around on the command line. While I'm no fan of Windows anymore, at least you can point and click your way through a fair amount of stuff natively. Having a built-in Device Manager clone would be handy.

    Also, setting up a multi-function printer/copier/scanner can be pretty ugly. Yeah only old people print, but they are still around. Tinkering with brsaneconfig4 to set up a scanner is a handful.

    For most laptop users who don't do much with peripherals and hardware, you're pretty good. If you connect anything kinda odd, you're going to have to work for it.

    I use an online platform to connect to my car for diagnostics and the USB to OBDII cable requires specific drivers. I am thankful that the manufacturer did supply them, but I've had a few devices like that where it was just a dead end.

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    • [–] 29 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

    I finally made the move. It's been great so far. Might accidentally convert 3 old computers into my home computer lab. Seems to be a slippery slope.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    You have old computers that are friends?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    You happy?/jokingly

    I edited my post to not have that relic of an adhd subject change mid writing a sentence. I can literally spend an hour thinking everything is wrong, or I get on with my life. I seriously felt bad about this one, which is why I did change it.

    Btw upvote for calling out the poorly written sentence. No calling me the more stupider-est dumbdumb.

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    • [–] 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

    OS X (obsolete & unsupported since 2018) has more users than macOS?!

    Also, where did you get those stats? https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/north-america has different numbers to yours.

    Link to stats: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I will never stop calling it osx.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    A young 'un! Macintosh, surely.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Os9!

    I just dont get why they changed it from osx to whatever it is now. 10.4, 10.5, 15.7...

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Wait, they renamed it? And back to the previous name? The previous name of the pre-Unix version of the OS was MacOS.

    I thought these stats meant there were still significant numbers of people on 25 year old computers.

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    • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    This graphic just flexing on BSD at 0% for no reason

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    • [–] 14 points 3 months ago

    ChromeOS uses a Linux kernel, so one could say desktop Linux usage is >12%.

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    [–] 24 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    I wasn't expecting this. Wow, 10.65% is awesome growth!

    https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america

    Worldwide: 7.61%

    https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

    Nice! Let's keep it up!

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    Outside of North America, and I just switched an old laptop (backup school device for kids) and my secondary computer that couldn't be upgraded to windows 11 (so no longer receiving security updates) to Linux Mint in the past week. I'm a normie, and the process was simple even for me. Over the weekend we've tested a couple games on the secondary computer and while they didn't run as well, they ran. Doing some more gaming this morning under the guide of "testing" haha

    So far everything has been easier than Windows, I was very impressed as last time I tried (I think 2015ish I tried Ubuntu?) it was not nearly this easy. Everything just worked: third party controllers, USB devices, etc all connected immediately. The only issue I ran into was the sound in one game cutting out randomly from time to time? Not sure why, didn't take time to diagnose.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Won´t be too long before EU governments and corporations stop handing their information over to Trump's surveillance state as a matter of routine; several governments and privacy-focused businesses (hospitals especially) are planning to transition off of Microsoft to Linux.

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    • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Would like to get some confirmation from other sources before I start huffing the hopium. I'm afraid they could just be AI scrapers

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    • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I wonder what the division between win10 and win11 is

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    • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    They stopped reporting "unknown"? I want to know the absolute number also. It was 20% unknown for June.

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    [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I love how everyone here(kinda including me too) is eating up bs willingly cause we hate windows so much. Its obviously not at 10%

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    • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    As long as it never becomes mainstream we're good.

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