Statcounter, a website that tracks the market share of web browsers, operating systems, and search engines, is reporting that Linux on the desktop has over 4% market share for the very first time (Statcounter records ChromeOS as a separate operating system despite being based on Linux). Statcounter doesn’t provide any explanation about why the market share has increased but we can speculate what’s going on.
Linux’s march to its 4.03% market share has been a steady process ever since the final months of 2020 when Linux held just 1.53% of desktop market share. One of the biggest contributors to the growth of Linux is likely the stringent hardware requirements of Windows 11.
I’d of thought steam and proton would of been a large contributing factor
I think the spotlight on KDE from Steam Deck definitely helps. It’s polished as shit, and it acts like Windows by default, and that is a good thing.
And the most of distros defaults to shitty gnome, slowing down Linux adoption. Steam finally showed that anybody can use Linux, with proper WM.
This! Gnome is absolutely a foil to adoption. Everyone I’ve seen try to start with Ubuntu has bounced right off back to Windows. You’re already wrapping your head around a new OS, you do not need an entirely new desktop paradigm.
So happy Valve went with the setup they did.
gaming was THE missing piece for me since i first tried desktop linux long ago. and it has improved massively in many other ways since then.
i suspect many other people think alike me too.
Definitely this is huge. Proton and the respective Wine advancements are exactly what needed to happen. And the headlines about some games running better on Linux really gives it a good look.
I’d of thought
would of been
Interesting grammar.
Where are you from?
Interesting good or interesting bad? I’m from UK Devon
The insane requirements of Win11 (and the added Ai features) are definitely factors for me to switch to Linux
I’m doing my part!
Proton is what allowed me to make the switch. I do dual boot but almost never use my windows partition.
I added 2 to that count this week!
I resurrected my Asus T100TA tablet/laptop that got killed by Windows10 and installed Linux Mint. I can now stream the seas in the comfort of my TV.
Then updated my Lenovo Flex from Win11 to Kubuntu. I used to play Android games via LD Player and it was so slow in Win11. But with Kubuntu+Waydroid, I was able to play my mmorpg game at the highest setting without lag!
I’d guess every day someone gets fed up with some MS bullshit and goes looking for something else, for me it was the forced updates/restart and the following waiting to finish updates then 100% disk usage for a few minutes, then removing whatever bullshit that got reinstalled.
I haven’t used Windows in years, hearing the forced updates stories always confirms that’s the right choice.
Last year’s December marked my one-year birthday of daily-driving Linux as my primary OS consecutively, while this January marked one year of me using a single distro reliably without running into weird issues that’d lead me into a distrohopping frenzy. I am still proud that I managed to pull this off! I guess third time really is the charm.
I had previously tried using Linux two other times before - the first time was around March 2021 when I had to finally upgrade my computer and switch out of Windows 7, and since I didn’t like Win10, I wanted to try out Linux. Sadly, I didn’t know much about it at the time and made a bad first-distro choice in Manjaro, whose installer broke so horribly that it somehow nuked my entire SSD. Lesson learned: Don’t use Manjaro.
Second time was in November (also in 2021), where I mustered the courage to try again after many frustrations with Windows 10, but with a different distro (initially Pop!_OS, but I had a terrible experience with its community and switched to Linux Mint the next day). My days on Mint were pretty great and I still remember them fondly, but there were many things that I needed but couldn’t use as Mint’s repositories were ancient and lacked them (and I didn’t know about Flatpak at the time), so I tried switching to other distros with newer repositories… and kept running into all sort of bizarre, nonsensical issues nobody else had (such as atrocious gaming performance, archives not working, and other things I don’t remember), and my requests for help were often either ignored or responded harshly, so I ended up giving up and returning to Windows…
…Uh, that didn’t last more than 6 months because for some reason Windows 10 hates me and started giving me even worse issues. I managed to find a nicer and more forgiving community of Linux users who could help, so I mustered the courage to try again. And thankfully, with my prior experience, I managed to make it stick this time by finally resolving some of the bizarre issues I had - it got to the point that I sometimes forget I’m using Linux, lol. I’m very glad I could contribute to the 4%.
I used windows all my life up until May 2023 when I decided to try Debian and then never went back. Now that Debian 12 is easy to install I hope more people will join.
Can’t wait for MS Linux
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