Linux market share passes 4% for first time; macOS dominance declines
Report: Linux was on 6.34 percent of computers last month if you count ChromeOS.
I know this might be a couple months old, but I didn't know we already passed 4%.
I don't think Microsoft (or Apple) want people to have personal computers anymore in the way that PCs have historically existed. That is to say, they don't want your computer capable of running arbitrary code of your choosing. They don't want your computer to have the potential to do everything, to run everything, to make anything.
They want to control and lock down all aspects of your machine and what it can do, retain ownership of hardware via software licenses, and monetize every click and keystroke.
Microsoft doesn't want you to have a functional computer anymore, they want you to have a dummy terminal that runs Office 365 and Copilot.
You'll own nothing and you'll be happy Ida Auken
They want PCs that work like smartphones, with apps completely self contained and unmodifiable, where the OS is a black box that no one but them can see in to.
Smartphones are actually a good window into what computers in general would have been like had the IBM bios not been reverse engineered and survived a bunch of legal challenges.
I think if it was up to them, and latency was low enough, they probably would have pushed some kind of "fully remote convertible laptop" where they literally own everything you do in a cloud, I don't even want to search if this is a thing that exist already
We've been most of the way their for a long while with thin clients. They have just enough computational capacity to connect to someone else infrastructure. Its also how schools use Chromebooks for the most part too
Now that we don’t have to pay for any of the infrastructure, it turns out that mainframes and timesharing is awesome. Can we go back to that please? - Silicon Valley, 2024
This is EXACTLY right.
They are dividing users into two groups. Unintelligent users who run Windows or MacOS in an extremely controlled limited way with AI assisting and monitoring everything remotely and reporting it back to the mothership...
Or people who are above an IQ of 85 and willing to learn to use Linux.
How much of this is decline at the expense of Windows 11, due to Steam lowering barriers to entry, fatigue with Windows' hard selling, and/or extending the useful like of hardware that W11 abandoned.
Copilot / Recall was the last straw for me. My only relationship with Microsoft for the last 10 years has been, "how much more of Microsoft's sh*t am I willing to put up with?"
I 100% put money on the fact that linuxes surge in popularity and usability is 100% because Valve, a multi-billion dollar company, stepped in and started dragging it forward in ways that the fractuous nature of the community never could.
Windows 11 being a spytastic invasive dogpile was just extra fuel on the fire.
Little bit of everything I think. I personally have been getting tired of Microsoft pulling their shit, but without Valve making compatibility so simple for their launcher it would make it a much harder sell.
The fuckery Microsoft has been doing with trying to outright trick people into signing in to the OS with a Microsoft account and using things like OneDrive combined with just how good Proton has gotten pushed me to make the switch full time a year or so ago for my personal usage.
Nearly zero. Gamers make up less than a rounding error of desktop installs.
Wut? It's an industry bigger than football and TV and film combined! Somebody's getting all those games and they have to be played on something too.
First off, I DO NOT count ChromeOS, but whatever.
Secondly, when is 18% of anything “dominant”??? The fuck? Arstechnica back up off the pipe.
They probably mean of Linux flavored ps coverage.
(I'm aware Mac is very different than Linux, but it is more closely grouped with Linux than Windows)
It's more BSD than anything.
Played csgo last night and this guy brought up he was playing on Linux Mint. Lfg, I was so happy.
I switched over to Fedora a number of months ago and switched to plasma a few weeks ago. 0 complaints on any game I’ve played between halo, cyber punk, doom, and forza.
It's cool and all, but I'm surprised it's not 10% at this point. Microsoft is shitting in their customers mouth and Apple is a luxury brand at this point.
Because every computer bought by the average human being, has Windows on it.
Yeah that's true.
4% is high considering there are probably more corporate desktops tham personal ones
Institutuonals like governments and businesses do embrace Linux, too, and I don't find many regular users running Linux on their machine for anything but IT work
For desktop or everything else. Because if its:
Web Servers, Supercomputers, Android Smartphones, Smart TVs, Network Routers, Network Switches, Embedded Devices, IoT Devices, NAS (Network-Attached Storage) Devices, Raspberry Pi, Smartwatches, Home Automation Devices, Google Chromebooks, Set-top Boxes, Drones, Digital Signage Devices, 3D Printers, Medical Devices, ATM Machines, Point of Sale (POS) Devices, Digital Cameras, Gaming Consoles, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Automotive Infotainment Devices, Mainframes, Telecommunications Equipment, Scientific Research Equipment, Security Devices, Cloud Servers, Network Firewalls, Storage Area Networks (SAN), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Devices, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Devices, Big Data Analytics Devices, Machine Learning Devices, Artificial Intelligence Devices, Financial Trading Devices, Air Traffic Control Devices, Spacecraft Control Devices, Weather Forecasting Devices, Broadcast Automation Devices, Railway Signaling Devices, Electric Grid Control Devices, Smart Meters, E-Readers, Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Stations, Robotics Devices
then Linux (or some kind of *Nix system) is probably what is running it. The only market share I dont see is desktop.
I don’t have any hard numbers, only what I have seen out in the world. But a good number of POS systems, embedded things like MRI machines, tire balancers in mechanics shops and ATMs run some flavor of embedded Windows.
It is not nearly as huge as *nix is, but it is not exactly uncommon either.
Linux founder Linus Torvalds, for example, has suggested that a lack of a standardized desktop that goes across all Linux distros has held back Linux adoption on desktop.
Yeah. Well, in on Linux in large part because of the diversity, choice, and options. If I wanted a monolithic, incestuous lock-in culture, I'd be on Windows, or a Mac.
Linux may have been simply making an observation, not a judgment, but fuck monocultures.
I'm thinking this comes from the consideration of taking imagery at the root of people's brains when they hear Linux. Reiterating elements of the Windows or Mac UI over the decades, even if they had small visual changes, enable a significantly large population of the world to imagine the desktop even just while mentioned in a passing. Anyone that doesn't use either of these OSes at least can have a basic imagery popping up about it due to constant advertising of the desktop via direct ads, support pages, tech websites using generic desktop images, screen shares, etc.
Linux is wild west in this regard. Everyone knows how Windows or MacOS looks like thanks to their abundant copies of descriptive bounty posters, but only other Linux users are familiar with other Linux desktops and that is usually as the names of fellow bounty hunters.
Yeah. When I think of Linux, I think of the terminal. It's the only constant over the years.
My septagenarian father thinks Linux looks like Linux Mint, because that's what I first set up for him, and that's what I walked him through installing on a new computer.
Viva la difference.
fuck monocultures.
I have to disagree. We can't have too many monocultures.
Just a reminder to take the data in that site with a grain of salt. I used to share them a lot, but then decided to read more about their methodology, and turns out it's mostly a black box, so they may be subject to several kinds of biases, and we can't even know. For example, we don't know which sites use their analytics and if there's a geographical bias. We also don't know how their scripts work and how the data is collected from devices. It would be nice if we had more sources of marketshare data to compare
For sure, I wish they gave us more data. The trend seems to be going up so that's nice.
Yes, this was big news all over Lemmy when it happened.
Thanks for bringing it up though! Not everyone might have known that.
Music and graphic art software is the only advantage I can find for MacOS over Linux at this point. I love the Apple silicon but I don't see that being a long term advantage.
Stability and UI/UX are still lightyears ahead in Mac, and to some extent Windows. Don't get me wrong, they suck for lots of reasons, but I think Linux has a lot of catching up to do to be as usable as Mac/Windows for the ordinary user.
I think standardizing package formats, and more mature desktop managers and proprietary drivers will go a long way to fixing that though.
People find Windows easier to use because they are used to the quirks. Of course you shouldn't let a beginner try Arch, but there are plenty of beginner friendly distros. The complications often come from installing Linux in the first place but the average user will have just as much trouble installing Windows.
High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.
And I haven't played around with Asahi yet, but it'll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple's fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.
I struggle to do the same things on the Mac that are trivial in Windows and Linux.
For example, I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install. For one thing, it required me to set up an Apple developer account on my version of MacOS
I don't use my girlfriend's Mac book because the OS is not as intuitive, like I found out recently you have to drag the icon in to install things. Who comes up with this shit?
I'm by no means a musician, let alone a professional one, but this part does admittedly suck. The actual sound backend works phenomenally well, especially when combining Pipewire and JACK for audio production, however using Windows-native VST/VST3 plugins is a horrible experience. A lot of mine are either really laggy, or just don't load properly at all
This isn't going to be the standard much longer. Gimp, Krita, and inkscape are extremely well developed and maintained.
Ardour is almost a full replacement for logic and the gap from it and protools is closing quick.
Honestly for art I’ve started using my iPad for it, and transferring the results onto my Mint install. Since mint or gnome (not sure which one) integrates Apple file sharing into the files app.
How much of this is regular people just not buying new computers anymore?
A lot of households that used to have had a laptop for each person have replaced those devices with phones and tablets. They weren't using Linux, so by removing them Linux market share would go up even if it hasn't actually grown.
Last I checked, Linux users also use phones.
I think the argument is that as less people have desktops and laptops, the only people left will be more technical (otherwise they'd just use a phone or tablet). The more technical people are also likely to use Linux. So as non-technical people move to tablets and phones, technical people make up a larger share of laptop/desktop users.
Glad for Linux going up, but the numbers should really come from Windows more than from MacOS.
Three cheers for King Torvalds and Lord Gaben!
"dominance"... You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means
Inconceivable
What happened in Nov 2023?
OSX and Windows move in opposite directions at the same time? Seems a little weird.
Since Unknown matches Windows only inverted some windows update was probably unclassified for that time period.
Probably sampling bias. Happens in steam surveys all the time, correlates to Chinese users being more or less represented in the sample
New PC / Steam Deck for Christmas happened
seems I'm too boomer for this shit, apparently phones count as "personal computers".
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
look at this graph and tell me that mac os is "dominant".
(the numbers for those who don't want to click the link)
Android = 43.86%
Windows = 27.97%
iOS = 17.8%
OS X = 5.64% (when did they stop calling it mac os?)
unknown = 1.96%
Linux = 1.44% (we're still last place guys!)
Isn't ChromeOS just a flavour of Linux?
Technically, yes. Practically, it's complicated. It doesn't really exist within the same ecosystem as other Linux distros.
It's not as different as Android (which is also technically a Linux distribution), but running a normal DE and all the programs that come with it is very clearly still an advanced user thing locked behind knowledge of how bash and virtual environments work.
Linux people generally use adblockers so I somewhat doubt all these analytics websites that don't have a methodology that wouldn't be blocked by adblockers listed
Do we actually see people unhappy with all Microsofts decisions? Did th so anything wrong?
