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So like 6% if you class ChromeOS as Linux (which it essentially is, just with a proprietary DE)
Then 7% unknown, you’d imagine a disproportionate amount of those would be Linux users, who are more likely to have unusual useragents or things that mess with telemetry. But who knows.
i didn’t need this date; i already knew this because the number of people coming up to me on the street and telling me they use Linux btw unprompted has increased noticeably.
How far down are PC sales in general though?
Is it that more people are buying Linux, or fewer Windows customers are buying new computers at all?
A few years ago, you’d have households with a laptop for every member of the family. Now with tablets and phones doing so much of the heavy lifting, many families are dropping to just 1 Windows or Mac laptop that mostly gathers dust.
My experience is more people having those devices on top of having laptops. I don’t know a single person in Uni that does not have a laptop at all. At last when it comes to writing reports or thesis you just need a proper keyboard device.
Meanwhile gaming and also PC gaming has become much bigger over the years, which keeps driving computer sales.
Believe it or not - but most people actually aren’t college students. Crazy, right?
Anybody in this forum isn’t a typical tech user.
I carry 3 laptops in my backpack (one for 8-5 job, one personal, and one for teaching night classes at the University) along with a foldable phone, a work phone, and e-ink notepad.
Between my 3 laptops, Rog Ally, 2 desktops, and some old laptops I keep around for media devices and network interfaces around the property, I’ve got like 10 Windows machines in my life.
But I also know I’m an outlier.
If you carry three laptops around you are definitely doing things wrong. There is no real world scenario where doing what you say you do needs 3 physical computers, and if you have a 9-5 AND teach night classes , you don’t have extra minutes to use your “personal” laptop that day, which leads me to call bull on the carry 3 laptops thing
The course I teach involves photo and video editing, which I do on my personal laptop for 2 reasons:
- Because I own the photos and videos I capture, the raws stay on my device.
- My personal laptop has a lot more horsepower
ooh! what’s the e-ink notepad, and what’s your usecase like?
it seems so appealing to just have a functionally infinite notebook on hand, but i’ve yet to find one that could ACTUALLY replace a regular physical notebook for me.
Boox Tab Ultra C.
It’s a 10" color e-ink tablet that runs Android.
Don’t get the keyboard case for it - it sucks hard. It’s so thick it turns it into another laptop, it types terribly, and when folded backwards so you can write it still tries taking over from the pen.
Other than that I love it.
argh that’s literally the ONE that was tempting me, now I guess I GOTTA buy one! this sucks!
(thank you so much i’ve wanted to buy this since it came out)
I used to think that I’d be glued to my PC forever, but ever since getting a foldable I’ve found that I’m no longer reliant on computers anymore for daily tasks. Plus there’s no point in eating up 300w of electricity during the summer (according to my watt meter), just to watch YouTube.
These days the only time I boot my PC is to play a game, search for a job, or make a large purchase. I’m a MilleniaI, so big purchases have to be done on the big computer. The phone is more than adequate for everything else. It’s not the 2010s anymore; phone screens are finally large enough now to replace a PC, and there’s an Android equivalent for almost everything a computer can do.
Programming? Nah. It’s a consumption device, not a creation device.
I’m not a programmer.
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or people are like me, not gamers, so perfectly contented to upgrade old used PC gear…shoehorn a CPU in with higher core count, max out RAM with a new matched pair of sticks, install a fresh NVMe drive, good to go!
I recently ordered parts from China to repair my old mechanical keyboard =_= Also ordered fancy new mice for other PC’s & wife’s laptop woo just a little tech refresh goes a long way for me =_=
Cool
Hmm is this really happening so fast? It’s a little hard to believe.
There’s some kind of network effect associated to it, so the greater the numbers, the more likely to grow even more, and faster. For example, when linux was used only by a very few people in it, most people were unlikely to even give it a try, but now that every class or working group, it’s likely to have one or two linux users, more people will be likely to try it, and so on.
Yes, although it’s not evenly distributed. Much of this rise is due to India doing some heavy lifting - they’re on like 16%.
Most places are in the 1.5-3.5% range.
You should go to your local university or knowledge center. The percentage is like 10%-20%
Even 3.5% is quite a lot imo.
Indeed it is. But this is also calculated based on monthly page views, so it only really covers devices that are used in that month.
There’s a non-trivial amount of Windows users that have a dusty laptop that they only pull out when they need to write a document or fill in a form that they got emailed, and will otherwise do all their computing on their phone.
My guess would be that Mac and Linux have fewer of these types of users? But who knows. I have a couple of Linux devices that I almost never use 🤷♀️
I’ve seen many people having Linux on such devices so idk either.
I suspect it’s a bump due to Windows Recall. I know I fully switched because of it after 25 years of off and on the Linux Desktop. And I will not be going back.
I suspect it’s a bump due to Windows Recall.
I don’t believe it that much. It may just be the Steam Deck’s financial success. But everything is possible.
100% switched because of Recall. Been a Linux user on and off for 20 years, windows was my daily driver for the past 5 or so (windows 10 was OK in my mind). Once Recall was announced, I bounced back to Linux. Having Steam popularize gaming on Linux has helped a ton
Steam deck alone isn’t much. It’s not even popular in a lot of places in the world. But there a lot of things happening in the market, and each small factor adds up to a general trend. So, there’s no single factor that we can point that will explain the linux growth in marketshare.
I wasnt thrilled about upgrading to win11 - it adds an irritating layer of stuff that I didnt want or need. The ads and telemetry bugged me too. I was probably going to reluctantly upgrade at some point though.
But then recall was announced and I realised how much worse it could get. Been really happy with the switch to Linux.
What distro do you use?
Mint cinnamon 21, then upgraded to 22.
Great choice
Maybe not, but, anecdotally, I know of a number of people who have made the switch because of Recall. Steam Deck surely adds to it, but people who have the choice to stop using Windows seem to be doing so.
Maybe not, but, anecdotally, I know of a number of people who have made the switch because of Recall.
Tbh I don’t get it. Wasn’t this feature only on Copilot+ PCs that almost nobody had? Why did so many switch if it wasn’t even confirmed that it’s coming to regular x86 machines? I always find it extremely weird.
Microsoft showed their hand and for some it was the last straw. It might not come to non-copilot pcs (for now) but they showed users they are OK with turning the OS into spyware.
Imo Windows is not even an OS anymore.
Agreed. It’s mostly an ad delivery platform these days. Can be somewhat OK if you have a DNS based blocker but hard to block built in spyware.
Why did so many switch if it wasn’t even confirmed that it’s coming to regular x86 machines?
Panic.
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Considering this is browser stats I doubt the steam deck has much to do with it, the steam deck is all about never opening anything other than steam.
Are you sure Steam is not one of the data suppliers for it though?
Yes, things move very fast if you haven’t noticed sugar pie
Sus
That’s what she said
I wonder if it is higher. Think about all the people using Librewolf
How do I hide which OS I am using? What is behind the high Unknown number?
Use user agent switcher and set it to something random. However that makes your fingerprint unique. I’ve read that people set it to windows just to blend in the masses
Every browser has a description like
"Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 8.1.0; SM-T580) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.157 Safari/537.36"called User Agent. You can set this value to something else, but be careful. If you set it to something that does not exist, then it makes it more likely to be identifiable. Or some things could potentially not work right if it expects a specific operating system, in example when downloading files. Usually not a big deal.So ultimately you want to set this value to something that exist and something that is used by many people. There are addons which can make this process much easier or even change it automatically after some time period in example.
Chameleon at https://sereneblue.github.io/chameleon/ is such an addon for the browser. There are lot of other alternatives, I used a few of them in the past, but stopped using them because there was here and there trouble. If you do, I recommend to install this addon from the addon store of your browser and not from the website, but that is just my personal recommendation.
Thank you. So what is being measured is just the browsers people are using? Then I can see why the metrics are more general than precise measurements, as the user agent can be easily changed.
The question is, if they only evaluate the User Agent? This is an organization specialized into statistics, they know it can be modified too. The ad industry tries to track you and find out everything about you despite these modifications. Don’t underestimate them!
Fair enough. They still don’t know what >7% of people are using, though.
That 7% might not even be people. It could be bots doing HTTP requests and throwing garbage in the user-agent.
To the moon!!! ┗(°0°)┛ …○
In my head it’s like half a percent, 4.45% seems huge.
4.45 is huge. 0.5 is normal sized.
about 1/20 computers that browse the web run linux, thats pretty goofy
To what extent could it be acceptable?
Goofy like silly, not like unacceptable. Reckon all three of us are happy it’s as high as it is!
Sorry but Linux is becoming too mainstream for me now. Time to hop on to BSD
Check out mister Mainstream over here. The rest of us snooty OS connoisseurs use Collapse OS.
Oh no, I feel it already the “I was on Linux before it was cool”
Dragonfly BSD, or else it will still be mainstream :)
nice
At this rate the Year Of Linux On The Desktop will be 2033!!!
Call me naive, I know I am. But how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop? I know phones run Linux, and many other products like streaming pucks run Linux (or is called unix?), but what would it take for an operating linux system to be centralized into a package to toss into a lenova laptop you’re staring at in best buy?
Some laptop manufacturers (and at least one of the larger ones) already offer Linux (Ubuntu) as a pre-installed OS. I suspect this will become more common if/when Linux becomes more popular as a mainstream desktop OS. Most likely it will still be 1 or 2 pre-selected distros though even then.
That’s really cool I didn’t know that was an option already. How does Ubuntu and windows compare for operating system support if I have a problem with the laptop? Is the manufacturer liable for the smooth running of the operating system? Or is the owner of the operating system liable?
One way to do it is for each company to develop their own flavor to ship with their laptop, in much the same way phone manufacturers just modify Android and ship it.
As an example, check out System76 and their laptops featuring their Pop!_OS distro, which is very user friendly and stable in my experience.
It’s a tough sell because there is no monetary incentive to get Linux on laptops and desktops. Dell has a few computers that ship with Ubuntu, and Lenovo with Fedora, and there’s System76. The problem is that the big manufacturers (namely Dell) get push-back from Microsoft if they start to sell other OSes with their products, so they no longer have 100% domination. Microsoft will say “Oh you’re selling a few products that come with Linux? Well, we won’t offer you the ability to sell Windows anymore…” which would obviously be a huge impact to their business. They have gotten around this, but their offerings are still really slim. The market just isn’t there compared to Windows based computers. Shelf space is expensive so they go with what sells: Windows based products.
Is it because Microsoft is the big dog with money and Linux is no dog because there is no company backing Linux? Windows sells solely because Windows can push the product?
Would it be benificial (albeit this will be extremely frowned upon by this community I believe) for a Linux distro to be backed and monetized via a corporation with a legal team to help push a Linux product on the shelves? In the short run it’s a bad idea, but in the long run it’ll familiarize the public, and push software developers for compatability. The incentive being that there’s money now involved and it won’t be a project for people.
Because right now to use Linux for the majority of user case operations you’d need at least computer science 101 to start installing a distro, partitions, manual software installation, to get running. Or am I wrong on this part?
There are a couple of OEMs like System76 and Starlabs that sell laptops with Linux on them, provide tech support for customers and so on.
And no, installing most distros aren’t hard. You just click the buttons to proceed and fill out the username and password box, select your time zone and select your wi-fi network if you’re using wifi.
You can do manual partitioning but why would you if you don’t know what you’re doing?
Installing software in the GUI is as easy as installing software from the Microsoft Store. Just search or look around and when you see something you want, just click the Install button.
how can Linux be a moderated product to sell for desktop
It kinda depends on each individuals’ use case; there’s lots of different Linux distributions that are better (or worse) for specific workloads.
Any given laptop I’m staring at in a store will probably work perfectly fine as a general-use machine with Linux Mint installed. This is my go-to distro when repurposing a machine because it works great out of the box. If I were running a computer store and wanted to sell consumer laptops with Linux on them, I’d default to Mint.
If someone is looking to turn their PC into something more specialized for gaming, they can look at something like Bazzite or Batocera. These will generally require some tinkering.
If an individual or company is looking to build an office with many workstations and user accounts, they might consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux so they can benefit from official support channels if something needs troubleshooting. Many computer labs at NCSU used RHEL when I attended many years ago.
Want a stable server environment? Debian is a standard pick.
Want a barebones system with no bells and whistles (but great battery life)? Alpine oughta work.
So Linux has many options for end users to pick from, which can be seen as a good thing (more options is generally good), but also a bad thing (many end users might consider the plethora of options to be overwhelming if they’ve never used Linux before).
Linux (or is called unix?)
Linux (Or GNU/Linux) operating systems are a modern implementation of an old research OS that was called “Unix”. Spiritual successors to Unix like Linux and BSD try to bring a lot of the design philosophies of Unix into modern OSes (I believe this is generally called the “POSIX” standard. e.g.: macOS is a POSIX compliant OS, iirc).
If I’ve gotten any of this information incorrect, please don’t tell Richard Stallman.
This is the greatness of Linux. Instead of having to change your workflow to be compatible with your OS, you can change your OS to be compatible with your workflow.
So if you did open a computer shop and are selling this plethora of Linux options, doesn’t that leave you liable if there are issues with the operating system?
If I buy a laptop and my windows is running poorly don’t I have windows support taking care of my windows problems?
If I buy a laptop from you with mint installed and am having problems I can’t contact Linux for support, I’ll have to contact you the shop owner.
Won’t this liability discourage shop owners from selling laptops/desktops with Linux?
I’m no legal expert; I assume support can be either offered or completely avoided depending on the shop owner’s preference. Most Linux distributions come with a “this software is free (as in freedom) and comes with no warranty or guaranteed functionality” disclaimer.
If I wanted to engage more with my clients and build more trust, I might offer some degree of troubleshooting/support for the Linux machines I sold. But I don’t think I’d be under any legal obligation to offer that service just for selling the laptops.
Whether or not the computer shop offers support might affect whether or not a customer wants to shop at my store. Maybe I can sell my laptops cheaper if I don’t offer support, or maybe my laptops cost a bit more because I do offer aftermarket support.
Thank you Windows 11!
This is the year!
9 crossposts is crazy
with like 600 comments between them, holy moley
One for every current ~0.5% market share!
