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Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

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Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#71

Post by eru »

alpaca9 wrote: post #55
eru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used one in the wild, but I was working for Google at the time.

It would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.

I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work.

Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#72

Post by olyjohn »

fragmede wrote: post #54
andsoitis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's obvious that the future of MacOS is continued iOS-ification What’s an example of a specific iOS-indication in macOS that makes the OS worse?

Launchpad. It sucks on macOS. You can just not use it but it's there. Fullscreen apps and Spaces. My Mac isn't an iPad, but their window manager wants me to use it like one. Hidden scrollbars. App sandboxing.

I think people don't know what OSX was like, when it was a glorious Unix system that did what you wanted. It let you install extensions and run unsigned code. Now its just a boring locked down iOS that has a windowing interface.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#73

Post by csomar »

rvz wrote: post #14

Imagine first thinking that humans are using Linux on the Desktop after seeing this (without specifying which distro) and then realizing that it is bots which are the "desktop users" because they are using Chrome to scrape websites since forever.

Any reason to think that bots are linux and not windows/macos. If you look at crawling resellers, you can simulate mac/windows/ios/android. Why would crawlers prefer linux over those?

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#74

Post by factorialboy »

I'd pick major Linux Desktop Environments (KDE or GNOME for instance) over macOS and Windows any day of the week. I feel 3-4x more productive on Linux.

With LLMs, I've been creating little desktop apps to fill the odd gaps. For example, yesterday, I made a little offline dictation app for KDE.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#75

Post by kirb »

kelnos wrote: post #31
prologic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing? > Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.

I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?

It’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-g...

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#76

Post by jsnell »

Flagging since statcounter's data is just so unreliable that discussing it is like discussing last week's lottery numbers.

(Just a couple of weeks ago there was an equally implausible frontpage post showing the Firefox had more than doubled in use in the US, to 12%, but only in the US, not in any other country. My money is on scraper bots identifying as Linux-Firefox, run from US IPs to minimize the impact of geo-blocking. But when Statcounter doesn't explain their methodology and doesn't care about the quality of their data, we'll never know.)

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#77

Post by ouchqt »

prologic wrote: post #30
raincole wrote: post #25

OS X: 21.14% macOS: 8.6% Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself. Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing? > Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.

My understanding is that apple officially changed from OS X to macOS in 2020 with the launch of macOS 11, even though the branding changed a few years earlier.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#78

Post by esseph »

olyjohn wrote: post #68
esseph wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vscode can run in a browser, your code is often in git, and it normally is going through CI/CD (being compiled/packaged/deployed elsewhere). All you need for that is a dumb terminal.

Boy I hope VSCode runs better in the browser than all of Microsoft's other terrible web apps.

https://vscode.dev/

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#79

Post by alpaca9 »

eru wrote: post #71
alpaca9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be hell being forced to use these things for your job. What departments were? Because I can't imagine a software developer using one.

I wasn't forced to use anything. This was in the mid-2010s when the first ARM Chromebook came out; I bought one out of curiosity. But I learned about it at work. Independent of that: some of the modern higher end Chromebooks can be quite nice, and you can (A) run general Linux on them, and (B) VS Code dev tunnel in the browser runs on them just as well as on any other laptop.

yeah i forgot about their linux capabilities they got. In my mind they didn't seem a lot different than simple android tablets with a keyboard but indeed if the hardware isn't bad it could be valid option now I think about it.

Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America

#80

Post by prologic »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #40
kelnos wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?

Even if you assume OS X is 1999-2016 and macOS is 2016- then the numbers are still odd.

This is what Wikipedia has recorded.
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