https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/north-america/#monthly-200901-202607
Cloudflare stats also seem to support peaks of 15% usage but around 9-10% on average.
The trendline suggests this is just the start.
There’s no way that’s accurate, right?
This graphic: fuck BSD in particular
Oh shit, is this it? Is this actually the year of the Linux desktop?
I think so! It just took Windows shooting itself in the foot to do it.
Don’t discount indirect thing like Sony announcing plans to abandon discs on the Playstation right as the Steam Machine launches with Linux and wide game compatibility via Proton. Even at its inflated price due to the Rampocalypse, it’s selling out constantly. It’s a perfect storm right now.
And it only took 728472994881 bullets!
Seriously… there will never be a wide-spread year of the Linux desktop. Because that would require lobbying and investments to get devices with pre-installed Linux by default to the clueless majority that doesn’t actually know what an OS is anyway.
And once a Linux distro goes commercial to fill that requirement it is incentivised to implement all the usual crap and enshittification that are missing in Linux normally.
IIRC this was debunked some time ago, it’s related to a change in OSX/MacOS that’s causing Apple devices to show up as Linux.
This makes more sense, that graph doesn’t pass the sniff test. I’d be looking for some other explanation than suddenly Linux use spiked almost 3X.
The spike likely represents Statcounter being too slow to adjust their methods of filtering out bot page views after some brand new web scrapers appeared on the scene hoovering up all the data for AI training. 10% linux market share would be a cosmic event. You would hear about it in mainstream media if it were really happening.
Edit: I forgot about popular youtube channel Linus Tech Tips’ recent videos in which they gave linux their highest praise yet. One was published in mid June, another in mid July, and their most recent and most favorable to linux was published on July 22 (“My Experience Using the Steam Machine as a Desktop PC”). There have also been videos on the Framework laptops. Vibes tell me that there’s a trend of more people using mobile over desktop, so I would expect a higher proportion of desktop users to be the gamer or technically inclined type, enough to be influenced by LTT and give linux a shot, compared to 10 years ago.
Here’s the data for the last 4 months.
Date Windows OS X Linux Chrome OS macOS 2026-04 66.39 17.04 2.94 4.42 9.21 2026-05 64.66 19.92 3.56 3.72 8.15 2026-06 59.08 24.06 6.14 2.19 8.53 2026-07 57.63 21.07 10.61 2.07 8.63The data looks noisy. You would expect the lines to have consistent, regular annual patterns. You can see that with Chrome OS which seems to have a dip in the middle of the year corresponding to when schools are out for summer vacation, and if you scan upward, it appears Windows has a corresponding hump at that time. But there are still unexplained extreme swings. The lines look smooth up until 2012/2013. Maybe Statcounter doesn’t have as many members/page views as it once did, leading to higher variance. We could see that if we had absolute numbers, but we only have percentages. That’s probably affected by the advent of the LLMs. Nobody’s going to the web anymore to find information.
Announcing Linux growth wouldn’t be in the best interest of US mainstream media’s billionaire owners so it would go unreported. Can’t increase Apple and Microsoft stocks if the word gets out people are freeing themselves. US journalism has effectively died.
In this context what is the difference between macOS and OS X? I can’t help but feel that is like listing Windows 10 separately.
It may not look like a big deal but it wasn’t too long ago Windows was like 95% of the OS market.
