Better quality data comes from Steam with the qualifier that it only applies to Steam users.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
It's also showing Linux usage exploding in English speaking regions.
Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
81–90 of 100 posts
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#82Earlier 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.
I presume Chrome on Mac still reports OS X as its OS, even when running a newer version. It is such a ridiculous idea not to put that together.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#83Does anyone has list of North America countries according Statcounter? Can't find their definition of NA whether it includes Mexico or not.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#84I imagine a big part of the puzzle is that many people do not even use laptops/desktops regularly anymore, just phones and tablets
I guess almost all laptops/desktops are corporate, student, gaming or own business use. I have never, ever, seen a corporate linux desktop outside of devs. I have never, ever, seen a student using a linux desktop apart from CS students and a few physics/maths. Linux is not for gaming. See above answers for Linux in own business.
Just my anecdata, I've seen dozens of CS students that own a Steam Deck in the past few years. It's a perfectly suitable alternative to owning a gaming laptop for many students.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#85OS 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.
Sort of. Apple half-heartedly changed their version numbers after 10.15, but there were times where they wrote both the 10.X and N+1.x versions elsewhere, so I think it's just generally a confusing mess with them now.
iPadOS masks itself as macOS/OS X (depending on where you look), so that doesn't help either.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#86Unfortunately, Cloudflare does not agree if you filter for "likely human", which results in 6%. If you include bots, it hits 9.3%. https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=o...
If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed. ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?
> ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?
It's schools letting out for summer. Most Chrome OS users are schoolchildren using their school issued Chromebooks. We will see it jump back up from ~1.5% to ~5% when school starts in September. The same pattern happened to Chrome OS usage in summer 2025.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#87[flagged]
I think the main split between hardcore "GNU/Linux" guys and the general tech world is about principle vs pragmatism. The hardcore crowd see free software as a right that needs to be fought for, whereas others see open source as nothing more than a way to modify or improve software without requiring explicit support from the publishers. And there are many, many parts of Linux that make the software "freer" but worse.
I remember when I first started reading HN I was surprised how many people refused to use Linux. I get it has friction but to me it was worth it for the social benefit of having a FOSS OS. That’s when I realized FOSS is kind of a lost cause if most tech people don’t even care.
People like to complain about the walled gardens and surveillance of Windows/MacOS but refuse to actually support the organizations working to make alternatives. So frankly, we deserve what we get at this point.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What have they iOSed about macOS? How about this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
Meanwhile, here I am posting this using Google Chrome, with Lightroom Classic, InDesign, Sublime Text, Steam bla bla all opened in the background. You posted a 6 years old link.
The post is still relevant and it's not about not being able to open non-Apple software, but about Apple contacting their servers before anything is started.
Apple is not blocking a lot, but step by step they're building their way into a locked OS, and it's very obvious.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#89I guess Steam OS counts as Linux?
I see people didn't get my point. If StatCounter considers Chrome OS different from Linux then they might also consider Steam OS a separate bucket. Or they might include Steam OS in their Linux count and thus the rise of Steam OS might be causing the increase in Linux share.
Re: Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't done any investigation but some scraper and/or bot configuration uses OS X as its user agent. I run an unpublished service used by 1s of people and was hit by an influx of supposed OS X user agents that didn't correspond to my actual user base.
Did you run any advanced TCP fingerprinting techniques to dig a bit deeper?
Well, guess it's worth spending a little time looking at it.
It appears that it's the Cloudflare Security Center scanning service? This would also explain how my unpublished service was located as I use Cloudflare for my DNS.