Source: windowslatest 🧐

Ironically, I'm not sure it matters.

people running bots are still a large section of an OS's market share. Microsoft wouldn't hesitate to include bots and such like because it inflates the appearance that "everyone just uses it". which does in fact drive up usage.

People running bots are still people using computers and such.

The numbers already accounted for bots.

Kinda assumed that. Who really thinks Linux usage DOUBLED worldwide in a month?

Just note how the guy starts with "only Microsoft numbers can be trusted" is biased bullshit. Pretending a company will give true numbers at all time, is a big lie. If anything they will inflate numbers and they'd try to hide the truth as much as they can because investors are watching.

While there will be truth in bots taking a part of the traffic, the whole article is Microsoft bootlicker talk.

Taking another random tool that seems to filter bot for results is just him trying to get a confirmation for his bias.

Yes a 10% stat at a given time by a given measurement tool, is not equal to a true 10% userbase. Yes there are bots. Yes there are Linux and Windows zombies alike.

Still, linux desktop is going up, with a fraction of the marketing power Windows and Apple have.

Yes there are zero bots running windows and nothing would ever inflate those numbers pleased clap.

Ignoring that the default browsers on many distros are seen as bot traffic, filtering the alleged bot traffic on Linux still results in around 7% of overall traffic, up from 4ish a year ago. It also doesn’t explain the giant leaps in downloads on many distros that correlate with the spike. It’s possible some organization set up a ton of computers with openclaw and a wide variety of distros on it I guess to influence opinion 🤷‍♀️

Also extremely biased source

Copium

To address some of the author's points.

1. MacOS vs OSX: to my understanding, safari reports the OS as OSX still, likely for compatibility reasons. 3rd party browsers such as chrome changed their agent to macOS, which explains the split. macOS users are more likely to use Safari in general.
2. Bots: Does the author really believe these sites aren't capable of detecting bots? I'm sure some slip through, but if not traffic were included in general, then Linux would be at a 90% share or higher. They just consume way more page traffic than a human ever could.
3. Data corrections: Sure, the data may get corrected a bit to bring Linux numbers back down, but there is a clear trend that Linux numbers are rising. It also happens that Windows is where people are migrating from the most.
4. Official numbers from Microsoft: lol

Okay, so did they account for the bots that claim to be Windows PCs? (I'll bet there are still some running around that identify themselves as IE 6, although those may finally no longer be the majority of all bots.)

it's weird (perhaps convenient) that their explanation is "bots" but they don't mention bot metrics from StatCounter themselves: according to StatCounter numbers, bot traffic share increased 0.37% in July 2026, while Linux Desktop grew 1.92% in the same month.

What I read is a whole lot of vagueness and assumptions and so n so...

Anecdotal evidence doesn't count but Ima use this one today: I know a guy.

Not a super tech wizard in the slightest but works with pc's, recently told me he joined the linux camp with bazzite. I think we here on the fediverse all probably know someone who recently switched through proton/bazzite or mint/ubuntu ...

And those might not all stick around, but some will.

As long as MS keeps shooting themselves in the foot and showing their allegiance to drumpelstilskin and company I'd like to think people are going to take notice.

It's not gonna be that old lady next door but her grandson at some point probably will be coming across linux at some point.

Sounds like they're in denial.

guys don't tell them that this also means that windows is poop, since it's either too bad at scaling or at tech infrastructure to even attract ai developers to the platform 😂

Overall probably closer to the truth.

I wish people didn't obsess over these large numbers as much. Like when Linux suddenly hit 5% on Steam when that was clearly just an outlier and was destined to fall right back down.

Aww :(

So is it still 4%?

There are thousands of organizations that rely on Microsoft for their office suite, Outlook, Teams and these companies have thousands of PCs. They can mandate what update will get pushed, restrict admin access, running monitoring tools etc.. These are hard to replace.

Jokes on them. I'm running WSL.

I'm on pro Linux side and still think that trend was pushed by AI scrappers.

Why not try promoting the Linux desktop as a platform that makes it easy to use AI bots?

I feel like im never early to things, so I've been using linux for 2 years it's probably pretty popular and has been for a while now

Humans are why we cannot have nice things. The internet was always going to get ridiculous, just like the usa was always going to prove back to the future right in the stupidest possible way.

Here at home two computers change from windows to linux in the past couple months. Windows isn't coming back 🤗

Nice try, Windows

My family had 3 windows machines a few years ago. Now we have 3 Linux machines.

I know we're not representative of the public at large, but my siblings are interested in transitioning... My friends are having more and more gripes with windows lately... Seems like a revolution is on the horizon. Never seen this sort of willingness, so who knows

Even if that's true it doesn't invalidate the 10% market share, I doubt that all 57% of Windows machines are actual users.

This is where I stopped reading. We’re looking at OS X, which was replaced by macOS in 2016, at 21.14%, while macOS itself sits at 8.6%.

Statcounter says on their market share page for macOS that they can't really reliably show usage stats for anything past 10.15, due to a bug in Apple WebKit. The actual market share of macOS is very likely much higher.

Granted, Windows 11 is not a perfect OS

You don't say...

This propaganda was brought to you by Microslop. Seriously though, as there is with all propaganda there is likely some truth to it, but I think the majority are real users. The winds are changing, and Microsoft is afraid.

I demand heckin' sources for that claim.

So the microsoft toady who wrote the article is saying that linux does ai better than windows 11?

Basically, the article says "Windows is doing fine. Microsoft even told us. Also, no one uses AI bots on Windows."

The bot argument is valid but the OS X thing could just be because most browsers on macOS report “Mac OS X” in the User-Agent string for compatibility (and 10.15 as the version regardless of the actual OS version, for privacy reasons).

I'd be willing to bet enough Linux users use anti-fingerprinting tools to make the statistics super inaccurate anyway.

Only windows device in the house is my work computer, which is mandated to have it for specific company demands.

Everything in the house otherwise is some nature of Unix.

I think this is still good to see. People on the edge of switching operating systems might see 10% market share on linux and finally give it a chance. It would be pure herd mentality but anything to get people off of Microslop.

Personally I made the jump a month or two ago. I don't think it is 100% AI traffic this increase.

While this sounds like cope, I'm leaning towards believing it. Firefox also just saw a 50% increase in users... Or the data got messed up in some way that nobody else (including Mozilla themselves) is able to detect and report.

Organic Linux usage jumping a full 100% seems even less likely.

The thing with FOSS is, that market share matters to an extend, only. It's about support und continued development and financing that (or helping otherwise).

The strain on the FOSS developers isn't closely related to the market share. Ok, bigger market share, might help to better the financing.

But Linux does well with the current share. (Doesn't mean its devs do too.) Server wise Linux is already here to stay. Desktop wise... It's much better than years ago, I must say.

KDE, Pipewire and all the USB and bluetooth device integration is already pretty good. There are bugs and flaws, but nothing serious. Hardware support - I can't think of any hardware in my possession, that isn't supported.

All the office apps, browsers, development environments don't need Windows anymore.

Gaming? Steam will continue to nudge developers to release native Linux versions. Or proper wine configs. They have a steam hardware to sell after all.
Yes, the anti-tamper ring0 and virtualization stuff can't be easily emulated or virtualized, I heard. Or has that changed?

Anything else that needs Windows running natively?

Specialized software still needs native Windows? What about Adobe and the like? Tools without a fully featured replacement and no native Linux version. These might offer Linux support if the share increases.

That's rookie numbers let's get it to 30% to get massive amounts of new Linux hardware, devices, accessories made. Also, to make unlockable bootloader the standard for phones, tablets, cars, etc

I thought those numbers looked fishy, now we know why. Actually, the numbers themselves aren't fishy, the fishy part is misinterpreting them.

Is there a reliable site that does report user installations of OS's?

Haha