Very cool! If you extrapolate the current trend by 2073 Linux will dominate the desktop market.
Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
221–230 of 635 posts
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#222After installing Arch / Gnome on my laptop last week, I can see why. Everything works completely fine and feels 3X faster than Windows 11. I have Linux on my desktop machine but always hesitated for laptops due to past bad experiences with power management (i.e. something always eventually went wrong when closing the lid). So far, all of that is working perfectly.
Windows 11 is exceptionally slow. I installed it on a ThinkPad Carbon X1, it was quite unusable. Unresponsive after starting up, copilot and O365 trying to run stuff and i had to wait for them to comolete. I was very surprised that they think this is acceptable. I spent about an hour going through processes and installed programs list, and uninstalling many things. At that point it was more tolerable.
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#223For another anecdata point, https://analytics.usa.gov tracks user device demographics to all visitors of U.S. government websites. Which of course might skew in ways different than the general U.S. population. But checking out the numbers right now for Linux users:
Last 30 days: 6%
2025 so far: 5.7%
2024: 4.5%
edit: analytics.usa.gov includes iOS and Android in its operating systems breakdown — e.g. Windows has a 32% share vs OP's 63%. Assuming most of Linux users are on desktop, it could be the case that Linux share in desktop users is a bit higher than 6%
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes. Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.
Wow, isn't that painful without a big screen and keyboard? [1] Most primary schools here (NL) use Chromebooks or Windows laptops. High schools sometimes have a BYOD, but you certainly have to bring a laptop.
[1] Of course, you can hook up most phones to a display, keyboard, mouse, but that blurring the lines a bit. A Samsung DeX device or future Pixel desktop mode device hooked up to peripherals is pretty much a desktop (Pixel will even support Linux apps in a VM).
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#225I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with. Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the p…
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here
Interesting, could you tell me which part of US you are from?
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My 2 cents, small country, mid-Europe, more or less in the middle of list of GDP / AIC per capita in EU.
Nearly everyone has some sort of PC or laptops for personal use.
Now it's changing, kids(~5-13yrs old) are using phones and tablets for school, Tiktok, Ytube, games. And only minority of kids is using PCs.
After they reach certain age, they've switched to PC games, at least in the past. Let's see what will happen now.
Gamers use primarily PC (Windows, because forced BS Anticheats), consoles are minority.
Probably because big tradition of piracy here, for long time it was legal to download anything. Even after forced change from EU, it's somewhat grey area and you can torrent anything, without VPN and nobody will care. But regarding pirating games, it changed years ago, with Steam of course. Like everywhere else.
Still it's funny that we have same price or sometimes even higher than US and our median salary is ~5x lower than US. :-) Here we call it "specific market", meaning "everybody buys it and everybody's stupid".
Only prosecuted cases I know, it was people uploading movies (usually local production) and they've made money from it.
In case of Germany and their automation of spamming letters from lawyers with ransom for €1k because someone on your internet torrented something. That's totally ridiculous from our point of view and it would spawn huge public backlash. I think that even lawyers torrents here :D
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#226I have to wonder how much of this is people switching to Linux vs the larger trend of people not having traditional computers to begin with. Outside of gamers, I don't know anyone that has a computer at home that is not their work laptop if they have one. At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. So is a solid chunk of this the p…
> At least in my circle everyone I know has moved to their general computing being on phones and tablets which is not captured here. > [...] (more technical, needing to do tasks not possible on phones and tablets) Somewhat unrelated but something I never see discussed is how the form factor of the computing device changes our relationship to, and the types of, media that we produce and consume. One critical task not…
> One critical task not possible on phones and tablets is the production of long-form textual media
The key addition obviously being “for me.”
For others tablets (and for some others, phones) are what they use for producing long-form textual media.
I, for example, have no issue producing long-form textual media on my iPad w/ Magic Keyboard.
I’m sure that you will feel as though I’m not producing Real Long-Form Textual Media.
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Must be circles. I just visited relatives, and brought my laptop as well as my phone; I barely used the laptop. But my brother always uses his, and his kids used laptops, and even one of my great nieces used a laptop. Did they have phones? Yes. Games isn't the only driver. It's hard to do things like write papers on phones.
Nearly everyone in our family’s (public, Massachusetts) high school writes papers exclusively on their phone.
How do you write long school papers on the phone's tiny screen and keyboard?
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#228Yay PewDiePie
Role models for computer use in my generation: RMS, Bjarne Stroustrup, Doug McIlroy.
Role models for computer use today: “PewDiePie”.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#229Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox. I never would have imagined history would turn out like this. Firefox had the easy job and desktop Linux had the hard one. This will lead to a virtuous circle for Linux unless someone does something; privacy issues are leading people to the OSes where you get to freely choose your level of privacy. Anybody have any more weird old unix patents to throw at them a…
> Linux now has a bigger desktop marketshare than firefox.
This means many Linux users install an alternative browser, not to use Firefox. That's funny, but so true.
Re: Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share in USA
#230This is huge =) I remember the days when we were under 1%. Congratulations to all involved on making this true.
I genuinely wonder why it is considered "huge". Does it really matter how many % desktop usage one of the several dozens desktop operating systems has?